Kritika Nayak
1
The first body was found at dawn, sprawled beneath the ancient banyan that stood like a sentinel at the village’s edge. A ring of vermillion dust, turmeric paste, and burnt hibiscus petals encircled the corpse, meticulously drawn like a sacred yantra. Her eyes had been closed gently, palms folded over her chest, and a curved knife still rested between her fingers. Carved into her bare skin were symbols that hadn’t been seen in generations—spirals, flames, and a crescent moon that bled red. The villagers gathered in hushed awe, not terror. “The Devi has returned,” someone whispered, voice trembling with reverence, not fear. By the time IPS Officer Ira Majhi’s jeep crunched over the gravel path into Devdungri, the chants had already begun. Drums echoed from nearby huts as if heralding her arrival—or warning her off. Dressed in her neatly pressed uniform, her long braid tucked into her collar, Ira stepped into the sweltering morning with the stillness of someone who had seen death before—but not like this.
Devdungri was a village forgotten by progress, cradled between dense sal forests and myths passed down through fire-lit nights. It was also the place Ira had once called home, before she was taken away at fourteen, after her mother’s death—branded a divine sacrifice and buried without inquiry. That memory clenched her jaw now as she crouched near the body, careful not to disturb the powdered circle. A constable tried to speak, but Ira cut him off. “This isn’t random. This is staged.” The villagers watched from a distance, unmoving, eyes blank. No one cried for the dead woman, not even her husband, who stood silently holding a copper diya. In her mind, Ira catalogued the scene: no drag marks, no blood pool, and the carvings were postmortem. Ritualistic. Deliberate. She’d dealt with honor killings and caste crimes before, but this felt older, deeper—something rehearsed over centuries. As she turned to question the priest standing nearby, an old blind woman seated by the temple entrance called out to her in a voice that cracked like dry leaves: “She was chosen. As was your mother.”
That night, the jungle seemed to breathe heavier. Ira sat on the veranda of the forest rest house, her tablet flickering with incomplete forensic requisitions and ignored calls from SP Choudhury. He’d told her not to waste time on “rural superstition.” But Ira knew better. The markings matched those she had once seen in a half-burnt book her mother kept hidden—a book of hymns and blood-soaked legends about Devi Vahni, the fire goddess who demanded sacrifice when justice was denied. Her mother’s eyes flashed before her—the night she walked into the forest and never returned. A knock broke her reverie. A local girl, perhaps sixteen, stood outside, barefoot and shaking. “There’s another,” she whispered. “In the rice fields. Same circle. Same eyes.” Ira rose without a word, the chill of memory and myth curling up her spine. The past was no longer behind her. It had returned, in blood and ash, by order of the goddess.
2
She lay curled between the paddy stalks like a discarded offering, but she was alive. Ira reached her before the others did, her boots soaking in the wet soil as she knelt beside the girl—a teenager, thin as a reed, eyes wide open but blank with shock. Her white kurta was smeared with turmeric, and on her forearm, a half-carved spiral had scabbed over. Ira gently touched her shoulder. The girl flinched but didn’t cry out. When the constables tried to lift her, she resisted—wordless, rigid, as if bound by something unseen. They carried her back to the outpost wrapped in Ira’s own shawl. By mid-afternoon, a crowd had formed outside the thana, whispering that the girl was a “chosen witness”, spared by the goddess. Some spat at the gate for fear of contamination. Inside, the girl stared at a blank wall for hours. Then, with a piece of charcoal from the stove, she began to draw.
First came the circle, then the flames, then a pair of eyes—large and almond-shaped, radiating light. Ira watched from behind the glass partition, her throat tightening. She recognized those eyes. They mirrored the ones carved into her mother’s amulet, buried with her—or so she thought. The girl, who the locals named Sabitri Nayak, hadn’t spoken a single word since being found. No records, no guardians. Only a neighbor had brought her forward, saying she’d “been strange since birth.” Dr. Avik Das, just arrived from Bhubaneswar, studied the drawings with cool detachment. “Classic trauma response. Could be subconscious pattern reproduction.” Ira didn’t reply. She noticed something else: Sabitri had drawn the same yantra seen at both crime scenes, and a hand—open, outstretched, with a spiral etched in the palm. “This isn’t mimicry,” Ira said quietly. “This is memory.” Outside, the sky cracked with pre-monsoon thunder, and power flickered. When it returned, Sabitri was staring directly at Ira, eyes unblinking. Then, slowly, she raised her hand and placed her own palm against the drawing, aligning perfectly with the spiral.
Word of the second incident spread faster than Ira could contain it. Local press was sniffing at the scent of blood and divinity. SP Choudhury called, irritated, warning her to not indulge “tribal drama.” “Two women killed and laid out like ceremonial dolls isn’t drama,” she snapped. He threatened to send a senior male officer to take over. Ira ignored him. That evening, she returned to the banyan tree. There, waiting in the fading light, sat Guni Maa, her blind eyes milky and pale, face painted with vermillion and ash. “She’s waking, beti,” the old priestess murmured as if Ira were a child. “And the goddess doesn’t like to be forgotten.” Ira stood still. “Who is she?” she asked. Guni Maa smiled faintly. “She is fire. She is balance. And sometimes, to speak in her tongue, one must first lose their own.” The wind rustled the banyan leaves like whispers. Somewhere, in the paddy fields, a drumbeat began again—slow, rhythmic, ancient.
3
The forest seemed to hum with breath as Ira and Dr. Avik followed the trail past the edge of Devdungri, toward the hills once marked as sacred land. It was Sabitri’s drawings that had led them—an unmistakable pattern of crescent flames and three-tiered steps that matched symbols from an old anthropological file Avik had uncovered. “These aren’t just tribal decorations,” he muttered. “They’re cosmological. Pre-Vedic.” As they climbed the hill’s base, Ira recalled stories her mother whispered by the fire: of Devi Vahni, the flame goddess who rose from ash when women’s voices were extinguished. It was said her wrath was cyclical, arriving once in every generation when balance tipped too far toward injustice. The temple, when they found it, was no more than a moss-covered mound, half-swallowed by the forest. But the entrance was unmistakable: a stone lintel with a familiar spiral carved at its center, and two hollowed eyes flanking it like silent guardians. Ira stepped in first, torch in hand, unsure if it was ritual, myth—or memory—that stirred the air around her.
Inside, the silence was thicker. The air was damp with the smell of char and rot. On the inner walls, faded with time, were painted stories—lines of women walking into fire, eyes closed, hands lifted. Avik, scanning with his phone’s flashlight, pointed to a mural. “There,” he said, voice hushed. It showed a woman seated in a lotus, flames encircling her, and surrounding her were bodies laid flat—just like the crime scenes. At the foot of the chamber was a depression in the earth, freshly disturbed. They dug. Bones. Dozens of them, layered carefully, patterned. Ira backed away, breath quickening. “This cult didn’t die,” she murmured. “It just went quiet.” The next moment, something moved outside. A rustle. When they turned to leave, they found markings on the stone they hadn’t noticed before—newer, etched in blood and soot: a sequence of symbols Sabitri had drawn days ago. Someone had been here recently. They were not alone.
They emerged into the fading sunlight, shaken and silent. At the base of the trail, an old man waited, barefoot and hunched. “Leave the forest,” he said simply. “She is not for you.” He vanished before questions could be asked. Back at the outpost, Ira studied the photos they had taken, laying them beside Sabitri’s drawings. Every symbol matched. Not merely tribal, but encoded—ritual language. And they were counting down. “A sequence,” Avik muttered. “Each murder is a phase.” Ira’s phone buzzed—another report. A third woman missing. The villagers refused to speak, retreating into their huts, their eyes shadowed with fear or complicity. Guni Maa appeared at the police station unannounced, wrapped in a red sari streaked with ash. She handed Ira a brass urn, sealed and warm to the touch. “When you feel the ground burn,” she said, “pour this into fire. Only then will she listen.” Ira stared at it, heart racing. She didn’t believe in gods. But something was moving beneath Devdungri—old, patient, and burning to be heard.
4
The jungle swallowed them whole. Ira and Avik moved under the canopy like trespassers, following the path etched into Sabitri’s latest drawings—a curved trail that deviated from any official map. The deeper they went, the more the forest seemed to shift: trees closer together, birds silent, even the air grew thicker with something old and waiting. Ira barely spoke, the brass urn from Guni Maa slung in her satchel, heavy like guilt. When they reached the clearing, the sight stopped them cold—a temple without a door, sunken into the earth, vines growing over its stone skin like veins. No bells, no flags. Just a slit of darkness yawning between moss-covered walls. A carved spiral above the entrance shimmered faintly, the same flame motif twisting inwards like a vortex. Ira hesitated only a second before stepping in. She didn’t need light. Somehow, she already knew the way.
The corridor narrowed quickly, then opened into a sanctum lined with murals that still burned with ochre and crimson, defying time. The goddess was everywhere—rising from fire, drinking from skulls, embracing women wrapped in wounds. In the center lay a stone platform, charred black. And around it, bones—meticulously arranged, ribs stacked like logs, skulls circled like an offering wreath. Ira counted at least forty, some bearing the same spiral scorched into the forehead. Avik knelt beside a fragment, brushing away soot. “These aren’t just old,” he whispered. “They’ve been added to—recently.” Ira’s pulse surged. A living ritual. A legacy still breathing in shadow. She turned to the back wall and froze. There, painted larger than all else, was the flame goddess not as a deity, but as a woman with closed eyes and tribal bangles—her mother. Not literal, but unmistakably modeled after her. “They made her the Devi,” she breathed. “They canonized her death.”
Before she could react, something struck her temple from behind. Darkness swallowed her. When she awoke, she was alone—stripped of her badge, hands tied, lying on the scorched stone altar. Around her, petals burned in a slow spiral, and above her, smoke twisted into a faint face. Then came the chanting, distant but rising. “Devi Vahni… jagat janani…” The ritual was beginning, and she was its centerpiece. But Ira wasn’t here to be sacrificed. With sheer instinct, she rolled, cracked the urn open beside her, and flames surged unnaturally high as the powder met heat. A wail echoed through the chamber—half wind, half voice. The ropes snapped as if seared, and the murals seemed to ripple. She ran, disoriented but free, chased not by footsteps but by whispers in her mother’s voice. Bursting into the forest, gasping, she collapsed under the banyan tree at dawn. Her shoulder throbbed—burned. She pulled her sleeve aside and saw it: a spiral, perfectly marked, freshly seared. Not cut. Not carved. Branded. The goddess, or her followers, had touched her. She was no longer just an investigator. She had become part of the ritual.
5
The fever came swiftly, crawling into Ira’s bones as she lay half-conscious in the forest rest house, drenched in sweat and unable to sleep. Her shoulder burned beneath the spiral mark, glowing faintly under bandages like a memory etched into flesh. Dr. Avik hovered helplessly nearby, administering antibiotics and wet cloth compresses, but nothing brought down the heat. Ira drifted in and out of dreams—visions more vivid than reality. She saw her mother walking barefoot through flames, not consumed but crowned in fire. Around her, dozens of women chanted a hymn Ira had never heard but somehow knew. In the dream, she tried to speak, to warn her mother, but every time she opened her mouth, ash poured out. She woke choking, her voice cracked, her palms covered in soot that hadn’t been there before. Avik stared, shaken. “There’s no logical explanation for your burn,” he whispered. “No blistering, no entry wound. It’s… like it grew out of your skin.”
Ira refused to rest. That afternoon, she pinned Sabitri’s drawings across the investigation room wall, forming a map—each symbol corresponding to a lunar phase, a ritual position, and a body. The pattern was unmistakable. “It’s a clock,” she muttered. “Each killing a point in a cycle. They’re summoning something—or fulfilling something.” Sabitri, still silent but intensely alert, added a new drawing: a woman standing atop a mound of skulls, eight flames surrounding her. The eighth was larger, central, unfinished. Avik recognized the symbol beside it—an ancient tribal glyph meaning “closure” or “balance restored”. “One more left,” he said. “Whoever’s behind this… they’re not done.” Meanwhile, reports flooded in: villagers refusing to leave homes, covering their doorways with blood and turmeric. Guni Maa had vanished. SP Choudhury dismissed it all as hysteria, calling Ira to demand a “final statement” blaming rogue Maoists. She hung up on him. “We’re not hunting rebels,” she said to Avik. “We’re walking inside a myth.”
That night, Ira took the brass urn’s remainder and poured it into a fire pit behind the station, as Guni Maa had instructed. The flames turned blue, then white, and then from the smoke emerged—not images, but sounds. Women weeping. Chanting. Screams of defiance. One voice louder than the rest—her mother’s—repeating a line in Bhumij dialect: “Balance through blood. Justice through fire.” Ira stood transfixed. She wasn’t just investigating a series of killings. She was uncovering a resurrection—the rebirth of a goddess cult disguised as retribution. The line between belief and justice blurred, and for the first time, she questioned her own code. What if the system failed these women for so long that mythology became their only law? What if vengeance cloaked in ritual was the only justice they had left? As the final lunar date neared, and the last mark awaited, Ira looked into the mirror, the spiral burning at her shoulder, and knew: the fire would either end with her—or consume her.
6
The village of Devdungri had grown eerily silent in the days leading up to the lunar eclipse, the air thick with anticipation and dread. Sabitri, still unable to speak, seemed restless, her eyes darting toward the forest edge as if sensing an unseen summons. Ira watched her closely, noticing the girl’s hand trembling whenever she traced the spiral on her own palm—a mirror to the mark branded on Ira’s shoulder. The lines between hunter and hunted blurred as Ira realized that Sabitri was more than just a survivor; she was the key to unraveling the cult’s secret. Late one evening, as the eclipse’s shadow began to darken the moon, Sabitri led Ira through narrow, overgrown paths to a hidden clearing where a circle of women had gathered, faces painted in ash and vermilion. They chanted softly, invoking Devi Vahni’s name, their voices weaving into the night like a hypnotic flame.
In that moment, Ira understood the truth behind the killings—not acts of mindless violence, but deliberate executions meted out by the descendants of the ancient cult. These women, including Sabitri’s own mother, had resurrected the old rites as a form of vigilante justice against those who had long oppressed and abused them. The ritual was not a curse but a reckoning—a fiery balance restored to a world that had ignored their suffering. Yet, as Ira stepped forward to intervene, she was confronted by Guni Maa’s final warning: “The flame consumes all, beti. Even those who carry its light.” Torn between her role as an officer sworn to uphold the law and her growing empathy for the women’s cause, Ira faced a haunting question—could justice be served by the hand of the goddess herself, or must she extinguish the fire before it spread beyond control?
As the eclipse reached its peak, Ira confronted the cult’s leaders in the flickering firelight, where past and present collided in a blaze of revelation. The air crackled with unspoken histories and painful truths, and in the final moments, Ira realized that to stop the cycle, she would have to become part of it. With a steady breath, she reached for Sabitri’s hand, forging a fragile alliance between the old world and the new, between myth and justice. The eighth flame was not an end, but a beginning—a promise that the voices silenced for centuries would finally be heard. And as the first light of dawn broke over Devdungri, Ira felt the spiral burn no longer as a brand of pain, but as a mark of purpose—by order of the goddess, she had become the guardian of the balance.
7
The investigation had reached a breaking point. Ira’s tireless pursuit unearthed chilling connections between the ritualistic murders and a powerful local political family long accused of corruption and violence. The victims, she discovered, were all women who had dared to defy or expose the abuses hidden beneath layers of patronage and silence. One name emerged repeatedly—a local MLA whose influence shielded his kin from the law. Ira’s report, however, was met with obstruction at every turn. SP Choudhury, under political pressure, pushed back fiercely, insisting on a quick closure that would protect the status quo. Yet Ira pressed on, her resolve hardened by the memory of her mother’s untimely death, a sacrifice once ignored as superstition.
The arrest of a local priest connected to the cult seemed to promise justice, but his mysterious death—found burned in the same ritualistic pattern—deepened the shadows. Whispers in the village spoke of divine retribution, while Ira confronted the chilling reality: the killers were not a lone fanatic but a covert sisterhood, tribal women taking justice into their own hands, reviving the ancient Devi Vahni cult’s fierce mandate. Sabitri’s mother, once presumed missing, was revealed as a leader of this vigilante circle, using the mythology of the goddess to shield their cause and execute judgment where the law had failed. Confronted with the blurred line between sacred vengeance and crime, Ira struggled to reconcile her duties with the justice these women sought.
On a moonlit night, Guni Maa appeared one last time, her blind eyes reflecting the flickering flames of a sacred fire. “The goddess speaks through many hands,” she said softly. “Even yours, child. To stop the flame is to deny the pain it seeks to heal.” Ira realized then that this was not a battle she could win by force alone. The ritual, the cult, and the blood were all threads woven into the fabric of a long history of suffering and resilience. As dawn approached, Ira made a choice—to shield the truth from a world unwilling to understand, to protect Sabitri and the sisterhood while seeking a path for their voices to be heard beyond blood and fire. The mother’s offering had ignited a reckoning, and the ember was hers now to carry forward.
8
The night of the lunar eclipse cloaked Devdungri in a shadow deeper than darkness itself. The village held its breath as the sisterhood gathered once more in the clearing beneath the ancient banyan, their faces illuminated by flickering flames that danced like living spirits. Ira stood at the edge of the circle, her spiral brand burning faintly beneath her sleeve, the weight of her choice heavy in her chest. The final ritual was to begin—the eighth flame meant to close the cycle of sacrifice, to restore balance as the Devi Vahni demanded. But Ira knew the fragile boundary between justice and vengeance trembled on a razor’s edge. She had come not to extinguish the fire, but to temper it.
With steady resolve, Ira stepped forward and raised her voice over the chanting, calling for an end to bloodshed and secrecy. She offered a promise: that their stories, their pain, would be heard beyond the shadows, that justice need not be borne only through fire and death. Some women hesitated, their faces etched with centuries of mistrust; others lowered their hands, recognizing in Ira a daughter of their soil and spirit. Sabitri, now able to speak in a voice soft yet clear, recited the ancient hymn of the Devi, weaving together past and present in a song of healing. As the eclipse waned, the flames dimmed not in defeat but in surrender to a new dawn.
Guni Maa’s final blessing echoed in Ira’s heart: “The goddess rests, but her flame endures—in every woman who dares to stand.” The village slowly stirred, the silence replaced by tentative hope. Ira filed a careful report—truth entwined with discretion—choosing to protect the sisterhood while alerting higher authorities to the abuses that had sparked the cult’s resurgence. As she left Devdungri, the spiral mark glowed warmly, no longer a brand of pain but a symbol of legacy and guardianship. The goddess had passed the torch—and by her order, Ira would carry the flame forward, navigating the delicate balance between law, myth, and justice in a world still learning to listen.
___
