Chapter Text
The first thing that he saw upon his materialization... was his father's face.
(The call was too hard to ignore. He was a boy when his father marched to war, one that made him an orphan. Vrishaketu was lucky enough to be blessed by the love of his uncles, even if most of it was given out of repentance for mercilessly killing his father. He was grateful for their love, nonetheless. While Arjuna—the slayer of his father turned into his guru—tried his best to answer whatever questions he had of his blood father, there remained still in the depths of his yearning (no matter how impossible), the desire to get to know that man in the flesh, not just the image that his guru portrayed of him.
He missed his father; to meet him once more might as well be his utmost wish.)
He was pristine and clean, unlike how Vrisha's childhood memory painted him: worn down and torn, the paleness of his skin stark to the background as if he was a wraith, those blue eyes looking forward as if he was greeting his death destiny. His hair was lush red, a far cry from that sun-blessed white (he remembered how his teacher explained to him, the features that set him apart from mortal, misfortune weighing on his fate as the result of his past life; an extraordinary man born in wrong place and time), and those red-blue eyes gleamed with boundless greed and grief.
"I beseech you," he started, because Vrishaketu needed to be sure of the summoner who called upon his presence—that he really was Karna, son of Kunti and the sun, also his own sire, "Father, are you my master?"
The man's face had been expressionless from the moment he came into existence, but the mere mention of that role might have metaphorically stabbed him, for that face twisted in pain, fleeting the change may be. It was gone, as quickly as it showed, and replaced by a cold but pitying smile. He felt the touch of this mage's fingers, a malefic force of wretchedness bound in flesh, and Vrishaketu felt that thin bond, the one that set this man as his master and himself a servant, strengthening with each moment.
"No." the declaration was made, the torrential force of magecraft rushing in afterward like a raging wave. It traveled so quickly as if his master had wanted to override his senses—
(he screamed from pain, from obliteration, from rage, from hatred, from the very emotions of everyone who died with grief in that plain, from madness)
—he was screaming as he was violated, the connection between them used to bind his reasoning in the mask of wrath and hatred. As the last vestige of his sanity escaped him, he recalled the words of his master, the glassy red-blue eyes reflecting the steel of his resolve:
"I'm not the father that you're yearning for, dear sun-blessed warrior, but you will meet him. I promise you."
His days were filled with enormous hatred and rage, so much that most of his thoughts were jumbled and warped and shattered. Servants needed no sleep (this, he understood from the get-go when he was summoned), but oh, he would trade anything for that luxury. His master—this wicked, alternative version of his father who had no offspring of his own—had him chained in this prison, alone with his thought and without respite over the hateful urges within himself. In every waking moment, he was stuck with the inscription—another curse bound to his core set by his master—inside him, a collection of memories, belonging to someone else's, flooding through the betwixt of his nights—
—and yet, among those flashes that were not his own, he saw the very people who cared for him since he was little: his fa-Master, his guru, his uncles, his stepmother, his grandmother, and the few kind faces who survived the war. And yet, despite the images of his most cherished people, they had always appeared in that bloody scenes of war, where his family spilled blood, killed each other, and desecrated the honor of righteous war. With each of them slain, the blood of either faction spilled unto the earth, Vrishaketu felt how he lost bits and pieces of himself to the many emotion running within him: despair, restlessness, regret, anger, hatred, vengeance.
(His guru would have scolded him for bearing these weaknesses. It would have been a scolding founded on grief, a soft rebuke in his gentle voice, and a haunting look on his face.)
On some nights when the flashes were not that bad (where he was still himself, shredded awareness coalescing in pathetic attempt to override the corruption that his master forced upon him), Vrishaketu sobbed as he recalled upon the one not-his memories of his guru. It instilled much fear (and anger) on him so much that he clung to it (he must not, for this, he knew, would become the undoing of his remaining sanity): the image of his guru in his uncle's hold, fighting to keep himself alive, fighting to survive death's grip.
(He wanted to believe so, and yet, a small part of him believed that weakened, dying guru Arjuna wished for this to pass.)
He remembered it in the memories of the guards of Madhya Pandava, the words exchanged between him and his beloved friend: "Ask for it, Partha. You only need to say the word and I will delay death for you."
Guru Arjuna's smile was weak yet determined, his words gentler than summer breeze, "I won't, my beloved friend... here... this must come to..."
The dream ended, with Vrishaketu feeling lucid for the longest time, yet overwhelmed with melancholy. Uncle Krishna had looked so mournful then, as he witnessed his beloved friend's passing, even if only for a single moment amidst the chaos of war. His uncle's expression twisted back into that of a steely warrior king, ready for battle (even when he was never there to fight, only to steer the chariot of his dear friend) as he rose up to greet another one who rode to their side. The berserker's thought wandered for a short moment, asking to himself of who the person that made his uncle recompose his bearing so quickly was, before the madness enchantment within him shredded his peace once again.
Agony never left him from that moment on. His dreams had become so distorted, the sound of dying men and women both as they're pit in war—the war—that Vrishaketu could no longer take solace from them. He only wanted this cycle of war to stop, for these tragedies to fall into the abyss, never to be seen nor heard. So that he wouldn't see the peaceful face of his mentor as he greeted death. So that he did not have to hear the weeping of his not-Father as he cradled his already-dead brother-in-law his beloved brother.
The sound of the opening cell door was faraway, but Vrishaketu flinched at it like a mournful child. Several of his master's attendants had covered his eyes with a blinder (bounded field with the grail shard as the core), bound his legs and arms to the pole in his cell with magecraft, leaving him unable to do anything. He was once overwhelmed with rage, but now... all that was left was anguish that was likely his master's too, dousing even the subtlest strength of his spirit. There were distant footsteps, growing closer with each step until the person stopped right before him. It quickly dawned on him that his not-Father had come to visit after a while, and Vrishaketu could feel the conflict within himself rising: anger, pain, suffering, agony, hatred, mourning, grief.
"You know my tale," Karna quietly spoke, steel in his voice—and something else akin to grief that echoed with his own. "You know my reason. Become my blade, Vrishaketu, and I promise to deliver what you desire. I will reunite you with your father."
It was in grief that he nodded to his master's plea, surrendering the last piece of himself so that his master can take back the fate he's devoid of. As his not-father lulled him to the abyss, Vrishaketu controlled his body no more.
The experience was like backseat-fighting.
He was present during the times Karna used his body like a marionette, the old curse that Karna cast on him possessing his system and forcing every part of his body yield. When his master wanted him to fly, he did. When he's asked to stab (the command was intuitive, shared between their master-servant bond), Vrishaketu would summon a divine lance bestowed upon him and thrust through his enemy. He was everything any Warmaster would have wanted, the perfect weapon who would never bite on his master's hand.
(Vrishaketu truly loathed this arrangement. He still had his warrior pride: the freedom to choose his allegiance and the way he wants to prove it; this Karna had taken those both away from him. What remained of him was only a simple belief that, no matter how twisted this version of his father was, Karna would never break his promise: that he would meet the real version of his father, somewhere along his malefic journey.)
Karna dragged him out of his desolated prison and commanded him to take to the sky. Everything around him burned as he propelled forward, the burst of his own mana singeing everything in his track. He distantly recalled the smell of ashes as trees burned, the fear that the dwellers of the forest below him as they cowered in terror, the spirits parting at his ascent. A beast, those beings probably saw him as, and Vrishaketu felt the tang of pain in his heart. It made him roar, it made him screech, it made him rush with hollowness and destruction.
(It made him want to die. He was not summoned to bring destruction—)
'Follow, Vrishaketu,' his master urged again, a gentle tug at the rein around his body. The scent of his master, he meant, and Vrishaketu noticed that trail. How could he not, when his father tried so hard to wrap that glorious power bequeathed by the sun? And his guru, always a touch of thunder rolling under his skin... his warrior's sense could never forget it. So he rushed in instinct, burning like a comet streaking in the sky, to the place where he could just end—
—there was another servant.
'Leave her to me,' the thought slithered into his mind, along with the command to stand by until he's given another order, and Vrishaketu obeyed. He stood still as his master descended from his chariot and made his grand entrance, as he felt the wary shift of power among his progenitor and mentor, as he felt the pity that this servant—this woman—cast at him and caused him untold shame.
'Don't look at me, not like this—'
He crashed at her, his own body ignoring the command that was sewn into his fiber, and felt thunder scorching his upper body. He ignored the pain, fueling it even to call for the blessing of fire. Agneyastra1 appeared in the form of hundred arrows around him, racing at her to burn her in infinite fire (the very first divine armament whom he mastered under his guru's tutelage). And yet he smelled no ashes nor burning flesh, only the frying air mixed with heat as his attack dispersed in lightning and flame. His father's.
It was really the father he had long to see, standing before that woman and declaring his protection.
"Didn't I tell you to leave her to me, Vrishaketu?" his master singsonged, malice building in the wake of his steps. It was the call of evil, an echo of misery and malice, built from the million deaths he brought upon Kurukshetra on that fateful day. The Scourge of Heaven, his people called him, for the devastation that he brought upon his enemies, and the irony settled in his thought like lead; for the hand of heaven to let madness claw into his origin like this...
His thoughts scattered once more as his master rushed to meet might with that woman. Vrishaketu might be deprived of vision at the moment (a bounded field to trade-off his sight with greater sense in mana), but he can smell how the air turned acrid, a definitive sign of his master calling unto the power of the grail and mixing them together with that taint in his spirit origin. His magical energy kept on surging, coalescing into that forgotten armor that was the price of his fall ascension, and Vrishaketu distinctively sensed the space among them shifting under his master's will. It took only a moment, and both of them were gone, swallowed by the reality marble of his master's making.
It left him alone with his supposed father.
But the bounded field around his eyes—the goddamn blinder that his master put on him—stung at his thought process, hijacking every bit of his sense with fury and tragedy. 'Of course', Vrishaketu thought to himself, resigned to this fate when he yielded his freedom, 'you who only see others as tools.. of course, you would lay your curse on me too.'
The last of his thoughts slipped into the darkness, echoing the sound of his knowledge springing to life—Agneyastra, Varunastra1, Vayuvyastra1—and they only spoke of regret and guilt. He could hear these: the sound of his father brandishing Indra's spear, the crackle of his mana bursting with life, the soft chants that Karna offered to the deva that had bestowed him that gift—but nothing of his guru.
His guru, who stood stock still behind his father. His guru, who tried so hard to keep his mana from clashing. His guru, who must be disappointed with how he turned up to be.
His guru, who taught him everything to know about warfare (about knowledge of these Astras, of lives, of wisdom, of hunting, of battle—)
'Kill him.'
And Vrishaketu, in his weakness and helplessness, broke for the last time.
He was prepared to die.
Death was not something he's unused to, his heroic spirit origin aside. He did experience death that one time, at the hands of his guru's son, but he was brought back to life by his uncle. In this moment, where his remaining sense of self returned, his thoughts resumed with a touch of light and awareness that came oh-so-familiar—as if his uncle was there to pull him from the depths of nothingness.
So he thought. Then he opened his eyes, uncovered by the bounded field that was fashioned from the grail-piece he's entrusted with, felt the scratches and cuts on his frame, struggled to move his limbs, endured the pain borne from Vasavii Shaktii lodged on his chest.
"Aah..." he croaked, hating the sound of his voice, hating how everything hurt, hating how his one wish in this broken world had to be met with such irony, hating, hating, hating—
"You have always been honest with your feelings, dear child," that voice interjected. Arjuna, his guru, had hurriedly gone to his side, throwing away all of his weapons and personal armaments in wisps of yellow. Even as he maintained that air of calm, Vrishaketu can see the brokenness in those brown eyes, so very similar to the fading joy within his master's red-blue. But the Archer-turned-Berserker let that be, just like how he let his guru cradle his head on his lap.
It reminded him of days long past.
"There's no longer need for... hatred," there was a pause amidst, as if his guru was breaking under the sin that was never his, and each moment only served to unravel him further, "...No, this... you have every right to hate... me. For not preventing.... this."
'But guru, I could never blame you for anything. Not even for my death,' he wanted to explain, to deny this unneeded accusation. Vrishaketu coughed instead, cursing the frailty of his spirit origin; already his composition of spirit origin started deteriorating, his dream unraveling at the seams. His guru softly rebuked him, but his words were so faraway—
—he's losing it, so much that even the tether that his master established to anchor him to this world was dissipating fast. Vrishaketu set aside his longing and hope, hand haphazardly trying to reach for his guru's (trying to give a measure of comfort, because he could not stand it, the was his guru's face twisted in grief). The latter reached for his hand halfway through, and the Berserker sighed.
"When I l-leave, take.. the grail shard... with you," he rasped, every word seeming twisting his guru's face with agony even further. But Vrishaketu kept going; they had to understand the secrets behind the conception of this world, of this eventuality that cannot be. "It... will tell you... what you need... to know..."
Gold swam around his vision, a sign of his ordained erasure, but he could still hear the sound around him: his own voice, his guru's comforting words of 'we will, don't worry about it', and the sound of light footsteps towards him. There was the face of his father—his father who finally had come to witness his last moments, right by his side—blue-eyed ('ah, so that's why my eyes are blue'), white-haired, and so heart-brokenly stricken. 'That won't do', he mused to himself, even when lucidity started to escape him, and reached for his father instead. His father reached for it in turn, two trembling hands cupping his own, and Vrishaketu wanted to tell him that 'this is fine, you only did what you need to do, so please—'
He smiled instead, the last of his energy spent, "Finally... We meet... Thank you..."
And everything around him turned golden, like the days when he would opt to look at the sky and wonder the face of his father. Kind, he used to believe, and it was with this impression that he left that broken world.