Leaving the forest of swords, my soul felt like a patchwork of poorly stitched wounds. The journey continued through that bleak twilight, the Yamduts silent, their presence a constant, heavy pressure. After what felt like another month of marching, we came to the fifth city: Shailagama.

There were no walls or gates that I could see. The city was a vast, desolate plain under a sky that was a shade darker than before, heavy and oppressive like a lid on a pot. The ground was littered with shattered rocks. And as we entered the plain, I felt a low, deep rumbling. It was coming from above.

I looked up. The sky was moving. It was not a sky of clouds, but of stone. Huge, dark boulders, the size of cars, of houses, were grinding against each other high above, raining down a constant shower of smaller, jagged rocks.

“This punishment is for those who placed an unjust burden on others,” the Yamdut’s voice echoed in my head.

Before I could understand, the first large boulder broke free. It didn’t fall fast.

It descended with a slow, deliberate, terrifying certainty. It was coming right for me. I tried to scramble away, but the rope yanked me back. I had nowhere to go. I could only watch it grow larger and larger.

The impact was not a sharp pain. It was an absolute, all-encompassing pressure. The feeling of being erased. My spiritual form was flattened, my very consciousness crushed into a thin film of screaming agony on the rocks below. There was a moment of pure, pressurized blackness.

And then I was whole again, standing on the same spot. Another boulder was already on its way down.

This was Shailagama. A constant rain of crushing stones.

Crush. A memory, not mine, but Dimple’s. She is at her desk, late at night. She drops a massive pile of files on a junior colleague’s desk. “I need this by morning,” she says, her voice cold. She doesn’t see the young man’s shoulders slump, doesn’t see the flicker of despair in his eyes as he cancels his dinner plans with his family. She only sees her own deadline. The weight of her ambition, crushing him.

Crush. I am Maya. My mother is asking me about my day. I give one-word answers, my eyes glued to my phone. I am placing the weight of my teenage indifference on her, crushing her attempts to connect.

Crush. A memory that makes my soul recoil. It is Dimple again, talking to her best friend, Priya. And then I see it. The truth Katha had hinted at. I see my husband, Rohan, in a secret conversation on his phone. Sexting. With Priya. My mother’s best friend. The weight of his betrayal, a secret he carried, now felt like a mountain crashing down on me. My “perfect” husband, the man I was grieving, was a liar. He was a sinner, too. The weight of his sin, and my own, and Maya’s—it all felt like it was crushing me at once.

And now, I understand why Katha had warned me about Rohan’s journey. It wasn’t just Maya’s soul at stake. It was his. And the path of flowers and nectar I had imagined for him… it was a childish fantasy. We were all sinners. We were all walking this road, in one way or another.

The boulders kept falling. Each one was the weight of a burden I had placed on someone else. The weight of an expectation. The weight of a lie. The weight of a secret. Here, in the city of Shailagama, I was finally feeling the gravity of my own life.

Index of: Journey Of Hell: The Unforgotten Promise

• A Warning to the Reader
• A Mother’s Testimony
• Chapter 1 The God of Small Betrayals
• Chapter 2 The Sins of a Mother
• Chapter 3 The Soul and The Body
• Chapter 4 the Road of a Thousand Regrets
• Chapter 5 A Desert of Burning Rage
• Chapter 6 The Prison Before Birth
• Chapter 7 A River of Self
• Chapter 8 The Twelve-Day Ghost
• Chapter 9 The Refusal
• Chapter 10 The Universal Law
• Chapter 11 The City of Hounds
• Chapter 12 A Forest of Lies