Chapter 1, The child everyone blamed
The forest was unusually quiet that afternoon.
Nivel Racket, eight months pregnant, was travelling with her husband during a holiday for her upcoming baby shower when she heard something that made her stop.
A cry.
It was faint, almost swallowed by the wind, but she heard it again.
Following the sound, Nivel stepped away from the road and into the woods. There, beneath an old tree, lay a little girl, no more than a few months old, crying alone in the cold.
Nivel stared in disbelief.
“Where is your mother, sweetheart?” she whispered, carefully lifting the child into her arms.
The baby had no answer. She onlyShe only continued crying.
Nivel looked around, hoping someone would appear. Nobody did.
She couldn't leave a helpless child to die in the forest. So, despite her husband's worries, she carried the baby home.
She named her Ava.
For the first two weeks, the Racket household was filled with the sound of a new baby's cries. Nivel loved Ava as though she had given birth to her herself, holding her close and promising that she would never be abandoned again.
Then everything began to fall apart.
Her husband's company collapsed. Their savings disappeared into debt, and the family that had once lived comfortably began struggling to survive.
Then came the worst news of all.Nivel lost her baby.
Grief swallowed the household. Relatives and friends began whispering that Ava had brought misfortune into their lives.
“Send her away,” they insisted. “Look at what has happened since she arrived.”
Nivel held Ava tighter.
“No,” she replied through her tears. “This child has done nothing wrong. I will not abandon her.”
But her health continued to deteriorate, and the financial strain grew unbearable.
Two months after finding Ava, Nivel died.
Her final days had been filled with pain, but she never stopped protecting the little girl she had chosen to love.
And just like that, Ava lost the only mother she had ever known.The years that followed were cruel.
Ava was passed from one foster home to another, never staying long enough to feel safe. Whenever something went wrong, people looked at her first.
A broken glass. A lost job. A sudden illness.
Somehow, it was always Ava's fault.
“Curse,” one woman called her.
“Bad luck,” another muttered.
Others were less kind.
Nobody wanted to hear her explanations. Nobody cared that she was only a child.
She learned to eat quietly, speak softly, and hide her tears beneath her pillow. Whenever she asked why people hated her, the answer was always the same.
“Because you bring trouble wherever you go.”Sometimes, Ava wondered if they were right.
She had lost Nivel. She had lost every home that followed. Even the people who promised to care for her eventually sent her away.
And somewhere, beyond the human world, her real father lived without ever wanting her.
Ava knew none of this.
She didn't know she had a twin sister.
She didn't know that her birth had been feared before she had even taken her first breath.
And she certainly didn't know that an ancient curse had followed her across worlds.
All she knew was that wherever she went, people eventually looked at her as though she were a mistake.So, on the nights when the loneliness became unbearable, Ava would curl up beneath her blanket and whisper the question nobody had ever answered.
“What's wrong with me?”
The room remained silent.
And the little girl who had once been rescued from the forest began to believe that perhaps the world would have been better if nobody had ever found her.
