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of blood and ash
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❝Ten-year-old me wanted to save the world.
I was so sure of it.
I'd be a saviour, I'd be the hero.
I was so sure of an impending doom, the apocalypse, another flood. I guess when you're a child, everything else feels bigger and somehow more important.
Movies and books romanticise the grandeur of doom and make you believe it's your job to save everything and everyone. 10 year old me wanted to be a hero.
And for years after, I felt stupid for thinking that I could be a saviour, that I could save the world.
I see it as a premonition now, 10 year old me saw what she believed was the world. She saw her older self and it was her world and it was her everything. And she knew she had to save it, save herself.
I hope 10-year-old me knows that she is saving the world, I hope she knows I'm trying.❞
—Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire