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This is one of the first worlds I built in the Song of the Trinity universe. A dark and dreary world which is nothing more than ruins. But building it was a challenge for I could not hope to bring any joy into it.
The Underfabric
01
The idea of the Underfabric came to me one day as I saw a t-shirt of mine, lying in the wash bin. It was a garment I liked so much and yet, lying like that, inside out, with all the stitches visible, the garment looked more like Frankenstein’s monster than anything else. I did not take a dislike to it. What I did though was turn it outside-in and leave it back exactly where it was. I felt happier.
The thought that struck me was, what if there is a place which is only inside out. What if it can never be set right. What would the place be like. What would it be called. And it came to me.
‘Underfabric’! Short for ‘The Underfabric of Nature’.
It is a place just like our world. Identical to it. Mimicking it but in a distraught, brutalised sort of a way.
02
The Underfabric has grey smoggy skies, scalding winds of heat, parched earth, tumbleweed, in which stood ruined buildings, broken metro rail tracks, high rises with dangling elevators and falling glass panes. If that is the place, what kind of a villain would dwell there. Either a recluse who wanted to hide or a prisoner.
In came the ‘virtuous villain,’ a term coined by a friend of mine that I liked so much, that I embraced it. Terribly wronged and ostracised, vandalised by a lust stricken Asura and shunned by her own Gandharva clan, so rejected and made out to be a raving pariah that she forgot even how to have emotions, the Disparate roamed the ruined world, not by choice though. Imprisoned in this desolate world by her own people, she intends to destroy everyone who harmed her.
03
And when she finds a way out of her desolate prison, albeit by a supreme villain who only intends to use her, she wrecks havoc, in the bargain, wronging the wrong sort of man. The only person who can face the Disparate is an impossible hero, a result of improbabilities, trained to hunt, with no regard for the Gods or even the very guardians of balance.
She attacks his people, kills his father, destroys everything he holds dear and to battle her, he must enter her world. The Underfabric. And what he finds there is just the tip of the iceberg. You can read more about this world in Shatru-Kronikles Book-1 the prequel to Song of the Trinity, Rise of the Kali. Why a different title to the prequel. There is a logic behind that. More about that, later.
Vadhan
Author Of Best Selling Fantasy Books