This chapter begins in the cold corridors of bureaucracy, where wealth is written in ink and loss is catalogued in silence. Tonight, the rebels will not raid for grain—but for paper. Not to steal, but to burn. Not to vanish, but to set loose the truth.

Ink That Bled Without Wounds

The Collectorate stood at the edge of the old city like an arrogant tooth—whitewashed, polished, and aching to be pulled. Its walls bore the scent of lime and ink, its corridors echoing with the drag of boots and the crisp turns of parchment. Inside, the men moved like machines in uniform—registers balanced under arms, quills in brass holders, and the air always heavy with the scent of bureaucratic power: dust, sweat, and sealing wax.

It was here that Kashmir’s dispossession was documented—not by war, but by sentence.

And these sentences were not shouted. They were written in a script that starved silently.

Scrolls lined the wall behind the Revenue Officer’s chamber, bound in red twine, their corners numbered and marked with the stamped insignia of the Dogra crown: two swords crossed beneath a sunburst. Each document a nail. Each seal a chain. They did not bleed, but they bruised.

Usman had walked through this building once before—as a child, clutching his mother’s shawl, listening as a man in round spectacles informed her that her husband’s “case” was incomplete, and that the cow confiscated would not be returned. That was the day he learned that some thefts wear uniforms.

Now, years later, he stood once more within those same walls.

But this time, he had come not to beg.

He had come to burn.

Madhav crouched behind him in the narrow corridor that ran beneath the back staircase, where a cracked door led into the central record hall. In his hand was a reed pipe, the same bamboo instrument that once delivered ants into a constable’s sleeping quarters. But tonight, it carried only breath.

Layaq waited by the outer grate. He wore a merchant’s shawl and carried a bag of salt. To anyone who passed, he was simply delivering a ration for the kitchen staff. But inside the salt sack, wrapped in goatskin, were two clay pots filled with kerosene and a fuse twisted from the hem of a priest’s robe.

They had twelve minutes.

One watchman had left to relieve himself. Another was asleep in the entryway, lulled by surma and cheap liquor. The third was inside the prayer room, muttering memorized verses while scratching at the scabies beneath his waistband.

Usman moved first.

He pushed the side door gently, its hinges recently greased by someone who did not yet know their service would aid a rebellion.

The record hall unfolded like a library built for cruelty. Scrolls. Ledgers. Stamps. Files wrapped in rice cloth. A thousand stories of despair arranged with such care, you might mistake them for civilization.

Madhav followed silently, striking a match against the hem of his pheran. He dipped it into the clay pot, let it catch, then stepped back.

Usman removed a bundle of scrolls at random—not because they didn’t know what to burn, but because everything deserved fire.

He placed them in a brass pail. More followed.

When Layaq entered, his eyes darted once toward the prayer niche in the corner. A velvet curtain covered it. He stepped to it, pulled the cloth aside, and spit into the chamber.

“No god lives here,” he whispered.

And then, with a motion as soft as it was final, Usman lowered the flame into the first scroll.

The fire took its time.

It licked the ribbon.

Then it bit the text.

The parchment curled inward like a wound trying to close.

And outside, the city continued to sleep.

But not for long.

Not wildly, but with the deliberation of memory made flame. And as the scrolls twist and collapse in heat, the act becomes not escape, but ceremony: a cremation of paper ghosts that had bound the living.

Smoke Made from Signatures

The parchment didn’t scream.

It crumpled.

Each sheet arched its spine, curled its corners, and caved inward with a delicate dignity—as if the lies it had carried all these years had finally become too heavy to bear.

Madhav watched it burn. He didn’t blink.

He had read one of the scrolls before feeding it to the flame. It spoke of a widow in Rainawari who had defaulted on grain tax during the famine of ’33. The note in the margin read: “Permission granted for the seizure of doorframe timber. Payment accepted in female livestock (non-bovine).”

Female livestock.

That meant a daughter.

Perhaps eleven years old. Perhaps already taken.

The ink had not blurred. The hand that had written it had done so neatly, with no tremor. That is what stayed with Madhav—the steadiness of that cruelty.

Now it was ink rising in smoke, curling in black ribbons above the hearth, above the ledgers, up toward the beams. No alarms. No panic. Just the clean undoing of legal wickedness.

Layaq tore away another bundle of scrolls and tossed them into the bucket.

“There are too many,” he said, voice dry.

“Then we burn faster,” Usman replied.

He knelt to tear the cotton bindings from the shelf corners. Each knot had been sealed with lacquer, some marked with thumbprints—men who had signed away their neighbors, their sisters, their mothers, for a few days’ peace with the tax men.

He thought of his own father, hung above the river after being caught selling beef.

He thought of the crows that circled the gallows the next morning.

And he smiled, bitter and soft.

“Let them circle now,” he muttered.

Madhav poured the remaining kerosene into the basin. The flames responded like a choir—rising, swirling, lapping against the metal rims of the shelves with a sudden roar.

Ash began to lift into the air, blackening the rafters, clinging to the ceiling like a second sky.

One ember drifted upward and settled on the tip of Layaq’s scarf. He pinched it between his fingers and ground it out.

“Time,” he said.

They moved with purpose.

Not running, but swift.

The rear exit led into an alley bordered by old lime walls. The smell of burning scrolls followed them like a ghost, leaving a trail not of fear, but of history in retreat.

Behind them, the windows of the Collectorate began to pulse orange. But still no alarms.

Just smoke.
Paper.
Firelight reflecting off ink that would never again name a debt.

As they emerged into the wider street, Usman carried the pail of ashes wrapped in a shawl. His hands, gloved in soot, gripped it as one might grip a newborn.

This was their offering.

Not to gods.

To the city.

To Lal Chowk.

Where, by morning, black snow would fall upon cobblestone.

And the poor would know that someone had set fire to their hunger’s signature.

This page captures the arrival of the trio in Lal Chowk, the city’s nervous heart. As the first rays of morning stretch across shopfronts and soldiers still sleep in their barracks, the ashes of erased debts are released—not hidden, not whispered, but offered to the sky like a benediction for the betrayed.

Ashes in the City’s Mouth

Lal Chowk still lay half-asleep when they entered it.

The wind was up—not cruel, not biting, just cold enough to carry scent and story. The square’s stones bore yesterday’s footprints, and the shutters of spice shops groaned in their hinges as the city stirred beneath them. Pigeons circled the empty gazebo in slow, half-woken spirals. A dog barked, then gave up.

The trio arrived from the southern lane, slipping past the clocktower whose hands still pointed to the wrong hour—stuck, perhaps permanently, at 2:17, the moment when silence had last broken during the curfew riot six years ago.

Usman led them to the center of the square.

No one stopped them. No one even looked. For now, they were just three men in shawls, carrying nothing of note. The soldiers stationed at the post office were still inside, their brass buttons removed overnight to polish. The watchmen in the tea stalls were too busy lighting stoves to notice the black fabric bundle tucked beneath Usman’s arm.

He untied it slowly, with care.

As if what lay inside could still feel cold.

The ash was finer now—sifted down to grey and coal dust. It held the scent of parchment, oil, and flame, but beneath that, something older: the faint sweetness of long-hoarded paper, touched too many times by hands that once believed ownership was final.

Zooni had once said: “Ash is memory that refuses to vanish.”

Now Usman would prove it.

He opened the shawl.

And lifted the brass pail to the wind.

He did not shout.

He did not name the act.

He simply turned once in a circle and let the ashes spill.

They danced immediately, caught by a gust that came down from Zabarwan like a whisper made of teeth.

The first flakes landed on the boots of a policeman asleep on a stool.

The second settled on a vegetable cart stacked with withered turnips.

The rest floated into the square like black snow—falling onto rooftops, into gutters, against the cheeks of those just emerging to sweep their storefronts.

Some looked up.

Some rubbed their faces, wondering what had fallen.

But a few paused.

Touched their foreheads.

And said nothing.

Because they remembered.

They remembered debts written in shame.

And they understood what had happened here—without a pamphlet, without a leader, without a gun.

Ash does not lie.

It only tells you what had to be burned.

The aftermath, not of destruction, but of awakening. The city does not explode—it absorbs, quietly, deeply. Ash settles into more than crevices. It settles into thought, into gaze, into language. And by midday, Kashmir begins to murmur—not in protest, but in reclamation.

The First Words After Smoke

By the time the sun climbed past the second tier of the clocktower, the ash had become part of the air.

Shopkeepers emerged from their thresholds brushing specks from their window grills. Children, barefoot and sharp-eyed, lifted flakes from their sleeves and examined them as if they were bits of silver. One boy rubbed a smear across his thumb, sniffed it, then looked at his mother and said, “This smells like the books in that big room.”

She did not reply.

She knew exactly what it was.

And she turned her face away so he would not see her weep—not from sorrow, but from the recognition that someone, somewhere, had touched what she herself had only dared to dream: the paper that once condemned her brother to exile, her father to bankruptcy, and her own dowry to dust.

A baker on the northern end of the square found a slip of scroll-ash stuck to the corner of his crate. He read what little had survived—half a name, the ghost of a seal, a number still legible in the margin.

“Seventeen rupees, six annas.”

He folded the fragment and tucked it inside the pocket of his apron, as if to say, you no longer own me.

Near the butcher’s lane, a group of boys squatted against a wall with bits of charcoal stolen from kitchen stoves. One had begun drawing a house, another a bird, but the smallest one—quiet and thick-haired—wrote out three names in block letters across the whitewashed stone.

“Aamina. Rahim Bhat. Jaffer.”

When an older boy asked, “Who are they?” the child replied without looking up.

“My mother. My grandfather. My uncle. They are mine again.”

Elsewhere, a seamstress who had not spoken to her husband in two days handed him a cup of nun chai and simply said, “They came for the records.”

He didn’t answer.

He didn’t need to.

He only reached for her wrist and held it there, just below the pulse, until the cup stopped shaking.

By midday, the city’s language had changed.

It no longer asked what had happened.

It asked what was next.

Not loud. Not reckless.

But with that particular softness that Kashmir wore when it knew something sacred had shifted.

The soldiers noticed it too.

They saw it in the way women looked them in the eye while buying rice. In the silence of men who no longer bowed their heads as they walked past checkpoints.

In the chalk writing that began to appear at the back of tea stalls and on the bricks of dry wells:

“A debt that cannot be proven is no debt at all.”

The Maharaja’s officers would send for censors.

They would scrub the walls.

But even stone, by now, had learned to remember.

The colonial ledger room—the Collectorate—where men once wrote out ownership with calm hands and lacquered seals. But today, they sit among the smouldering wreckage, and try—in vain—to bring back a world the fire has already unmade.

The Ash That Could Not Be Rewritten

The soot had settled by afternoon, but the stench of burned parchment still hung in the corridors like a question no one dared answer. The floors were blackened with a fine carpet of ash. Footprints led in and out—soft, desperate prints left by slippers and boots, by scribes and watchmen who had arrived too late to stop anything, too soon to pretend nothing had happened.

Inside the main registry room, the Revenue Officer sat hunched at a splintered desk, his elbows dusted with grey. The wall behind him, once lined with scrolls, was bare. Naked brass rods stuck out like the ribs of a gutted beast. In front of him, a junior scribe leaned over a fresh parchment, the ink pot trembling slightly beside his hand.

They had been ordered to rewrite.

From memory.

From fragments.

From surviving duplicates in the smaller taluq offices across the district.

But memory had betrayed them.

And the ash, soft as moth wing, clung to everything—their robes, their nostrils, their pens. Each time the scribe wrote a name, the letters seemed to fade, as though the very script now resisted being reborn.

“Write faster,” the officer growled.

The boy nodded, but his hand shook. He could not keep the lines straight. Sweat from his brow dotted the sheet and smudged the figures. He dipped the reed again, but the ink refused to take as it should.

It was as if the parchment itself had become cursed—unwilling to carry the burden it once bore so easily.

From the hallway came the muffled voice of a clerk: “The weavers from Bota Kadal came again. They claim their bonds have been burned. That we have no right to evict.”

“And what did you say?”

“That we are… investigating.”

The officer rubbed his temple. “You should have lied better.”

Outside, near the charred window sill, another clerk scraped soot from the sill with a spoon. He paused, staring into the grey beyond, where the wind scattered flecks like lost birds.

“They say,” he muttered, “that the scrolls weren’t stolen. They were unburied.”

The officer turned to him.

“What did you say?”

“I said nothing. I was just… listening.”

The officer stood abruptly, his robes shaking dust into the air.

“We do not listen. We correct. We rewrite. We restore order.”

But in the corners of the office, the soot kept drifting back.

Like a hand pulling the ink from the page even as it was laid down.

Like history unlearning itself.

The Maharaja’s effort to reassert control—not through justice, but through paper again: posters, proclamations, bounties. But the city that once cowered before printed edicts has changed. Now, as reward notices flutter on lime walls and tea stalls, it is the people who decide what stays and what burns.

The Proclamations That Never Settled

They came with buckets of glue and stacks of proclamations before the midday sun had even shifted west. Six men in grey wool uniforms, boots clicking like spoons on tin, marching lane by lane, escorted by two riflemen too bored to be stern.

Each proclamation bore the same words, stamped in blood-red ink:

“To Whomever Aids the State:

A reward of 250 rupees shall be granted for any information leading to the identification of the saboteurs who committed arson against the Collectorate Record Room on the 12th night of this month.

The Crown shall reward loyalty. The Crown shall avenge theft.

Let the law be restored.”

Beneath the text, a printed seal—the Dogra sun flanked by twin jackals—and space left blank for names yet to be filled in by the hands of scribes waiting in barracks.

The glue steamed against cold brick. The brush slapped, spread, dripped. One by one, the notices were pasted to walls like spells cast to summon obedience.

At first, the people said nothing.

They watched from half-shuttered windows and behind woven curtains, the old ways of silence still holding their breath. A woman stood by her rooftop pigeons and stared. A fruit-seller wiped his knife and squinted at the curling paper, then returned to peeling oranges.

But something was different now.

Not louder.

Just less afraid.

By evening, half the proclamations were gone.

Some peeled silently by boys with ink-stained fingers. Others smeared with spit and dirt until the names blurred and the red ink wept down the walls like old blood.

In Habba Kadal, someone had drawn a circle around the words “Crown shall reward loyalty” and written beneath it in charcoal:

“And who shall reward memory?”

In Chotta Bazaar, a notice was replaced with a scrap of shawl fabric stitched with only one word:

“Returned.”

At the shrine gate, an old man leaned on his cane and asked the posting officer, “Did the fire steal what belonged to you, sahib? Or did it only take what you had already stolen?”

The officer did not reply.

He only ordered the man shoved aside and the poster nailed higher, out of reach.

But that night, when the wind picked up, it tore that same poster free—and carried it downriver where two boatmen, unloading winter reeds, saw it drift like a curse written in parchment.

They did not retrieve it.

They let it float.

In the morning, the Maharaja’s messengers reported that not a single tip had come in.

The people had seen the reward.

They had heard the price.

And for once, they had chosen to remember differently.

Not as informants.

But as witnesses.

The focus from public fire to private arrival—from the burning of scrolls to the slow return of the erased. Beneath the veil of night, a figure enters the cave—not to seek shelter, but to ask a question that has waited for years on the threshold of grief.

The Ribbon in Her Hand

The night had folded over the hills like dark velvet. Above the valley, stars blinked behind thin veils of cloud, but down here—in the mouth of the cave—the only light came from a single oil lamp balanced atop a clay shelf. It flickered gently, casting long shadows across the uneven walls. The air smelled of earth and old fire, and the warmth from the kiln’s dying coals still lingered in the stone.

Zooni sat hunched near the fire, brushing clay dust from her lap with slow, repetitive strokes. The reed stylus lay beside her on a folded shawl, its tip dulled from hours of inscription. She had carved four new names that day. Two were given by memory. One by dream. One whispered to her by a potter girl who had overheard it in a prayer uttered by her mother in her sleep.

Khatun sat opposite, wrapped in silence and wool, her eyes half-lidded, not from sleep but from the soft distance where memory lives. She had spoken only once all day—to ask if the kiln’s smoke had risen clean.

Then, without warning, the cave’s mouth shifted.

A figure stood in the entrance.

She did not knock. She did not speak.

She simply appeared—barefoot, her shawl torn at the hem, her hands closed tight against her chest.

The potter elder stepped forward instinctively, but Zooni raised her hand.

“No,” she said. “Let her enter herself.”

The woman came forward in short, steady steps, her eyes fixed not on the people in the room, but on the fire—as if it alone had the authority to judge her grief.

She stopped just beyond the light, opened her fingers, and revealed what she had carried:

A narrow strip of burnt ribbon.

Once red. Now scorched at one end. A trace of gold thread barely visible along the edge.

She did not weep.

She did not ask permission.

She simply said:

“She was twelve. Her name was Insha.”

Zooni did not speak. She reached for the ledger—her own, stitched in brown cloth—and opened it.

Her fingers moved through the pages with practiced reverence.

She stopped.

Turned the book slightly.

The woman stepped forward.

There, written in black ink, pressed between two lines of older names, was the entry:

Insha. Taken from Rainawari. Last seen 1934. Daughter of F.
Status: Named. Remembered.

The woman exhaled—sharp at first, then hollow. Her knees bent. Not collapsed—just gave way, as if they too had waited too long to rest.

She knelt on the stone.

Cradled the book with both hands.

And whispered something that did not need translation.

Zooni leaned forward.

“You gave her name,” she said softly, “and now the clay will carry it.”

Khatun moved to the back wall and brought out a tablet already fired that morning—blank, waiting. She handed it to the woman.

“Your hands,” she said, “will write her this time.”

The woman took the reed stylus with trembling fingers.

Dipped it.

And for the first time in her life, wrote her daughter’s name herself.

No officer.

No court.

No fee.

Just memory.

And fire.

And the right to say:

“She was. She is.”

The cave no longer belongs to its walls. The fire at its center, the clay cooling near the kiln, and the tablets lining its recesses become something else entirely—a living archive, tended not by scribes or priests, but by those who were never supposed to remember. Now they arrive—not loudly, but in a rhythm older than politics. The dispossessed return not to reclaim what was lost, but to record that it ever existed.

The Archive That Breathed

By the third night, the cave had changed its sound.

It was no longer the stillness of hiding, of waiting for footsteps to pass on stone. It had become the hush of entry, the careful exhale of shawl-covered women lowering themselves onto goat-hide mats, of men removing their shoes not because they were asked, but because something sacred was unfolding. Not a shrine, not a court, but something between the two. A place where what was taken could not be returned—but could be recorded.

The fire had been moved closer to the kiln to warm the soft tablets awaiting inscription. A flat slab of river stone was now used as a makeshift desk. Clay was cut in equal slabs and passed from hand to hand like bread. And each time the stylus passed into fingers not trained to write, it trembled first, then steadied. Memory, it seemed, taught faster than any schoolmaster.

Zooni had long stopped counting the names.

She no longer marked the hour or asked where they came from. It no longer mattered whether someone arrived from the orchards of Ganderbal or the alleys of Chotta Bazaar. What mattered was that they arrived.

Some came barefoot, carrying scraps of fabric.

Others came holding nothing but a name they had whispered too long in the dark.

The potters no longer asked. They simply received. Clay was shaped. Fired. Stored.

A shelf had been carved into the far wall of the cave. Upon it rested thirty-two tablets, their surfaces etched and cooled, each bearing names and brief lines—nothing grand, no epitaphs. Just truth, fired into permanence.

Gul Amina.
Jameela of Wazir Bagh.
Unnamed daughter, bled on courthouse steps.
Seized for shawl debt, winter of ‘35.
Returned through fire.

No one read them aloud. That would have made them sermons. And sermons belonged to pulpits, to kingdoms. This was something else.

Khatun stood for most of the evening now, not because she needed to supervise, but because her body had learned once again what it meant to be among the living.

She helped knead the clay, her hands cracked, her eyes softer than they had been in years. She whispered corrections when a curve bent the wrong way, not to scold, but to remind: "Her name had two A’s, remember. Don’t let the fire miss one."

At one point, a child barely able to speak reached out and pressed a thumbprint into the wet clay beside his sister’s name. No one stopped him. The potter elder nodded, then marked the tablet with a dot beside the print—a mark of consent, of belonging.

When he placed it on the drying shelf, he did so as if placing a body into the soil—not with sorrow, but with respect.

Outside, the sky held no moon. But the cave glowed gently, a fire within the mountain.

No one called it a revolution.

But the scrolls of the state had been replaced by the clay of the people.

And this time, no one would dare carry them away.

The fire that once belonged only to paper and vengeance now moves differently—carried on breath, inside stories, in the murmured names passed over hot tea and whispered through reeds beside water mills. The state does not yet see the shape of its undoing, but those who’ve long carried silence in their bones know: what was once forgotten is now spoken aloud in rooms where fear used to sleep.

A Fire Passed from Mouth to Mouth

It did not begin with a declaration.

There was no banner, no rebel printing press, no coded flyers slipped beneath doors. No one stood on rooftops to shout. No slogans rippled across riverbanks. But still—it spread. The story of the cave, of the names etched in clay, of fire that hardened remembrance into something unbreakable—it moved, not quickly, but surely, the way a thaw creeps into soil after the longest winter.

A woman returning from the spice market told her neighbor while grinding cumin, her voice low but certain.

A shepherd boy near the almond groves overheard a potter humming a name in rhythm with his wheel. When the boy asked what it meant, the potter replied only: “It is what was taken and is now returned.”

In a carpenter’s courtyard in Safakadal, a young girl asked her grandfather to write her mother’s name into the dust with a stick. The old man, who had not spoken of his daughter in twelve years—not since she vanished with a tax collector’s ledger—wrote the name carefully on the mud floor. Then he whispered, “They have it now. It’s in clay. It is safe.”

And he wept into his fists like a man whose breath had been held underwater for far too long.

By the week’s end, the rumor no longer needed explanation. One didn’t have to say the word “scrolls,” or “burned,” or “cave.” One only had to say:

“They are writing names again.”

And the listener would nod, slowly, as if something long dormant behind their ribs had just stretched awake.

The Maharaja’s soldiers heard it too—not from rebels or spies, but in the way people walked. In the way a butcher looked them in the eye without apology. In the sudden absence of bowed heads at the gates of the grain stores. Something had shifted—not loudly, but unrelentingly.

The Collector, red-eyed and shivering in his fur-lined office, signed an order requesting an intelligence report: “Locate this rumored kiln. Arrest those who name.”

But the names were no longer just in caves.

They had moved into thread.

Into bread.

Into lullabies sung to children whose mothers now knew it was safe to remember the sisters they had once lost.

At night, the wind carried the scent of burnt pinewood across the lake.

And somewhere in the warren lanes behind the shrine, a boy knelt with chalk and wrote on his threshold:

“My father’s debt is ash. My name is not.”

He did not know where the cave was.

But he had already entered it.

Khatun, now simply a woman among her people, returns to the fire—not to guide others, not to witness, but to offer the last name she has withheld. The one that carries her entire story. The one she had buried not for others’ safety, but for her own. Tonight, she unburies it—not for vengeance, but for remembrance that lives beyond her breath.

The Last Name She Carried

The cave was nearly empty. The fire had calmed to its blue heart. Clay tablets cooled along the wall, soft heat rising from them like sleeping children’s breath. Outside, the wind had retreated behind the hills, as if even it needed to rest after so much carried sorrow.

Zooni was asleep near the entrance, curled beside her ledger, her fingers still marked with the ink of names she had written until her eyelids betrayed her. A reed stylus rested near her shoulder like a fallen feather.

Khatun rose from her place in the shadowed alcove.

She walked slowly, her cane clicking once, then again, against the packed earth floor. The sound did not wake anyone. It was a sound the cave had come to know, like a heartbeat growing older. She passed the drying shelf, passed the stack of fresh clay blocks, and stopped beside the fire where a single unmarked slab waited in a shallow dish of water.

She sat down without ceremony.

She took the stylus in both hands and held it for a long time before moving. Her fingers hovered above the clay, then drew back.

Not out of hesitation.

But out of respect.

For what was about to be named.

Then, in a hand slower than age but surer than regret, she wrote:

“Born without dowry. Taken in 1925. Shaved, silenced, sold. Escaped with jawbone and memory intact. Watched the others vanish. Refused to forget. Waited until they returned through Zooni’s hands. Name: Khatun. No father claimed me. No brother came. But the clay does not ask for guardianship. It only asks the truth.”

She stopped.

Touched the tablet once with her palm, pressing it gently.

Then added one more line:

“Whoever finds this, carry it forward. Not to avenge me. To remind the next girl that she is already named.”

The stylus slipped from her hand and landed softly on the shawl in her lap.

Khatun did not weep.

She simply sat with the clay until it dried a little under the warmth of the fire.

And in the stillness of the cave, the last scroll was written—not with borrowed ink, not with legal script—but with a woman’s hand finally steady enough to remember herself without apology.

She leaned back, closed her eyes, and let her breath match the rhythm of the fire.

Not extinguished.

Only resting.

Next Chapter: Chapter Nine: The Robe and the Rope