A Quote by Author (Phoenixfly_steller)
"There are always questions left in the dark, often because the only person who held the answers was taken from our lives before we could even feel their presence."
Agastya’s refusal to believe the diary’s impossible confession was forcefully interrupted. A hollow, clawing ache twisted deep within his stomach.
It was a sharp, biological demand. An undignified reminder that while his soul might be adrift in a cosmic error, the flesh he currently inhabited was starving.
He stared at the leather-bound book for a long moment, the existential dread warring with raw, physical need. Slowly, he pushed the heavy diary aside.
The mysteries of House Esrala would have to wait. The dead could afford to be patient; the living required fuel.
His blue eyes, predatory and calm, swept the dim, flour-dusted shadows of the bakery.
Resting near the far edge of the heavy teakwood counter were a few leftover loaves from the morning’s bake. They were tightly wrapped in thick, brown butcher paper and bound with coarse jute twine, meant to preserve whatever little freshness remained.
Agastya approached the loaves in total silence. His boots made absolutely no sound against the floorboards. He hooked a finger under the knot of the twine. With a deliberate, measured pull, he snapped the thread.
The brown paper unfolded with a dry, crinkling rustle that seemed unnaturally loud in the suffocating quiet of the shop.
Beneath the wrapping lay a dark, dense loaf of rye. He rested his palm flat against it. The crust was entirely stale, feeling as hard and unforgiving as a cobblestone left out in the winter cold.
He needed a blade. Agastya’s gaze dropped to the space beneath the counter. His analytical mind instantly mapped the utilitarian layout: a column of two sliding drawers built into the left side, and a set of low, heavy cabinet doors on the right, likely concealing bulk sacks of grain.
He reached out and pulled open the top left drawer. The wooden tracks groaned faintly. Inside lay a modest, perfectly stacked pile of paper currency, seven notes of five Elartraum each.
It was a pitiful sum, the meagre wages of a man who had worked himself to the bone just to maintain this crumbling shop.
“Well, even though it is less. He wasn’t that poor.” Agastya stared at the money for a fraction of a second. Wealth meant absolutely nothing to a man trying to survive the night. He slid the drawer shut with a dull, dismissive thud.
Bending down slowly. He ignored the lingering, phantom tightness in his chest. He opened the lower drawer. Amidst a chaotic clutter of wooden dough scrapers, heavy measuring spoons, and rolling pins, his eyes locked onto a glint of steel.
It was a long, serrated bread knife.
Agastya reached in and drew it out. He stood up straight, bringing the blade into the jaundiced yellow light of the oil lamp. As his fingers wrapped around the worn, wooden handle, his muscle memory instantly fired.
He adjusted his grip, testing the balance and the weight of the steel. It was a mundane, domestic tool, forged to saw through crust and flour. Yet, as he held it, his hands instinctively locked into a lethal, reverse grip—holding it like a weapon meant to saw through muscle and bone.
Adjusting his hold, he brought the knife down. With a single, sharp motion, he cleaved a thick, jagged slice from the hardened loaf.
He raised the dense bread to his mouth and took a bite. He chewed slowly, his jaw working methodically against the impossibly tough texture. It ground against his teeth like dried clay, devoid of any real moisture. But a starving man cannot afford to be a food critic, and a master assassin even less so.
For decades, the old master who had ultimately put a bullet in his head had meticulously stripped him of such worldly weaknesses. Agastya had not merely been taught the mechanics of murder; he had been broken down and rebuilt into a perfect, biological engine of endurance.
His conditioning had forced him to consume things that would shatter an ordinary man’s mind and body. He had survived on strips of rotting meat, gnawed on raw, bitter tree bark to stave off madness in the wilderness, and swallowed toxic, hallucinogenic roots just to build an immunity to poison.
His palate had been systematically destroyed over the years. Every texture and taste—no matter how vile, sour, or agonising—was registered by his brain as nothing more than necessary fuel.
Compared to the punishing survival trials of a childhood spent with that damn fucking old man, this stale, stone-hard bread was no hardship. To Agastya, it was a feast.
It took him nearly ten minutes to consume half of the dense rye loaf. His jaw ached from the mechanical, grinding effort, but the sharp, hollow pain in his gut finally subsided. His stolen biology was satisfied, pacified by the intake of heavy, coarse grain.
Agastya lowered the serrated knife and put it against the teakwood counter with a dull clack.
With the primal distraction of hunger out of the way, the cold, analytical machinery of his mind instantly spun back to life.
His blue eyes drifted across the counter. It was locked once again onto The Last Book of House Esrala.
‘Whoever that little brother was,’ Agastya thought, a rare, grim flicker of respect passing through his mind, ‘he was incredibly lucky. In the shadows of the empire, a man who will burn his own soul to hell just to give you a second chance doesn’t exist.’
But the fleeting sentiment quickly evaporated. It was replaced by the chilling, tactical realities of his situation. Agastya leaned over the counter, his gaze narrowing at the fresh, glistening ink of the suicide note.
If Agastya wasn’t the intended recipient, then why had Astragan written the letter just a few hours before the hit? The timing was too precise to be an accident. The baker had known the assassination was coming. He had prepared the diary, set the arcane yantra, and quietly waited for Agastya to pull the trigger.
How?
Agastya’s brow furrowed, his mind racing through the variables. Did the baker's unnatural, entropy-reversing power grant him the ability to foresee his own death? Or was it something far more grounded, and far more insidious? In Agastya's line of work, coincidences were usually just poorly disguised traps.
What if this wasn't just a botched resurrection?
What if the assassination order itself, handed down by Agastya's own master, was part of a much larger, unseen design?
The suffocating silence of the airtight bakery grew heavier, thick with the weight of a conspiracy he could not yet see. Agastya reached out, his fingertips brushing the dry edge of the diary, preparing to turn the page and uncover the secrets of House Esrala.
Then, the silence was shattered.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Three heavy, deliberate knocks echoed through the shop.
Agastya froze, his hand hovering over the book. The sound hadn't come from the walls or the shifting floorboards. It had come from the heavy, iron-banded door leading out to the dark cobblestone street.
Someone was standing outside in the dead of the night. And they were waiting for the baker to answer.