Chapter 1
12 people line up to get ready to fight the dark shadow… but first lets start from the beginning…
I lived in Nashville, North Carolina, nestled in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A city known for its foggy mornings, endless forests, and quiet oddness that always made me feel… a little less alone. It wasn’t a place most people her age dreamed of staying in forever, but for me, its was the only place that ever made her felt like home
I moved there after everything changed. After the academy. After the incident. After I ran.
I’d been twelve when I arrived, carrying just one bag and a single priceless accessory. A silver ring, shapped like a delicate serpent coiled around a shapphire. My Aunt Marlene had givin it to me the year before she passed, she whispered as she slid it onto my finger.
“This isn’t just jewelry Audrey. It’s protection, from yourself and from those who don’t understand you.”
I Never took it off. Not once.
I lived in a tiny apartment above a flower shop, working a part-time at a used bookstore called Fern & Page. The owner, a quiet man named Cliff, never asked questions. He didnt mind that I always went into the back a lot, when the store wasn’t really busy, he also let me read while I wait for the next customer. He was such a kind man.
I has a few close friends, they caref for me and I cared for them.
Ivy was my roomate in my apartment. She was a painter, with purple hair and a tattoo of a phoniex on her neck. She always said I was “like a walking snowstorm in July,” but she meant it as a compliment, she was really funny could make anyone laugh.
Jorden was in my flim class, obsessed with horror movies and conspiracy theories. He liked me because I never rolled my eyes at his ideas, even when they got weird. Especially when they got weird
Cleo worked across the street of me, at they crystal shops and swore that she could feel magic in my aura. I laughed it off but sometimes Cleo stared a little to long at her ring.
I had no family left, not really
My aunt, the only one who ever believed in magic. She died to years ago from a quiet illness no doctors could explain. My parents has passed long before I ever to to M.A. Thats what made Marlene so important. She was the link between the normal world and the magical one I tried to bury.
When I wasn’t it in school or at work, I would walk the trails behind the bookstore, deep into the forest, where no cell signal reached. Sometimes I sat on the mossy rocks and whispered to the trees. Not because I expected a reply, but because it felt rude not to.
Then came the letter, it arrived on cold morning in early September. No stamp. No return address. Just a seal I havent seen in years, the sigil if M.A.
I Froze when I opened it. My Fingers trembled as I read the words that undid everything i had built in Asheville.
You are summoned. Return to the first. The twelve are needed one more.
The ring on my finger grew colder. And I knew
I couldn’t hide it much longer.
