Agni: Rise of Asura: (Book 1 in the Agni Series) (AGNI Origins - Echoes of Bhu)

Ten thousand years ago, an Asura prince went into cryosleep with a single order. In March 2024, a widow in Delhi wakes at 5 a.m. from a dream of blue fire. Neither knows the other exists. Not yet.

WINNER — Salis Mania Choice Awards, Best New Author (Editor's Choice), 2024

900 BC — KRITIKA
Indrajeet is thawed aboard a stolen stealth ship by an AI that has kept watch for a hundred centuries. His target is a world locked to one face of a red dwarf: one hemisphere above 400 degrees, the other frozen solid, and a single band of perpetual crimson dusk between them where anything at all can live.

The people who built an empire in that dusk are called Mixed Breeds — green-skinned, red-eyed, a red diamond on every forehead, born of unions both starfaring empires call abomination. Their royal temple cannot be scanned. Indrajeet has one mission and two ways to finish it: get close to the king's twin heirs, or burn the twilight kingdom to ash.

Then, alone on the ice of the dark side, a royal scientist turns at a sound and finds himself standing ten metres away. Same uniform. Same face. His wife's bracelet on its wrist. “I am what I need to be. Tonight, I need to be you.”

MARCH 2024 — EARTH
Kanishka buried her husband two years ago and is raising their ten-year-old alone. The nightmare is always the same and always at 5:00 a.m. — blue flames that crawl over her skin and refuse to burn her, her own dead closing in, chanting that she is a curse.

Then a black van blocks a rain-slick highway. A gun finds her son. A stranger says: hand over the key.
She has no idea what the key is.
The man who has been her best friend since she was seven kills both gunmen in seven seconds, hides the bodies like he has done it before, and will not tell her where he learned to do that.
Two timelines. One old war. And a weapon the last people who saw it wrote down as a god.

WHAT THIS IS
An Indian mythology space opera on a hard-SF frame — a tidally locked red-dwarf world worked out honestly, and technology old enough that the civilisations it met recorded it as scripture. If you have ever wondered what the Mahabharata would read like with starships in it, this is that book.
Nobody in this book has clean hands, and it does not pretend otherwise.
Adult science fiction. Graphic violence, on-page death, and grief that is never tidied away. It ends on a cliff, and it means to.

THE ECHOES OF BHU UNIVERSE
Agni: Rise of Asura is Book 1 of AGNI Origins — the first trilogy in Echoes of Bhu, an expanding shared universe of Indian mythology space opera where separate series run through the same galaxy. This is where the origin begins. Start here.
For readers who want the scale of Dune, the premise of Lord of Light, and a mythological sci-fi epic that treats mythology as history.

WHY READERS ARE OBSESSED WITH AGNI: RISE OF ASURA:
• Award-Winning Indian Mythology Sci-Fi: Merges Vedic lore, the Mahabharata, and ancient alien history with hard-SF realism, orbital mechanics, and galactic scale.
• Gripping Dual Timeline: Seamlessly weaves ancient cosmic espionage with a pulse-pounding modern-day survival thriller.
• Complex, Morally Grey Characters: No clean heroes or villains—only ancient empires fighting for survival, fierce motherly devotion, and anti-heroes driven by duty and grief.
• Epic Scope for Fans of Legends: Searing action, mind-bending technology, and deeply emotional stakes.

PERFECT FOR FANS OF:
Amish Tripathi (Shiva Trilogy), Anand Neelakantan, Kevin Missal, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light.