Aru Shah and the End of Time

by Roshani Chokshi

  Boo dove into the crowd, pecking the demon’s eyes until the asura screeched and teetered backward. Aru glanced up. Dangling a short distance away was a giant, heavy, and very sharp chandelier. It had been handcrafted by a local glassblower and was her mom’s favorite part of the lobby.

  “You’re a liar, Aru Shah,” said the Sleeper, creeping toward her. “You lie to your friends, your family, but most of all yourself. If you think you’ve beaten me, you’re wrong.”

  Aru moved back some more. Her palms felt slippery. One wrong move, and the Sleeper could end her on the spot.

  “I’m not a liar,” said Aru.

  The Sleeper took another step forward. Aru let Vajra loose. For once, the lightning bolt did as she wanted. Light sparked from the end of it, slicing the column of the chandelier. She rolled out of the way just as the Sleeper glanced up.

  “What the—?” he started.

  “I’ve just got a big imagination,” she said, grinning.

  The chandelier crashed down. The Sleeper barely got a scream out before a bunch of glass and crystal erupted around him.

  “Sorry about the chandelier, Mom!” Aru whispered. She raced back toward Mini.

  All around her sister lay the slumped-over forms of demons and rakshas.

  “They’re not dead, unfortunately,” said Boo, landing on Aru’s shoulder. “But they’re out of commission for now. The problem is, this is only a fraction of the Sleeper’s army.”

  “Where’re the others?”

  “Sleeping,” said Boo in a duh-why-do-you-think-he’s-called-that-it’s-not-like-he’s-known-for-his-own-epic-napping-skills tone.

  The seven-headed horse shook its head. Blood and spit flew over the walls. “We cannot stay much longer, daughter of Indra, but you have fought…” The horse paused, struggling to find the right word.

  “Bravely?” Aru guessed.

  The horse heads snorted.

  “Valiantly?” she suggested.

  “Cunningly,” it finally said.

  Aru sighed with relief, bracing her hands on her knees. Now that the Sleeper was down, all she needed was to finish him off with Vajra.

  She turned toward the wreckage of the chandelier, but a demon rushed at her. Boo acted quickly, and bird droppings rained across the demon’s eyes and forehead.

  “ARGH!” it shouted, spinning around before knocking itself unconscious by running headlong into the wall.

  “If only I was in my former form,” the pigeon moaned. “Ah, well. Annoyance is its own power.”

  Aru raised her arm and Vajra transformed into a whip. The lightning bolt was very heavy, like carrying three gallons of milk in one hand. But she was so close to having everything back to normal that strength rushed through her. She brought Vajra down with a sickening crack, and the demon flew back, slamming into the wall before evaporating into…demon dust? No, demon gunk. There was some sticky-looking residue on the paint. Nasty.

  The chandelier shards twitched. Mini ran to Aru’s side. Time for their final blow.

  It should have been easy. Quick and painless.

  But then a lot of unexpected things happened at once.

  Around them, the room went from full to empty in the space of a second. The army of demons and rakshas—many of them now little more than melted lumps on the lobby floor of the museum—vanished in a puff of smoke. With a rush of wings and paws, the celestial mounts disappeared, called back to the deities they served. The last thing Aru heard was “Blessings upon the Pandavas.”

  The Sleeper rose from beneath the smashed chandelier. Pieces of glass scattered in a thousand directions. Aru squeezed her eyes shut, gripping Vajra tightly. Then she raised the lightning bolt over her head. Beside her, she could sense Mini’s thoughts: Now, Death Danda, move quickly!

  Unfortunately, the Sleeper moved faster. Black ribbons streamed from the tips of his fingers. They were aimed not at her, but at Mini and Boo.

  The two of them slammed backward and were pinned to the wall.

  “Aru!” croaked Mini.

  Aru raised the lightning bolt, but a ripple of instinct held her hand. It was as if Mini’s thoughts alone had stopped her: If you attack, he’ll kill us.

  Aru paused, her lungs heaving from the weight of the lightning bolt and the decision put before her.

  “Your move, Aru,” said the Sleeper. He grinned. “You can destroy me, or protect them.”

  Aru stood still. There was nothing she could do. No right answer.

  “The chandelier was a rather clever move,” said the Sleeper, rubbing his jaw. “But not quite clever enough, I’m afraid. Here’s some advice: let your family die, Arundhati. The love of one’s family can be a powerful and horrifying thing. Why, just look at the stories of the Mahabharata. Consider Shakhuni—although you know him as ‘Boo.’ He felt his sister had been insulted when she was forced to marry a blind king, and for that he swore destruction on your ancestors. And he succeeded. That’s just one example among many. You see, child? To act with your heart is a dangerous thing. Let them die.”

  “Let them go,” croaked Aru.

  “Oh, dear,” said the Sleeper. “And here I thought you would have turned out to be so much more clever.”

  “I said, let them go.”

  “Drop the lightning bolt, and I will.”

  Aru lowered her hand, hating herself.

  The Sleeper flexed his wrists, and Mini and Boo slumped to the ground, unconscious.

  But alive.

  “You just reminded me of something, child,” he said softly. “Mercy makes fools of us. I’ve had eleven years of torture to think about all the ways I was made a fool.”

  The Sleeper was next to her in an instant. “Rather fancy toy for a child,” he hissed, snatching up Vajra.

  Aru hoped it burned him. How could her mother have ever loved someone like this?

  The young, hopeful Krithika had misjudged him. He couldn’t help but be a demon after all.

  The Sleeper grabbed her arm and dragged her across the museum lobby. “You made me into what I am now,” he said. “You and your mother. All I wanted to do was end the tyranny of destiny. Can you understand that?” For the first time, his voice grew soft. “Do you realize how cruel it is to tell someone that their future is fixed? That they can do nothing but play out their life like a puppet? Do you see how even your gifts have enslaved you?”

  Aru was only half listening. Panic had sharpened her thoughts. When her hand had knocked against her pajama pant leg, she had felt something in her pocket: a nub of tile from the Palace of Illusions. It can give you the part of me that matters most: protection.

  “Your death will signal the end of not just a life, but an era,” said the Sleeper. His eyes were shining. “You and your siblings will no longer be damned to live life over and over again. I’m doing this for you, because your mother”—he sneered—“didn’t have the guts to free you.”

  “Sorry,” said Aru, yanking her arm from his grip. “I’m just not in the mood to die right now.”

  Her fingers dug out the little piece of home, and she threw it on the floor. A fierce gust of wind blew the Sleeper back. For one blissful blink of her eye, Aru could catch her breath. She felt the tile of home thud back into her pocket. The piece of home was tiny and so only bought her a second’s worth of distraction. Still, it was enough.

  The Sleeper had lost his grip on Vajra. Aru raised her hand, and the lightning bolt snapped into her palm. Now she held it out. She steeled herself. She had to do this.

  The Sleeper lifted his arm, as if he was trying to block out the light. “Child, wait—” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  Aru was twelve years old. Even she knew that half the time she didn’t know what she was doing.

  But this wasn’t one of those times.

  “You’re cursed,” said the Sleeper. “I’m only trying to help.”

  Cursed…

  Before Aru could throw the lightning bolt, an image sprang before her:

&
nbsp; In this vision, Aru was older. Taller. Across from her, on a night-soaked battlefield, stood four other girls…four other sisters, she realized. She wasn’t even sure how she knew that, but it was undeniable. All five Pandava girls, together. All of them wielding weapons. Even Mini.

  Mini was older, too. Her face was a fierce mask of hate.

  Hate that was directed against…her.

  “Don’t you see?” said the Sleeper. “Fate never intended for you to be a hero.”

  Who’s the Liar Now?

  The image faded.

  Aru couldn’t shake it from her thoughts. She had done something so bad that her own sisters had turned against her. Why were they on a battlefield? What had happened?

  “You think your partial divinity is a blessing,” said the Sleeper. “It is a curse.”

  “You’re lying,” said Aru, but her grip on Vajra had slackened.

  When she blinked, she saw them—all of them—turning against her. Rejecting her. Abandoning her.

  Where were they going?

  Why were they going?

  Nausea jolted through Aru. She thought of every time she had rushed out of her bedroom and run to the window, only to see her mother leaving for the airport and Sherrilyn giving her a sad smile and offering to take her out for ice cream. She thought of every day she had walked through school filled with dread, knowing that all it would take was one word, one gesture out of line and she’d lose it all: the friends, the popularity, the belonging.

  The lights that Vajra had cast into the museum lobby had dimmed. Mini and Boo were still out cold. It was just Aru and the Sleeper.

  “Kill me, and that is the future you will face,” hissed the Sleeper. “You think I’m the enemy. Do you even know what that word means? What is an enemy? What is evil? You are far more like me than you realize, Aru Shah. Look inside yourself. If you hurt me, it will mean losing everyone you ever cared about.”

  In the stories, the Pandava brothers fought an epic battle against their own family. But they never turned on one another. In the vision the Sleeper showed her, Aru saw something else: her family turning against her.

  Tears ran down Aru’s cheeks. She didn’t remember when she’d started crying. All she knew was that she wished the Sleeper would choke on his words.

  But he kept talking.

  “I pity you the most, little one,” he said. “For you think you are the hero. Don’t you realize the whole universe is laughing at you? That was never meant to be your destiny. You are like me: a hero draped in evil clothing. Join me. We can wage war on fate. We can break it together.”

  He walked toward her. She raised the lightning bolt a little higher. He stood still.

  “Your mother pays no attention to you,” he said. “Don’t you think I’ve sensed it through the lamp? But if you’re with me…I will never leave you, child. We can be a team: father and daughter.”

  Father and daughter.

  Aru remembered her mother’s face in the vision from the Pool of the Past. The way she had talked about the three of them being a family. She had shared her husband’s idea of people defying their own destiny.

  Her mom had lived with only half of her heart for eleven years.

  Eleven years.

  And only because she loved Aru that much.

  “Kill me, and your sisters and family will grow to hate you,” said the Sleeper. “You will never be a hero. You were never meant to be a hero.”

  Hero. That one word made Aru lift her chin. It made her think of Mini and Boo, her mom, and all the incredible things she herself had done in just nine days. Breaking the lamp hadn’t been heroic…but everything else? Fighting for the people she cared about and doing everything it took to fix her mistake? That was heroism.

  Vajra became a spear in her hands.

  “I already am. And it’s not hero,” she said. “It’s heroine.”

  And with that, she let the lightning bolt fly.

  The moment the bolt left her hands, doubt bit through Aru. All she could see was the image of her sisters lined up against her. All she could feel was the shame of being hated, and not knowing what she’d done to deserve it. A single dark thought wormed into her head: What if the Sleeper was telling the truth?

  Her fingers tingled. The bolt cut through the air. One moment it was spinning straight at the Sleeper. She watched his eyes widen, his mouth open up for a scream. But the next instant, everything changed.

  That tiny, needling doubt shifted everything. The lightning bolt stopped just short of hitting him, as if it had picked up the barest whiff of Aru’s misgiving.

  The Sleeper stared at the lightning bolt poised an inch from his heart. Then he glanced at Aru. He smiled.

  “Oh Aru, Aru, Aru,” he taunted. It was the same voice she had heard when she lit the lamp. What have you done?

  “Vajra!” called Aru.

  “One day, you’ll see it my way, and I will welcome you, daughter.”

  “Strike him, Vajra!” shouted Aru.

  But it didn’t matter. When she looked up from the spear of lightning…the Sleeper had vanished.

  Failure

  Once, when Aru was really stressed about an exam, she didn’t eat for a whole day. She was too busy trying to remember all the dates from her history textbook. When the last bell rang, she stood up from her desk and got so dizzy that she fell right back down.

  That had been a bad day.

  But this day was worse.

  Aru had thought that magic would make her powerful. It didn’t. It just kind of kept things at bay. Like how anti-itch cream erased the pain of a bee sting but didn’t repel the bee itself. Now that all the magic had drained out of the room, hunger and exhaustion rushed into her.

  Aru sank to the floor. Vajra flew back to her hand. It was no longer a spear or a bolt of lightning but just an ordinary ball. The kind of harmless toy a kid would play with and a demon wouldn’t look twice at.

  Aru shuddered. What had just happened?

  She kept staring at the spot on the floor where the Sleeper had disappeared. She’d had him in her sights, right there. She’d had the lightning bolt poised and everything. And yet somehow—even with everything lined up to help her—she’d failed. The Sleeper had let her live, not because he pitied her, but because he thought she’d actually join him.

  Tears ran down her cheeks. After everything they’d been through, she had failed. Now her mom would be frozen forever, and—

  A touch on her shoulder made her jump.

  It was Mini, smiling weakly. There were a couple of cuts on her face, and one of her eyes looked a bit bruised. Boo fluttered down from Mini’s hands and hovered in front of Aru.

  Aru waited for him to yell at her. She wanted him to tell her all the things she’d done wrong, because that would be better than knowing that she’d done her best and still wasn’t good enough. But Boo didn’t yell. Instead, he tilted his head in that strange pigeon way of his and said something Aru had not expected:

  “It is not failure to fail.”

  Aru started to cry. She understood what Boo meant. Sometimes you could fall down and still win the race if you got up again, but that wasn’t how she felt right now. Mini sat down next to her and put her arm around her shoulders.

  Aru used to think that friends were there to share your food and keep your secrets and laugh at your jokes while you walked from one classroom to the next. Sometimes, though, the best kind of friend is the one who doesn’t say anything but just sits beside you. It’s enough.

  Boo circled the museum. As he did, all the rubble and chaos sorted itself, the dust and debris jumping and wriggling. The front wall of the Hall of the Gods rose from the floor. Even the chandelier in the lobby gathered its crystal shards and took its place on the ceiling.

  The front door to the museum had fallen into the street. Aru peeked out and heard familiar, beautiful sounds.

  Cars honked. Tires screeched against the asphalt. People shouted to one another:

  “Is there an ecl
ipse? Why’s it nighttime?”

  “My car battery is dead!”

  Aru couldn’t believe it.

  “See?” Mini said quietly from behind her. “We did something.”

  The girls stepped inside, and the front door zoomed back into place. Aru leaned against it, completely worn-out. “What’s happening?”

  Boo flew down and landed in front of them. “Only if the Sleeper reached the Kingdom of Death by the new moon could his curse of frozen sleep become permanent.”

  “But I didn’t defeat him…” said Aru.

  “But the two of you managed to distract and delay him,” said Boo kindly. “And you did it without me. Which is, frankly, mind-boggling.”

  “What about the Council of Guardians?” asked Mini. “Do you think what we did was enough to impress them?”

  “Ugh. Them. Are they going to want to train us after I…” Aru paused, not wanting to say the word even though it hung over her head: failed. “At the last minute, I…I let him get away.”

  “It was that curse,” said Mini gently. “Remember?”

  On the Bridge of Forgetting, Shukra had told her that when it mattered most, she would forget. But had that really been the fulfillment of the curse? Aru couldn’t remember—or perhaps she didn’t want to remember—what she had felt the moment the Sleeper disappeared.

  “Yeah,” said Aru weakly.

  “But even with the curse, you stopped him,” said Mini.

  Aru didn’t point out that he’d stopped himself, and only because he thought she would join him. Never in a million years.

  “And on top of that, we prevented the end of Time,” said Mini. “What more do you want?”

  Aru jolted upright. “My mom! I should—”

  From the top of the staircase, Aru heard a door open and close, and then feet racing down the steps. Even without turning, she could feel her mother in the room. The burst of warmth. And the smell of her hair, which always reminded Aru of night-blooming jasmine.

  When Aru spun around, her mother looked at her. Only her. Then she opened her arms, and Aru ran in for the hug of her life.

  Got All That?