Adhiyan opened his eyes! He felt so light both in his head and his body. The last thing he remembered well was roaming in the forbidden forest. He could not remember anything after that. His eyelids felt so heavy as if a pair of elephants were sitting on his eyes. A heavy thing was placed on his face that made his nose crushed. Everything seemed out of focus in his eyes and he struggled hard to see where he was.
“He is opening his eyes! He is moving!” He heard a rugged voice on his side but it felt like the voice was coming from inside a well. He heard shuffling around him like rocks sliding from the top of a mountain. He panicked and tried to sit up.
“Huh!” He heard gasps around him and he rubbed his eyes with his hands to clear his vision. The scene in front of him just made him jump thus made the rock on his face fall down.
“Aaahhh!” The rock people around him screamed in terror as he jumped. He understood that they are afraid of him. But the truth is he was afraid of them. Their body is made up of mud and rock. Strings of roots were hanging from all over their bodies. They came in different sizes, huge like seven feet to tiny like one feet.
“Shhh, calm down.” A very old rock man came in and all the others made way for him. “How are you feeling now?” He asked Adhiyan.
“I… Where am I? Who are you? What are you?” Adhiyan asked him, unable to breathe. It was like he was trapped in a vacuum.
He was extremely confused. He could not understand the surroundings he was in. The roof of the place he was in was covered in branches of trees intertwining with each other. But no branch had leaves of any kind. But it had a spherical fruit all over. The fruit glowed in a gentle white light and inside of the fruit had different shades of purple colored pulp or seed. The fruits kept falling from the branches and the small rock men were collecting all the fruits in a wheelbarrow. There was no sound except their talks and gasps, not even the falling fruits made a sound.
“We are trolls. We are soul cleansers. This is amortal world. And you are the first living thing that had come into our world with your mortal body.” The old man said. “Here, have this.” He gave Adhiyan the clustered crystal rock with many pores that had fallen down.
“What is this?” Adhiyan asked him.
“It has tiny air pockets that mortals breathe. Use it to breathe.”
“Thank you. But what is this place? What is Amortal?” Adhiyan asked him, taking in a deep breath from the crystal and filling his lungs with air. It felt like heaven.
“We cleanse the souls here! Only souls come here. We are waiting for a siddhar to come. He will tell us what to do with you and your body. Until then, you are our guest. Welcome to our world.”
“Is this the world for the dead?” Adhiyan asked in fear. He could not believe that he was dead already. Netra and his babies’ thoughts killed him from inside.
“No! There is nothing called death. The souls don't die. The souls come in here. We clean them off of their memories and send them back to eternity. Eternity resends them to the land of living.”
“Am I dead?”
“No! You are very much alive.”
“Then what am I doing here?”
“We don't know the answer to your question, human.”
“My name is Adhiyan. Is there any way I can go back to the world of living?”
“I told you already. We have no answer. This is the first time this has happened. When you came up the root, you were still breathing. The decomposers could not destroy a breathing body and hence they sent you up here.”
