Waking up on your seventeenth birthday usually feels like a monumental occasion, mostly because your phone vibrates so hard it practically dances off the nightstand and shatters on the floor. Mine didn’t shatter, but it did blast a barrage of notifications so chaotic it sounded like a dial-up modem having a seizure. I squinted at the screen, watching my group chat explode with terrible memes, blurry photos of me sleeping with my mouth open, and voice notes of Rohan aggressively beatboxing. Birthdays are basically just an annual, legally mandated reminder that adulthood is creeping up on you, and my friends were determined to make sure I felt every second of it.
I dragged myself out of bed, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, and padded down the hallway in my socks. The apartment already smelled like freshly ground coffee and toasted sourdough, a scent that instantly grounded me. When I walked into the kitchen, Naomi was standing by the stove, her hair piled up in a messy clip, completely absorbed in flipping pancakes. The second she heard my footsteps, she turned around, and the tired, sarcastic UI/UX designer melted away, replaced by something incredibly soft.
She walked over without saying a word, gently cupped my face in her hands, pulled me into a one-armed hug, and pressed a quick kiss to my cheek. "Happy birthday, kiddo," she murmured, her voice thick with that quiet affection she usually hides behind dry jokes.
I groaned dramatically, pulling back and rubbing my cheek. "I'm seventeen, Auntie. I'm too old for that."
She just smiled, turning back to the stove. "You'll be fifty and still my kiddo. Now sit down before I burn these."
I leaned against the counter, casually reaching out to steal a pancake straight off the spatula. She didn't even look at me, just lightly smacked my hand with the wooden spoon. "Plate."
"Sharing is caring," I argued, popping the pancake into my mouth.
"Stealing is stealing, Professor," she shot back, sliding a perfectly golden pancake onto a plate and shoving it toward my chest. "And your gift is on the island. Don't spill syrup on it."
Sitting on the kitchen counter was a custom-machined, matte-black aluminum tablet stand, sleek and minimalist, with a tiny, engraved soundwave of my favorite indie track etched into the base. She had designed and fabricated it herself, spending weeks tweaking the angles to get the ergonomics perfect. I stared at it for a second, my throat suddenly feeling a little tight, before I just walked over and hugged her from behind, resting my chin on her shoulder. No dramatic speeches. Just a quiet, "Thanks, Auntie," and a squeeze that she returned just as fiercely.
The bicycle ride to school was a blur of morning breeze and bass-heavy indie rock, the city waking up around me in a wash of amber streetlights and pale blue sky. I loved this part of the day, the quiet freedom of the wind in my hair, feeling like the only person awake in a city of ten million. But that peace lasted exactly until I walked through the school gates and was immediately ambushed by a wall of terrible singing and cheap paper confetti.
My friends descended on me like a swarm of overly caffeinated locusts. Someone forced a pointy cardboard crown onto my head, another shoved a tiny, sad-looking cupcake into my hands, and Rohan tried to gift me a framed photo of a pigeon he claimed was my "spirit animal." In first period, my Biology teacher made the entire class clap for me, which was deeply embarrassing but honestly kind of sweet. In second period, my Math teacher handed out a pop quiz on calculus, which my friends found absolutely hilarious while I stared at the paper like it was written in ancient Aramaic.
Lunch was the usual beautiful chaos. We sat on the roof, passing around tupperware containers of biryani and sandwiches, arguing loudly about whether synth-wave was dead or just evolving. They spent twenty minutes ruthlessly roasting my YouTube channel’s thumbnail choices and demanding I feature them in my next travel vlog, promising to bring their own lighting equipment. I just laughed, eating my food, looking at these absolute idiots and thinking that life was genuinely, perfectly good.
After school, we didn't even go home right away. We just rode our bikes aimlessly through the elite, tree-lined streets of Jubilee Hills, hitting a few skate spots and wandering through a high-end tech store just to look at cameras we couldn't afford. Nothing important happened. We didn't save the world, we didn't have deep philosophical breakthroughs. We just existed, beautifully and normally, in the golden hour light.
When I finally got home, the apartment was quiet. Naomi was at her desk, and I spent the next hour sitting on the couch, editing a quick birthday vlog while she quietly worked nearby. Every few minutes, she’d point her stylus at my screen without looking up from her own monitor. "That jump cut is jarring. Use a cross-dissolve." I’d change it, and she’d be right. Again.
Dinner was just the two of us. She made my favorite meal, and for dessert, she brought out a homemade cake that was slightly lopsided but covered in way too much frosting. She sang "Happy Birthday" slightly off-key on purpose, just to be annoying, and I joined in, deliberately singing louder and worse than her until we were both laughing so hard we could barely blow out the candles. When the smoke cleared, she looked at me across the table. She wasn't joking anymore. She just looked incredibly, profoundly proud. "Happy birthday, kiddo," she said softly. "Thanks, Auntie," I smiled back.
We ended the night on the couch, watching a terrible sci-fi movie and ruthlessly predicting every single cliché. "He's definitely going to trip while running from the alien," I pointed out. "And she's definitely going to drop the keys," Naomi added. It was one of our favorite traditions, a comfortable rhythm of shared sarcasm and easy affection.
After the movie, we stepped out onto the balcony. The city glowed beneath us, a sprawling, glittering grid of amber lights and neon signs stretching out into the dark. We stood in comfortable silence for a while, just listening to the distant hum of traffic. Eventually, we started talking about college, about my channel, about where we wanted to travel next. The conversation was easy, but as I talked, I noticed Naomi was looking at me a little longer than usual. Her eyes were tracing the lines of my face, quiet and intense, like she was trying to memorize the exact way I looked in the balcony light. I didn't think much of it at the time.
It wasn't until I was in my room, brushing my teeth and setting my alarm for the next day, that the rhythm broke. There was a gentle knock at my door, and Naomi walked in. She didn't sit on the edge of the bed to steal my phone charger like she normally did. She sat down rigidly, her hands folded in her lap. The easy, sarcastic warmth was completely gone from her posture.
"Krish," she started, her voice unusually tight. I stopped towel-drying my hair, suddenly hyper-aware of the silence in the room. "Tomorrow... I'm taking you somewhere."
I smiled, tossing the towel aside. "A birthday surprise? Did you finally buy me that new drone lens?"
She gave a small, fragile smile. "Something like that." She paused, her knuckles turning white where she was gripping her hands together. "There's something I've needed to tell you for a long time. About your parents. About... the world." She took a breath, choosing her words carefully. "The world is much older than people believe, Krish. History has hidden truths. Some of the stories we were told as children... some of the myths... they were never meant to just be myths."
She was easing me in, trying to build a bridge to a truth I couldn't possibly comprehend. I sat up, my heart doing a weird, nervous flutter, opening my mouth to ask her what the hell she was talking about.
But the answer came before she could give it.
It didn't happen with a dramatic explosion. It happened with a sickening, heavy sigh. The overhead light flickered, buzzed like a dying wasp, and died. The Wi-Fi router blinked out. The indie track in my headphones warped into a demonic, slow-motion groan before cutting into absolute, suffocating silence. My tablet screen fractured into jagged lines of digital static.
The apartment fell into an unnatural, ringing quiet.
Naomi didn't look confused. She didn't look around to check the breaker box. She froze, her eyes going wide, all the color draining from her face in a single, terrifying second. She knew exactly what this meant.
"...No," she whispered to the empty room, her voice trembling.
Then, she stood up so fast the chair scraped violently against the hardwood. Every trace of the warm, sarcastic aunt who had just sung me off-key birthday songs vanished, replaced by someone I had never seen before. Her posture was lethal, her eyes scanning the dark hallway. She grabbed her car keys from the dresser.26Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7iR0L5kdho
"Krish," she said, her voice stripped of every ounce of warmth, cold and sharp as glass. "Get in the car."
We didn't take the stairs; we practically flew down them. She threw the car into drive the second the doors were shut, peeling out of the underground parking garage so fast my head snapped back against the seat. The elite, quiet streets of Hyderabad blurred past the windows as she drove, her knuckles white on the steering wheel, her jaw locked tight.
"Auntie, what is happening?" I asked, my voice cracking slightly. "Why did the power die? Where are we going?"
She didn't answer. She just ran a red light, her eyes darting to the rearview mirror, checking the shadows. She was silently calculating, trying to decide how much of the truth she could fit into the few minutes of life we had left.
Finally, as we swerved onto the darker, winding roads leading out of the city center, she spoke. Her voice was steady, but it shook at the edges.
"Everything you've ever read about Hindu mythology," she said, staring straight ahead through the windshield. She paused, swallowing hard. "...it's real."
I just stared at her, my brain completely short-circuiting. "What?"
She turned to look at me, her brown eyes shining with unshed tears in the dashboard light. "And you're a demigod."
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and then Add to home screen.