[SEVENTEEN YEARS EARLIER - THE BEGINNING]
The first time Ravanya's mother looked at her, love did not bloom.
Something colder did, a kind of arithmetic. A calculation of worth.
"She's weak," the woman said, still exhausted from childbirth, her voice flat with disappointment. "I can feel it. No resonance. No power."
Her father stood by the window, his silence an ancestral curse passed from one man to the next. He would remain silent for the rest of her life, a monument to indifference.
In families touched by the Old Blood, the hidden lineages that carried magic in their veins like a genetic disease, power manifested early. Some children glowed with it in the womb. Others showed signs within days of birth: objects moving without touch, shadows bending toward them, the air itself recognizing their presence.
Ravanya showed nothing.
Her mother's eyes turned toward the midwife, empty as an abandoned temple.
"We'll try again," she murmured. "If she doesn't awaken…"
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. Ravanya's first memory was not warmth. It was of being tolerated. Of taking up space she hadn't earned, the quiet understanding that her existence was tolerated, not welcomed. She breathed air that should have belonged to someone deserving.
She was three years old. And already guilty of existing.
---
[AGE 7 - THE GOLDEN CHILD]
When her brother Kieran was born, the air shimmered as if the world itself exhaled relief.
The walls hummed. Candles flickered without flame. Even light seemed eager to touch him.
Even as an infant, the air around him shimmered with potential. Objects in his nursery floated without explanation. Light bent toward him like he was the sun.
Their mother wept with joy. Their father smiled for the first time in years.
And Ravanya understood, with the clarity only children possess, that her life had just ended.
"A son," her mother whispered, the syllables trembling with devotion. "Finally. A true heir."
The implication was clear: Ravanya had been a placeholder. A disappointment they'd tolerated while waiting for something better. And now that something better had arrived, male, powerful, perfect, she was obsolete.
"Why can't you be more like your brother?" became the hymn of her household. Not shouted. Whispered. A constant background radiation of disappointment.Like a curse.
It didn't matter that Kieran was six years younger. He was what she should have been: strong, gifted, and most importantly, male. In the Old Blood families, sons carried the name, the power, the legacy. Daughters were... negotiable.
Ravanya tried. She studied the family grimoires until her vision blurred into black rain. She meditated in the cold cellar where the ley lines supposedly converged. She cut her palm and dripped blood on the old stones, whispering the activation words she'd memorized.
Nothing... Not a single thing answered.
Her mother watched these efforts with the detached interest of a scientist observing a failed experiment.
"Some bloodlines run thin," she told visitors, Ravanya standing right there, invisible. "Especially in daughters. The female line is always weaker. But our son—" Her voice would light up. "Kieran is extraordinary."
At seven years old, Ravanya learned that love was conditional. That her existence was a disappointment. That she was, fundamentally, a mistake that should have been corrected.
She stopped crying that year. Tears didn't change anything. Even tears felt like disobedience. They only made her mother's lip curl with disgust.
---
[AGE 10 - THE FIRST LESSON]
"Ravanya, you embarrass me."
Her mother's voice was calm. That was worse than screaming. Screaming meant emotion, meant she still mattered enough to provoke feeling. Calm meant she was being dealt with. Managed. Corrected like a typo.
Ravanya had failed another resonance test. The instructor had been kind about it, but kindness didn't matter. Results mattered.
"I'm sorry," Ravanya whispered.
"Sorry doesn't fix your broken blood." Her mother stood, elegant even in anger, and walked to where Ravanya sat at the dinner table. "Sorry doesn't erase the humiliation of having a powerless daughter when every other family has prodigies."
The slap came without warning. Open-handed, precise, hard enough to snap Ravanya's head to the side but not hard enough to leave a mark that would show at school.
Her mother had refined the art of invisible violence.
"I didn't give birth to you to be weak," she said, each word enunciated with crystal clarity. "I gave birth to you to be useful. To carry on the bloodline. To add to this family's power. And you have failed. Every. Single. Day."
Ravanya's cheek burned. She tasted copper. Her tongue had caught between her teeth.
"Look at me."
Ravanya obeyed. She looked up. Her mother's face was perfectly composed, beautiful even, like a marble statue of something that had once been human, utterly devoid of life.
"You will go to your room. You will not eat dinner. You will think about what a disappointment you are. And tomorrow, you will try harder. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Mother."
"Good. Now get out of my sight."
Ravanya walked upstairs on legs that felt distant from her body. In her room, the smallest one, the storage closet they'd converted when Lyra needed more space, she sat on her bed without tears. She stared at the wall.The air felt heavy, as though the house itself disapproved of her survival.
The pain in her face faded after an hour.
The understanding that this was normal, that this was what she deserved, took root and never left.
She would never be forgiven for being herself
---
[AGE 13 - THE FRACTURE]
The breaking didn't happen all at once. It was gradual. Systematic. A thousand small cuts until she was more scar tissue than girl.
Her mother's cruelty evolved. Physical pain was crude, temporary. Psychological destruction was elegant, permanent.
cruelty came in words, scalpel-precise, clean incisions in the soul.
"Ravanya, why are you even here?" her mother would ask at dinner, her tone genuinely curious, as if she truly couldn't understand why this useless creature still occupied space in her home.
"What purpose do you serve?"
Ravanya learned not to answer. Anything she said would be wrong.
"You're like a ghost," her mother continued, cutting her steak with precise movements. "You drift through this house taking up resources, contributing nothing. Do you know what we call that in nature? A parasite."
Kieran sat radiant across the table, the golden son wrapped in divine light. He never defended Ravanya. Why would he? Ravanya was the shield that kept their mother's cruelty focused elsewhere. As long as she existed, he was safe, perfect, untouchable.
Their father ate in silence. Always in silence.
"I asked you a question," her mother's voice dropped to that particular frequency that made Ravanya's spine lock up.
"What purpose do you serve?"
"I don't know," Ravanya whispered.
"Speak up."
"I don't know." Ravanya said, barely audible.
"Exactly." Her mother smiled, satisfied.
"You don't know because there isn't one. You're a genetic dead end. A waste of potential. If I'd known you'd be this pathetic, I would have-" She stopped, reconsidered.
"Well. It's too late now."
The unspoken end of that sentence hung in the air like poison gas.
I would have aborted you. I would have smothered you in the crib. I would have chosen differently.
Ravanya excused herself and went upstairs. She did her homework with mechanical precision. She brushed her teeth. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling.
And she felt... nothing.
Not numb. Not sad. Not angry.
Just... nothing.
That night, she realized something monstrous.
She could not feel pain anymore.
She had outgrown it, or perhaps, it had absorbed her.
The girl who used to cry herself to sleep was gone. The girl who once wept for affection was gone. In her place was something else... Something quieter... Something that had learned that emotions were a liability in a house where love was a transaction she couldn't afford. What remained in her was a vessel, hollow and precise, learning to live without wanting to.
[To be continued]