The Moon in the Lining of Her Skin

by Kiran Manral

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

In the shadows of their turbulent pasts, three women made of the light find their destinies intertwined.

Noor, a fallen angel, is condemned to an eternal existence on Earth, forever fleeing from the hounds of hell and creatures of the netherworld. Rani, a once-vain beauty, is now possessed by an invisible lover, an entity that has consumed her body and soul, marking her for itself. Gulab, having murdered her father in cold blood, has escaped a nightmarish home and forges a perilous alliance with Teja, a hitman and collector of souls.

As their fates intertwine, they must navigate through realms of unimaginable darkness, where terrifying entities - both earthly and beyond - pursue them.

From the ethereal heavens to the infernal depths of hell and every realm in between, The Moon in the Lining of Her Skin weaves a spellbinding tale where love and loyalty are tested amidst the eternal struggle between light and dark.

Release date: August 19, 2024

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 368

Sample

Prologue

‘Shall I come wearing the visage of a lost world? How shall I dress when descending into your clay?’

– RIYAZ LATIF

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE INFERNO, THE BLAZE that lit up the heavens and seeded the hells. Gases collided, atoms danced, the void was set ablaze, and from nothing emerged something, fuelling the furnaces of the universe, the multiverses.

In the beginning, there was nothing and then there was everything: time, matter, space, atoms, molecules, vacuum, infinity. From nothing came everything, and everything would go back into nothingness. Before the beginning, when there was nothing, we were there. When there will be nothingness again, we will be there. In the spaces between the beginning and the end, there will be us. We are the eternals, the ones born of the void, the ones who will go back into the void, the ones who are the void. We are the emptiness from which everything began. An emptiness so vast and overreaching that all of humankind’s efforts have not yet begun to comprehend it.

We first emerged from the fires of creation, from the explosion that set the universes into motion. We rode on pieces of rock and debris hurtling through the void, we swirled in the distances between our suns, we cooled down, we heated up, we found hidden corners of the universe that would allow us to survive, between earth and mud. We were here. No one saw us, but we were here, scattered across the ethers, creatures of wind and air. A Petri dish on a planet.

From the stars came the stuff that germinated this planet. Us, born of fire, made of flame. We left no ash when we burnt. When the world was moulding itself, we were watching and waiting. We watched as creatures crawled out of the swamps, formed themselves from the mud, unformed themselves, formed again, were wiped out by the debris hurtling through a violent universe in its cradle. We have lived before, we will live again. We are everything that is unending and everything that will never begin. We are what was there, before the single cells formed in the primordial oceans. We are the life tied to this planet, life that found no form, no shape, that inhabits the rocks beneath the surface, that rides the zephyrs and nor’westerlies. We were smoke and ash, molten and fluid, with nothing to define us except perhaps the urge to be.

Our kind don’t die like humans, like animals, like plants; we keep forming over and over again, over thousands of years. We have seen Rodinia, Pannotia, Pangea, Gondwana. We are made of all that the earth brought together unto itself, before it spun into what it is today. We have seen the mother ocean, the beginning and end of all life in this part of the solar system. We have seen continents take birth, break away, boundaries between land and sea erase and grow again. We have seen all the earths and all the worlds and all that lies between the two, all that humankind cannot see, cannot ken. Not yet. We were created by the one who created it all, only he can destroy us. We are indestructible. We are forever and ever. We walk amongst humans, we can take their form without the flesh, with their flesh, and sometimes we take over them. And then we never let them die, because their death would be the end of us in flesh too. But die they must, and we must live on. That is our curse and blessing.

Noor

‘There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.’

– BRAM STOKER, Dracula

I WOULD RUN AWAY, YET AGAIN, TONIGHT. THE whispers had begun, soft susurrations on the edge of my consciousness now, soon they would grow into a roar in my head, dinning out every thought. They were warning me, they who were watching out for me, those of my kind whom I had forsaken to become this creature neither human nor divine. No longer angel and far from human. Run now, Noor, they told me, whispering gentle warnings, tiptoeing first into my dreams, apologetic and hesitant, then breaking down doors to storm into my waking thoughts: they are coming for you, the hounds of hell will be released yet again, and they will hunt you down. My brothers and sisters, who were the unfallen, who watched out for me, whom I had abandoned in my insanity to taste what being human meant.

Mankind didn’t know what it was tampering with when it began digging down to the centre of the earth, from the bed of the ocean, in Russia, in Qatar, in Oklahoma, in Canada, in Bavaria, in Mexico. Man wanted to open up the earth, for they knew more about space than about what lay within the planet they lived on the surface of. Humans should have known, should have heeded the cries of the damned that echoed through the miles of rock, begging to be let out, back on to the surface, breaching the Moho, the last delineated barriers between mankind and the damned, barriers that the volcanoes had already erased wherever they erupted. They were just making it easier for them to emerge through the thousands of miles of rock and crust; it took them no effort when they found one, they slithered out in seconds and covered thousands of kilometres on the surface in one short run. I knew, we knew, we ran away from them. No matter how many tunnels one closed up, they found new pathways drilled into the earth that led straight to hell. All the levels of hell. And from them emerged the hounds, drooling and slavering, sniffing down the surface for traces of the fragrance of roses that always emanated from me, driven by their charioteer, the one whose name would never be mentioned for fear of summoning him. From these holes in the earth emerged the evil that should be confined within, they had no route to emerge on to the surface.

The hounds of hell, they had no mercy, there was no pleading my case with them. To look them in the eye was to die instantly if you were human, and it was a mercy to die instantly if you were human. They could suck your soul out through your eyes if you locked gazes with them, blasting holes into your ocular sockets as they devoured the only thing precious about you – your soul. If you could see them with the human eye, they would shock you into senselessness. I could see them as they were. They had a hundred heads, each with slobbering jaws, dripping acidic drool that etched grooves in the earth as they strode it, each jaw with rows of sharp fangs ready to rip flesh from a soul. The one who commanded them did not care about the human destruction left in their wake. Humans were but collateral damage when it came to collecting fallen angels. I was one. They had my scent, they would sniff me down from the four corners of the earth, no matter where I hid, unless I managed to throw them off my scent. I could not camouflage it, I was fragrant like a thousand roses, a fragrance that heralded my coming, a fragrance that trailed as I walked away. It was a fragrance that humans were confounded by, humans lost judgement and coherence when too close to me. I could tempt them to do what I chose at that particular moment, whether to feed me or to consort with me.

They were simply doing what they had been tasked with, having been commanded to drag me to the netherworlds. A fallen angel could not be allowed to roam the earth for so many years – I had lost count of how many centuries it had been, millennia from the time of my descent. One loses track of time when one has lived so long in undying flesh. I had escaped them each time they came, every few years or a few months, or whenever it was that they remembered I was still on the loose, a fallen angel who could only be permitted to be a demon, never allowed to be a human, never ever allowed to forget that she could never be human.

When I first fell, I fell into the land where the Tigris joined the Euphrates, where all was golden, crops swayed in the fields, rivers fed the lands, and cities were ruled by benevolence and grace. I would never rise into the light again. I was there when the great king had his code engraved on the tablets that modern man had yet to fully comprehend. I lived in the house of a merchant who had taken a fancy to me much to the despair of his many wives. I outlived him and then moved to the palace as handmaiden to the noblewomen, then to the temple as a sacred consort, and then, as the generations moved on and I stayed unchanged, moving to another temple in another city as a high priestess.

I kept moving. I had done it all, all that I had been sent to keep humans away from, to warn them about, to keep them on the path of virtuousness. I had succumbed to the temptations of the flesh, of the carnal, of the vicissitudes of emotions. I had wanted to know joy and sorrow, bliss and pain. I had sunk into the sin I had been sent to warn the people about. I was there when legendary armies pillaged and sacked the cities, driving the people into despair and ruin. I fled from the devastation on feet that were slow and human, fled to the east. I had walked the surface for centuries, through high mountains and arid land where the sun was relentless and the cold scathing, where men were scavengers, building homes in walls of stones covered with cloth, living off the shrubs that grew around, raising their own livestock, drinking the clear water of streams and breathing the crisp clear air of the high mountains. As I fled to safe havens, the others of my kind fled too, scattering to the four winds, fleeing from that which pursued them, pursued me, rising from the bowels of the earth ever so often, through the tunnels to hell, these abominations invisible to humans. Visible only to those they hunted, their horror was punishment enough for daring to want immortality and the flesh. I fled again, hoping that the further I went the more difficult it would be to track my scent. But distances mattered nothing to the hounds. They just began emerging through hell-holes closer to where I was; the ground sank into broiling magma and they slithered out, sniffing the breeze for me, for the others like me who had fallen, still fleeing them. How many had they collected yet, how many of us had managed to escape, how many more had fallen, I didn’t know. I was alone, and tired, and terrified. My light was fading more and more as time passed by.

It was messy and tiresome, the demands and limitations of this human body. You had to eat, drink, urinate and defecate. You were subsumed by the extremes of temperature, the flesh rebelled against the heat, it shrivelled against the cold. When it was time to run, I cursed these feet, no matter how quick I was in human terms, I was limited by how fast my legs could carry me. This is what I’d chosen when I had dropped from light into flesh, forsaking the ethereal for the corporeal, choosing flesh and blood of the human body, its joys, its pains, its desires, its pleasures. But not its fear of death. I could not die. I would not die. Death was not a privilege allowed to us who chose to fall. I would spend eternity in the hell they put me in.

I was still glorious if I chose to unfurl myself in my full radiance, but where on this earth could I dare do that without a human chancing to see me; humans were everywhere on the surface, wherever one looked. Even in places where you thought you wouldn’t see a human for miles, one would suddenly emerge – a traveller, an explorer, a journeyman – and they would carry the tale of the woman who unfurled her light for miles in the midst of darkness wherever they went. The ones they told it to, they would hunt you and try to destroy you. It unsettled humans, a glory they could not explain, match or control. At first, they would worship you, then when the pleasures of worship paled, they would try to pull you down, either with words or actions, to their levels of ordinariness. When both worship and denigration didn’t satisfy them, they would try to destroy you.

Shining in a sack of coal got you picked out, I had learnt to dim my light on the surface. Sometimes, dangerous things picked you out, things that wanted to take your shine for their own, that sucked out all that made you radiant and ground it into their darkness where nothing redeemed them, not even shards of stolen light. My radiance was so bright it could blind the human eye. I had dimmed over the years, as fragments of my light dissipated into those I had taken the purest light from; the kernel of light that lay unawakened in most humans, coiled at the base of their spines. I had been created from light, of light, and wherever I went the darkness would be waiting to claim me as its own. So, I dimmed my light.

I was light within flesh, muscle and tissue covered with skin. I was light without the shadow, the one darkness had staked a claim on, when light had abandoned me. I abandoned the path of the light, even though it still shone through me, shimmering through my veins, skeins of moonlight glittering in a riverine estuary seen through my skin. But the light really hadn’t abandoned me, although I had chosen skin over light. That was the only explanation as to why the hounds hadn’t been able to drag me down to the hells. And that they did not know my true name. No one did, except the one who had named me. The name given to me when I had been created had cadences too complex for the mortal tongue, it came from a language not meant for mankind or demon to use, from the language of those who were of the light, from the light. I had no right to use it, now that I had fallen from the light, but it still called me at times, a soft murmuring within my head that warned me, that told me I needed to run again, away from where they had tracked me down.

My light, silver and rippling, a blaze once, faint remnants of all that was still heavenly in me, a faint glimmer now compared to the brilliant radiance I used to be: but still too powerful for them to drag me against my will. But I was in human skin, and human skin was vulnerable, I was vulnerable, I felt pain, I felt fear, I felt all the things I didn’t when I had been just fire and light. Skin had weakened me. The hounds sensed that, they fed on fear, they leached the courage from one, easier to just give oneself up for the taking. How long can I keep running? As long as it takes, I told myself. As long as it takes.

Tonight, I would run again. They had emerged on the surface, I could sense that, the whispers in my ears had become screams. Their growling would burst through the skies, a sonic boom echoing through the ethers, shaking the window panes, rattling the roof. A howling only I would hear, sounds no human ear could. It would only be my blood that ran cold in these veins that criss-crossed my body. Only my eyes that would see the horror they were as they strode magnificently across the earth in huge bounding leaps that covered kilometres in a matter of minutes.

I had come here to this house, in this sleepy mofussil town in the Doaba, the patch of land fringed between two rivers, verdant and fertile, one bitterly cold night many years ago. I thrived where there was a confluence of waters, where waters enclosed land, I sought it out. The night I fell from the skies was black, and mournful voices were calling out the names of the dead, and the frost seeped into your veins, turning skin to ice, when to step out was to risk losing a limb. I was barefoot and bleeding, and had no idea why I had been dropped here in this lane, in this strange town, where the winters were cruel and the summers were worse. Of that night I don’t remember much. I don’t remember anything of where I had been before that night, of being chased down by the hounds. I remember trying to desperately flee the tent with the nomads in the vast outback of rugged mountains and bare land. They had kindly given me shelter and food. I had watched in despair as they were eviscerated into nothingness before my eyes, as the slavering jaws bent down to collect me. A flash of white light searing the skies and nothingness, and the falling, an infinite falling through layer after layer, piercing each with a rip that tore the invisible fabric dividing the various dimensions that separated all the worlds, landing with a thud on what seemed to be a road in an unfamiliar place, a road fringed with low homes in an unfamiliar town.

The homes were all barricaded against the icy cold, some had lights lit within. The wind sliced my skin with icy fingernails, piercing my unwrapped throat, stabbing my eardrums, freezing my thoughts. I was bleeding, and I had fallen from great heights, and I was running from what would still be chasing me, playing cat and mouse with me; the acrid, sulphurous stench of the hell they had come from in my nostrils as the portals between the worlds were still ripped open. I looked desperately for escape, for refuge. Ringing the doorbell, the voice came into my ears, a familiar voice, one that I knew I should know but my mind was blank at that moment, with no memories.

If you asked me now as to why I had picked that particular house of all the houses in the row of houses on the street, I would be hard pressed to answer. Perhaps it was because theirs was the only house down the length of the street with all lights on and the curtains not drawn to keep the casual stroller down the street from peering in. The people within, they waited for the doorbell to ring, for someone to need them as much as they needed someone. As I dragged myself down the street, shivering in the inadequate clothes I had on, the blood freezing in my open wounds, I sensed an unquestioning welcome awaiting me here.

I pushed open the gate, my breathing heavy and laboured. The hinge creaked, alerting those within that someone had entered. Perhaps that was why the creaking hinge hadn’t been oiled, the creak was necessary, the creak was the sentinel. If there were dogs, they did not bark. A light came on above the door, lighting up the porch, and the door was thrown open without the precaution of a safety chain. An elderly lady stood there, looking me over. She wore a bulky hand-knitted fraying sweater, thick woollen socks under her moccasins, her hands tucked into the pockets of the sweater, a muffler wrapped around her face and neck. Within this packaging, her face was tiny, crumpled and curious.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. She seemed unperturbed to find a young woman on her porch, bleeding from gashes all over her body, barefoot and bedraggled, clad in clothes completely inadequate for the weather.

‘Help me,’ I pleaded in a voice too exhausted for coherence.

She beckoned me closer with a gesture as imperious as it was graceful. An unbidden thought came to my mind, through the chill and the pain, perhaps she had been a dancer when she was younger, her muscle memory still retained the grace and economy of movement. As I came into the circumference of the yellow light spilled by the bulb, she caught a glimpse of the wounds on me, gasped and called for her husband.

‘Sunoji,’ she called, her voice redolent with the unmistakeable tone of command that had the Sunoji from within scurry out hastily, wrapping a shawl around himself, bracing for the cold that would inevitably hit him when he stepped out onto the porch. He was a kindly man too, that I could see. His eyes were warm and gentle. He had once worn a turban, I knew, and he had given it up when he had married this woman. She had come across the Radcliffe Line, a young girl, buried beneath corpses in a train full of carnage, someone she didn’t know had grabbed her when the mobs were butchering her family and fled to the railway station, stowing her under a seat. She had sat there terrified as mobs stormed the train compartment and butchered all those within, sparing no one, failing to notice her huddled, shivering between dead feet, sitting soaked in the blood of those killed. She had grown up an orphan, taken in by a kindly home. They had married each other for love. They had lived together all these years with love, they had raised children and they had created a home with love.

What I needed now to heal me, to keep me safe, was a house that had been lived in with love. I could feel my light struggling to emerge, to reach out to the love that enveloped them, to draw from it, to seek the strength it needed, I needed. I would be safe here, the voice in my head told me, that strangely familiar voice that was looking out for me when everyone, even my kind, had withdrawn in fear. I put my hand out and she held it. The silvery threads reconnected, after all those years. I had met her before, in another life, in another skin, from another time, when I had been travelling through mountains bare and stark, hostile and treacherous, I had walked across rivers of ice and valleys of stone and soil, I found shelter where I could, and I had walked, walked and walked. She started, and peered at my face curiously.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Why do I feel I know you?’ I had lived so many lives now, had so many lovers, touched so many lives, that I would never know when I met them again in new skin. They would know me though, they would feel the light in me reaching out to the light I’d left behind in them as I’d taken what I’d wanted from them.

I fell to the ground in a dead faint. I didn’t know what happened after that, but I know they took me in, tended to my wounds, nourished me back to health. It took weeks before I could stand again, before my wounds healed. They never asked me what had compelled me to step out on that freezing night. They didn’t know what it was that I had been fleeing from that night, and why I’d knocked on their door. I never did tell them, it would terrify them, that what had chased me could return sometime, anytime, and take them as well as me. They didn’t ask me where I came from and when I planned to leave, what my name was, who my parents were. And so, I stayed on in their home, like a guest who had overstayed her welcome, becoming day by day part of the household, filling up their need for a living creature to alleviate their loneliness, like one took in a stray to care for, and in return be needed. I was safe for a while, a few days, a few weeks, a few months I didn’t know. She grew fond of me, the waif who had landed up on her doorstep, in the thick of the darkest days of winter, when even ghosts refused to wander the streets and breaths congealed into ice before one could even exhale. She called me Noor, after the child she had been and lost before she became the woman she was. She had a new name now, she gifted me her old one, the one that had been discarded when she was torn from her family in the melee of the Partition of these countries.

I was Noor now. I was light. She didn’t know that when she gave me her name, the name she had abandoned, she had given me a new power. She had named me for the light I was.

When the susurrations began that night, I was ready. The fire rose up the walls of their room and engulfed them in a quick searing embrace before they could wake and register what was happening. I was humane with those I chose to sacrifice, sacrificing only those who were ready to go; if there was no one around who needed to end, I ran. I may have fallen but I was of the light. I first made sure they slept, never to wake, thanks to a generous meal I had cooked, served piping hot from the stove, ladled with ghee and crushed sedatives, sedatives I had carefully sourced from the lady’s own stash of sleeping pills. She couldn’t sleep without them, the pain was excruciating, it was a matter of months now. The man had been more prosaic, if he had any unfulfilled desires of his youth, he had tucked them away in the grind of providing for the woman he had married, the children they had birthed. She had clumps of cells rotting her body from within, she would be dead in a few months anyway, I knew, even if she had been diagnosed and they began treatment. He was already sliding into the blessed oblivion of forgetting, where he would soon forget everything, even his own name. Death was inevitable. I only hastened it. They would have faced the wrath of what chased me had they lived, had they faced what no human should have to face. I was doing them a kindness, I told myself. I was ending them when they were still happy. I stroked their heads as the fumes asphyxiated them and drew their energy into me, diminished energy, but enough to get me some more time in this skin before I needed more light.

Her thoughts, as she died, were still confused. ‘Noor,’ she whimpered. ‘It was always you, wasn’t it, the one who put me on the train? How can it be? How can you still be the same after all these years?’ That had been a different life, a different me. She remembered. I had all but forgotten.

I smiled. Of course, it was me, I had plucked her from the carnage of her home and family, and fled with her to the railway station where I put her on the train, bidding her to hide beneath the seat until they reached. I always came back to those who had touched me. She owed me her life, and I was here to take hers, that was how it worked. I was led to them by the skeins that connected us, I just needed to follow the silvery lead, etheric and unseen to the mortal eye. Their fate was sealed when their skin touched mine, even in passing, even if they didn’t realize it back then.

It had burnt down perfectly, old and crumbling as it was, brick, mortar and wood, almost like divine providence was guiding the lick, flare and spread of the flames. I left the house from the main door, giving it time till I reached a fair distance away, before I allowed the flames to rip through all the rooms unfettered. The blaze lit up the night. I grabbed the bag I had packed earlier with all the money and valuables I could find in the house and a few clothes for good measure. I ran down the road, the cover of darkness my c. . .