Agni

“Agni’s Ashes”:The beautifully sad. The sacred soft. The flawed immortal. The dying mortal.

The god was dying.Not with a roar of flames or the cracking open of the heavens. Just a subtle tremble in his palms, a cough that carried smoke instead of fire. His once-radiant form, Agni—the Fire God—now barely shimmered under the dying embers of his own divinity.

Once, kings lit sacred fires in his name. Warriors prayed for his flame in battle. Rishis fed his hunger with ghee and chants. Agni had been the bridge between earth and sky, the messenger of the gods. Eternal, they said.

But time, in its quiet erosion, had done what no demon ever could — made the world forget.

He sat alone now at the edge of an abandoned yajna shala, where grass grew wild between the stones, and pigeons nested where lamps once burned. Smoke curled from his fingertips, not fire. Ash, not spark.

She found him there. A girl. Mortal. Ahalya.

Not the Ahalya of stone and salvation, but a namesake born into dust and displacement. She was orphaned by floods, raised by whispers, and carved sharp by survival. She did not believe in gods. What good had they done?

Yet when she saw him—this once-mighty figure cloaked in silence—she did not run.

“You’re Agni,” she said, more a fact than a question.

“I was,” he murmured. “Now I’m smoke pretending to be flame.”

She sat, unafraid. “You’re supposed to be powerful.”

He looked at her with eyes that had seen the Vedas born, now dulled by the weight of forgetting. “Power doesn’t make you immortal. It only makes you necessary. Once you’re not…”

He trailed off. She understood. Mortals knew that kind of fading intimately.

Days passed. She brought him stories, not offerings. Her mother’s lullabies. Her father’s rice-cooking jokes. The way hope sometimes looked like rusted temple bells still ringing in the wind.

He listened. And something shifted.

Not a blaze. Not a rebirth. But a flicker.

Ahalya built a small fire beside him one night—flint, twigs, patience. She lit it with mortal hands. No mantra. Just will.

“You’re still fire,” she said. “Even if you’re quiet now.”

He watched the flames reflect in her eyes, not his own. “I was meant to consume. To transform.”

“Maybe you were also meant to warm,” she said. “To stay.”

For the first time in centuries, Agni did not ache to burn. He ached to remain. In this ruin of a temple, beside a girl who had no faith, only fierce compassion. And he did.

Not as the roaring fire of havans and epics. But as a quiet hearth flame. A guardian of stories. A witness to resilience.

She was mortal. He was myth. But in that space between dying and believing, they found something sacred: The soft that survives.

-Teja