1097.260 · September 17, 1224 BC
The Cub He Raised
Sixty-three years since the leopards arrived. The other four Guardians lost to age and illness over the preceding decades. Vikram — the last remaining Guardian, the only one who can still open the Portal — enters the enclosure of a male leopard he has known since its birth. He does not leave alive.
Vikram was twenty-five years old when the leopard was born. He named it. Fed it. Trained it. Watched it grow from a mewling cub into a powerful adult, one of the finest specimens the programme had ever produced. The bond between them was something the other handlers envied — Vikram could enter the animal's enclosure without fear, could touch its flank, could look into its eyes and see something he believed was recognition. He was wrong. On a morning like any other, Vikram entered the enclosure alone. What happened next took seconds. Andhakara's final Guardian died in the dust, killed by the creature he trusted most. With his death, the settlement's Earth connection severed forever. The four other Portal Keys had already gone dark — claimed by time and by sickness, one after another, across the decades since the settlement's founding. Vikram's was the last. Now there are none.
