By Azeema Anhar
At dusk the mountains bruise into deeper green,
almost black at the edges,
swallowing even their own outline.
From the house perched above the terraced crops,
The child watched the evening slide downward.
She was supposed to sleep
but her heart paced behind her ribs
An animal wanting out.
Under the flickering lantern
she was trying to write a fairytale:
A mountain-witch conjuring spells
spells to protect the mountains
with a single syllable of her tongue.
The story’s ending she had not figured out yet.
Every night she wrote that tale
The forest breathed around her,
dark and watchful,
its wet leaves glistening like scales of a dragon.
But something else watched.
A presence with no body, only hunger
leaking out between the trunks
With cold breath from another century.
The elders warned her:
there were things that lived here
long before children learned to speak,
things that despised the softness of cradle-words,
things that devoured anything warm enough
to belong to someone.
Still, she kept writing.
The mountains were “majestic”
Everyone who visited said so.
They adored the ridges,
the waterfalls,
the bright woven baskets,
the fruit glistening in the market sun.
Why should the world not be filled with
fairytales of such places, she thought.
One night, without warning,
her page turned white.
The sentences dissolved mid-breath.
The curves of the letters were scraped clean
A storm had gutted the paper.
She opened her mouth
and nothing came.
No sound.
No memory of sound.
Her mother touched her cheek
and murmured desperately,
Try again.
The child tried.
The air stung her throat like a gash.
The demons had come
the tongue-thieves.
Those ancient creatures
who lived at the mountain’s summit,
where the air tasted metallic
and plants grew twisted from surviving too long
on stones instead of soil.
They had reached inside her sleep
and pulled her tongue out
root by root.
Now she was empty,
An empty vessel shaped like a child.
Something shattered in her chest
not fear,
Only rage that bled through her skin.
Because those demons had not just taken words
They had taken her story.
Her fairytale witch with hypnotizing charms.
Her mountains.
Her ending.
Without speaking,
she stepped into the night.
The forest closed behind her like a beast’s mouth.
Bare feet against moss and shattered twigs.
The ground slick with last night’s rain.
The trees hunched above her
Frightened even to offer her protection.
She climbed.
Every thorn knew her name
and punished her.
Every stone pressed its cold tooth
into her small soles
until skin peeled
a crimson trail following her
up through the dark.
But she kept climbing,
because rage is a kind of fire
and fire always climbs up.
Halfway up the mountain,
She thought she heard screams
of murdered languages,
syllables butchered and scattered
Bones across history.
Her heart hammered
trying to outrun extinction.
By dawn she reached the summit,
where nothing grew
except hatred.
The demons waited
shadows ruling over the mountains,
mouths like torn caves
dripping black.
They laughed without teeth.
Laughed because they saw a prey
too small to defend themselves.
She stood trembling,
bleeding from heel to ankle,
but she did not kneel.
Then she spoke.
just one broken syllable torn out of pain,
the first word she ever learned
but had forgotten until now.
The demons hissed, writhing,
their forms flickering,
The syllable was a torch to them
held against their slithery skin.
She screamed the rest
guttural, raw,
the sound of a wounded animal refusing to die.
Her language flooded back
unstoppable,
ancient,
ferocious.
The demons shrank into themselves
until they were only dust,
then nothing at all.
She stumbled downward at sunrise,
her feet torn,
her voice trembling
but hers.
At the house,
she opened her notebook
placed her injured hand on the page
and began again
A mountain-witch conjuring spells
conjuring the strength of the mountain dwellers,
the strength of their ancestors who were once
nursed by these mountains, and nursed back equally.
And this time,
she wrote her ending.