On the other hand was Gopi—taller, broader, brown curly haired and far more expressive. A shy boy with a good heart, a short tempered personality with street smartness and an ulplucky strength and courage, always wavering between fear and courage. Trouble seemed to find him even when he stood perfectly still.
He kicked a dry pebble along the path and muttered, "I don't believe a single word that priest said. My father always says they just fool people with imaginary stories, feeding on fear and blind faith. Besides, it's 1970. India has been free for over two decades. We have satellites, modern medicine, and steel plants. The age of science doesn't have room for monsters in the dark."
Arjun didn't say a word. He just kept walking, his silence heavy as he remained locked deep within his own thoughts.
Gopi, who had been talking just to fill the quiet, suddenly went completely rigid. He froze dead in his tracks, a sudden, chilling realization locking his muscles.
"Arjun," he whispered, his voice cracking like dry parchment. "Look up."
Arjun tilted his head upward—and the entire world seemed to tilt with it.
Only moments ago, the moon had been a silver coin, bright and serene against the velvet sky. Now, a jagged, unnatural darkness was crawling across its surface, swallowing the light inch by inch.
The eclipse had begun.
"The Chandra Grahan," Arjun breathed. The priest's warnings, which had seemed like mere folklore minutes ago, suddenly echoed in his mind with the force of a physical blow.
Gopi swallowed hard, his eyes wide and glassy with fear. "My grandmother... she used to whisper about this," he stammered, his voice trembling as the skepticism drained completely from his face. "She spoke of Rahu, the celestial shadow, devouring the light. She said when the moon bleeds a hellish red, the gates of Asurlok swing wide... and things that don't belong under this sky begin to slip through the cracks.
Arjun tried to force a smile, though it felt brittle on his face. "Your grandmother sounds just as skilled a storyteller as our Pandit ji," he remarked quietly, trying to anchor himself to his logic.
But Gopi didn't laugh. He shuddered, a cold sweat breaking out across his brow. Despite his modern clothes and his schoolbooks, something primal and ancient was twisting inside his chest. The forest around them had fallen into an unnatural, suffocating silence. The very air felt too tight, too watchful—as if the trees were leaning in to listen.
"Home," Gopi choked out, his eyes darting toward the shadows. "Arjun, i think we should stay in my uncle's home tonight near behind the previous village instead of going towards our home, Something just... doesn't feel right here"
Arjun nodded "You are right i think something wierd is definitely gonna happen here" the bravado of the 1970s vanishing in a heartbeat. They had just turned to run—and than suddenly the world shattered.
A violent, predatory gust of wind tore through the forest road, howling with the voice of a wounded beast. Above them, the dark sky tumbled and screamed. A jagged vein of lightning split the sky open, a blinding, merciless white that seared their retinas. Crows erupted from the canopy in a shrieking black cloud of panic, while from the deepest thickets, the cries of wolves and dogs rose in a chorus of raw, shivering terror.
"The moon!" Gopi shrieked, pointing a trembling finger upward. "Arjun, look at the moon!"
Arjun looked at the moon, hearing him. His heart missed a beat, as soon as he saw the moon. The blood in his veins turned to ice.
A colossal skull-shaped visage glowed in the sky, its surface burning with grotesque pinkish-red light. Ghostly vapors spiraled around it as it devoured the moon whole. When the moon vanished entirely, only a blood-red orb remained, wrapped in crimson clouds that painted the earth in a hellish glow.
The skull's hollow eye sockets burned as it stared down upon the world.
✦ SOMETHING HAD COME ✦
Along the forest road, people stood frozen, staring upward in disbelief. No one spoke. No one breathed. Their mind simply refused to accept what the eyes were seeing.
A thunderous hysterical laughter echoed accross the sky and the earth.
High above, monstrous and unrestrained, laughter rippled through the night—sharp enough to pierce the soul. striking the primal fear in every living heart. It shattered reason, cracked courage, and tore at sanity itself.
Pandemonium broke out with the suddenness of a dam bursting. The air was no longer filled with the quiet rustle of the forest, but with the raw, jagged sounds of human terror. Adults screamed, their voices thin and reedy against the roaring wind, while children wailed in a blind, instinctive panic. Every living creature—from the birds in the canopy to the cattle in the fields—fled in a frantic, directionless swarm, driven by a singular urge: to get away from the horrific voices echoing accross the sky and valley striking fear in every one's heart.
But Arjun did not flee. He pivoted on his heel and broke into a desperate, lung-searing sprint toward the very heart of the chaos leaving his bicycle and Gopi behind.
"Arjun! Have you lost your mind?" Gopi shrieked, his voice barely audible over the howling gale. He skidded to a halt, watching in horror as his friend raced toward the village.
He picked up Arjun's bicycle and ride towards arjun. "Hey idiot, The forest is an open field! We have to run away, otherwise it wouldn't be late when the source of this would soon arrive here. So why are you heading back? Directly towards the source"
"My mother!" Arjun's voice drifted back, strained and fierce. "She's still in the house!"
He didn't slow down, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "She's been sick all day, Gopi—too weak to even sit up! She's been bedridden since dawn. I can't leave her to face this alone!"
"She'll find a way!" Gopi bellowed, his eyes darting toward the black silhouettes of the trees. "The neighbors will help! Arjun, come back!"
"She can't move, Gopi!" Arjun's voice broke, a flash of pure, agonizing fear crossing his face. "Not fast enough! I won't let her die in the dark!"
Gopi stood frozen for a heartbeat, his knees knocking together, his entire soul screaming at him to save himself. He looked at the retreating back of his friend, then at the hellish, bleeding moon above. He let out a string of panicked curses, his face twisting in a mask of frustrated terror, and then he bolted after Arjun.
"You're insane! Completely, utterly idiot, if you wanted to save your mother than why the hell you left your bicycle and running with your barefeet!" Gopi yelled at him as he ask him to sit behind him in the bicycle.
As he stop the bicycle, arjun sits on the back of the seat, than Gopi starts pedalling the cycle towards the village. "If we die tonight, I'm going to haunt you for eternity, do you hear me?"
Despite the cold dread clutching his chest, a faint, fleeting smile ghosted across Arjun's lips. It was a brief spark of warmth in the middle of a winter storm.
✦ HELL ON EARTH ✦
As they reached the village outskirts, the last remnants of their childhood innocence were destroyed in a single, horrific heartbeat. The world had just turned dark and predatory.
From the bleeding sky, winged monstrosities descended like vultures made of shadow. They snatched men mid-stride, their talons sinking into flesh with sickening ease before crushing them as though they were mere insects. Bodies burst apart with a wet, visceral thud, like overripe fruit hitting stone. Above, the clouds seemed to weep fire; embers rained upon the thatched roofs and golden fields, turning lifetimes of labor into drifting ash within seconds.
Then came the giants. Towering demons, some reaching five meters in height, thundered through the narrow streets. Their faces were grotesque masks of goblin-like hunger, their jagged, mismatched teeth glistening with saliva and gore as they plowed through the fleeing crowds. Blood did not merely spill—it violently splattered across the village walls in such massive amounts that a crimson stream began to flow down the cobblestones. Every dream and every hope of the unfortunate souls whose blood joined that stream was now stripped of meaning, washed away aimlessly into the dirt.
Alongside them crawled huge, serpent-like creatures with slender, towering bodies and sickening humanoid faces that retained all their reptilian features. Slithering through the narrow streets, bushes, and ponds, they effortlessly snared fleeing villagers in their suffocating coils. With a terrifying, half-human smile revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth and a long, flickering, double-slit tongue, the monstrosities opened their jaws to an impossible width—devouring their screaming prey whole in a single, gruesome gulp.
Children's screams were cut short by the sound of rending bone. Families were torn apart in the time it took to draw a breath by the demonic knights riding on the back of demonic horses.
In the shadows of the granaries, some wolf face creatures had already begun to feed, hunched over the fallen while the living watched in a paralysis of soul-crushing horror, a little girl infant crying laying in the side of her dead mothers body, who was being devoured slowly by those creatures.
"Why?" Gopi wailed, his voice fracturing into a high, thin reed of sound. "Arjun, why is this happening?"
Arjun could not answer. The ground trembled beneath them. Flames scattered. Screams rose from every direction—a mother dragging her child, an old man limping with blood pouring down his face.
Human agony merged into a single, endless cry.
Tears streamed down Gopi's cheeks, reflecting the unnatural, bleeding light from above. "What did we do?" he choked out, his voice breaking under the weight of sheer terror. "What was our sin that brought this doomsday right to our doors?"
Arjun's throat constricted, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He remember the exact horrific scenarios of human corpses in his nightmare which was finally unfolding itself in front of him with such a bone shattering reality.
But watching his friend fall apart broke something inside him, and a toxic mixture of helplessness and white-hot rage finally erupted.
"The sin of weakness!" Arjun shouted, the words tearing from his throat. "We are too weak—too damn weak to fight back against these cruel entities! Look at how easily they extinguish a human life—like it's nothing! Like we are no more valuable than toys made of clay."
He gestured wildly at the encroaching darkness, his voice rising in panic and fury. "Not a single one of us stands a chance against these behemoths. Only gods could match them, but where are they? Every ancient horror of the Asuras devouring us mercilessly is repeating right in front of our eyes. It's forcing us to face the cold-hearted truth of our own fragile vulnerability—a truth we buried deep enough to forget. And now, they are digging up that exact catastrophe right in front of us to remind us who are they! We stand no chance against them. None. We are completely at the mercy of these tyrants now, unless they lose focus... or something divine intervenes."
He snapped his head up to face the suffocating, crimson sky, his eyes burning with a desperate, furious defiance.
"Why are they so strong?!" he screamed into the void, his voice a jagged blade of pure anguish. "And why the hell were we made so fragile?!"
He hurled the question into the bleeding heavens with every ounce of strength he had left.
He screamed the question into the crimson sky.
But the sky did not answer.
The only answer was a sound that chilled the marrow in their bones: a low, booming laughter vibrate from the very throat of the earth itself.
...