My name is Eliza Ravn.
I am seventeen. For most people, that's the bright threshold where you start to know the world and step into a life full of color. For me, seventeen marks the end of being young. That thought has weighed on me for a long time. Years ago I imagined that, by this age, I'd be like any other unbound classmate—running headlong into campus nights and after-hours parties.
Instead, on the night of my birthday, after my parents lit a candle no wish could snuff out, they told me—solemnly—"From tonight on, your old mischief and that unbridled freedom come to an end. You will start to notice what you've never seen, begin to wield what you've never held. With your own hands you will shape—or break—your future, and the futures of others."
As custom demands, the house filled with siblings and kin from our clan to celebrate. I smiled for them all, but the joy wouldn't take. I was caught on the edge between happiness and hurt, half fire and half sea. From this day on, by the witches' tradition, I stood at the crossroads where Awakening meets duty—where childhood ends.
Does my "status" matter? It's only a tiresome title. Since I was small, whenever people asked who I was or what I did, I answered with my name. It wasn't rudeness or defiance. It was because I have never forgotten what my parents and the elders taught me:
"In this world, only you define who you are. Only you choose your life. But that freedom is owed to the strength you forge—to shoulder the cost of your living and your worth. You have no right to complain about the price of idleness. You have no right to demand other people's pity. The memory in your blood is not a privilege—it is a trust. Cherish it. Cherish the tears and lessons of the past. Cherish the present you can see, and make what has never been seen or owned. When all is finally as your heart wills it, any title is just a party hat you pick up for a holiday."
Still, to avoid needless arguments—and to buy myself room to grow—I built two versions of me for the world to meet.
By day, I'm a small-town English girl: school with friends, basketball and dance after class, community events, the occasional weekend shift at the café by the market. I love the fullness of that simple life. Every new task teaches me a useful skill; small things for now, but they'll lay stones under my feet when I head for farther roads. For instance, I learned that fine millinery and wig-setting always find a use in London society—though the rise of hair implants made me rethink the trade, and sent me down a rabbit hole on post-op follicle care…
After dark, I put on linen robes and walk with my parents and our kin to the riverbank, to seek the other layer of the world and the imaginations that vault beyond the sky.
We are descendants of the Vikings.
Centuries ago, when Christendom's fires reached the north and witch-hunters looped their ropes around ordinary necks, our forebears packed what they could and crossed the seas. On strange shores they took new names and learned to live unseen. They no longer called the gods aloud. They spoke the names inwardly. They carved runes on the backs of furniture. They folded magic into ordinary days.
So we endured—dynasty after dynasty, age after age. The stories people tell about raids and conquest never seem to end, and once, we would stand up to argue each time. Later, we grew too tired to bother. Let those who love their own voices gild the histories with single-sentence hearsay; we have little time to polish borrowed glory. From lands of midnight sun and winter dark, our ancestors learned the first law: live. Live so the saga can go on. Live so that in the turning of all things, we bend and survive, and keep a line of hope ahead.
Since I could first remember, I've been taught this: witchcraft is not a miracle. It is the duty that comes with blood.
Every child of a witch faces the Awakening before their seventeenth birthday—to glimpse the flow of fate, to rouse and know the power within.
Some in our clan kindle fire from air. Some read the truth in another's thoughts. Some can see the shape of a soul. As for me—after my Awakening I saw a single omen: a blood-pool and the number twenty-four. Beyond that, nothing "special" came.
What did change was this: from that night through the summer, I could not sleep. Whenever I shut my eyes, I saw—clear as if wide awake—scenes from my past, the present, and a few narrow futures for others and for me. I thought it meant I'd awakened something rare. Then my mother told me every witch has this sight. I fell apart a little. Others had gifts; I had a vision that left me shaking, and then…nothing.
In class as a child, they said I was a daydreamer, always staring out the window and talking to the old tree. I tried to explain. Then I learned to keep the strangeness to myself. I could hear what others could not: the low speech of wind, the lament of rivers, and whispers that pass between the dead. Those sounds haunted my childhood—and my life. Was I happy? When I first understood I was different, no—I refused it.
Why do other children get whole and carefree years?
Why are they never harried by voices and sights?
Why was I born to carry a burden at the very age when our kind must step into duty?
But does any of that matter? As I grew, I learned this: each of us has a place. Whether we're born with little or too much, we're answerable for what comes next. Every gift arrives with the grace it brings—and the curse it cannot help but carry.
Blood is memory—like the feeling and recall every child is born with. We cannot slip free of our ancestors' history or our ties to them. We cannot live untouched by parents, by our people, by the world around us. One thing, though, does not change: our responsibility to live and to go forward.
If we cannot change the past or the role we were born into—or the duties of survival and continuance and the push and pull of the world—then we smile, and make it into armor. Others in the coven have said the same in their own words. Some complain. Some let go and come back. In the end, we trace the line to its root, own the charge we carry, and set our direction.
Civilizations and histories endure because ordinary men and women keep walking, believing, and working. That is not a shackle. It is a reminder of who we are. It is how we keep hammering a new self into shape with a courage that does not go out.
After that, I learned to smile. I learned to hide. I learned to pass in a crowd as if I were ordinary.
——
The more I pretended, the more I felt what I was. Study piled on study; the strange noises grew stronger; and the gulf between me and everyone else widened into something I could hardly name.
In the Coven, they look to me with high hopes—my parents carry one of the purest Viking lines left to us. Among my friends, I'm the cheerful one, the bright, easy girl. Among the witches, I'm a promise for tomorrow. And to myself? I am a girl often caught in shadow. The authors who say magic is everything—and the children who rejoice to learn they are different—rarely speak the second half. Magic and faith always move forward with the heaviest duty, and the sharpest price.
That night, when the mirror first showed me the vision, an unease took root so deep it would not fade. I knew—though the scene seemed far removed from me—that something within it was bound to my very soul.
There were twenty-four figures, shifting like shadows caught between light and blood. There was a rotting form that stood alone at the heart of a stone circle. And there was the crimson pool—ever swelling, ever whispering. The images clawed at the edges of my mind, stirring fear like a tide that would not turn back.
I tried to reason through it—again and again. Did those twenty-four silhouettes stand for the twenty-four hours of a day? Or were they the personified runes, the ancient symbols of power etched into our bloodline? Perhaps they were twelve signs of the Zodiac mirrored by twelve infernal reflections beneath the earth? None of it made sense.
At times, I thought of calling upon the Three Mothers of Fate themselves, to tear the truth from the threads they spin. Yet each time I raised my hands to cast the Ceremony, my mother caught them and pressed them down. Her face darkened as she spoke:
"If you do not know whether this vision concerns you, then prepare for the worst. To gaze upon destiny has a price, and such acts must only be done when the need is absolute. Magic is not an excuse to flee from self-reflection. Confusion is only a season; if you walk with care, the world will reveal its answers in time."
Her words unsettled me more than they soothed. I was still adrift—confused, angry at her restraint, desperate to act. Yet soon I would learn that this was not about my future alone. It was tied to the fate of the world itself.