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Infernum of Jharia: The Coalhearts
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 16 2025
Pages: 194
Weight: 0.43
Height: 0.41 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Book III of Jharkhand: The Cursed Cartography
By Shadab Alam Khanson
The land never sleeps. The fire never dies. And the forgotten never forgive.
Jharia is not just a town-it is a wound that burns.
For over a hundred years, the coalfields beneath this region have smoldered endlessly, burning beneath homes, schools, temples, and history itself. Official reports call it an underground fire. Journalists brand it an ecological tragedy. But the locals know better. They whisper of something older. Something buried with the first pickaxe in 1916. Something that awakens not just the earth-but the truth.
Dr. Naina Roy, a geologist returning to her ancestral state, is sent to assess the expanding fissures threatening the already fragile landscape. But Jharia is no place for science alone. As her boots touch scorched soil and her instruments fail to capture the strange warmth rising beneath her, Naina begins to experience things no seismic reading can explain: charred letters appearing in locked offices, bones that glow in the dark, and children with eyes like flickering coals who seem to know her name before she speaks.
And then the voices begin.
They call her from below-voices shaped in smoke, memory, and betrayal. Each name whispered is another thread in a tapestry long forgotten by the government and buried by history. Naina soon learns that her great-grandfather was part of the original excavation team that unearthed a sealed cavern deep in the coal seams. What they awakened, they tried to contain. What they failed to protect, now wants witness.
They call themselves the Coalhearts.
Not ghosts. Not demons. Survivors.
Burned but unbroken, the Coalhearts are the embers of history's injustice. Some were miners buried alive, others were families displaced in the name of industry. Some were silenced journalists, others children swallowed by vent holes. All were victims of a fire no one wanted to explain. And now, through Naina, they begin to rise-not for revenge, but for recognition.
As Jharia quakes, government offices combust, and ash rains like snowfall, Naina races against both time and bureaucracy. She uncovers fragments of a sigil-map-a forbidden design hidden in the coal veins, carved not by engineers, but by those who first tried to contain the inferno through ritual and blood. With the help of a tribal archivist, Lakshmi, and a skeptical inspector named Mehta, Naina retraces the ancient Pact of the Firevault, a binding once powerful enough to keep the flames in place. But to renew the ritual, she must confront her own legacy-and carry the testimonies of the burned to the very halls that buried them.
In Jharia, fire isn't the enemy.
Forgetting is.
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