Lore Of Jivavarta: Vakshi Monastery

 

The Broken Promise

Long ago—so long that even the oldest stories were only beginning to form their first words. Thats when the great war of Jivavarta began and no kingdom, no place, and no town was safe.

Few families fled the war, until they stumbled upon the jungle of Vakshi, where the air was mystic with the breath of ancient trees.

Those trees were not just trees; their trunks bore the knowledge of centuries, and their leaves whispered wisdom.

Deep among them lived Medini, the goddess whose roots touched every birth, every death, and every trembling secret of the jungle. When she rose before the families, her shape was neither woman, nor man, nor even tree, but something that hovered between the three.

“We will shelter you,” Medini whispered in a voice that sounded like a thousand leaves rustling together. “What will you give us in return?”

The family leaders answered, “We will look after your children. We will plant a forest larger than the one we shelter in. We will not spill blood here, not even in anger.”

Medini, who knew the worthlessness of promises given during difficult times, accepted it nonetheless. For even a false promise sounded sweet compared to the cries of war outside the jungle.

The Village and the Broken Vow

The refugees built their first village by a river that ran clear enough to reflect a person’s hidden heart. In the mornings, the elders greeted the trees as if greeting older relatives; in the evenings, they whispered apologies to the younger trees which were bent by the winds. For generations, the treaty held. The jungle watched them grow, and the villagers watched the jungle breathe.

But promises are delicate things, more fragile than a newborn sprout. As years turned into centuries, the single village grew into a city, and around the city grew many more villages.

The people of Vakshi, drunk with wealth, prosperity, and the illusion of permanence, forgot the gratefulness with which their ancestors once touched the earth. Temptation arrived not with demons, but with axe and greed.

“It’s only one tree,” they told themselves when they cut the first tree. Then one became a hundred. And a hundred became the skeleton of the jungle. Every tree felled made the jungle inhale more sharply. A terrible repetition settled over the land, brothers killing brothers, sons killing fathers, the same sins twisting through generations like a cursed song. Yet the people continued, blind to the way the shadows of trees lengthened under Medini’s gaze.

The Reckoning

One morning, though some say it happened at midnight, the jungle withdrew its borrowed silence. The river swelled, not with water, but with thick red mud, the kind that remembered every footprint ever made upon it. The roots of trees rose from below like serpents waking up from ancient sleep. Mountains, those creatures of stone that rarely moved, dragged themselves into new shapes, burying entire villages under their indifferent weight.

It was not merely destruction. It was obliteration.

The jungle swallowed Vakshi’s kingdom whole, tree by tree, breath by breath, until nothing remained but stories carried by the wind. Floods followed landslides, landslides followed floods. Jivavarta braced itself, for it seemed that all jungles would soon awaken into the same righteous fury.

The God-King’s Plea

Far away, in the kingdom of Rongcha, the God-King—successor of Supreme God Sarvabhu, whose eyes were said to mirror past and future simultaneously—understood that if Vakshi’s wrath spread, Jivavarta would again drown in the wars it had once barely survived.

He went to the heart of the devastated jungle, unarmed and alone.

“Medini,” he said, kneeling amid uprooted trees, “let me build a temple where your name will be breathed like a prayer. A monastery where all faiths may study the peace you once offered. Let trees be planted there in your honor. Let no blood ever touch its soil.”

Medini listened, for even gods grow tired of their own anger. Slowly, the roots relaxed, the rivers went back to their own way, and the jungle allowed the world to breathe again.

Thus arose the monastery town called Vakshi, a place where students of every religion walk under the shade of trees planted with their own hands, and where even disputes are whispered for fear that the leaves might overhear.

The jungle remains calm to this day, so long as no blood is spilled and no tree is cut. For Medini’s  final warning echoes through every branch and every prayer. At the entrance of Vakshi’s gate:

“He who sheds blood within the monastery shall be undone by betrayal from his own kin.”

And no one in Vakshi doubts that the trees remember.

Jivavarta is a fictional land created by Shon Mehta, where epic tales of power, survival, and social upheaval unfold, as seen in her novels The Timingila and Lair of the Monster, along with many other stories and parables set in this richly imagined world.