1 1.1 Voices from the Edge of World. (1.6k)

# # In case you missed the Prologue, make sure to read it in the auxiliary volume.

I admit the first three chapters, including this, are horrendous. Even as the author, I cringe, re-reading through those every time. But I had to start writing about anything and everything that came to my mind. Otherwise, I wouldn't have even started.

I'd ask you to skim through those since they don't add much to the story. They are beyond redemption. I'll likely take care of them during the next draft. Chapter 4 onwards is where the story truly starts, and I'm working on it to make it mobile-friendly. ##

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Summary: Our MC is called Dhruva. He dreams of weird people giving him unwarranted advice. Except for two, who seem to know him already. He next sees a cute little village in the foothills of Himalayas where children his age were playing around. There is also something better than Wi-Fi in such a remote place. That's all. Oh my God. What was I even thinking, lmao!

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"Ashtam, it's not your time yet." I heard a soft male voice vibrating within my ribcage, reminding me of that time my parents took me to a movie hall.

As a little child, the sound reverberating inside my body was a huge source of discomfort back then. But now, it left a warm and pleasant tugging sensation within my stomach as if a long-lost friend was giving me some advice.

"I'm Dhruva, not someone named Ashtam. You might be mistaken..." I said, perplexed. Ashtam usually meant eighth, but the way the voice called to me made me feel like it was indeed my name for some reason.

'I thought I was asleep.' I wondered, looking around at the vast expanse of mountain ranges sprawled in front of my eyes.

The snowclad peaks far away were almost the same height as my eyes, and two lakes adorned the earth below, connected by a small stream that looked like the ground was wearing spectacles.

'And I'm sure I was not in the Himalayas before I went to sleep.'

For a split second, I felt excitement born from a minute possibility that I might've been abducted by aliens and standing right now in front of some hidden mountain base. The occult and conspiracy theories often piqued my interest, and I frequently found myself rereading books filled with stories of alien encounters and abductions.

'I wonder since when or what made me interested in those.'

"You'll soon be given a choice. Make sure to imagine the consequences carefully. The world is not what you think it is; you'll find out soon enough..." A different voice cut in. This one was rude. I imagined a fussy middle-aged man to be the owner, just like the uncle who lived across the playground, notorious for seizing cricket balls and complaining to our parents.

"How soon is soon? A few days, months, or years...?" I tried to interrupt, thinking, 'Imagining consequences? What a weird expression' at the back of my mind.

"Shut up and listen, ughhh... why are we even doing this? This piece of..." The voice sounded annoyed, and the vibrations scratched my intestines.

"Continue; we don't have much time. We need to ensure this doesn't happen again..." another voice said. This one was a bit raspy, as if words were coming out of a throat that had long gone out of service.

'Should he even be talking?' I thought.

"Don't be greedy; you'll need as much help as..." The voice suddenly cut off as if someone pulled the plug, powering a speaker.

My vision of the mountain with two lakes at its foot at the front, clouds wrapping around the peaks of those situated far beyond, all became a spiral of watercolors combining to become a dark red wasteland filled with deformed corpses and protruding bones of some whale...was it even a whale?

Looked like the ribcage of some gigantic snake. I knew enough biology to guess it was not something of this world.

"Damn geezers!" I heard a male voice resounding all across the scene as my head whipped up to the top of a rib bone of the prehistoric animal as if pulled by an intangible force.

A lean male stood there with torn clothes fluttering in the wind. 'Has to be a genocidal murderer,' I 'imagined' taking the valuable advice from the unknown voices reminiscing the story of a guy who murdered his whole family to save some Village.

"Say what you have to fast; looking at you, I think you'll get angrier if I ask who you are at this point," I shouted back at the figure, expecting him to get cut off soon.

He snorted. "Funny as always...Don't believe anybody; only you can..." And, he got cut off as expected, with the view changing.

'Cliche,' I mumbled for only myself to hear as I came to stand in front of a massive waterfall in a green valley surrounded by mountains.

"So, who's next?" I was excited at this funny set of events. I presented myself with a medal for having such a vivid and strange yet detailed imagination.

"It'll be me." another voice stated as if he expected this question from me. "This is good practice. The edge of the world has started unraveling, and repetition is the only way to train your eye." His whisper appeared right beside my left ear as I felt a sensation of touch over my left eye.

It was the eye I had almost lost, being unable to see for whole three months, just because of a small fight between friends. A slight push and my skinny ass lost balance planting my eye right at the edge of a table.

After running around in hospitals and two metropolitan cities, I finally recovered, leaving me with a lifetime regret of not being able to stay by my grandma's side in her final days. By the time my therapy finished in a different state, hundreds of kilometers away from home, she had long left this world.

I looked around the place and took in its breathtaking beauty. A huge waterfall split in the middle seemed to float away into the wind before reaching the earth. The sky was covered in gray clouds without a hint of sunshine as huts lay sprawled around the green meadow I was standing on.

There were people, too, walking around or napping under trees. They all seemed a little older than my 12-year-old self.

"This looks like a cozy place." I said, looking around, "If only there was Wi-Fi around here..." My voice trailed off, thinking about the logistics of an internet connection in such a remote place.

"We have something even better!" The voice said with a hint of excitement. I imagined him smiling as he said so. "On a different note, things have never worked out following the path others have set for you. Whenever you're confused, go with the flow." he finished.

"Finally, a piece of sound advice." I answered back, still looking around. There were only males in this place. Was this some monastery where they had to practice celibacy or something?

Finally, I realized that my dream was over, and reaching such a state of acceptance, my eyes opened, greeting the sunlight that traced through the gaps in the window beside my bed. Little dust particles floated in the ray of light as it kissed my face.

"It's time..." I sat up, whispering to myself. I have decided to move forward and stop regretting my previous situation. I will honor my grandma by fulfilling her final wish of attending a school that made it compulsory for the students to stay inside the campus.

I will only be able to come back home for two months and fifteen days every year from now on.

The test was difficult, and I had to put in effort for the past year. But somehow, I knew I would make it. As a man, I guess you have to keep a promise you've made.

After one and a half years of my grandma's return to the cycle, I was finally going to the place she wanted me to for all these years. I left my home, friends in the neighborhood and school for a totally new place.

I'll still hopefully meet them once or twice a year, I kept thinking.

I remember I couldn't even say goodbye properly to anybody other than one of my friends who stayed near me. He was tasked with notifying others that I won't be returning to my old school.

Maybe when we are allowed to have phones, we can connect again. But deep down, I knew these bonds were unlikely to stay intact.

"It is what it is..." I said and took the first step toward my primary school life. Dreams of dawn are usually a precedent of what's about to come, I kept thinking. Maybe everything I saw was just an idealized version of what I would experience there.

Author's Note: Thank you for reading the first chapter. I hope I can give you a week's worth of good binge-reading experience when this work stores up more chapters in the future.

It's been years since I wrote something, so I'm still stumbling. Indian myths will be mentioned throughout this series. Even though talking about it openly is quite taboo in our families, where we often ignore adult content and make out the gist of these ancient stories, the myths themselves are filled with explicit content. With lots of it, in fact.

So I'll have to water down the versions quite a bit, making changes and ignoring some of the 'details.' The mythical characters here have lived through all these years and gone through changes in my imagination. Some are proud of their past, while others still repent of their wrongdoings.

I'll try to stay faithful to their backstories while making their current personalities a close depiction of what might happen to a person with a particular past.

The story will be a little slow at first, so I'll ask you to give it at least ten chapters(when I wrote this, it didn't even have that much, lol). I have probably kept some cliches in the story. I can't help it when I'm writing something with these tags, so I'll ask for your patience.

I hope you have a fun read ahead!!! Thanks again for reading.