Veilfire 🔥🕯️ A Short Story

Declared dead by her ex and betrayed by family, Mira uses ancestral strength to expose their sinister plot and take back what’s hers.

Copyright Priya Florence Shah. All Rights Reserved

It started not with blood, but with silence.

A silence cultivated over the years — first with guilt, then entitlement, and finally, with intent.

They had waited patiently. When Mira’s grandmother died, they came to the prayer ceremony dressed in white, offering hollow condolences.

Neelam wept loudest. Suresh recited mantras with perfect inflection. Ravi didn’t come at all. But he called three days later with the voice of an old lover, soft and insistent.

“Just checking in, Mira,” he’d said. “It must be hard alone in that house.”

She didn’t answer. She hung up.

That was eighteen months ago. She hadn’t heard from any of them since.

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Three Weeks Before the Court Date

“She’s isolated,” Ravi said, leaning over a blue-lit screen in a dark apartment in Erandwane. “No husband, no kids, no public appearances. She posts prayers and turmeric shots on Instagram. No selfies. Not a single friend tagged.”

Neelam handed him a steaming glass of adrak chai. “She’s arrogant. Thinks the land protects her. Thinks her rituals are stronger than the law.”

Suresh grunted. “She’s had that house since Ma died. We were there too. I bathed the body. She gets the whole property for lighting a lamp?”

“She filed the will and locked it in three days after the funeral,” Neelam said bitterly. “Didn’t even give us time to object. She manipulated Ma when she was weak. I saw it.”

“She didn’t manipulate anyone,” Ravi snapped. “She inherited. Legally.”

He sipped his chai and stared into the steam. “Which is why we have to kill her legally first.”

The silence thickened.

“What do you mean?” Suresh asked, uncertain.

“She dies on paper. We file the death certificate — already printed. Power of attorney signed — thanks to your signatures and Bhaskar at the notary’s office. We ghost-write the petition, get it listed under urgent transfer, claim religious rites were performed in her home village.”

Neelam blinked. “And no one checks?”

“They check when someone complains. But Mira doesn’t know. She doesn’t talk to neighbors. She’s got no lawyer. By the time she even suspects, it’s done.”

“And the house?”

“Ours,” Ravi said. “We flip it to a shell company. Cash buyers from Hyderabad. They’ll demolish it, build flats. We make a clean fifty lakhs each—untaxed.”

Suresh leaned back, stunned. “And if she resists?”

“She won’t. Not if her ancestral protections are removed. We send the bundle in before the paperwork lands. If she’s spiritually exposed, she won’t even have the strength to fight us.”

Neelam frowned. “She’s not stupid. She won’t open anything from us.”

“She won’t have to,” Ravi said. “We won’t send it to her.”

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The Insertion

On a humid Thursday, Mira’s part-time maid, Suma, entered the kitchen as usual. She left her sandals by the back door, washed her hands, and got to work boiling water for Mira’s herbal bath.

She didn’t see the package.

But someone else had been in the house the night before. A man paid ₹2,000 to scale the back wall and slip a red cloth bundle behind the base of a rusting water drum.

Inside: crushed bones, hair bound with iron thread, a blackened bead soaked in grave oil.

The purpose: not to hurt, but to open. To thin the veil of protection Mira’s family had carried for generations. To let something in.

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Discovery

Mira awoke at 4:03 a.m. The hour when spirits speak clearly. She heard the whisper not in words, but in sensation—the sharp rise in her pulse, the flicker of the flame on her altar that bent toward the west.

She walked barefoot to the rear wall. Not hurried, not afraid. Just certain.

The bundle was where it had no reason to be.

She didn’t touch it.

She fetched the metal tongs from the havan kit and a small copper bucket. She lifted the bundle, cloth and all, dropped it inside without ceremony, and carried it across the courtyard.

At the edge of the property stood an ancient pit lined with black stone. Her grandmother had used it to bury the bones of rituals that should never be burned.

Mira dropped the bucket’s contents in without a word.

A gust of wind pushed past her cheek. The smell of rain and ash rose.

Then quiet.

She lit a stick of sambrani and turned back toward the house. The threshold bell rang gently on its own.

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The Backfire

Bhairav, the tantrik Ravi hired to charge the bundle, was found wandering naked outside a temple in Ratnagiri two days later, chanting Mira’s name in reverence and fear.

Ravi cursed and punched a hole in the plaster of his apartment.

“She reversed it,” he growled. “She didn’t even touch it, and she reversed it.”

Suresh was panicked. “We’ve already filed. What if she contests?”

“She won’t. She doesn’t know.”

But Mira did know.

She’d seen the court date in a dream. Her grandmother had said it aloud, clear as a bell: “Ninth of June. Pune Civil Court. Courtroom Four.”

She’d gone straight to her contact in Mumbai, a legal journalist who owed her a favor. A few soft calls were made. A copy of the petition landed on her desk.

Her name, declared dead. Her signature, forged.

She didn’t cry. She collected her real paperwork — her Aadhaar, PAN, original property deeds, and the registered will. She scanned everything twice and packed it in a red cloth of her own.

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The Trial

On the ninth of June, Mira walked into Courtroom Four in a white cotton saree, silver-rimmed glasses on her nose, her hair tied in a simple plait.

Ravi’s smile vanished the second he saw her.

Neelam gasped.

Suresh began to sweat.

The judge looked between Mira and the forged documents and said only one word: “Impossible.”

“I agree, Your Honor,” Mira smiled. “It’s difficult to be dead and pay electricity bills.”

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The Fall

CBI officers entered five minutes later with sealed warrants. The task force had been watching Ravi for months on other fraud charges. Mira’s complaint gave them the last piece.

Fraud, forgery, criminal conspiracy, and attempted spiritual harm—an obscure clause under cultural protection laws.

Ravi didn’t speak as they cuffed him.

Neelam cried.

Suresh muttered a mantra.

None of it mattered.

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The Return

That evening, Mira washed the entire front threshold with saltwater. She lit 11 diyas, one for each ancestor she knew by name, and whispered their names into the flame.

She didn’t gloat. She didn’t post about it.

She just sat under the neem tree, head bowed, the smell of jasmine thick in the air.

A breeze moved through the trees.

The bell above her door rang once.

Her grandmother’s voice drifted in gently: “It is done.”

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