Chapter 2: I'm Still Alive

Nidhi

The forest wanted to kill her almost as badly as the coven did.

Three hours of walking — stumbling, really, because her left knee was shattered and the bone had started to reset at the wrong angle, and the Divya Shakti that should have corrected it was still sluggish from a decade of suppression — had taken her roughly four kilometres from the drainage tunnel, which was not far enough. Not nearly far enough. The Chandramukhi Coven's tracking warlocks could cover four kilometres in twenty minutes with a decent spell and a fresh Pishach to ride.

But the forest was dense. The Nilgiri hills — ancient, tangled, thick with undergrowth that had never been cleared because even the local villages knew to stay away from the land surrounding the coven's territory — provided cover that tracking spells struggled to penetrate. The canopy was so thick that sunlight reached the forest floor only in thin, scattered blades that cut through the green darkness like dropped knives. The air smelled of wet earth, decaying leaves, and the sharp medicinal tang of eucalyptus that burned Nidhi's nostrils after a decade of breathing stale dungeon air.

Aarav had not cried since they left the tunnel. He rode on her hip with his legs wrapped around her waist and his arms around her neck, silent, watchful, his enormous dark eyes tracking every shadow and rustle with the hypervigilance of a child who had learned that stillness was survival. His weight — barely twelve kilos, heartbreakingly light for his age — was nothing compared to the chains she had carried, but her arms were weak and her wounds were draining her faster than the Divya Shakti could replenish.

She needed to stop. She needed water. She needed food. She needed medical attention for her knee, her ribs, the deep laceration across her abdomen where last week's punishment session had opened a wound that was now seeping through the overall's fabric and attracting flies.

She kept walking.

The forest floor dipped sharply into a ravine carved by a seasonal stream that was currently dry — a bed of smooth stones and red clay that would leave footprints. Nidhi considered her options. Crossing the ravine would slow her and leave tracks. Following the ravine downstream might lead to water, but ravines were natural traps — easy to ambush from above.

She crossed the ravine anyway, carrying Aarav on her back now, her fingers gripping roots and stones as she descended the slope on her good knee, the shattered one dragging behind her like dead weight. The descent took ten minutes. The ascent on the far side took twenty. By the time she pulled herself over the lip of the far bank, she was shaking uncontrollably and her vision had narrowed to a tunnel ringed with black.

"Monkey," she whispered, because speaking at normal volume required energy she did not have. "Monkey, I need to rest. Just for a minute."

Aarav's grip on her neck tightened. Not in fear — in permission. She had taught him this: a tight squeeze meant yes, a loose one meant no, a pat on the shoulder meant danger. Their private language, born from necessity in a dungeon where spoken words could be overheard and used against you.

She collapsed beneath a banyan tree whose aerial roots had formed a natural curtain around the trunk, creating a space that was almost enclosed, almost hidden, almost safe. The roots smelled like damp wood and the particular vegetal musk of bark that had been growing for centuries. Nidhi pulled Aarav into her lap and leaned against the trunk and closed her eyes.

Not sleeping. She could not afford to sleep. Just resting. Just letting her muscles unclench for sixty seconds while the Divya Shakti worked on the worst of the damage — the knee, the ribs, the abdominal wound that was now hot to the touch and probably infected.

"Nini," Aarav said. His name for her. His second word, after "out."

"Hmm?"

He pressed his small, warm palm against her cheek. The gesture was so tender, so adult in its compassion, that Nidhi's composure — the steel wall she had built around her emotions to survive the escape — cracked, and a single tear escaped before she sealed it shut again.

Not now. Later.

"I'm okay, monkey. Just tired."

He did not believe her. She could see it in his eyes — the ancient, knowing look that no three-year-old should possess. He had seen too much. He understood too much. He knew that "just tired" was code for "barely alive," the same way he knew that closed doors meant danger and raised voices meant pain and the only safe place in the world was pressed against Nidhi's body where her heartbeat was a metronome of consistency in a universe of chaos.

A sound in the forest. Footsteps — but wrong. Not the heavy, shuffling gait of Pishach. Not the deliberate, spell-enhanced stride of a tracking warlock. These footsteps were light, quick, moving through the undergrowth with the ease of someone who knew the terrain. Two sets. Coming from the north.

Nidhi's hand found a rock — fist-sized, sharp-edged, the only weapon available since she had abandoned the spear in the drainage tunnel. She pulled Aarav behind her and pressed them both against the banyan trunk, using the root curtain as cover.

The footsteps stopped. A voice — male, deep, speaking a language she did not recognise at first because it was not the coven's dialect but something older, more musical, threaded with power.

"I can smell the blood from here," the voice said. "East. Behind the banyan."

A second voice, lighter, amused: "And a child. Fresh. Both injured."

Nidhi gripped the rock harder. Her Divya Shakti surged — weakly, pathetically, a candle flame where she needed a bonfire — but she would fight. She would always fight. They would have to kill her to take Aarav, and even then her corpse would be gripping him because death was a state of being and love was a force of nature and forces of nature did not stop when the body housing them stopped.

The root curtain parted.

The man standing in the gap was — wrong. Wrong for a warlock, wrong for a Pishach, wrong for any of the creatures Nidhi had catalogued in her decade of captivity. He was tall — absurdly, unreasonably tall — with shoulders that blocked the light and green eyes that caught the scattered sunbeams and refracted them into something that looked less like colour and more like intent. Dark curls fell across his forehead. His jaw was carved from granite. His body radiated heat — actual, physical warmth that Nidhi could feel from three metres away, a warmth that her frozen, malnourished, blood-starved body yearned toward with an instinct that overrode every survival protocol she possessed.

He looked at her. She looked at him. The forest went silent — not metaphorically, not dramatically, but actually silent, as if every bird and insect in a kilometre radius had simultaneously decided that this moment required their respectful attention.

The Divya Shakti in Nidhi's blood did something it had never done before. It sang. A low, resonant hum that vibrated through her bones and her wounds and the broken cartilage of her knee, not healing them — it was too weak for that — but recognising something. Acknowledging something. Reaching toward the man in the gap the way a plant reaches toward light: involuntarily, irresistibly, with the absolute certainty of a biological imperative.

Mate.

The word arrived in her consciousness without permission, without context, without the polite preamble of rational thought. Just the word. Mate. As if her Divya Shakti had been waiting ten years for this specific moment and was not interested in being subtle about it.

No. Absolutely not. She was bleeding from twelve places, she had a shattered knee, she was holding a traumatised toddler behind a banyan tree in the middle of a hostile forest, and she had not bathed in approximately three months. This was emphatically not the time for her divine power to develop romantic interests.

The man's expression shifted from alertness to something softer — something that looked dangerously like wonder, like recognition, like the same involuntary knowing that was currently short-circuiting Nidhi's brain.

"Easy," he said. His voice was careful, the way you speak to a wounded animal, and Nidhi hated that it was the most comforting sound she had heard in a decade. "I'm not going to hurt you. Either of you."

"That's what they all say," Nidhi said. Her voice came out as a rasp — broken, dry, barely audible. "Right before they hurt you."

The second man appeared behind the first — shorter, lighter-built, with a grin that seemed to be his default expression and eyes that assessed the situation with an intelligence that contradicted his carefree demeanour. "Sunshine, if we wanted to hurt you, we wouldn't have announced ourselves from twenty metres. That's basic villain etiquette."

"Don't call me sunshine."

"Would you prefer 'terrifying blood-soaked woman clutching a rock'? Because that's accurate but a mouthful."

Despite everything — the pain, the fear, the decade of trauma, the absurdity of her Divya Shakti's sudden romantic awakening — Nidhi felt her mouth twitch. Not a smile. Not even close. Just the ghost of the muscle memory of a smile, triggered by the unexpected experience of someone being funny in a situation that was entirely humourless.

The tall man — her alleged mate, the one with the green eyes and the warmth and the jaw — crouched slowly, reducing his height, making himself smaller, less threatening. He extended one hand, palm up, the universal gesture of harmlessness.

"My name is Arjun," he said. "This is Sahil. We've been tracking something from this forest for three days, and whatever we were tracking, it wasn't you. But we can help. If you'll let us."

Nidhi looked at his hand. Then at his eyes. Then at Aarav, who had peeked out from behind her back and was staring at Arjun with an expression that was not fear but curiosity — the first curiosity she had seen on the boy's face since his arrival in her cell.

Her Divya Shakti hummed. Aarav's small hand patted her shoulder once.

No danger.

Nidhi did not trust the man. She did not trust the situation. She did not trust her own divine power's sudden enthusiasm for tall strangers with green eyes. But Aarav trusted her, and her body was failing, and she was four kilometres from a coven that would recapture her within hours if she stayed still.

"If you try anything," she said, "I will kill you with this rock."

Arjun's lips curved. Not a smile — a recognition. "I believe you."

She reached for his hand.