Her fingers grazed the mirror's surface—
—and the world shattered.
A scream lodged in her throat as visions detonated behind her eyes:
A palace drenched in blood.
A woman in crimson—Ratna? Alira?—collapsing under a dagger's kiss.
A voice, serpent-smooth: "You promised to remember."
Then—nothing.
The Next Morning
She woke to searing sunlight and the panicked shouts of her team. Her mouth tasted of copper, her limbs were leaden. Someone was shaking her.
"Rasmika! God, where were you—?"
She tried to sit up, but her body screamed in protest. When she rolled up her sleeves, she froze.
Bruises coiled around her arms like serpentine shackles.
Not random. Not accidental.
Deliberate.
The Mirror
She reaches again. Her fingers tremble, suspended in midair.
She doesn't remember wanting to touch it. She doesn't remember moving at all.
But the mirror draws her like a breath she forgot to take.
She collapses like a shuttered shrine.
Her body folds onto the cold stone, limbs limp and unfamiliar. A glass sound echoes—not from the mirror, from inside her.
Discovery
In the morning light, they find her.
Not peacefully. Not poetically. No dreamlike pose of the dead girl in the fairy tale.
She's sprawled, face pale as chalk-dust, with bruises ribboned around her arms like something coiled something claiming something returned.
Explanations
The school nurse blames low blood sugar. The principal murmurs hysteria. But the aunt who runs the temple in Kuldhara whispers,
"Naagkanya."
And spits three times behind her shoulder.
The Village
At the tea stall, beneath the pipal tree, the old men pause their cards.
Talk spirals, brittle and biting:
"Didn't Ratna faint the same way?"
"Didn't her skin turn cold after touching that mirror?"
"Didn't her father find her with—"
"Bruises like snakebite."
And one, quieter than the rest, says only:
"She was never the same after."
"Neither will this one be."
The Hours After
She does not wake.
But she mutters.
Words spill from her mouth like the river Yamuna when the floodgates are snapped open by moonlight.
Dead dialects. Forgotten prayers. A child's voice, but not her own.
"Saap toh nahin tha… par kuch toh tha."
(It wasn't a snake… but it was something.)
The Bruises Deepen
By dusk, they resemble inkblot spirals.
Nagmani shapes—serpent sigils older than temples. Her skin sings stories her mouth won't tell. Her eyes, when they finally open, are not looking at now.
Side Effects
The villagers begin to avoid her shadow.
Even the dogs howl differently around her home.
Even the mirrors in her house begin to fog from the inside.
Bhangarh Remembers.
It's a place that eats silence like rice.
It knows how to keep secrets half-alive.
They say Ratna was the last girl to touch that mirror.
They say the mirror belonged to the queen who vanished, body never found, only her anklet and a trail of black feathers.
The Folklore Folds Tight
Ratna — the girl who walked into the hills barefoot. Ratna — who returned barefoot and broken. Ratna — who screamed snakes in her sleep and drank milk straight from the kalash like a cobra in temple trance.
Now, they speak of this girl in the same breath. They don't remember her name, but they say:
"She touched the mirror."
"She belongs to it now."
The Second Collapse
Her fingertips graze the glass again. It isn't cold.
It pulses.
The mirror has a heartbeat.
Then—nothing.
Darkness doesn't fall like sleep. It falls like a trapdoor opening beneath her ribs.
She collapses without a sound, her body folding to the stone like she was part of its memory.
They find her at dawn, curled like a question mark before the mirror.
Her skin pale, her lips mumbling things no one can understand.
The Names Begin
And the marks— Bruises like coils. Circling both her arms. Like something had embraced her. Or claimed her.
Snakelike patterns— Too symmetrical to be random, too old to be explained.
Rasmika doesn't speak for hours. When she does, her voice isn't entirely hers.
It has an accent she's never used. A rhythm out of time.
She keeps repeating strange syllables between half-lucid glances: "…Kālī… Ratna… Alira… nāg-jāl…"
One of the older workers—a local man with sun-creased eyes— steps back when he hears it.
He makes a sign of protection. Spits in the dust.
"Yeh Ratna ki kahani phir se jaag gayi hai," he mutters.
(Ratna's story has awakened again.)
The Curse and the Queen
Ratna—the queen who bled the land dry and vanished into mirrors.
The serpent-bride who cursed Bhangarh to fold in time forever.
The Exodus
The whispers spread like wildfire.
The scientists dismiss them. The expedition leaders file a report.
But the locals? They start packing.
Even the wind, that day, refuses to pass the haveli's gate.
Return
She sleeps now with her back to the mirror, but its heartbeat lives in her bones.
At night, she whispers to her bruises, as if they are listening.
And maybe they are.
She doesn't remember fainting, but now, when she blinks,
her reflection blinks after her.
The mirror never needed to be watched.
It was watching all along.