RAKSHASLOK

Quiet Saturday evening. The one where streets become silent early, stores close down, and even the air feels weary. Rubbing his eyes, the man opened the gate of his home. Another long day at work.

Inside, the smell of daal and roti filled the air. His little daughter came running, smiling so wide it almost hurt to look at her.

“Papa! Kal zoo chalenge na?” she said, eyes shining.

His wife laughed softly from the kitchen, holding their baby boy in her arms. “Mat pucho abhi. Papa thak gaye hain, beta.”

The man smiled, dropped his bag on the sofa, and crouched down. “Nahi nahi, it’s okay. We’ll go tomorrow. Promise.”

And that one promise… would become the last thing he ever kept.

Sunday morning was great. The sky shone, birds were loud, and for once life seemed peaceful. They arrived at the zoo. His daughter screamed every time the lion roared, clapped for the peacocks, and giggled at the monkeys. Her hair blowing in the wind, his wife laughed beside him. Gurgling and smiling even was the baby in her arms.

For a few hours, it felt as though the world had stopped only for them.

His wife asked him to bring something to eat after some time. He stopped by a nearby stall to pick up tea and samosas. People were yelling as he returned. Loud, frightened shouting.

There was wrongness somewhere.

He ran and dropped the food. A crowd had gathered close to the tiger exhibit. Time appeared to halt when he got there.

People were lying everywhere. Dozens of them. Their bodies were covered in strange, thin red cuts that showed little under the sunlight. Some were missing parts of themselves, as though hollowed from inside. Eyes wide and mouths open, their faces froze.

He went through the chaos looking for his wife. His breath stopped, his hands shaking. Then he saw his wife and daughter lying by the bench where he had left them. The baby’s stroller had turned over.

He ran to them, shouting their names. He held his wife’s hand; it was still warm, but her eyes were empty. The little body of his daughter had those same bizarre red lines. The baby was not sobbing. His surroundings became indistinct.

“Call an ambulance!” someone screamed. But he couldn’t budge. His knees collided on the ground. All he could do was scream till his voice cracked.

The hospital smelled like antiseptic and fear. People cried everywhere. Police officers walked in and out. Questions. Paperwork. Endless waiting.

The man sat in silence, staring at the floor. A doctor came and said something, but the words didn’t make sense anymore. “We did everything we could.” That’s all he remembered hearing.

He spent the night in the hospital corridor, staring at his phone screen his wife’s picture, his daughter’s voice note, his baby’s last video. Everything that was his world… gone.

The next morning, the news spread like wildfire. “Mysterious deaths across multiple locations.” “No signs of poison or gas leak.” “Victims’ bodies appear drained of internal matter.”

He went home that day, alone. His house felt empty, too clean, too quiet. Toys were scattered on the floor. Milk bottles on the table. A half-folded blanket.

He sat there for hours before the tears came. And when they stopped, he only felt the need to know what happened.

The man began to travel. From city to city, town to town. He visited families who had lost loved ones in the same way. Everywhere, the story was the same bodies with red glowing cuts, hollow chests, no explanation.

He met Ramesh and Savita, who had lost their son. Savita spoke in a broken voice, showing him a photo. “He was laughing one minute, then he fell. His body felt empty.”

Ramesh said, “I saw something purple in the sky. Not like light, not like smoke. It was moving. I can’t explain.”

The man noted everything.

In another town, he met an old rickshaw driver named Chandan. “My daughter-in-law saw something,” Chandan said. “She said the air shimmered, like heat waves. Then she screamed, and… she was gone.”

And in a small village, a widow named Kavita showed him a short video on her husband’s phone of a purple flash in the sky, like lightning from another world, and then static.

Everywhere, the man heard the same two things: a purple shimmer… and silence.

He started to mark every place on a map. Slowly, a pattern formed. All the locations were spread out in a circle the center of which seemed to be somewhere in Bihar.

Months later, he arrived in a small, almost forgotten place, a village near an ancient Mahadev temple. The temple was half-broken, covered in moss.

He asked an old man sitting outside, “Yahan koi pooja nahi hoti?”

The old man, Om Prakash, shook his head. “Sab chale gaye. Yeh mandir shraapit hai. Kahi log mar gaye, kuch pagal ho gaye.”

The man looked around. The place was silent, eerie. But he decided to stay. He rented a small abandoned house nearby and began his research.

Every night he had strange dreams, flashes of a purple sky, people screaming, the temple glowing faintly. He told himself it was trauma. “It’s all in my head,” he whispered to himself. “Because I lost them.”

During the day, he explored the area. He met some of the remaining villagers Vishwajeet, Ramesh, Chandan, Savita, Kavita. They helped him with food and water. Slowly, he started bonding with them.

He played with their children, helped repair roofs and fetched water from the well. Little by little, the village started to feel like a home. Something he had lost.

Om Prakash, the eldest man in the village, often sat with him near the bonfire. “You city people don’t know,” he used to say, staring at the flames. “This place was once full of life. Then one day, people started dying... animals too. Those who could leave, left. Only a few of us stayed. Maybe because we didn’t want to run away from the memories of our loved ones.”

The man listened silently, staring into the fire. Sometimes he would look at the stars and think of his wife and children. He still couldn’t believe they were gone.

Days turned into weeks, and the man decided to learn Sanskrit after finding old carvings and scrolls near the temple ruins. He borrowed old books from Om Prakash, who had preserved them from his father’s time. Every night, under a dim lantern, he tried to translate the ancient text.

Inside the temple, he found carvings strange symbols and ancient writing. He began studying them at night. One phrase kept appearing: “Beyond the seal… do not awaken.”

Another line appeared several times, like a warning: “The One Beyond the Rift.”

He didn’t understand it, but the name stayed in his mind. The more he read, the more his dreams worsened. He started waking up sweating, his hands shaking, hearing whispers in the dark.

Still, he stayed. He wanted answers.

It was difficult the words were old, twisted, and written in a form that barely made sense. But slowly, over months, he began to understand a few lines. He learned about “Ek Astitva Jo Parmaatma Ke Barabar Hai” a being equal to the Supreme God. The texts said that even Parmaatma couldn’t destroy it completely. The being was sealed away beyond this world in another dimension known as “The Rift.”

The man grew obsessed. He spent almost a year in the village, surviving on whatever the villagers shared with him. Every time he found a new piece of writing, he would sit by the temple stairs and try to translate it. He wrote down everything he could understand in a small notebook.

One day, Vishwajeet, a young farmer, asked him, “Bhaiya, you keep going to that broken temple every day... what do you even look for there?” He smiled faintly. “Answers.” “Answers to what?” The man looked at the old stone idol inside the temple and whispered, “Why didn’t God stop all this.”

Vishwajeet replied “bhaiya bhagwan ne kya kiya kya nahi vo to mai nahi janta par ab aapko sab bhul k aage badh jana chaiye.. Aakhir kon janta h bhagwan hai bhi ya nahi..?”

That night, as he read one of the stone carvings again, something struck him one line that he had missed earlier. It roughly translated to: “The seal weakens as faith fades. The protector and the destroyer, both trapped in the Rift, wait for the day balance breaks.”

He froze. If his translation was right, it meant that the God who sealed the being was also trapped inside the same rift. Maybe that’s why no divine help ever came. Maybe that’s why the world was filled with chaos and evil because the balance between good and evil no longer existed.

The man kept staring at the inscription, his mind spinning. “So... even the almighty couldn’t kill it?” he whispered to himself. “If the Supreme One sacrificed all His power to trap it, then who’s left to protect us?”

He spent nights thinking about it, sitting alone near the temple. Sometimes, he thought he could hear faint whispers coming from beneath the ground voices he couldn’t understand. Other times, he saw strange flashes like brief visions of another place, burning skies, shadowed figures. But he told himself it was just his trauma playing tricks on him.

A whole year passed and he had filled his notebook with everything he could translate. Most of it made no sense half-broken sentences, incomplete words, and lines that ended abruptly. But there was one message that he could read clearly, carved deeper than the rest: “The seal shall break, and none shall be able to stop the One Beyond the Rift.”

The man stared at those words for a long time. He didn’t know what it meant for the world or for him.

Soon after, his dreams started changing. He began seeing the villagers Om Prakash, Vishwajeet, Savita, Ramesh all standing around him, whispering things he couldn’t hear. But he just thought of it like it was his fear of losing his family again.

He then decided to visit all the temples famous for their mysterious carvings and he decided that he would leave the village.. It was hard for him to leave the second family he had obtained but he had to uncover the truth.. That night, he saw himself standing in a burning village, blood on his hands. He woke up sweating, breath heavy. He tried to shake it off as another nightmare.

But the next morning, the nightmare came true.

He woke up outside, the air thick with smoke. The village was on fire, houses burning, animals and human bodies scattered everywhere. The same faces he had seen in his dream now lay lifeless in front of him.

He stumbled through the flames, shouting their names. “Om Prakash! Vishwajeet! Savita!” No one answered.

And then, as he looked down at his trembling hands bloodstained, shaking he realized the horrible truth. The dream wasn’t a dream. It was real. He was the one who killed them.

Tears rolled down his face. He fell to his knees, staring blankly at the destruction around him.

Then he heard it. A deep, horrifying voice echoing in his head; heavy, ancient, almost inhuman.

“Yes... that’s right.” “You’re the one who killed them.”

The voice laughed. The sound was not human. It was like a thousand whispers echoing through stone.

The man covered his ears, but the voice didn’t stop.

“You belong to the Rift,” it said. “And the Rift remembers.”

The man screamed. His mind broke into pieces.

And from deep within, he felt something stir something ancient.

He opened his notebook, wrote the same words he had seen on the temple wall:

“The One Beyond the Rift.”