Vangah

She had been the hidden tendon in the tiger's paw, the unseen current steering the royal barge. Wars moved at the flick of her wrist; peace was a thread spun from her silence. Yet when the conqueror's drum fell mute, they did not carve her name in stone. They erased it like a footprint in tidal sand.

Five monsoons came, thirsty as desert wolves, and drank the memory of her. The king-hollow idol she had once filled with breath-now sat enthroned, blind to the hands that shaped him. No decree of exile, no funeral chant, not even the mercy of a swift blade. Only the long hunger of a forgotten well, drying under the sun.

But Time is a wheel with broken spokes-it does not only crush. Sometimes, it spins backward.

She wakes at fourteen, a flame kindled from cold ash. The court's poison-tongued serpents still bask on warm stones, their fangs still sheathed in silk. The dagger that will one day taste her ribs is yet an unborn shadow in the smith's fire.

She does not return as the weaver of fates, nor the silent river that nourishes kings.

She returns as the lightning splitting the palmyra.
As the scorched earth refuses the next seed.
As the blacksmith's anvil sang under the hammer.

This time, she does not bargain with the storm.
This time, she is the storm.