In the glass deserts of what was once Central Europe, where dust storms carved symbols into dead cities and lightning crawled across the soil like serpents, a single rider crossed the wasteland.
His horse was not flesh, but forged—a machine of sacred metals and ancient Vedic scripture, humming with the pulse of something more than technology.
The rider was Kaelren.
He wore no sigils, no marks of divinity, yet the air bowed around him. Light parted where he walked. The remnants of the world whispered Avatara when he passed.
Unlike Eloryn, who carried memory, Kaelren carried judgment.
He had been chosen by Kalki, the final avatar of Vishnu, destined to arrive at the end of time—not as a healer, but as a cleanser. His blade, Nistrinaya, was forged in divine silence, meant not to kill but to sever karma.
Behind him, the last freehold of the Western Sanctuary burned. Not by his hand—but by the cults of recursion that refused to let the past die.
Kaelren's goal was not preservation. It was renewal. Even if it meant destroying what others sought to save.
He had heard whispers of another.
A woman born of Bhairav's eye. A weaver of time.
Eloryn.
They had crossed in dreams before—lifetimes past, when she was a river priestess and he a soldier dying in the mud. Then again, when she was a scholar in an underground memory-vault, and he was a smuggler ferrying sacred seeds. Always near. Never quite together.
This time, Kaelren hoped it would be different.
But he already knew.
"You cannot mend a river by following it upstream," he muttered to the desert wind.
A message chimed on his visor—an encrypted glyph only he could read. The mark of Kalki.
Another artifact had stirred in the frozen East. A shard of the Final Dharma. Eloryn would be drawn to it.
So would Kaalketu.
Kaelren spurred his machine-horse forward.
He would not stop them from weaving time.
But he would be the one to cut the last thread, when the moment came.
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