Hii, I’m Bhairavi. Mayuri’s best friend forever.

Once upon a time, we laughed without care, spun dreams from sunlight and dust. But even then… something was wrong. Something gnawed at my chest.

The villagers called me shaapit. Dayan. I never understood why. I only knew that when I touched the dead, they breathed again. When I touched the sick, they healed. I thought I was an angel. Yes, I said it—an angel. Not out of vanity, but truth.

Tomorrow I turn eighteen. Adulthood presses against me like a weight I cannot name. There’s a thrum in my veins when I see Mayuri—my soft little heart wants to kill her, yet I contain it. Is that normal?

The forest has always spoken to me. Not with words, not in any tongue humans know—but in sighs, murmurs, the heavy bending of branches as if they carried secrets too vast for the sky. They called it cursed. I called it home.

As a child, I thought the whispers came from wind. But as I grew, the voices became clearer. Nights of laughter that was not human, sobs that drowned themselves in grass, and sometimes… my own name, breathed into the dark.
“Bhairavi…”

The villagers warned us: never stray too deep. People vanished beyond the blackthorn, they said. Shadows followed you even in sunlight. Creatures drank warmth from bones. Mothers told these tales to keep children obedient. I was never obedient.

At seventeen, the woods were the only place I felt whole. Mayuri called me reckless, gripping her prayer beads whenever I slipped past fields into thickets where even dogs refused to follow.

“One day, the spirits will take you,” she’d whisper.

I only smiled. A part of me… wanted them to.

Tonight, beneath a swollen, white moon, the forest felt sharper, hungrier. Lantern in hand, flame trembling like a heartbeat, I crossed the first wall of blackthorn. Their thorns glimmered like pale teeth, warning me away. I pressed on anyway, dew soaking my skirts, ears straining.

Then it came—a voice, faint but unmistakable.

“Daughter of the curse… child of the bloodline…”

I froze. Breath stolen. Pulse rattling like prayer drums. No one had ever called me that. The villagers only called me stubborn. My mother called me foolish. Grandmother… dangerous. But this voice—low, ancient, carved into the very bark—named me something else. Something I did not yet understand.

I tried to push past another wall of blackthorn, but the forest seemed to notice. The moon overhead was changing. Slowly, almost painfully, from pale white to a deep, molten red, as if it had bathed in blood. The air grew thick, heavy with iron and fear. Dogs howled, frantic, while bats scattered through the sky in chaotic flurries. Every instinct in me screamed to run—but I couldn’t.

Then I heard it. A voice, ancient and curling through the shadows, chanting:

“Sha’vra, khol’mar, zinthra…
Tirak ul’vah… mor’ka…
Ylith… ka’thar… ulnesh…
Bha’ra, bha’ra, bha’ra…
Fyrnox, fyrrn… crathil…
Shra’ka… shra’ka… shra’ka…”

It was a language my mother had spoken in whispers when I was small. I understood its meaning even before the words fully registered: “Welcome, beta… I was waiting for you. Only you are my hope. Help me take revenge…”

Before comprehension could settle, my body betrayed me. My clothes shredded as if the thorns themselves had grabbed at my skin. My nails elongated, sharp as obsidian claws. Pain exploded in me. A hot, raw, screaming kind of pain….and I cried, screamed for help. The forest responded only with silence, thickening the tension around me.

Five minutes passed, but it felt like an eternity.

When it ended, I was… transformed.

Every inch of me burned with a new reality. I stood as a creature of impossible beauty, impossible danger, a living fantasy no one could have dreamed of. The pain of the transformation was bitter, but it came with clarity. Every heavy, confusing feeling of my past, every ache of my childhood, every whispered slight and superstition, the curse, the fear, the isolation, now it all made sense.

And inside me now, my veins pulsed with fire: anger, resentment… and the pure, untainted emotion that would guide me above all else

"revenge".