Character Backstory - Pooja Amrita

My name is Pooja, meaning ‘prayer’. My mother’s name was Shwetta Amrita. My father was never one to own us, and my mother prayed for his death every day.

Sometime when I was 7, we visited the yearly fair in our village. There, I saw a woman dancing wildly about. “Goddess! The goddess has descended!” Someone shouted loud. All of us bowed down. I was fascinated.

Since everyone invoked my name on our religious festivals, I naturally developed a strong affinity to the gods. Our gods who looked upon us from the heavens and took care us. Our gods, whom our potters made with their hands. Our gods, who gave the flowers their smell and the peacocks their color.

Our gods did nothing when a mugger killed my mother in broad daylight.

My grandma took me in, my sweet and caring grandma; my god-fearing grandma did everything to still appease our gods.

That year, grandma started having fits of violence. She would, for a moment, forget who was who and would throw everything about.

The people took her to a saint in a cave. There, grandma had another fit and she started dancing aggressively around. “Goddess!” I proclaimed: “The goddess has descended.”

The old saint caressed her forehead and she went peacefully asleep. He then addressed me: “My child! That was not a goddess. Why in the world would the goddess harm anyone? That was a bad spirit, a demon.”

Demons, I speculated, were very powerful. I was fascinated.

When I was 12 years of age, I started seeing things. Well, not actually seeing but… It’s something like intuition, when you know something bad is going to happen and it does. Just like that, I started sensing the presence of someone I could not see.

A year later, someone visited me. It was… not human. It said that it was an angel, but I knew better.

It was a child, but a very strong one. No one could see her but me. She was beautiful and very mature for her age. She took care of me throughout, like a guardian spirit and as I grew up, she did too.

She always saved me from the bullies, like an older sister that I never knew I needed. And then, that day came.

The day I graduated, she asked me something. She wanted my loyalty, my allegiance. She asked me if I could lay down my life for her if it came to it. “It will be dangerous from now on.” She had told me. I nodded without a second thought.

After that day, I saw and did many things that were not humanly possible. For example, I saw a village of demons. She was in my body at that time. Even though she possessed me, I saw and heard every single thing. It almost felt like I was doing all of that of my own accord. I told the village chief to leave. At first, he was hesitant but then I said: “You know me, do you not? Surely, your ancestors must have left my name Naheere.” The chief had shuddered at this. After some consultation, they chose to leave.

Afterwards, we tracked down a lone demon in the woods. Having possessed me, Naheere told him to leave. And after a while, he agreed.

Whenever she was in my body, I always felt like anything was possible. She was just too powerful and I was proud that I was by her side.

After years of traveling around the globe to send –whom she called- the ’leftovers’ back, she ordered me to settle down in Britain. At last, when I got a job at Suntown High School, she gave me a book for safekeeping and left.

The book was amazing, I felt like I had a natural understanding of the script in which it was written. Even before I met her, the demons fascinated me and so, I read bits of the book at least once a day, every day. And one day, I managed to find a necromancy spell in it.

Curiously, I read the incantation aloud without even preparing the other ingredients needed for the spell. And that is when he awakened.