I awoke from the ocean of filth with a gasp, my lungs burning with phantom foulness. Each morning was now a violent reentry into a world that no longer felt like my own. My body was just a temporary shell I inhabited between sessions of torture. The promise of my family’s return was the only thing that kept me from shattering completely.

When Katha appeared, I was already waiting. There was no conversation. There were no more questions to ask. I simply nodded, and she touched my forehead.

The plunge was instant. I was Maya again, my soul-body still feeling slick with the grime of Puyoda. The Yamduts dragged me away from the shore of that nauseating sea. The landscape shifted into something new.

We were in a vast, open field under the same dead, twilight sky. But the air here was different. It was thick. Heavy. It felt like breathing through a wet cloth. With every step, it became harder to draw a breath. My spiritual lungs, which I didn’t even know I had until now, began to ache with a desperate, burning need for air.

This was Pranarodh. The Hell of Suffocating Life.

“This Naraka is for those who hunted for sport,” the voice of a Yamdut echoed, not in my mind, but in the thick, heavy air itself. “For those of high birth—Brahmins, Kshatriyas, leaders—who should have been protectors of life, but instead took it for pleasure. For the powerful who used their strength to corner and kill innocent creatures of the forest.”

The Yamduts did not use whips here. Their cruelty was more refined. They began to run, dragging me behind them. The exertion made my lungs scream for air, but the atmosphere was a thick, unyielding blanket. I was running and suffocating at the same time. My vision began to tunnel, black spots dancing before my eyes. My soul-body grew heavy, my limbs like lead.

Just as my consciousness was about to extinguish from the lack of air, a new torment began. The Yamduts produced long, cruel-looking bows and arrows. They aimed not at me, but at the empty space around me.

“You took pleasure in the chase,” one of them rasped.

They did not aim for my heart or my head. They aimed for my limbs, my torso. With every arrow that struck, I felt a sharp, piercing pain, but the wound was not the true torment. The true torment was the feeling of being a target. Of being helpless prey.

I saw Rohan here. Not as a participant, but as a memory. I saw him on a corporate hunting trip, a trip he took to impress a client. He was holding a rifle, a proud, foolish grin on his face as he stood over the body of a magnificent stag. He had not killed for food, but for ego. For business. He had treated the sacred act of taking a life as a networking opportunity. And I knew, with a sickening certainty, that he, too, would one day have to feel the stag’s last, terrified breath.

In Pranarodh, there is no place to hide. There is only the endless, suffocating run, and the constant rain of arrows, each one a reminder that the terror you inflict upon the helpless will one day become your own.

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
• Chapter 13 The Weight of the World
• Chapter 14 The Price of Meat
• Chapter 15 The Question of Hope
• Chapter 16 The City of Strange Torments
• Chapter 17 The Road to the Court
• Chapter 18 An Interrogation Before Judgment
• Chapter 19 The Hall of Judgment
• Chapter 20 The Book of Deeds
• Chapter 21 The Currency of Hell
• Chapter 22 Tamisra, The Hell of Darkness
• Chapter 23 The Anatomy of a Jailer
• Chapter 24 Andhatamisra, The Betrayer’s Hell
• Chapter 25 Raurava, The Hell of the Hunted
• Chapter 26 Kumbhipaka, The Cook’s Hell
• Chapter 27 The Question of a Beast
• Chapter 28 Kalasutra, The Burning Plain
• Chapter 29 Krumibhojan, The Hell of Worms
• Chapter 30 Sandash, The Hell of Pincers
• Chapter 31 Taptasurmi, The Hell of Burning Lust
• Chapter 32 The Sin of the Eye
• Chapter 33 Vajrakantak Shalmali, The Hell of the Thorny Tree
• Chapter 34 Vaitarni, The River of Broken Duty
• Chapter 35 Puyoda, The Ocean of Filth