NARAK: The Blood Covenant

Three months after the XI-C cursed incident.

They were back. Every name that had once been forgotten—etched out of memory, history, and even the school database was now returned.

Class XI-C, once cursed to be erased by the world itself, stood whole again. The empty chairs now had names. The teachers now remembered. The world no longer blinked in confusion when asked about "those students."

The curse had lifted.

Or rather, it had been pushed away. Temporarily.

The trio—Vicki, Nayla, and Raka—walked side by side through the sun-drenched street just beyond the school gates. For the first time in what felt like years, their world was not on fire.

Which, for them, felt suspicious.

"Do you remember we just sealed six ancient concepts, banished a bone warlord, and rewrote the rules of memory three months ago," Raka said, grinning. "And somehow, I'm still hungry."

"Your trauma response is carbs," Vicki muttered, hands in hoodie pockets.

"And your trauma response is sarcasm. So shut up and let me order rice."

Nayla gave a faint smile as she glanced toward the small local diner at the corner—a beat-up food stall with flickering neon signage and the smell of garlic oil hanging like a sacred blessing in the air.

It was... familiar.

Human.

Too human.

They stepped inside.

The diner was quiet, just the soft clatter of bowls and a distant TV playing an old movie rerun. Their usual table by the window was empty.

Or so it seemed.

Because as they approached—a cat was already sitting there.

Jet black.

Perfectly poised on the fourth chair.

Tail curled neatly. And eyes—

Violet.

Unmistakably, painfully, cosmically violet.

It was staring directly at Nayla.

"Uh…" Raka blinked. "You brought your cat?"

"She doesn't have a cat," Vicki said flatly, narrowing his eyes.

Nayla whispered, "That's... not mine."

The cat did not move.

Did not blink.

Only stared as if it was waiting.

Then without warning two voices echoed simultaneously in their heads.

Not just in Vicki's and Raka's minds, Nayla heard it too.

"So... the Dharma bloodline still has a flair for theatrics."

Avici and Arkana said that at the same time.

The air froze.

Raka's jaw dropped. Vicki slowly straightened. Nayla's hand twitched toward the Archive scroll at her hip.

Then it spoke. Out loud.

With a voice far too old for a cat.

Familiar. Sharp. Mocking. Tired.

"After all the sacrifice... after all the screams and seals and broken timelines... here you are. Laughing. Eating. Living."

"Truly heart-wrenching."(He turned his head slightly, gaze piercing) "Especially you, young lady."

Nayla stepped back. Just slightly.

"...Anata?"

The cat—no, the being—sighed and licked its paw casually.

"Anata Dharma is dead. I'm what remains when knowledge refuses to die with the body."

"Call me Daramahesa now. It's more poetic. And besides... reincarnation has perks. You can sit on warm chairs and judge people in silence."

Vicki sat slowly, eyes scanning the creature.

"This isn't funny."

"It's not supposed to be," Daramahesa said with a tired purr. "But it is, isn't it?"

"Why now?" Nayla asked, voice low.

The cat paused, tilting its head slightly. Then:

"Because you thought the war ended."

"But you were wrong."

"The Balance is gone."

"The seals were just locks. And someone out there... just broke the door."

He turned his gaze to the street outside, violet eyes reflecting a reality none of them could see yet.

"And if you're laughing now, children—then you've clearly forgotten what the Echo taught you."

The table was quiet now.

Raka had stopped joking.

Vicki had stopped pretending he wasn't tense.

Nayla had stopped blinking.

Only the low hum of the diner fridge and the distant hiss of boiling noodles filled the space between them and the violet-eyed cat.

Daramahesa sat with one paw lazily pressed to the tabletop, his tail flicking like a metronome of tension.

"Someone has steal The Nameless Balance," he said calmly, as if announcing a weather report.

Vicki leaned forward. "I thought it was destroyed."

"No," Daramahesa replied, "it simply vanished the moment the final seal broke. Which is... not how cosmic anchors usually behave."

Raka raised a brow. "So what does that mean? No more balance, world ends, fire and ice scream into the void?"

"Not exactly. It means the rules of this world—of memory, time, identity—are now... optional."

"Optional," Vicki echoed. "Great."

"And someone took it," Nayla said softly. "But you don't know who."

The cat's ears twitched.

"Correct. I remember the moment it disappeared—I was... in the final loop, handing you the Archive. And then everything fractured."

"So you saw the theft?"

"No," Daramahesa said, voice lower. "Worse. I felt nothing."

He looked straight at Nayla.

"No imprint. No trace. No timeline variant. Whoever did this... exists outside the Archive's lens."

Nayla's eyes narrowed.

She reached to her satchel and pulled out a sealed strip of aged vellum, one of the Anchor Fragments from the Whispered Archive. The script crawled across it like living ink.

She whispered a command phrase.

"Core Query: Balance. Theft. Identity."

The glyphs began shifting, pages unfolding, light pulsing in soft arcs of white and blue.

Vicki and Raka leaned in as spectral images began to form—flickers of the last day at Naraya Dharma, the collapse of the seals, the final clash with Hiranyaksha, Arvanu, The Ashen One, Anata's sacrifice, the moment the world reset...

And then—Blankness.

A sudden void, a blackout of narrative.

"That's not a corrupted file," Nayla said. "That's an absence of event."

Daramahesa growled softly. "Exactly. The Archive cannot record what doesn't register as real."

"So this thief," Vicki said slowly, "wasn't just invisible. They were... untold?"

Daramahesa turned to him, eyes flickering.

"Spoken only in ruin."

A long silence passed.

Raka finally exhaled. "Well. That's comforting. Anyone want dessert?"

But Nayla didn't laugh.She stared at the Archive, the blank spot in the thread of history.

Then, she did something she hadn't done in three months. She whispered a deeper command.

"Open Timeline Fracture: Forbidden Layer."

Daramahesa's ears shot up.

"Nayla, stop—!"

But the script had already begun to unfold—trembling, unstable, ancient.

The moment the forbidden layer unfurled, the Archive pulse cut through the food stall like cold lightning.

Customers didn't notice because they no longer existed.Time skipped. Reality blinked.

For an instant, the trio sat alone in a suspended moment, trapped between seconds, surrounded by the faint hum of Archive glyphs and a voice echoing inside their skulls:

"Say my name, and I will unwrite your fate."

Nayla's breath caught.

"That voice… it wasn't a memory."

Daramahesa nodded, fur ruffled. "It was a challenge. Or an invitation. Either way, it spoke through the Archive. Not within it."

A low growl echoed from Vicki's chest.

And then—he wasn't alone anymore.

"Finally," said a voice that crackled like wildfire licking bone."Someone decides to stop playing guessing games."

Avici Narak emerged within Vicki's mindscape, but as always, his voice bled through to the others when his presence burned too bright to contain.

"An Archive that can't track the thief. A Balance gone missing. A fake god whispering names like curses.""Tell me again how this isn't the beginning of another failure?"

Daramahesa sighed from across the table.

"Ah, the fire incarnate speaks. Still as melodramatic as ever, I see."

"Still alive, are you?" Avici fired back. "Didn't expect your kind to linger like a bad prophecy."

"Didn't expect you to still be hiding behind a teenager, but here we are."

"Say that again, furball."

"Gladly, when you're done flaming the cutlery."

Nayla groaned. "Are you two seriously going to fight—again?"

Then came a third voice. Soft. Crisp. So cold it carried silence within it.

"Enough."

Arkana Arhad.

His words carried weight. Not volume. Not aggression. Just stillness. Like a pond that reflected a storm without rippling.

"Petty insults will not return the Balance."

"Tell him that," Avici muttered. "He's the one reborn as an emotional support cat."

"Says the one reborn with anger issues."

Raka held up his hand. "Okay, I love a good god-argument as much as the next guy, but can we please focus?"

Daramahesa sat straighter, tone shifting from sarcastic to solemn.

"The voice you heard—it exists outside the Archive's architecture. That alone should be impossible."

"Meaning?" Vicki asked.

"Meaning," Arkana said softly, "we are no longer alone in this world."

"We never were," Avici growled. "But now... the untold ones have begun to speak."

"Untold?" Nayla echoed.

"Beings not recorded. Not remembered. Not written. The gaps between glyphs. The blanks in the Archive's sentences."

"Anti-narratives," Daramahesa finished. "Things that should not be. Cannot be. Yet... here they are."

The Archive glitched slightly in Nayla's hand, shivering like paper trying to scream.

"And one of them stole the Balance," she said. "Meaning this isn't just about memory anymore."

Avici's fire crackled within Vicki's chest.

"It's about rewriting the laws."

A pause.

Even the flickering glyphs seemed to hold their breath.

Then Raka leaned back and folded his arms.

"So what do we do?"

"We start looking," Daramahesa said, "not for who stole the Balance... but for who has never been written."

Just as Daramahesa finishes speaking—

The Archive in Nayla's hand rips itself open. Glyphs unravel.Pages twist in midair.The diner's walls begin to bend—literally folding inward like the edge of a book page.

Raka: "Uh… is this normal?"

Daramahesa: "No. This is reactive memory bleed. Someone is rewriting the present."

Suddenly—

A figure appears at the edge of the street.No face. No eyes.Its body glitches, like a drawing caught in the wrong animation frame.

It raises one hand.

The Archive screams.

"It's a shadow construct," Nayla whispers. "But… it has no origin point."

"It's not part of the record," Daramahesa growls.

The creature begins erasing the ground beneath it as it walks—tile, sound, color, even temperature, gone in its path.

Avici: "That thing shouldn't be here."Arkana: "It was never meant to be."

Then the construct looks directly at Nayla.

And in a voice layered with a thousand overlapping tones:

"You opened the page, little Archivist.""Now read what comes next."

The lights shatter. The sky rips.

And the Archive flings open to a single phrase:

"CHAPTER ONE ENDS HERE."