Klesha
"Stop! Enough—enough already! I don't want to see any more of this!!"
But contrary to the Sage's desperate wish, the Eye continued to force the horrific tragedy upon him. His own agitation had driven the Eye into a frenzy. In the end he thrust his fingers into his sockets and tore the orbs free—yet the Eye no longer belonged to flesh. The moment he had become a god, it had unbound itself from his body. Even as bloody tears poured endlessly from the hollows of his face, the Sage had no choice but to keep watching the slaughter unfold.
Ah…
The forces of the Kosala Kingdom did not bother with a finishing blow. They simply left her, certain the princess would die soon enough on her own. And they were right. Before the end, though—whether fortune or cruelty—she regained consciousness.
I'm… going to die now, aren't I…
The words were barely a murmur, yet they reached the Sage's ears with perfect clarity. Perhaps it was not sound at all, but the raw voice of her heart transmitted straight to him.
Siddhartha… I know you have… a special power. Maybe you'll even be able to see… my final moments.
He had never told the princess about his Eye. Yet with that keen intuition of hers, she seemed to have sensed his gift all along.
I have a confession… to make. I slept with… Devadatta. And I… bore a child. I didn't want to die… a virgin, so…
It's all right.
What right do I have to reproach you? I was the one who abandoned you first. Whoever you loved, whose child you bore—it makes no difference to me.
So you… don't do anything foolish either… Don't refuse to marry out of guilt… or live out your days as some celibate idiot… Don't be that kind of fool…
She kept speaking. Aside from those first words, nearly everything she said was meant for the Sage's cousin and for her own child. That most of her final breath was spent on the cousin told him how truly she had loved him—and that she wanted those words carried to him.
When at last her life gave out, the Sage arrived before the princess's already decaying body.
"Ah…"
No words would come. With trembling hands he gathered her corpse into his arms.
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I couldn't protect you until it came to this. I never should have treated you so coldly. I hurt you for my own comfort. If I had known it would end like this, I would have loved you more.
He wanted nothing. A swamp of grief from which there was no escape closed over him. If only he could go completely mad and be done with it. But the mental fortitude forged in his ascension to godhood proved unexpectedly unyielding. Even destabilized by the Vaishnavastra, it refused to shatter entirely.
"…"
He had to move. There were still people left. Driving himself onward, the Sage laid the princess's body down.
"I'll be back… soon. I'll come right back."
He forced his heavy body upright and set one foot in front of the other. Through the Eye he confirmed, at least, that his cousin had escaped the Kosala pursuit with the infant in his arms.
The problem was his disciples.
They had realized the catastrophe too late. Emerging from the forest to defend their master's kingdom, they found the hour already past. Instead they became targets themselves, forced into a desperate bloodbath. They fought with a ferocity beyond anyone else. Every one of the Sage's disciples was a formidable warrior—yet even they could not hold against a Kosala host a hundred thousand strong.
"I hear you're from Kosala originally."
Virudhaka looked down at one of them—a man whose legs had been severed, a spear driven through his abdomen, unable to move. He had been one of the ten disciples who had revered the Sage most deeply and followed his teachings with the greatest devotion. A man who told the occasional flat joke, yet who, unlike his self-serving master, knew how to put others first and keep faith.
"You dared betray your origins. This is what you get."
Virudhaka sneered. The man met him with an unflinching face.
"Betrayal? You are the true traitor, Virudhaka—you who abandoned all human decency. You're a coward drowning in inferiority. A fool of a king. You will pay for this."
Virudhaka could not abide a man so composed even at the threshold of death. He had the Sage's disciples carved apart while still alive and impaled the pieces on stakes.
"…"
The Sage stared at the bodies of his disciples fixed upon those spikes. The grief had grown so vast that speech itself had left him. What could he possibly say to men who had staked their lives for nothing more than admiration—for the mere scraps of teaching he had deigned to give them?
Thank you?
Was that what you said to people who had died in agony?
I'm sorry?
Wouldn't that only desecrate their sacrifice?
"…I don't know."
He didn't know. He truly did not know.
His knees buckled. He could hold himself up no longer.
In the distance, as if on cue, a volcano erupted. The sky filled with black cloud, and rain began to pour. It was as though the world itself had chosen to share his sorrow. For a long time the Sage did not move.
"Sage…"
Tana and her sisters spoke to him. He gave no response. He was not even breathing; a stranger might have taken him for dead. Tana tried again.
"You can't just stay like this."
"…"
Still nothing.
"At the very least we have to recover the bodies. We can't leave them like this. They… they deserve better than this."
"…"
At that, something in him twitched.
"…You're right. We should at least give them a funeral."
He rose. By then his eyes had fully regenerated—yet he did not open them. He had no wish to look upon this hell any longer. Even so, to ensure that not a single person was overlooked in the rites, he called upon the Eye. Using his divine authority, he gathered the corpses one by one with painstaking care. The recovery alone took more than two weeks. Anyone else would never have attempted it. The Sage worked in silence, Eye and power both, collecting every body he could find.
Mara's daughters helped him. Lowest-rank goddesses though they were, they still performed the labor of more than three hundred strong men. Throughout those days the rain never ceased—and still the bloody tears that had run from his sockets would not wash away.
Only when the bodies had at last been gathered and pieced together as best they could did the rain miraculously stop. The Sage offered a quiet prayer, then set the dead to the flame. Though soaked through, the fire he raised burned without hesitation, consuming those tormented remains. Thick smoke climbed into the sky. It almost seemed their souls were rising with it. But the Eye told him the truth: there were no souls here at all. The funeral was nothing but self-consolation. He knew that—and held it anyway, because without even this much he could not have endured.
Where did it all go wrong?
Like so many others, the Sage searched his past for the root of the tragedy. His life overflowed with mistakes and regrets. Yet he found the fundamental cause of this present ruin in one place alone.
Because I showed mercy.
Vermin should have been treated as vermin. Granting them time out of misplaced compassion had been the seed of disaster. He should have slaughtered them all the first time he struck their kingdom. Failing that, the second. Failing that, the third. Chance after chance, and he—the fool—had kicked every one of them away with his own foot.
No more mercy. He would repay, measure for measure, the pain of those who had harmed his country and his people.
"Sage?"
Grief receded. Rage took its place. The murderous aura that poured from him locked Mara's daughters rigid, their throats closed. They were too terrified even to flee. Without a glance at them, the Sage turned and walked, following the trail of the Kosala army.
I will give you the same suffering I endured.
As he was now, a single sweep of his hand could erase a city. But he had no intention of granting them so clean a death. He would make them beg for it. Already his mind was tearing Virudhaka and every one of his soldiers apart in every manner of exquisite cruelty he could invent, turning over and over the question of how best to make them suffer.
And before long, while tracking the Kosala host, the Sage came upon a strange sight.