Prithivi stepped into the oldest and darkest part of the library where no mortal had ever stepped foot for the past thousand years fearing the magic of the ancient books there.
But Prithivi had no such qualms because he didn’t believe that any of these books had magic. He thinks that some people who didn’t want others to gain knowledge had spun a tale to keep them from accessing the rich contents of these books. As he walked deeper and deeper, the magic inside the books reached out with their hands to grab the attention of Prithivi, but the one who ensnared Prithivi was Harbinger.
Unbeknownst to the forces controlling him, Prithivi took Harbinger home believing that this was the book he was searching for when in fact it wasn’t.
It was late in the night he realized the fact and the library was closed for the return, so he decided to read the book of his own volition. He was not controlled by the Harbinger anymore. As he opened the book, angry dark clouds shrouded the moon, and it started pouring when moments before there was a clear sky. As the raindrops hammered against his window, he looked up startled to see the sudden change in weather.
But he didn’t think much of it as he closed the window and returned to his book. With every page he read, the rain became fiercer and the weather around the world started to show drastic changes. It worried the scientists, but the true disaster struck when he found the coded coordinates in the book.
It was for Lake Manasarovar, no big deal, if not for the coded mantra that Prithivi also found. As he jotted it down, several volcanoes erupted, severe storms brewed in the oceans, and earthquakes struck many villages all around the world. People around the world thought these abrupt disasters were a premonition to the end of the world and they were not far off.
If Prithivi followed through the instructions in Harbinger, the world would end.
However, Prithivi closed the book and went to sleep having satisfied his curiosity. The next day he returned the book and found the one he was looking for.
For the next few days, Prithivi concentrated on finishing his assignment and he almost forgot about the information he had written down, but an insistent voice in the back of his mind urged him to decode the information and find out what it was. Prithivi successfully ignored the voice until his semester was over, but during the summer break, he had nothing but time.
Prithivi decided it was as good a time to decode the messages. It took him three weeks during which nature tried to warn him multiple times. As usual, Prithivi ignored every warning including his instincts screaming at him to not continue and stubbornly decoded the information.
The result didn’t make him jump up and down in joy for a man who had spent every day pouring his all into the work because he was disappointed in receiving the coordinates of Lake Manasarovar and a mantra.
He wanted to end this, but Prithivi was not a person who left things halfway. So, he made the necessary arrangements to go to the Kailash Manasarovar Yatra. His ticket got canceled, yet he pulled some strings and got in. Nature itself seemed to give up because the rest of his trip went smoothly and he reached Lake Manasarovar within the next couple of weeks.
Standing at the edge of the lake, Prithivi glanced around at the serene blue waters for what would be his last time and waded into the river to recite the mantra he had memorized thrice. A sudden blinding light had him wincing and he closed his eyes. When he opened it, he was still in Lake Manasarovar yet he wasn’t. Because the other people on the yatra who were with him had vanished.
He looked around ready to call the friend he had made on the trip when the ground shook. The tiny stones around the lake jumped up and down as an enormous animal walked toward the lake. Prithivi's mouth dropped open as he watched the dinosaur—a creature wiped off the earth billions of years ago—come to a stop and drink water from the lake.
Prithivi wiped his eyes and blinked multiple times yet he still saw the dinosaur and he realized it wasn’t an illusion. He was seeing the creature in real time. Another sound caught his attention and he turned to find a woolly mammoth vanishing inside the ever-green forest topped with snow. Before he could process this information, he saw a variety of birds from large to small in all sorts of colors take flight almost hiding the sky with their numbers.
He shouldn’t be seeing some of those birds because they had died ages ago, yet he watched them fly off wondering what on earth this place was.
“You aren’t supposed to be here for another billion years.” A feminine voice said, making Prithivi whip his head to look at a fellow human being.
“Why do you mean? What is this place?” Prithivi asked just as he spotted an extinct flower in her hair. What’s with this place and extinct things? He thought but didn’t ask out loud.
“This is Sanctacre, a sanctuary for all creatures.”
“Sanctuary from what?”
“From the end of the world.”
“What?” Prithivi asked, wading toward the girl.
“After the world destroys itself, the cycle of life begins again. Every creature in here has a male and a female, when their time arrives, they go to the newly made earth. The plants too.” She finished looking pointedly at Prithivi. “Every species now has a male and a female including humans.”
Prithivi’s brain worked a mile a minute and he finally whispered, “That means the world is ending right now?”
“Yes.”
“Ohh God, what have I done?”
“You made a mistake, a big one by reading the Harbinger. Its purpose is to lure a weak human to do the job of ending the world and you just made it happen.”
“I… I didn’t do it on purpose.” Prithivi stammered, running his hand over his face.
“It’s no use wondering whether it was purposeful or not, the world is going to end.”
Just like the girl said, disasters struck the world on a humungous scale, and within the next few days, our beloved planet Earth died before its time. But don’t you worry, the cycle of life continued with the creatures living in the Sanctacre.