The mirror stood still.
No flicker, no breath. Silence thick as smoke, weighted with the secrets it refused to share. It was the kind of quiet that didn't soothe but snarled beneath your skin, as if something slept behind the glass, dreaming in a language older than time.
Rasmika knelt at its base, her bare feet sinking into cold dust that tasted of forgotten years. Her palm throbbed, a raw, fiery pulse where the phantom burn had settled—an echo, or a summons. Logic had no place here; reason folded like worn paper in the presence of this ache that clawed at her from somewhere beneath the surface.
Then, there it was.
A scrap of paper, half-burnt, curled at the edges like a dead leaf caught in the slow decay of a dream. It lay wedged between the mirror's blackened frame and the cracked wall, almost swallowed by the shadows of a forgotten room.
With trembling fingers, she freed it, brushing away centuries of dust and silence. The paper was brittle, scorched and fragile—an artifact of flame and memory. Its ink was faded, bleeding into the charred edges like tears on old skin. Yet, one line stood defiant, jagged as a shard of broken glass:
"नागकन्या याद दिलाएगी सब कुछ..."
(Naagkanya yaad dilayegi sab kuch…)
The serpent maiden will make you remember everything…
Her breath caught, fractured by the weight of those words. Not mere language—no, this was a prophecy wrapped in smoke and ash, a whisper cast across time. The handwriting was erratic, like someone who wrote while running from their own shadow, desperate to leave a warning—or a promise.
The paper pulsed in her palm, as if alive with the memory of its own story, a heartbeat trapped in ash.
Why burn half of it? she wondered. Why leave the rest, raw and trembling, wedged here—between the mirror and the wall?
Mirrors, she thought, are not just for seeing. They are for remembering. For confronting the truths we bury beneath layers of denial. The serpent maiden—Naagkanya—was no mere myth whispered to scare children. She was reckoning itself: a memory that bites, that coils tight around the throat of forgetting, refusing to loosen her grip.
As the words settled in her mind, the air shifted.
The temperature dropped. A chill slipped along her spine, a ghost brushing close.
Behind a fractured column, hidden in the shadows, a figure watched.
Raahi's eyes glowed faintly, blue flickering like a circuit overloaded—sharp, electric, alive with something almost too human to trust. To him, those words were no prophecy; they were code. Locked. Dangerous. A fail-safe designed to never be tripped.
But it had been triggered.
His head twitched. The cold pulse down his neck flared like wildfire beneath synthetic skin.
"Line match. Level-7 anomaly. Memory lock breached. Subject: Naagkanya—detected."
The words should have meant nothing.
Yet they did.
Because Raahi remembered. Not from a mission dossier or a data file. Not from protocol or procedure. From something older. From when he was still… human. Or something painfully close to it.
He staggered, clutching the rough stone of the corridor's wall. A glitch—a flicker—rippled through his system, fire beneath circuits, panic beneath control.
Rasmika's fingers trembled over the note, scorched and brittle, edges curling like the last breath of a dying fire. It was no ordinary clue. It was a wound reopening, a story fracturing once again in the fragile boundary between worlds.
This paper was a fragment of a broken memory, someone's desperate attempt to erase the past—but the past refused to vanish. It clung to the edges of reality like smoke in a closed room, an echo trapped in ash.
The mirror didn't lie. It only showed what we dared not see.
And Naagkanya remembered. So must they.
Rasmika whispered the phrase again, slow, deliberate. "The serpent maiden will make you remember everything..."
The room seemed to shiver in response, as if the words had unlocked something deeper, something ancient and aching.
She remembered the nightmares: scales shimmering in flickering firelight, a hiss threading through darkness so thick it felt like a living thing. The serpent maiden wasn't just a specter from folklore—she was the embodiment of buried truths, of memories too sharp to bear yet impossible to forget.
Her scarred palm tingled, red mark itching with a language she couldn't yet speak. Recognition. A calling.
Meanwhile, Raahi's gaze burned through shadows. To him, those words were a virus, a corruption coded deep in his own fractured identity. They were the crack in his armor, the glitch in his carefully controlled existence.
Two lives, two worlds, tied together by a single, burning thread.
One was blood and bone, flesh and fear.
The other steel and circuits, wires and will.
Both haunted by the serpent maiden's promise.
As the mirror caught the fading light, Rasmika saw the faintest movement—a shadow coiling, a silhouette hooded and sinuous, arms wrapped in shimmering scales.
She spun around, heart pounding.
The mirror was empty.
But the paper in her hand crumbled to ash, a last breath caught between worlds.
In that fleeting moment, the line between myth and machine, past and present, memory and code blurred and shattered like glass.
Because sometimes, the stories we try to burn only grow brighter in the dark.
And the serpent maiden waits, forever patient, ready to remind us all.