The Peaceful Planet

The harmony of Asura and Rishi forged vows deeper than stone or song.

The planet of Svarnadvīpa hung in the blue-violet embrace of its twin suns, a jewel of balance. From its high plateaus to its ocean-etched coasts, the air carried both the fragrance of incense and the whir of crystalline machines. Here, Asuras and Rishis lived side by side—two ancient lineages whose destinies had once been scattered across the stars, now entwined upon a single soil. They had not come to tolerate one another. They had come to listen—and in that listening, to grow.

In the capital city, Manidvīpa, stood the Spiral Halls of Concord—a living structure grown from the Great Banyan of the Inner Court. Its roots spiraled downward into subterranean meditation chambers, while its branches supported glass-domed observatories where astronomer-Rishis charted the breadth of constellations. Once each season, Asura artisans and Rishi philosophers would meet in its central amphitheater. There they would weave Luminous Agreements—covenants encoded in both the vibration of sacred chants and the pulses of quantum glyphs. These agreements were not laws enforced by fear but vows sung into the collective memory of the people. On one such day, a Rishi elder named Anantamati spoke: “A vow is a bridge of sound—may our children walk across without falling.” And an Asura engineer, Raktavān, replied, “Then we must weave it with both steel and prayer.” This was how Svarnadvīpa ensured that the bonds between its peoples did not erode with time.

In the coastal city of Ratnahrada, traders came not only by ship and skycraft but also by lightpath—beams of refracted energy through which goods and travelers could step across continents in moments. The Market of Thousand Currents was more than a bazaar; it was a breathing archive of invention and beauty.
Asura metallurgists displayed memory alloys that bent like silk yet remembered their form. Rishi gardeners brought forth moonlotus blooms that opened only when sung to in ancient ragas. Even the humblest stall carried a piece of someone’s devotion. No haggling here was cruel; it was a kind of courtship between giver and receiver.
A young Asura merchant once gifted a child a small spherical lantern that pulsed in time with her heartbeat. “Why free?” the child’s father asked. “Because her laughter will carry farther than my coin,” the merchant smiled. Such acts made wealth a river, never a stagnant pool.

High in the Śveta-Kūṭa Mountains, where clouds brushed the teeth of the peaks, floated the Skyforges of Mahāśilpa—enormous platforms anchored by gravitational crystals. Here, Asura blacksmiths and Rishi geomancers shaped aeroglyph ships, vessels whose hulls were etched with both flight equations and protection mantras. When a new aeroglyph ship was launched, it was not christened with wine but with Prānashakti Breath—the collective exhalation of the workers, sealing into it a fragment of their vitality. On one dawn, the first Tṛilocana-class explorer departed for the nebula known as the Swansong Veil. As its sails unfurled in violet light, a Rishi child whispered to her teacher, “Will they find the edge of the sky?” “No,” the teacher said, smiling. “They will find the sky has no edge.”

Svarnadvīpa’s ships returned not only with minerals and data but also with new philosophies, exchanged like precious spices. Once every nine years, the cities would dim their lights, quiet their markets, and hold the Festival of Seven Silences. For seven days, no public speech was allowed; instead, the people communicated with gesture, expression, and the Thread of Shared Mind—a low-frequency telepathic link woven by meditating Rishis. On the seventh day, the silence broke not with chaos but with a harmonizing bell, rung in the central plaza of Manidvīpa. The sound was said to reach even the dreams of unborn children. During one such festival, an Asura child and a Rishi elder sat together by the fountain. They did not speak—but when the bell rang, both wept without knowing why. In that shared silence, they understood more than years of words could teach.

Years flowed like molten gold through the channels of progress. Svarnadvīpa’s cities glittered in the night, and its forests whispered to the stars without fear. There were no war drums, only the measured beats of craftsmen’s hammers and the layered cadences of temple hymns. But peace is not invisible. From far beyond the constellations familiar to Svarnadvīpa’s astronomers, another consciousness drifted—cold, wakeful in its slumber. Her name was Śūnyāntarā–Nidrāprabhā. And though the people of Svarnadvīpa could not yet feel it, her gaze had fallen upon their bright world, like a shadow moving across a sunlit wall.

Far beyond the navigable star-lanes, where the light of creation thins into a black ocean, dwelled a presence neither wholly asleep nor fully awake.
She was Śūnyāntarā–Nidrāprabhā—the Radiance of the Void-Sleeper—a being born from the hush between heartbeats of dying galaxies. Her form was not fixed.
At times she appeared as a woman veiled in shadows, her eyes twin abysses from which no light escaped. At others, she was only a silhouette of moving emptiness, her edges fraying into the surrounding dark. Where she moved, reality sagged, as though it wished to rest and never rise again. Śūnyāntarā did not hunger for gold, territory, or mere domination. Her hunger was older—the yearning to be the axis around which all worlds must turn. She was a weaver of obedience, not through loyalty or love, but through quiet surrender, where the will of others rotted from within. In the silent courts of her drifting fortress, she communed with her Pishacha legions—shaped from the abandoned fears of countless civilizations. They spoke in clicks and murmurs, asking her, “Mistress, where shall we feed next?” Her gaze turned outward, slipping through the weave of time, sifting through the glimmers of living worlds until it fell upon Svarnadvīpa. The planet shone in her vision like a lamp in a mausoleum.

To Śūnyāntarā, Svarnadvīpa’s harmony was not beauty—it was weakness disguised as grace. She saw the Asuras’ tempered strength, the Rishis’ contemplative wisdom, and the intertwining of their arts and sciences, and knew that such trust could be unraveled. A society without the muscle memory of betrayal could be made to kneel without even realizing the moment it happened. Her mind was an ocean of layered strategies. She imagined how she would enter their skies: not as a storm at first, but as a shadow under the roots of their peace. Not breaking their walls, but turning their gates inward. Yet patience was a skin she could shed when hunger grew too loud.

On the night when Svarnadvīpa’s twin suns tilted into their longest eclipse, Śūnyāntarā rose from her drifting palace. Her fingers—if they were fingers—brushed the membranes between realms. Her armies, countless and restless, uncoiled from their dark dens, their eyes kindling like coals in windless air. In her silence, a vow was made: “This bright island of stars will dim. Its breath will be mine. Its voice will speak my name.”Far away, in Manidvīpa’s temples, a few Rishis shivered during meditation, unable to say why. The shadow-sleeper was coming.