Chapter 3

                                    

                                          
Flashback, 30 years ago
Arjun looked up sharply as a faint hissing noise interrupted the near unearthly silence. There was nothing overtly visible to even his famed eagle eye, except the eerily thick canopy of the gigantic trees which made the forest glove into which he had traversed. 
The Pandava Prince had been travelling all around Aryavarta, engaging in penance and following the rigorous yet frugal lifestyle of an ascetic while he went about his exile period. 
Twelve long arduous years of it. 
More than a decade of separation from his brothers and wife. 
'Their common wife', Arjuna reminded himself bitterly. 
Many would have lamented on the unfairness of the fact immensely. 
But not him. 
Not the elusive swarthy skinned, long limbed, prince of the Kurus. 
Au contraire, Savyasachi had only breathed a sigh of relief as the final gates of his majestic city had closed behind him. 
A knot which had been tightly wound like a painful thorn in his muscled chest rendering him short of breath since his marriage to the bewitching fireborn Princess of Panchala a year ago, had finally come lose as the distance between them had increased in spades. 
Yet the lingering feeling of an inescapable loss still haunted at the back of his mind. A strange hollowness had corroded into his very bones and the idea of ever being completely at peace had started to resemble a distant dream. 
Unachievable despite his incredible fortitude. 
'Why are you running away from me?'
'What was my fault in all this?'
'Don't leave me, Arjun. Please don't leave me.'
'I will suffocate without you.'
'And if I stay another second within your vicinity, I might die of this claustrophobia!'
He had turned away from her intoxicatingly large yet acutely sad eyes, wrenching his wrist away from her desperate grasp with a cruelty which had made him want to throw up. 
He had heard the sickeningly dull thud of her falling to her knees and wanted nothing more than to turn around and run back into her arms, yet his feet had forced him out. An invisible force beyond his control had gripped him tight, nearly pulling him out of his home with an urgency unforeseen and unbearable. 
He hadn't even turned and had practically fled. 
Her painful sobs spearing through his supposedly impregnable body like a barrage of poison drenched arrows had followed him out till the foyer. 
Yet he ran. 
As fast as his flighty feet could carry him. 
And here he was, tens of thousands of miles away, hundreds of days had passed since, yet no amount of meditation had managed to completely wipe away that look, of his Draupadi's pulchritudinous face, ravaged with the tears that he had refused to let fall down his own stoic one. 
So deeply perturbed Arjun was, in his own depressed musings, that he hardly noticed when the damp forest air was replaced with a suspiciously rank stench. The ground which had been covered with dense foliage had given way to what could be called a dead land. The flowered vines which had priorly embraced sturdy trunks had turned into thorny creepers having wrapped around burnt wooden thumps, which could have been trees once upon a time.