There was a time when Raga was a frog.Not just any frog. They were the kind of frog whose throat opened the sky.

  Back then, the nd was cracked. The clouds hid. The sun gred. The kes shriveled. The crops bent their heads and waited to die.

  Raga lived alone in a hollowed root just above a small pond, nestled between the mountain and time. And I — I was a snakeling, just hatched from one egg of my mother’s clutch. I had only just learned to slither, darting my forked tongue into the air.

  That time, I came upon Raga by chance. But as, a snakeling could not speak. I hissed and hissed. The great frog only turned. Raga’s eyes stared straight at me.

  And they sang.

  And the world softened.

  Gods and men said their voice held water — that when they sang, the clouds came to listen. The sun swayed. The rains fell. The soil loosened. The pnts remembered how to breathe.

  The first pair of man and woman came to Raga, bringing offerings, chanting, dancing, and praying in the hope that they might sing again.

  And sometimes, they did. Not always. Not on command. But when the grief of beasts and men was loud enough, when the trees leaned in and stones began to crumble — Raga would sing.

  Time passed. The pond became a ke. A patch of grass became a forest. The pair grew and the people built homes. Names. Language. Borders. And I grew with the nd. My body lengthened, thickened. My coils carved new paths into rivers. My skin fell away in sheets that became ridges.

  Yet my serpentine tongue could not speak with the frog who sang.

  Then one night, Raga vanished.

  The people searched and searched. They dug beneath roots. Drained wells. Held fasts. They bmed the wind. They bmed the Sun. But mostly, they bmed the Moon.

  For the Moon had been watching. She had seen Raga and said nothing.

  They called the moon a traitor. They said she grew jealous of Raga’s song — or perhaps weary of their hope. That she whispered to the demon, fed the demon visions of Raga in chains, in death, in another world altogether.

  Oh, people of the ke. You did not know the demon like I do. The demon does not work in absence or silence, nor do they move through the veil of night via the moon.

  And what is a Seeker, if there’s no demon to defy and no Raga to seek?

  So I went mad.

  I bit down on my tongue and tore it from myself. Tore out my eyes, so I would never again see a world without purpose. I buried myself and moved through the bones of the world.

  And sometimes — only sometimes — I would feel Raga in the wet stone. A ripple in the dark. A soundless hum that pressed against the air like the beginning of a song.

  My body would move on its own. Move, and move.

  Because maybe — just maybe — Raga was not gone.

  Just elsewhere.

  And I —

  I must find Raga.