Draupathi had always loved the forest at the edge of Vaithara,
a small, quiet town where days moved unhurried. The forest was her sanctuary, a
place built of light, leaf, and silence. She came here most evenings after
work, sketchbook under her arm, following the same worn path until the hum of
traffic disappeared.
On the night everything changed, it felt different. You know
how sometimes the air feels too still, and you cannot explain why it bothers
you? The trees stood motionless, the usual chatter of birds oddly distant. Even
the wind seemed to be holding its breath. Did you notice? We rarely do.
She sat on her favourite fallen log, pencil poised. The sun
was painting the treetops in gold, each stroke soft and deliberate. She thought
she had time.
Then the gold began to change. It thickened. It pulsed. And
with it came a faint, acrid scent. Smoke?
“That’s not sunset,” she murmured.
The first flames appeared on the ridge, curling upward in
the wind. Most people would have turned away immediately, but Draupathi…
paused. There was something in the fire that felt familiar, almost like a
memory she could not place. The way it moved – fierce yet graceful – made
her think of hands shaping her from heat and ash long before she had ever set
foot in this forest.
Was it music? Was it brushwork? The crackle became
percussion, the arcs of flame strokes on a dark canvas.
Have you ever admired something you should have feared? That
is where she stood, caught between awe and survival.
Then the wind shifted, sending a spray of embers across the
clearing. She startled, and her sketchbook slipped from her fingers, fluttering
to the ground, pages catching the glow of the fire. She turned to run – then
hesitated.
The drawing lay face-up, a half-finished forest bathed in
gold, mirroring the inferno beyond. She bent to snatch it, her palm slick with
sweat. The paper gave under her touch, soft and damp, and she realised her
thumb was smearing the faint graphite of her self-portrait in the corner.
Her graphite face blurred – almost gone. In another
moment, so would she.
She ran until her lungs burned and her legs felt carved from
stone. At the riverbank, she waded into the cool water, gasping, clutching the
sodden paper. Across the current, the forest blazed – her forest – now
a living sun collapsing into smoke.
For a long time, she just stood there, watching the gold
fade into black. The air still carried the heat, and deep inside, something
answered it –
a spark that would never fully die. She looked at the smeared face in the
corner of her sketch. It no longer belonged to her, not entirely. The forest
had signed it now: in heat, in ash, in the truth that nothing stays as we leave
it.
When she finally walked away, she did not look back. But in
her mind, the storm still burned, and part of her still stood in that clearing,
born of fire, trying to draw the moment before it all began.
#Fire #Passion #Art
