The hollow ache in his stomach tightened again, a sharp, biological demand from a body he did not own. But Agastya ruthlessly shoved the hunger aside, locking it away in the back of his mind. Physical discomfort was a minor inconvenience.
He moved toward the heavy wooden counter. His footsteps were perfectly silent out of pure, ingrained habit. His brown eyes were locked entirely on the object waiting under the dim light.
It was a thick diary, bound in dark, weathered brown leather. The surface was scuffed, scratched, and worn soft at the corners. It shows the mapping out of years of constant handling by its previous owner.
Wrapped tightly around its centre was an old, coarse jute ribbon, knotted firmly to keep the covers bound shut. It sat there like a locked vault, holding the quiet weight of a confession.
Agastya stopped at the edge of the counter. He hesitated for a fraction of a second. Curiosity was a dangerous, often fatal trait in his line of work, but right now, it was his only compass.
He reached out with hands that belonged to someone unknown or likely to be the man he was in. His fingertips brushed against the rough, bristly texture of the jute.
Slowly, with the deliberate, agonising precision he usually reserved for disarming a tripwire, he worked the frayed knot loose. The stiff ribbon finally gave way, slipping off the diary and dropping to the wooden counter with a faint, dry rustle.
Agastya rested his palm flat against the leather cover, feeling the subtle, worn indentations in the material. Then, taking a slow breath, he pulled it open.
The stiff spine let out a faint, cracking groan.
A single, pale yellow page came into view beneath the lamplight. The paper was incredibly dry. Its edges were brittle, jagged, and deeply discoloured by the slow burn of time.
As the book opened, it released the distinct, heavy scent of old dust, dry air, and faded ink. The page looked ancient, far older than the bakery, and perhaps far older than the man whose body Agastya now inhabited.
Agastya’s eyes locked onto the first page.
There were no complex cyphers, no clockwork diagrams, and no intricate introductions greeting him. There was only a single line of text resting dead centre on the yellowed paper.
It was written in large, ornate calligraphy, styled in heavy, sweeping typography that belonged to the previous century. The ink was not faded. It was a thick, deep black, formulated from crushed iron gall and soot, looking as though it had been stamped into the brittle paper by a heavy industrial press.
‘The Last Book of House Esrala.’
It was a surname.
Agastya stood perfectly still, his eyes narrowing as his mind instantly began to sift through the vast, dark archives of his memory. As a high-tier assassin operating in the shadows of the empire.
He was required to know every player on the board. He knew the royal bloodlines of the old nobles, the wealthy merchant barons who controlled the steam railways. The names of the Empire officers who ran the colonial docks, and the ruthless crime syndicates that ruled the smog-choked slums.
But ‘Esrala?’
The name yielded nothing. It sounded ancient, carrying a heavy, aristocratic weight, yet it was completely absent from the underworld ledgers. The fact that a master assassin had never heard of a "House" powerful enough to wield reverse-entropy powers sent a cold, sharp spike of unease down his stolen spine.
He moved his hand, his calloused fingertips extending to grip the dry edge of the stiff paper. He needed to see the next page. He needed to know what House Esrala had left behind.
But just as his thumb brushed the parchment to turn the leaf, the atmosphere inside the bakery violently shifted.
He felt it in his bones before he heard it. A sudden, massive drop in barometric pressure sucked the air from his lungs and made his ears pop painfully, exactly like a steam train plunging into a deep subterranean tunnel. The hairs on his arms stood on end, prickling with the sharp, metallic sting of aetheric static.
A localised gale erupted out of nowhere, swirling directly around the heavy teakwood counter.
Agastya snapped his head up, his combat instincts flaring. His golden eyes darted across the shadows of the shop. The single glass window overlooking the street was locked tight behind heavy wooden shutters.
The thick, iron-banded door was firmly bolted from the inside. There were no open ventilation grates, no cracked masonry in the colonial brickwork, and no chimney drafts.
The bakery was a sealed, airtight box of brick and wood. There was absolutely nowhere for the outside elements to enter.
Yet, the wind howled.
It was a fast, unnatural current, surging with the heavy, humid pressure of an approaching monsoon. It smelled of ozone, crushed dried leaves, and hot copper. Across the room, the heavy purple velvet curtain was caught in the invisible vortex. It whipped and thrashed wildly against its brass rings, snapping through the air as violently as a galleon's flag caught in a hurricane.
Agastya braced himself, planting his boots firmly against the floorboards as the wind screamed past his ears. Flour spilt from the heavy jute sacks, swirling into the air like a localised sandstorm, catching the dim yellow light of the oil lamps.
Then, the invisible current slammed squarely into the diary.
The stiff, yellowed pages caught the gale. The book did not just open; it erupted. The heavy parchment began to flip violently, blurring past in a frantic, dry rustle that sounded like a flock of birds taking sudden flight.
The wind tore through the binding, flipping dozens, then hundreds of pages in a matter of seconds.
Agastya threw his arm up to shield his eyes from the swirling flour, but he kept his gaze locked on the book. Through the blur of moving paper, his sharp eyes caught chaotic, fragmented glimpses of the diary's contents. He saw frantic, jagged handwriting spilling across the margins.
He saw incredibly complex sketches of human anatomy overlaid with clockwork gears and geometric yantras. He saw sprawling equations that looked more like dark alchemy than mathematics.
The wind was not random. It was propelled by an unseen, deliberate force, searching through the tome, tearing past the years of history as if it knew exactly what it was looking for.
Then, just as abruptly as the tempest had begun, the pressure vanished.
The transition was jarring. The wind died in a fraction of a second. The heavy velvet curtain dropped, falling dead and motionless against the wooden shelves.
The swirling flour drifted slowly back to the floor like fine snow. The heavy, oppressive silence of the night rushed back into the sealed bakery, ringing loudly in Agastya's ears.
Agastya slowly lowered his arm, his breath shallow and controlled. He looked down at the teakwood counter.
The diary lay perfectly still. The wind had forced it open to a specific spread, resting heavily just a few pages away from the very end of the thick book. The pages lay flat, waiting for him.
The wind had vanished without a trace, leaving only the quiet, suffocating enviroment of the bakery.
Agastya leaned over the heavy teakwood counter, his breathing shallow and controlled. The dim, jaundiced light of the brass oil lamp cast long, flickering shadows across the open diary. The thick parchment lay completely flat, unmoving.
Agastya lowered his gaze. The words on the newly revealed page were scrawled in thick, bold strokes. But unlike the brittle, ancient paper they were written on, the ink was strikingly new.
It glistened faintly under the lamplight, reflecting the amber flame. Agastya leaned closer, his trained senses instantly picking up the sharp, acidic scent of crushed iron gall, wet soot, and aetheric residue.
The ink hadn’t even fully dried into the porous fibers of the page. It had been written only a few hours ago.
His blue eyes scanned the handwriting. The strokes were heavy and frantic, the nib of the pen pressing so hard into the paper that it had nearly torn right through it. It was the desperate, hurried script of a man who knew his time was measured in seconds.
He began to read.
‘My dear little brother,
I am sorry that I could not save you. I am sorry that I failed to protect you, just as I promised our parents I would.’
Agastya’s eyes stopped. He froze, his analytical mind dissecting the words with the cold, detached precision of a forensic investigator.
‘Little brother?’ Agastya’s brow furrowed. He had no siblings. He was an orphan raised by a lone man.
He had been forged into a weapon for the last twenty years by a master who had ultimately put a bullet in his head. Whoever this tragic apology was meant for, it certainly wasn't him.
Yet, he was the one standing here, reading it through the author's stolen eyes.
Pushing the confusion aside, he forced himself to read further down the page. The handwriting grew even messier, the letters bleeding into one another as the baker’s desperation peaked.
‘I really mean it. By the time you are reading this, I will already be dead. I do not have much to say, mostly because I no longer consider myself worthy enough to speak to you. I just want you to know that this book is all I am leaving behind for you. It is the last thing I can do.
I was not powerful enough to save you. So, I am giving you my life, so that you can live a second one. I am giving you everything I have. Now, you can finally become the man you wanted to be. You can do all the impossible things you probably used to read about in those old novels. I bet you read those types of novels.
I love you. From your terrible brother, a man who will surely be denied by Heaven, and likely thrown out of Hell.
Astragan.’
The heavy, oppressive silence of the night rushed back into the room, ringing loudly in Agastya's ears.
Agastya stared at the signature. ‘Astragan.’
The name carried the same heavy, ancient weight as the clockwork yantra that had just reassembled the room.
The letter was not just an apology. It was a confession. It was a suicide note.
The pieces of the impossible puzzle began to snap together in the assassin's mind. Astragan—the baker, the man whose body Agastya now possessed—had known the assassination was coming.
The heavy, unnatural presence Agastya had felt in the alleyway wasn't a man preparing to fight; it was a man preparing to die. Astragan had let himself be killed.
He had used the kinetic violence of his own murder as the catalyst for a massive, forbidden aetheric ritual, sacrificing his own soul to pull his younger brother back from the dead.
But something had gone catastrophically, horrifically wrong.
'The ritual hadn't resurrected the little brother. Instead, the magic had blindly reached into the void for a soul just as Agastya was executed by his own master.' He thought. The aetheric current had snagged the assassin's newly severed spirit, dragging him across the city and anchoring him inside Astragan’s freshly healed corpse.
Agastya gripped the edges of the heavy teak counter, the wood groaning under his suddenly white-knuckled grip.
The sheer, mechanical irony of it was staggering. Astragan had traded his life, his magic, and his very soul to save the person he loved most in the world.
At last, he murmured, “Of course. I’m not his little brother. I’ve just been dragged into this by mistake.” He refused to believe it.