What you carry, carries you — Elementary: Book 1
Across centuries, a sealed metal box follows catastrophe. Three strangers—a guardian, a survivor, a scientist—are drawn together when it surfaces again. What they carry may carry them.
Emerging Author • Speculative Fiction • Mumbai
Viaan is a Mumbai-based operations leader at a 1,600-person technology company—and a storyteller whose imagination runs as wide as his playlists. Between boardrooms and blank pages, he writes speculative fiction steeped in history, weather, and the mysteries we inherit.
Away from work he is a painter, amateur perfumer, and the kind of music obsessive who can trace a line from K.L. Saigal to Kumar Sanu to Pink Floyd without pausing for breath. Bathroom singer, enthusiastic cook, and devoted consumer of Bollywood in all its forms.
He is father to a monosyllabic fifteen-year-old with a passion for expletive-laden rap and an adventurous palate, husband to a fiercely protective corporate professional who adores food but loathes cooking, and son to parents who hold the family together with gardens, faith, and unshakeable grit.
A cyclone strikes Bombay, the first in its recorded history. Two dams fail in a single night against every prediction. Storms rise from a cloudless sky over a Roman trading port in 25 CE. The disasters span centuries and seem unconnected—until you notice that each one follows the same object: a sealed metal box, its script older than any living language, surfacing and vanishing again and again, leaving ruin wherever untrained hands have opened it.
Three strangers have spent their lives circling that box. An old man on the Godavari who has kept its power in check through decades of daily ritual, asking only to guard it. A woman who released it once as a child, watched a city drown, and has tracked its trail of catastrophes ever since. And a discredited meteorologist chasing its impossible storms through the archives, certain the answer must be rational.
When the box surfaces again and the three are finally drawn together, they face the question each has avoided: what is this thing—an artifact from beyond the stars, a relic older than memory, or something that was never meant to be found?
And what does it cost those who carry it? The Waterbearer—Elementary: Book 1—opens a series where history, myth, and the elements collide, and every burden leaves a mark.
What you carry, carries you.
Some storms wait for centuries.
Not every relic was meant to be found.
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