They say our village was blessed once.
But blessings rot faster than fruit in the sun.

What remains now is a curse—older than any prayer, sharper than any sword. It was not the gods who cursed us. No… it was a woman. A woman wronged. A woman no one dared defend when she cried out, when her beauty was turned against her, when men took what they wanted and left her hollow beneath the neem tree.

Her name was Mrignāyinī.
Her vengeance, they whisper, still drips from the roots of this forest.

The villagers call her a witch. They tell their children she consorted with Yakshinis and danced with spirits in the cremation grounds. They forget to mention how their silence made her monster, how their hunger for her skin gave her the reason to spit fire into their bloodlines.

Every family in this village carries her thorn.
Every birth is shadowed by her curse.

Rudrā Singh, son of the man who broke her, walks proudly through the fields as if his father’s sins are buried. His wife, Vindhyā, keeps her home warm and her daughter Mayūrī untouched by the darkness beyond their walls. But shadows are patient. Shadows do not forget.

And Bhairavī…
The granddaughter of the witch herself…
Seventeen, restless, her blood humming with secrets her family tried to bury. She does not yet know that her veins are rivers of fire, her breath an inheritance of ash. She does not yet know that the woods whisper her name because they remember.

But she will.

For when the blackthorn blooms under a full moon, no child of the curse may hide from what they are.