The Unexpected Surprise - By Anvita Prasad

Written By: Anvita Prasad

Category: Short Story

Competition: Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

Anvita Prasad presents "The Unexpected Surprise," an enthralling short story that captures the imagination with its blend of mystery and magic. As a participant in the Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 hosted by Hashtag Kalakar, Anvita invites readers into a world where the unexpected becomes reality. The tale, set against the backdrop of a mystical city, explores themes of adventure, friendship, and the surprises life holds in store.

About the Work

"The Unexpected Surprise" is a narrative that masterfully intertwines the elements of fantasy and adventure. Through vivid imagery and engaging storytelling, Anvita Prasad takes the reader on a journey filled with enchantment and intrigue. The story's mood shifts from suspenseful to heartwarming, while its underlying message emphasizes the importance of unexpected friendships and the value of freedom.

The unexpected surprise

Original Submission by Anvita Prasad

The Unexpected Surprise

Devika cursed under her breath as the vault refused to open for the sixth time. The lockwork hummed beneath her fingers with the specific smugness of something enchanted by someone who had wanted you to know how clever they were.

Four tumblers. Four separate enchanted tumblers, for one iron box. Whoever had designed this had wanted the thief to feel personally insulted, and it was working.

"Devika." Grij's whisper-shout came from behind her, in the voice of someone trying to be urgent and quiet simultaneously and achieving neither. "Any time now."

"I'm working."

"The guards change shift in four minutes."

"Then stop talking to me and let me work."

She took a breath, pushed her meagre, slightly uncooperative magic into the lock, felt it resist, pushed harder- and click! The vault swung open.

The prize sat on a velvet cushion in the centre of the vault, which was otherwise completely empty, a detail she filed away and immediately forgot about in favour of the warmth radiating from the bundle, and the satisfying weight of it when she grabbed it, and the distant sound of armoured boots that told her she had approximately thirty seconds to stop being pleased with herself.

She grabbed it and ran.

They went out the window they'd unbarred earlier (preparation was the difference between a good thief and a very short career) and hit the alley below, and kept running until the city swallowed them whole. The cool night air of Vathek tasted like smoke and river water and getting away with it.

"Tonight," Devika announced to the dark street ahead of her, grinning, "we dine like kings."

______

Their hideout was a converted spice warehouse in the lower quarters of Vathek, the magical city that sat at the intersection of four ley lines and approximately nine hundred bureaucratic disputes about who owned them. It smelled of cumin, old wood, and the faint acrid edge of something Shoko had been burning again. The walls were scorched in three places. None of them recent. Probably.

Shoko was at the workbench when they came in, already wearing her goggles pushed up on her forehead, which meant she'd been expecting them. She was like that- preternaturally timed, unsettlingly calm, and possessed of the specific quality of stillness that made Devika feel, irrationally, like she was always slightly late to something. It was both creepy and endearing in equal measures.

She looked up when Devika set the bundle on the table.

"Well?" she said.

Devika placed both hands on the velvet. "Contents of High Mage Aldren's personal vault. Could be a philosopher's stone. Could be a condensed celestial artifact of the third age. Could be -"

"An egg," said Shoko.

"I was going to say priceless relic."

"It's an egg." She'd already unwrapped it, efficiently and without ceremony, in the way she did most things. "Mottled. Gold and black. About four kilos." She pressed her ear to the shell, frowned, then looked up. "Half-hatched. There's something alive in there. Something impatient, by the sound of it."

Devika stared at the egg. It was, she had to admit, large. And warm. And radiating a faint golden light that pulsed like a heartbeat. She had expected something with more of a resale value.

"That's fine," she said. "We can still sell it."

Shoko looked at her censoriously. "You want to sell a live creature."

"I want to sell a priceless live creature.There's nuance."

"There really isn't-"

The egg exploded.

Not violently. More like, enthusiastically. A burst of gold light punched outward from the shell with the energy of something that had been waiting a long time and had opinions about it, and all three of them went stumbling backwards into shelving units.

Devika blinked the light out of her eyes, and when the world resolved itself again, something small was sitting in the ruins of the velvet, covered in shell fragments, looking deeply, personally pleased with itself.

It was a dragon.

The size of a tabby cat. Scales the colour of cooling embers, wings roughly the size of Devika's palm, still slightly damp from the shell. Its tail curled around its own feet with a proprietorial satisfaction, and when it looked at Devika, its eyes reminded her of molten copper.

It sneezed. A small blue flame came out.

Hello, said a voice, directly inside Devika's skull. Finally. That orb was so stuffy.

Devika sat down heavily on the floor. Her legs made the decision independently and she saw no reason to argue.

She sat there for a moment, looking up at the dragon, which looked back down at her with what she could only describe as patient affection, like it had already decided something about her and was waiting for her to catch up.

"It talked," she said. "Inside my head."

From behind her, she heard Shoko say, with the tone of someone filing information rather than reacting to it, "Fascinating."

____

"Sixty years old," Shoko said, twenty minutes later, with the focused energy of someone who had completely forgotten they were a thief, not a naturalist. In dragon years, that's barely a teenager. No wonder it's small- here, hold this end-"

"I'm not holding-"

"Devika."

Devika held it, sullenly, while the dragon, who had spent the last ten minutes investigating the warehouse and setting two things briefly on fire, submitted to the measuring with dignified tolerance. It glanced at Devika occasionally in the way of someone sharing a private joke. She refused to find this charming.

I am not small, it told her. I am precisely sized for my age.

"It's doing it again."

"What's it saying?" Shoko asked, not looking up from her notes.

"That it's not small."

Shoko made a sound- a soft, involuntary oh- and looked at Sparky with an expression that Devika had genuinely never seen on her face before. She was cooing. Shoko had once disassembled a live containment field with a hairpin and no discernible increase in heart rate, and was now cooing at a mini dragon like it was a market kitten. Devika looked at her in disgust.

"We," she announced firmly, "are taking it back to the vault. Tonight."

Both Shoko and the dragon turned to look at her with identical expressions of betrayal. The resemblance was, frankly, alarming.

I do not wish to return, it said.

"I didn't ask you." Devika pointed at the dragon. It sniffed, regal and aggrieved, and proceeded to set a curtain on fire.

____

They named it Sparky, which Devika objected to on principle, and then started using

immediately because it fit.

By morning, Shoko had built Sparky a nest from three of Devika's good blankets-the ones from her first real score, which she magnanimously chose not to make a thing of- and was feeding it dried fish with the methodical devotion of a parent with their first child. Sparky had discovered Devika's coat pocket was warm and taken permanent residence in it, which meant Devika walked lopsided and found small scorch marks on her lining and felt, entirely against her considered judgment, fond.

You feel warm, Sparky told her, from the pocket, with simple satisfaction. It feels safe.

Devika did not examine this sentence.

"We're going back tonight," she said. "You will show us the inside layout. Every door."

Grij, from across the room, pretending not to be listening said, "I'll sharpen the knives."

Sparky looked at Devika with sad resignation. She resolutely decided not to feel bad about it

____

The vault turned out to be a door. Behind it, stairs. Behind the stairs, a room that made Devika's feet stop moving of their own accord.

It was vast, the kind of space that the building above had no right to contain. Dozens of dragons of various sizes were locked inside a humming crystal chamber, scales dull with captivity, glowing threads running from their bodies to a central dais that pulsed with cold, methodical light. The kind that didn't warm anything.

They take it, Sparky said, quieter than she'd ever heard him. Magic. Life. They take it and keep taking. They took Mama, too. A pause, small and careful. I wasn't ready yet. So they kept me. Waiting.

Devika looked back at the room, holding Sparky closer. Then at Shoko.

Shoko already had her tools out. She was looking at the containment fields with the particular stillness that meant she'd already solved it and was simply confirming. "I can break all of them. Give me eleven minutes."

"Eight."

"Ten."

"Eight and a half and I help."

Shoko looked at her. There was something in it, brief and quiet. "Done," she said.

____

The High Council chamber was mid-session when the floor began to shake. Mage Aldren paused his speech on quarterly magic reserves and looked down, alarmed, at his notes, then at the dais, then at the ceiling.

The vault doors blew open from the inside.

Forty dragons came through the chamber at once, in a wave of scales and fire and a hundred years of stored fury, and the entire High Council dove for cover with the undignified speed of people who had forgotten they were supposed to be in charge of things.

Three twenty- somethings walked through the chaos in the other direction, grinning. Sparky rode on Devika's shoulder, surveying the scene with the expression of a general reviewing a successful campaign.

That one, he said, indicating Aldren, who was attempting to become very small behind a ceremonial table, kept me in the dark for thirty years.

"Noted." Devika crouched to Aldren's eye level. "Hello. We've met, sort of. You had something of mine."

"Yours?" Aldren spluttered. "That dragon was a registered asset of the High Council-"

"Mine now. We've discussed it."

We have, Sparky confirmed, in the private way he had that was only for Devika, which she was beginning to think was genuinely not the worst arrangement in the world.

She stood up. Behind her, she heard Shoko laugh and Sparky huff with pleasure, short and surprised, the kind that slipped out before you decided to let it, and it was a better sound than forty dragons and a collapsing chamber put together. Devika faced forward so they wouldn't see her smile.

____

Outside, in the pre-dawn streets, forty dragons dispersed into a sky that was just beginning to go pink at the edges. People came to their windows. Some of them would remember it for the rest of their lives. The official record would call it an unauthorised aerial disturbance and leave it at that. Sparky watched from Devika's shoulder until the last of them disappeared.

They are going home, he said.

"Where's that?" Grij asked.

Sparky considered this with the gravity appropriate to a sixty-year-old who was, in every other respect, still very young. His tail curled thoughtfully around Devika's collar.

Here, he decided. You are loud. The warehouse smells strange. She measured my wings without asking. Grij snores like an ox.

A pause.

I will stay.

Devika looked at Shoko and Grij. Shoko was already looking back, with that expression she had, quiet and certain and unhurried. She reached over and squeezed her hand. Grij, behind them, grinned and said nothing, wisely. Sparky set the hem of Devika's coat briefly on fire, then looked innocent.

"Family," Devika said, with the resignation of someone who had gone looking for quick money and ended up with an unexpected surprise that considerably more complicated, considerably less sellable, and, she was prepared to admit this, privately, to no one- considerably better.

She found she wasn't unhappy about it at all.

About the Competition

The Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar celebrates the art of storytelling and the power of words. This esteemed event provides a platform for writers to showcase their creativity and share their unique voices with a global audience. Participants from diverse backgrounds come together to explore various themes and genres, enriching the literary landscape with fresh perspectives.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to Anvita Prasad for sharing "The Unexpected Surprise" with us as part of the Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Her contribution enriches the creative tapestry of the event, and we look forward to seeing more of her imaginative storytelling in the future.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.