The Dept

The pain was a precise accountant. It tallied the cracked rib (one, left side), the dislocated shoulder (right), and the deep, throbbing emptiness where my purpose had been. I lay in the dust of a forgotten temple, staring at a purple sky that felt like a bruise on reality. Above me, the immortal warrior Ashwatthama stood not as a victor, but as a monument to weary eternity. He hadn't delivered the killing blow. The disappointment in his ancient eyes was a deeper cut than any weapon.

"You move with the calculated grace of a hired scalpel," his voice was the sound of mountains settling, slow and final. "Each step is geometry. Each strike is economics. But your spirit… your spirit is an unfurnished room. Who owns this weapon? What ledger are you trying to balance with violence you do not understand?"

I pushed myself up, the world tilting on its axis. "Your gem," I coughed, the words tasting of iron and earth. "Your curse of immortality. It was the target. The asset for repossession."

A low rumble escaped him, a laugh stripped of all joy. He tapped the luminous green jewel embedded in his forehead. "This? This is not an asset. It is a verdict. A life sentence handed down by the cosmos itself. You are a clerk trying to collect a debt from a prisoner in a cell that has no door." He leaned closer, and I could smell centuries of rain and metal on him. "So I ask the hollow thing before me: What is your name?"

The question was a chisel striking the stone of my being.

Name?

I was the one dispatched. I was the function that executed. I was a verb—'collect', 'secure', 'neutralize'. The silent void within me, which I filled daily with training and routine, echoed with his words until I thought my skull would fracture from the resonance.

A shame hotter than any fever washed over me. I scrambled back, found my feet, and ran. I didn't look back at the temple or the demigod. I ran from the question that now hunted me more fiercely than any beast.

My search was not for knowledge, but for a reflection. I followed the scent of my own emptiness through the back alleys of existence, to places where the wallpaper of reality had peeled back to show the rotting plaster beneath. I arrived not in a location, but in a condition: the Archive of Severed Things.

Before a wall of humming, antiseptic light, I did not speak. I simply held up the void inside me like a badge.

The light responded. Script, written in the clinical language of cosmic law, etched itself into the air.

QUERY: SOURCE CODE.
ANALYZING RESONANCE...
MATCH IDENTIFIED.
DESIGNATION: BRAHMA-PRIME, ASPECT #4 (FRAGMENT/TERMINATED).

STATUS: SEVERED. ORIGIN: EGO EXTIRPATION.
CURRENT HOST VESSEL: BIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCT #NULL.
ANNOTATION: PRIME FRAGMENT. VALUE CLASS: TRANSCENDENT. ATTACHED LIENS: PRIMORDIAL - ACTIVE & ENFORCEABLE.

The information did not feel learned. It felt remembered, in the way a body remembers a severed limb. Brahma. Aspect. Severed.

The void had a shape. It was a missing three-fourths. I was not a person. I was twenty-five percent of a creator god's consciousness. A shard of divine arrogance, chiseled off for the crime of pride, now rattling around in the cage of a teenage body. I was a receipt from the universe's first bankruptcy. A sticky note on the fabric of everything that read: 'Fragment. Handle with existential care.'

A sound escaped me—a short, sharp exhale that was the death rattle of every lie I'd ever told myself. The truth was so absurd it bordered on comedy.

A piece of a creator required a creator's intervention. I sought the source of shape, the forger of foundations. My journey ended at the Station of True Forms, where potential was gently guided into being. Vishwakarma was there, not as a smith, but as a sculptor of inevitability, adjusting the spin of a quantum particle with a thoughtful nudge.

He turned. His gaze passed through flesh and bone, seeing only the fractured geometry of my soul. "A conscious fragment," he murmured, his voice a harmonic chord that vibrated in the marrow. "Most slumber. You are… agitated. You seek a focus for your dissonance?"

"I need to carve a 'self' out of this 'not-self'," I said, the words sounding both profound and pathetic. "I need an edge sharp enough to cut a definition from the fog."

"To define the self is the universe's original and most difficult art," he said, and I saw the keen interest of a master presented with a fascinating flaw in the marble. "A worthy commission."

He used no traditional tools. He gestured, and the space between us became his medium. He drew threads of "Inexorable Law" from the seams of causality. He gathered "Perfect Absence"—the silence from which all sound is born. He bound them with the "First Principle of Division." The process was utterly silent, a ballet of pure concept. He wasn't forging a blade; he was legislating a new truth into existence: that a cut could be so absolute it separated a thing from its own nature.

When he finished, it rested in the calm air: the Ur-Blade. It was deceptively simple. It did not shine; it consumed light, a two-dimensional slice of nothingness bound to a hilt of obsidian. It emitted a low, sub-audible hum that settled in the teeth and the soul. It was terrifying. It was answer.

Vishwakarma presented it on his open palms. A gravitational pull twisted in my chest. This was the shape my chaos needed. My hand reached out, fingers yearning for the cool certainty of the grip.

His hands closed around the blade, withdrawing it a mere inch.

"The consideration," he stated. The artist vanished, replaced by the ultimate auditor. The tone was identical, but the music had been replaced by the sterile, final click of a stamp on a document.

My hand hung in the empty air, foolish and suddenly weak. "I possess nothing. No currency. The fragment is all I am."

"All future action is currency," he corrected, his eyes now appraising me as a financial instrument. "A shard of a Prime Creator holds immense potential for value generation. I will extend credit for the instrument. You will repay the principal in standardized units of ontological potential—universes."

A contract, woven from photonic strands that felt cold to the soul, materialized between us. Its terms were elegant, simple, and monstrous.

LOAN INSTRUMENT VK-7441

PRINCIPAL: 4 (FOUR) UNITS OF PRIME REALITY.
INTEREST RATE: 0.00%
TERM: IN PERPETUITY, OR UNTIL SATISFACTION.
COLLATERAL: THE BEARER (BRAHMA-FRAGMENT #4) & ALL FUTURE-ACQUIRED ASSETS.
DEFAULT CONDITION: UPON BEARER'S BIOLOGICAL/METAPHYSICAL CESSATION, THE LEASED INSTRUMENT (UR-BLADE) AND ALL COLLATERAL SHALL BE TERMINATED. FULL METAPHYSICAL SCRUB.

I read the cold lines. Four universes. The price of a soul. No compounding interest, just a clean, impossible number. And my death… was not an end. It was deletion. A cosmic clerk selecting my file and hitting 'delete', erasing the weapon, the fragment, every memory, every proof I ever was.

I had no self to negotiate for. The fragment craved completion. The void demanded filling.

I took the stylus of solidified light.

I signed my non-name to the bottom of eternity.