36 Clue

Aman tried to make out the Goddess' face but as in the case with the Gods from his last visit to the Dreamland, all he could see was a fuzzy countenance. So, he wasn't able to make out her expression as the demon charged towards her, its eyes red with rage and steam spurting from its nostrils with every breath.

The mount of the Devi, her lion, roared its own challenge and rushed to meet it in battle. The ground shook from the might of the two confronting forces.

They met in the middle of the battlefield, raising a ring of dust that expanded outwards.

The lion roared in pain as the deadly horns of the demon gored it through one of its legs, hot blood streaming out of the deep wound. Fighting through the pain, it bit down on the side of the demon's thickly muscled neck and its claws rent deep furrows on its shoulder.

Although he couldn't see the Devi's face, he could almost feel her anger at the injury to her mount.

With a movement too quick for even Divine Vision to follow, one of her hands flashed and the curved ceremonial blade, the Kharga, bit deep into Mahishasura's neck. With a pained bellow, the demon's limbs buckled under the weight of the blow, the ground fissuring beneath its hooves as it struggled to stay upright even as the blade nearly severed its spine.

It tried to dislodge its horn from the body of the lion and retreat, only for the lion to clamp down even more viciously, holding it in place.

Unrelenting, Devi Durga dislodged her weapon from its spine, drew it back and chopped down again, unheeding of the warm blood that splashed all over her, lending her an aura of fierceness.

This time, her blade cleaved cleanly through Mahishasura's spine and passed through the rest of its neck, beheading it.

The headless body flailed on the ground in the throes of death, its limbs twitching this way and that, drawing deep furrows into the ground. Furrows that soon filled with its blood.

The lion reared back its head and roared out its joy at the victory, dislodging the Asura's disembodied head which still had its horn embedded in its shoulder.

There was no warning at all.

One moment, the demon's headless carcass lay still upon the ground, the next, its stomach burst out in a shower of gore and from within it, the bloody form of the Asura burst out with a snarl, now in the guise of a man. For Mahishasura could possessed myriad incarnations and his treacherous nature was known to all.

Even as the lion roared of its victory, the Asura had already lunged forward towards the Devi, his claws outstretched and fangs bared.

His claws stopped mere inches from her face, the blood dripping down from their tips and falling on the head of the lion below, startling it out of its premature victory celebration.

Mahishasura looked down at his chest, where the Devi's trident, the Trishul, had pierced his heart. Shivering, it tried to pull the divine weapon out, but he had exhausted his strength and had nothing more left to give.

The demon that had ruled the three worlds for a period of time breathed his last.

Immediately, the Dreamland dissolved into psychedelic patterns and swirls before the entire scene began anew.

Aman felt a tug on his soul that indicated that he was nearing the limits of his usage of Divine Vision.

Hastily, he tried to make out anything useful from the Dreamland. The only thing he could make out was that beyond the battlefield, which was roughly the size of the park the pandal was in, the Dreamland turned really unclear and hazy.

But in the distance, he noticed an area of clarity, though what was in it, he couldn't tell.

Without warning, his vision snapped back to his real body and his eyes snapped open, only for him to tightly shut them again as he gasped in pain. His eyes hurt like hell and when he touched them, he found the area around them inflamed and giving off heat.

Getting up shakily from his chair, he staggered his way blindly to the drinking fountain that was nearby, wet his handkerchief and pressed it onto his eyes like a cold compress. He relaxed slightly as the pain reduced a bit. Repeating it twice, he felt good enough to open his eyes.

The world seemed blurry and his eyes prickled as he took stock of his surroundings again. Startled, he brought out his phone and took a selfie, and studied it.

His eyes looked horrific, with all the capillaries in the eyeball showing up, making his eyes seem scarily red. The area around it was a blotchy red too.

He knew that he had gone overboard and using the ability again that night might just blind him. He didn't want to risk it. He decided to return the next day.

Leaning against the streetlamp near the drinking fountain, he waited till the dizziness abated and his vision cleared before walking towards the direction he had seen the anomalous patch of clarity in the Dreamland.

He wanted to understand what the correlation between dreams and reality was.

Reaching the spot, he was surprised to find another pandal, albeit on that was only the size of a one storey building, a dwarf in comparison to the one at the park.

It was a local puja, organized by the members of the local club with the donations of the households in the neighbourhood.

Aman realized the nature of the visions he had seen in the Dreamland thus far…

Before the puja had started, the thoughts of the public had been unfocused and sometimes they gathered together, sometimes they diverged, like the waves in the ocean.

The scene he had seen with the mountain sized Mahishasura and the Devas was like a tsunami, a result of the collective subconsciousness peaking with one particular scene from the myth as the focus.

Now, that the puja had officially started and the pandals had been opened to the public, the public's thoughts weren't scattered anymore but concentrated into pockets with the puja pandals as the lode stone condensing them together.

Thus, located around each pandal, the same scene, the one depicted on the idols: Of Devi Durga slaying Mahishasura, was playing out in the Dreamland. The more popular the pandal, the more the footfalls, the stronger the reflection in the Dreamland and the larger the figures of the Deities that fought their eternal war.

For example, the Mahishasura and Devi Durga he had seen over the Bose pandal was around a hundred metres high. Incomparable to the Kilometre-tall demon that he had seen the first time.

Aman felt he had grasped an important clue that might lead to the solution of the mystery around Raunak Bose's actions.