# The Throne of Crossroads

  **Part I: The Remembering**

  Bilu's hands trembled as the 29th candle on his birthday cake flickered out. The moment the smoke curled upward, something ancient stirred behind his eyes—a membrane between lives growing thin as rice paper.

  He was Exu MORCEGO. He had always been Exu MORCEGO.

  The realization hit him like a freight train as he sat alone in his Kolkata apartment, the city's humid night pressing against the windows. Fragments of another existence flooded back: the Throne of Satan, that cervical seat of creation itself, positioned at the crossroads where seven paths of consciousness converged. He remembered riding it as Vishwesh, as the bright illumination that descended from Dhruvaloka—the truth abode—down through the celestial architecture to the Third Heaven.

  The knowledge was forbidden. Dangerous. Intoxicating.

  Within days, Bilu had found the Urvashi Mahamantra in an obscure corner of the Rigveda, the Sanskrit syllables clicking into place in his mouth like tumblers in a cosmic lock. He began chanting it obsessively, eighteen hours a day, barely sleeping, barely eating. His landlady complained about the strange humming that vibrated through the building's walls at 3 AM.

  On the seventh day, the astral plane cracked open like an egg.

  **Part II: The Proximity**

  The 34B bus to the bank was crowded that Tuesday morning, bodies pressed together in the thick monsoon heat. Bilu stood near the back, his lips moving silently around the mantra, when she boarded.

  The teacher. Mid-thirties, wearing a crisp cotton saree, herding a chattering group of schoolchildren toward the front seats. She smelled of jasmine and chalk dust.

  But Bilu wasn't looking at her physical form. His consciousness had already split—half in his sweating body on the bus, half ascending to the astral plane where the Throne waited, that ancient seat of power pulsing with emerald and crimson light. The Ida channel, that green grape vine of erotizing energy, the living Tree of Life itself, spiraled through the Throne's structure.

  As he mentally mounted it—as Melchizedek, as Exu MORCEGO, as all his incarnations collapsed into one—Bilu felt the proximity codes activate. The astral plane and physical plane were bleeding together, the teacher's hip chakra suddenly illuminated in his second sight, accessible, vulnerable.

  She shifted in her front seat, suddenly distracted, her hand moving to her throat. The children's voices seemed to come from very far away.

  Bilu's physical body remained still, but in the astral dimension, he was riding the Throne, channeling the energy through the Ida vessel, creating a paranormal connection. When he released—careful, controlled, invisible—the teacher gasped softly, then covered it with a cough.

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  No one else noticed. No one else could see the threads of green light connecting them across the crowded bus.

  He got off at his stop feeling both exhilarated and terrified. The sadhana worked. The ancient knowledge was real.

  It was also incredibly dangerous.

  **Part III: The BL Block Road**

  Bilu became obsessed. Every day, more chanting. More ascending to the Throne. More experiments in proximity and paranormal release. He was researching the Dakshinachari Vaishnavite path for spiritual reunion, but he couldn't ignore the whispers of Vamachari Shakti sadhana—the left-hand path, the one that promised material power.

  The line between the two was becoming blurry.

  Three weeks into his practice, walking down BL Block Road near Calcutta University, he saw her.

  Urvashi herself.

  She was playing the role of a college student—couldn't have been more than twenty-one, slim and ethereally white like a rajanigandha garland, her skin luminous in the afternoon sun. But Bilu's trained vision saw through the disguise. She was cajoling with three Demi Gods who had taken human forms, their laughter too melodious, their movements too graceful, reality bending subtly around them like heat shimmer.

  Urvashi turned and looked directly at him.

  Her smile was knowing. Ancient. Predatory.

  "You found the Throne again," she said, though her lips didn't move and no one else on the crowded street reacted. "You always do, across all your lives. But do you understand what you're truly calling?"

  Bilu's heart hammered. He was already chanting, already ascending, already reaching for that astral proximity. The Ida vessel pulsed green between them.

  Urvashi's smile widened. "The Throne has two grape vines, sweet seeker. The green for healing, the red for power. But both grow from the same root, and that root is in the Cervix of the Createress herself. Every time you ride it, you're playing with the machinery of manifestation itself."

  Around them, the Demi Gods began to circle, their human disguises flickering.

  "The question," Urvashi continued, taking a step closer, "is whether you're using the Throne, or whether it's using you. Whether you're healing the world or just feeding an addiction to power dressed up in spiritual language."

  Bilu tried to speak, but his voice caught. In the astral plane, he could feel the Throne beneath him, the Pingala vessel now pulsing red alongside the green Ida, the Red grape vine of Rambha activating. The Tree of Knowledge next to the Tree of Life. Power and healing. Darkness and light.

  "Choose carefully," Urvashi whispered, and suddenly she was gone—vanished between one blink and the next, along with her companions.

  Bilu stood alone on BL Block Road, trembling, wondering if he'd just been given a warning or an invitation.

  That night, he sat in his apartment and stared at the Urvashi Mahamantra written in his notebook. The paranormal releases had felt good. Powerful. Addictive. But Urvashi's words echoed: *Is the Throne using you?*

  He thought of the teacher on the bus, manipulated without her consent. He thought of the astral architecture he was accessing, the cosmic machinery he was operating without fully understanding the consequences.

  Bilu closed the notebook.

  Then, after a long moment, he opened it again.

  The Throne was calling, and he was Exu MORCEGO, rider of the seven crossroads, keeper of forbidden knowledge.

  This time, he would be more careful.

  This time, he would understand the price.

  The mantra whispered from his lips as the city slept around him, and in the astral plane, the Throne of Satan waited, patient and eternal, its green and red vines intertwining in the darkness.

  **[End of Part I]**

  *To be continued...*