Where mountains walk and storms bow.
To the west, the war raged as a tempest—bold, unyielding, and raw.
Here, the Ashvattha Guardians rose from the earth, not as men, but as living bastions of the wild. Their skin was cracked bark, ancient as the oldest tree rings, their eyes glowing with the green light of unborn forests and ancient wisdom. They moved with the slow certainty of mountains, but each step thundered like an earthquake's roar.
The Kamboja Spiral armies poured forth like a plague of smoke and flame—smoke-beasts with lungs ablaze, riding storm-riders mounted on thundering beasts of twisted metal and corrupted bone. Their howls split the sky as dark clouds churned with unnatural fury.
The lead Guardian, a towering figure named Tarkshya, raised an immense hand like a mountain blocking the sun. The ground beneath a charging column of cursed cavalry shifted beneath their hooves.
What was once cracked stone turned to a sacred marsh, blooming with lotus roots and shimmering blue-green algae.
Horse hooves sank, entangled in writhing roots that pulled down steeds and riders alike. Riders screamed, trying to strike the roots with wicked blades, but the plants moved with uncanny speed, twisting like serpents woven from the earth itself.
A warrior, cloak aflame with Spiral Qi, swung a spear burning with black fire—but Tarkshya moved forward, his bark-armored fist smashing into the rider's chest. The warrior exploded in a burst of corrupted smoke, dissipating into the marsh as the Guardian's chant rippled through the air.
Another Guardian, Nimisha, stood amid a battlefield shattered by siege engines. Her voice was a deep, subsonic hymn—a vibration so low it slipped beneath mortal hearing, felt instead as a pulse in the bones, a stirring in the roots beneath the ground.
The Spiral Qi surrounding the enemy writhed like oil pulled from flame. Warriors suddenly convulsed, their chanting fractured, their limbs trembling as though the nightmare within them was unraveling.
One Spiral-warrior screamed, clutching his head as tendrils of dark energy snapped and curled away, dissolving like smoke.
Nimisha's arms swept through the air, her palms glowing with verdant light that healed the scorched earth in seconds. Grass re-sprouted where fire had raged, the air thick with the scent of rain and moss.
From the horizon thundered colossal siege-beasts—twisted hybrids of bone and iron, their carapaces covered in runes of Spiral corruption.
A Guardian named Harivira stepped forth. His footsteps cracked the ground, sending shockwaves rolling through the plains.
He grabbed a siege-beast's leg, towering as high as a temple, and tore it from the ground like a sapling uprooted by a storm. The beast roared—a terrible sound like earth breaking—before it crashed into the chaos behind the enemy lines.
Harivira's voice rose in a chant that summoned the very mountains to awaken.
From the Seven Hills surrounding the plains, great boulders and ancient stone slabs moved, rolling down with the weight of millennia. The Spiral armies scattered beneath the crushing tide of rock and earth.
The Ashvattha Guardians did not speak battle cries or war songs meant to terrify. Their power was a slow, relentless reclamation.
They marched in a line, their chants weaving a canopy of pure Qi that peeled back the Spiral corruption wherever it touched.
Where they passed, the land healed—the broken earth mended, the air cleared, and the war-beasts' dark flames sputtered into embers.
When a spiral-bound war-chariot charged at one Guardian, he caught its spiked wheels between two mighty roots bursting from the soil. With a slow, inevitable twist, he crushed the chariot's frame.
Far from the roiling chaos of the plains, Devavrata stood alone atop a jagged ridge, the last embers of twilight casting long shadows across the valley below. The sky bled a deep violet, fading into stars. The wind carried the distant clamor of battle, the crack of shattered shields, the low hum of corrupted chants, and the sharp scent of scorched earth.
In his hand, Devavrata gripped only a simple staff—worn smooth by years of travel and discipline. No shimmering aura of soul transformation cloaked him. No celestial flames danced from his fingertips. He was mortal—unyielding, unyielded.
His eyes, sharp and piercing as a hawk's, scanned every inch of the battlefield stretched below like a living tapestry of light and shadow. Every motion—the ripple of a Sentinel's cloak, the stagger of a Spiral warrior, the pulse of ancient ley lines glowing faint beneath the soil—was captured and measured in his mind.
He breathed deeply, steady and controlled, as though inhaling the very rhythm of the world.
With a slight lift of his arm, deliberate and unhurried, he commanded the archers stationed on the craggy ridges lining the valley.
From their quivers, they drew arrows tipped not with ordinary metal, but with sacred resin infused with purified dharma—a substance that would not pierce flesh but sever the dark Spiral chants binding their enemies.
The archers loosed a volley. Arrows whistled through the air, not to kill, but to disrupt: bursting mid-flight into shimmering veils of golden light that clung to Spiral walkers like sacred smoke, unraveling the woven curses in their breath.
Devavrata's next command was a subtle movement of his hands, as if stirring an unseen current. His Sentinels responded instantly.
They moved across the field like water flowing over stones, their steps silent, their motions seamless. They did not strike with brute force; instead, they intercepted the Spiral walkers with sweeping, fluid motions—palms extended, fingers tracing invisible sigils.
Where their hands passed, dark energy dissolved as if it were morning mist caught in the sun's first rays—fragile, powerless, and swiftly vanishing.
A Sentinel stepped between two snarling Spiral warriors locked in dark ritual. With a quiet word, he pressed his palm to one's chest. The cursed Qi twisted, snapped, and fell away like cracked glass.
At the heart of the battle, Devavrata's gaze narrowed as he raised both hands and traced delicate patterns in the air.
From the earth, faint lines of ley energy—glowing soft gold—began to thread themselves through the plains. These were no mere lines, but the ancient Trikala Grid—a web of spiritual harmony, precisely mapped to intersect the battlefield's ley nodes.
With a voice calm yet commanding, he gave the final order.
The Ashvattha Guardians stirred as the grid anchored their march, their slow steps synchronizing with the pulse of dharma flowing beneath their bark-like skin.
Where the ley lines crossed, the land hummed with renewed vigor. Corrupted shadows shrank back, unable to endure the rhythm of the ancient grid.
Devavrata's power lay not in godlike transformation, but in his mortal will and strategic mind—in the patience to listen, the clarity to see beyond chaos, and the calm to conduct a symphony of earth, breath, and spirit.
He was no divine avatar. He was a man who understood that true strength came from balance—between action and restraint, offense and healing, destruction and restoration.
With steady hands and unwavering eyes, he wove the tide of battle like a master artisan—turning dissonance into harmony, chaos into order.
And in that mortal breath before the strike, he shaped the fate of the Plains of Saptagiri.