Translunar Travelers Lounge, Issue 14, February 2026
Shaili is an apprentice apothecary without green-magic — a rare and shameful lack in a family of celebrated green-mages — working under her aunt Ishavari, a gifted healer who took her on not for her talents but simply to give her a place in the world. One evening, while walking near the ditch separating forest from settlement, Shaili encounters a tiny jasmine girl-blossom — one of many mysterious flower-beings of uncertain origin — who imperiously announces herself to be a van-yakshini, a primordial spirit of the wilds. Shaili, trained enough as an apothecary to detect the tell-tale human scent beneath the flower’s perfume, is amused but not deceived. She offers the girl-blossom a home in her aunt’s garden, and the jasmine-girl — christened Malati over her loud objections — reluctantly accepts.
Malati settles into the garden with characteristic difficulty. She complains constantly, antagonizes the other girl-blossoms (roses who claim to be queens, moonflowers grown from the graves of five sisters, and violets who escaped a florist’s knife), and clings stubbornly to her identity as a cursed van-yakshini. Shaili tends to her daily with patient affection, and in time Malati’s sharp tongue wins over the other blossoms and even charms the apothecary’s customers, who stop by increasingly just to be advised — or berated — by the strange little jasmine-girl.
A crisis comes when Shaili forgets to lock the goat in its pen and wakes to find the animal chewing Malati’s petals, leaving her nearly bare. Shaili moves her inside to a sunny kitchen windowsill, where Malati declares she will stay permanently, and proves unexpectedly useful to the apothecary’s work. When a woman arrives late one night, hollowed by grief over a husband who abandoned her, it is Malati who instinctively suggests poison — and who reveals, in one unguarded moment, that she somehow knows betrayal from the inside.
This prompts Aunt Ishavari to brew a remembrance potion, one that will restore Malati’s lost memories rather than erase them. At Malati’s own insistence — and her specific wish that Shaili administer it — the potion is strained over her. The truth floods back: Malati is no cursed girl-blossom. She is a genuine van-yakshini, exiled three hundred thousand years for the transgression of stepping on mortal soil, betrayed by her own lover to the queen of the yakshini. Her exile can only be ended if someone speaks her true yakshini name aloud — a name that will burn out any mortal tongue that utters it.
Without hesitation, Shaili asks Malati to tell her. She speaks the name carefully, syllable by syllable, and her tongue burns away. In that instant, Malati transforms — tall, luminous, powerful — and steps into the morning air for the last time before vanishing in a whirl of leaves and jasmine blossoms.
Aunt Ishavari tends to Shaili’s ruined mouth with herbs and turmeric, then tells her that what she did was the greatest kind of magic there is. For the first time, Shaili feels green-magic stir at the edges of her soul. The story closes on a cup of tea and her aunt’s quiet reassurance: all things grow with time.
Tunvey Mou’s work has been published in various literary journals, including Tasavvur, where she has published stories such as “Wheel of Fortune, Wheel of Life, Wheel of Gold” (2026) and “Mother, Do Not Grieve” (2024), as well as The Colored Lens (2025) and Flash Fiction Magazine (2025).
She hails from Assam and with every passing day in Delhi she wishes she had remained there as well. Ex-chess player, voracious reader, and part-time poisoner; she enjoys writing about eldritch monsters, uncanny myths, cursed love, demonic cults, ritual cannibalism, and other such delightful things.