Nandini Verma was 18 when she penned her first story, a tale of passion, betrayal, and revenge. It was a masterpiece, poised for publication. But on the night she was to share her brilliance with the world, tragedy struck. Her abusive father, a figu...
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The evening sky stretched above me, a canvas of fading light and swirling clouds. I sat on my balcony, watching the horizon without really seeing it, lost in the abyss of my thoughts. A month had passed since that night—since the truth had been revealed to me—and I hadn’t seen Yash’s face once in all that time. I turned off everything that connected me to the outside world: social media, phone calls, even my emails. Everyone thought I was busy writing my next book, lost in my own world as usual. But that was far from the truth. The words weren’t flowing anymore. How could they, when the very story I had been written had spilled out into my real life in the most surreal way?
I took a sip of my coffee, letting the warmth spread through me, but it did little to thaw the cold confusion that had settled deep inside. My mind had been running in circles for weeks now, and no matter how much time passed, I still didn’t know what to feel.
I loved Yash.
The thought slipped into my mind, quiet but undeniable. I loved him. I always had. And I always would. He was my first love, the one who had stirred feelings in me I didn’t even know existed. It didn’t matter that he was a character from my book, a figment of my imagination that had somehow crossed the line into my world. The fact remained: I loved him. I had written him into existence with every word, every scene, and now he was here, real, breathing... and waiting for me.
But that’s where the complication lay. How do you process something like that? How do you wrap your mind around the fact that a character you wrote , a being designed and given life to on the pages of a manuscript, had climbed out of the very world you built for him and entered yours? That wasn’t something that happened in real life. It was too extraordinary, too fantastical. It defied all logic.
But there was nothing logical about this.
Rakshit had been the one to fill in the gaps, to explain everything to me when I hadn’t been ready to face Yash myself. He had sat with me, patiently telling me the story of how Yashwardhan Singhania—the Asura I had written in my book—had entered this world. It was still hard to believe, even after hearing it from Rakshit’s own mouth. Yash hadn’t just come to this world randomly. He had come with a purpose: to kill the author who had written his fate.
Me.
I still shuddered at the thought. He had wanted to kill me, his creator, for trapping him in the cycle of violence, pain, and power that defined his existence. But something had changed when he saw me. Something had shifted. He hadn’t expected to fall in love at first sight, to feel something for the person who had written his life. And it wasn’t just me. It was Luna—my pen name, my alter ego, the one who crafted his world and every intricate detail of his character.
Rakshit had explained how Yash had arrived in my life that night—the night. The night when my father had tried to kill me, the night that had left scars so deep they still bled every time it rained. Yash had been there. The trauma of that night was still alive in me, like a dark shadow lurking in the corners of my mind, always ready to pounce. But Yash’s presence had been a strange kind of balm, even before I knew the truth.
