Prologue :- The Boy Who Spoke to the Dead
A boy sat cross-legged on the icy balcony tiles, his pencil whispering across the thick pages of a worn scrapbook. The steady scratch of graphite was the only sound in the quiet evening.
Except he wasn't alone.
"I loved playing cricket," a hoarse voice murmured from the darkness beside him. "He and I used to spend whole afternoons in the grounds. We always came home covered in dust."
"Was he your friend?" the boy asked softly, never lifting his eyes from the sketch taking shape beneath his hand.
A faint, wistful chuckle drifted through the silence.
"No, boy." The voice grew quieter. "He was my little brother."
Aarav's pencil paused.
"...Was?"
The silence that followed felt heavier than the night itself.
"Did he die too?"
"Yes."
The single word carried years of grief.
Then the grief curdled.
"He tried to save me." The voice thickened, each syllable trembling with restrained rage. "That man... he killed my brother too."
The air seemed to grow colder.
Neither of them spoke.
Only the relentless scrape...
Scrape.
Scrape.
Scrape.
"I think about him every day," the voice whispered after a long while. "Sometimes I wonder if the only way to quiet this anger... is to make that man suffer exactly as we did."
A pause.
The voice again murmured with dark contemplation "Will you help -"
"AARAV!"
A sharp voice sliced through the chill air
"STOP THIS INSTANT! WHERE IS YOUR LOCKET? WEAR IT RIGHT NOW ."
Aarav flinched.
"Sorry, Mother."
His trembling fingers found the silver chain lying beside him. The moment the locket clicked shut around his neck, the presence beside him unraveled into the darkness as though it had never existed.
The balcony suddenly felt unbearably empty.
His mother stormed into balcony, her face pale with panic disguised as fury.
"How many times have I told you not to talk to them?"
"Sorry, Mother."
His voice was barely more than a whisper.
"Sorry, Mother."
The words sounded practiced.
Automatic.
Empty.
Something inside her finally snapped.
Her hand struck his cheek with a sharp crack that echoed against the concrete walls.
Aarav's head jerked to the side, but he didn't cry out.
She grabbed him by the collar and pulled him toward her until their faces were inches apart. Her breathing was uneven, almost desperate.
"If I ever catch you doing this again..." she hissed, her voice shaking, "I'll send you to an asylum. Do you hear me? I don't care what people say anymore. I'm done trying to protect someone who insists on acting like a freak."
For a heartbeat, neither of them moved.
Then she shoved him away and stormed back inside.
The sound of her retreating footsteps slowly dissolved into silence.
Aarav remained where he had fallen.
The sting in his cheek was nothing compared to the ache settling quietly inside his chest.
He lowered his eyes, blinking hard.
One tear escaped anyway, tracing a lonely path down his flushed face before disappearing into the collar of his shirt.
Beside him, the scrapbook lay open.
On the fresh page stared the face of a man no child should ever have imagined—a jagged portrait carved in furious, merciless strokes. His eyes had been gouged into hollow pits. His jaw was crushed beyond recognition. Bruises swallowed what little humanity remained.
Aarav looked at the drawing for a long time.
Then, with trembling fingers, he gently closed the scrapbook.
As though shutting the page could silence the voices that no one else believed were real.
