Hey, isn’t that ASHA EDARA-BAKSH. I thought they went away for the summer? Did you hear they might be a WITCH, and have a connection to SAGA’S COVEN? What I do know for certain is that they’re 32, and they’re LIONHEARTED and SHORT-TEMPERED. They’re originally from LONDON, UK, and have been back to FENRIRSWOOD for TWENTY-FIVE YEARS living in WOOD ROAD. I wonder if they still work as a BARRISTER. Best if they stay safe for now.Â
TW: murder, death, trauma, ptsd
You’re born on the cusp of spring, bringing forth vitality and hope to a family in desperate need of it. You fill once-barren arms and they call you a miracle, a slim chance, an unlikely hope – magic. Because it’s magic that cursed your mother’s womb and magic that healed it. You healed it, somehow. Your magic is strong, and your presence is stronger, demanding to be heard, to be felt. You blow into every room like a hurricane and they wonder if you’ll have an affinity for air, flitting from one place to another, without a care in the world. Your footsteps are so sure, so confident for such a small thing and they wonder if you’ll instead ground yourself in earth. But your temper. Oh your temper is explosive from the start, a volcano set to erupt at a moment’s notice and they’re sure you’ll fan the flames within yourself, that fire that was there the moment you were born.
Instead, water calls your name. And you hate it. You’re at war with yourself from the start. Water is fluid. Water can be fixed. It can be as hot as a summer’s day as cold as winter’s night, and so can you. But you hate it. The push and pull tears at you even from a young age. You struggle with your magic but your mother and father have an abundance of patience. After all, they waited so long for you to arrive. So when your magic shows, even when you struggle with it, they’re right beside you. Until they’re not.
You’re seven now, and you feel older than ever but you’re still too young to know what blood-feud means. What consequences curses actually carry. You’re too young to understand what’s happening when magic fails your parents. When you’re woken up in the middle of the night by the sounds of glass shattering and the noise of voice yelling. By chaos. You hide, or you try to, and you tell yourself to be brave until they break down your bedroom door. You don’t remember if you cried. You don’t remember anything but the white hot heat of fire, the searing pain of flame kissing flesh, and the sound of your own screams filling your ears.
When you wake, you’re surrounded by somewhat familiar faces. Neesa and Amir Baksh. Your parents' best friends. But your parents aren’t there. It’s so strange, to wake up in a hospital, arms wrapped like a mummy’s, not a parent in sight. So you ask, voice hoarse and wheezing. It feels like glass scratching the inside of your throat and it feels like glass piercing your heart when they tell you. But that doesn’t make sense. Your parents aren’t gone. They’re not dead. That’s impossible. Your father, so strong and solid, and your mother, so fierce and protective…they wouldn’t leave you. They wouldn’t. They wouldn't. They wouldn’t. And who are Neese and Amir anyway? How close were they actually? You reach for your magic, for that stormy ocean that lives inside you and find…nothing. You try again and again and again and you’re hysterical, explanations of a centuries-old feud, of bad blood, of how they’d arrived too late for your parents but just in time to save you from the worst of it – they mean nothing but they still fill your dreams when you drift off, magic soothing you into sleep.
Your parents weren’t part of a coven. They’d long since struck out on their own, thinking that London would be vast enough to protect them. To protect you. You have no one but the Baksh family who take you in as one of their own.
Life looks different now. You’re part of a coven. You have siblings. But it’s not the same and you spend the first years of your life in Fenrirswood resistant to all of it. Your magic is stubborn. It takes nearly two years for it to come back. For you to feel it again. The coven leaders say it’s been there all along, simply dormant and waiting for you to be ready but you don’t feel ready. You still feel like that scared girl, hiding under your bed. You’ve seen what magic can do, you’ve felt the sting of it used like a blade, cutting through opponents mercilessly. You’ve felt the loss and barren wasteland it leaves behind.
You don’t want it. You resist it. And the storm rises up in you again, waves crashing against your ribcage. Let us out. Let us out. You resist until you can’t. When you answer the call and open that door, it’s a tsunami rolling over you. Everyone says it’ll take time, of which you never feel like you have enough of. And patience, which you know you definitely don't. But something pushes you forward. An invisible force that tells you your parents would’ve wanted you to move on. To grow. You continue to fight it but a little less each day until, one day, you don’t even notice that voice is gone. It’s just you, and your magic.
It’s your magic that heals you in a way your new family couldn’t. You throw yourself into training, each instructor reporting to your parents that you’re impatient. Demanding. Impatient. Volatile. Impatient. Obsessive. Impatient. But you need to be. Because magic is what keeps out the nightmares. What keeps you from waking up screaming, just before the flames of your nightmares consume you. It’s what keeps you connected to your parents, what keeps their spirits alive with you, helping you. Comforting you.
So the years pass. You improve your magic but not your patience. You speak your mind, even when you shouldn’t, and you drive your parents crazy with the trouble you get yourself into. But even they would prefer a third call to the principal’s office because you were outspoken in class to watching you sleep the days away in bed when waves of sadness hit. And they still do. It doesn’t matter how much time goes by, there are days when it threatens to overwhelm you. On days when they should be there, you withdraw into yourself, cocooning yourself to the world, the stormy sea calms and gives way to something darker beneath the surface. Grief is a stone in your pocket, weighing you down at times. You miss your graduation from uni because of it. But sometimes that same grief is what drives you forward. Determinations that no one ever goes through what you’ve been through.
You think you can make a difference. You think that there are people, witches or otherwise, who are trying to escape situations that have become chains around their lives. Like your parents’ fear had been. Choking them until they died by the hands of those who’d wish them harm. You don’t know if you’re cut out for it but you become a barrister, working towards a future where no little girl, magical or otherwise, has to hide under her bed again.
When the bodies start piling up, you leave your busy life in London and return home to Fenrirswood. Questions fill every conversation and while answers are sparse, you’re confident in your decision to come home. You’ve already lost one and you’ll be damned if another slips through your fingers. So you ball your hands into fists, holding on tightly to the things that matter most.
Played by G.
Portrayed by Sobhita Dhulipala.
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