Dawn found the battlefield littered with things no army in Swarnabhumi's history had ever had to catalogue before: broken cold ones bound in rope and iron, their gray eyes still fixed and empty even in captivity, and beside them the ordinary human wreckage of any hard night, wounded soldiers, exhausted horses, a scorched crater where the earth itself had swallowed a man whole.
Rama stood at the crater's edge long after the last soldier had been ordered back to the barracks, staring down at ground gone smooth and black as though nothing had ever burst up through it at all. Sekar stood beside him, her hand still closed around the shard, its faint inner light gone dark and quiet now that whatever it had been reacting to had withdrawn.
