Evareth: Awakening

Eva

I have always felt a little out of place.

Not in the dramatic, I’m different from everyone else kind of way that made for good monologues in coming-of-age films. Nothing so theatrical. It was quieter than that, more like the universe had accidentally handed me the wrong instruction manual at birth, and I’d spent eighteen-ish years trying to decipher a language everyone else seemed to speak fluently.

While my classmates chased the latest trends with religious fervor, I found myself deconstructing them, pulling them apart at the seams to see how they worked, then stitching them back together into something that felt more like me. Fashion wasn’t just something I wore; it was the only language that ever made sense. The drape of silk, the architecture of a well-constructed bodice, the way a single piece of jewelry could transform a silhouette from mundane to magnetic, these were the things that spoke to me in ways people never could.

Getting accepted into Salem State University to study fashion design should have been the happiest day of my life.

I had spent years dreaming about it, sketching designs on napkins during family dinners, staying up until three in the morning perfecting portfolios that would make admissions officers weep with joy.

When the acceptance letter arrived, I cried. My mother cried. Even my father, who had secretly hoped I’d follow him into dentistry, hugged me so tightly I thought my ribs might crack.

But beneath the joy, something shifted.

A restlessness I couldn’t name. A sense that I was standing on the edge of something vast and unknowable, like a traveler who had just reached the precipice of a canyon and realized, too late, that the map in their hands was for an entirely different journey.

My grandmother certainly didn’t celebrate.

She lives in a small cabin at the edge of our property, a ramshackle structure that had been in our family for generations, its wooden walls weathered silver by decades of New England winters.

Surrounding it were gardens that grew with impossible exuberance, herbs that thrived in soil that should have been too rocky, flowers that bloomed months past their season, vegetables that tasted like nothing you could find in any supermarket.

Wind chimes hung from every eave, their discordant music filling the air day and night, and enough wildlife treated her porch like a personal sanctuary to make Walt Disney reconsider his entire career. Squirrels ate from her hand. Birds nested in her hair. And a red fox, sleek and watchful, followed her through the woods like a shadow given fur.

Most people in town called her the Crazy Witch.

She never corrected them.

Not that anyone truly believed she was a witch. Salem had long since traded its burning pyres for souvenir shops and walking tours, its dark history sanitized into something palatable for tourists with disposable income. The word “witch” had become a costume you wore on Halloween, not something you actually were.

Neither did I believe it.

This was the twenty-first century. Magic belonged in books and movies and the fevered imaginations of children, who hadn’t yet learned that the world was made of science and logic and things that could be explained. Not in Massachusetts, not in my grandmother’s herb garden, and certainly not in my blood.

Yet every morning she wandered into the woods before dawn, gathering roots and leaves and mushrooms I couldn’t identify, muttering incantations under her breath that sounded ancient and forgotten. She spoke to foxes as if they answered back—and sometimes, disturbingly, they seemed to. She knew things before they happened: when a storm would break, when a neighbor would fall ill, when the deer would come down from the hills and eat my mother’s prized roses.

Growing up in Salem meant every family had a story.

We were all descendants of someone who had been accused, someone who had been burned, someone who had escaped into the woods and never returned. The town thrived on these tales, weaving them into its identity like threads in a tapestry. Hawthorne. Proctor. Corey. Nurse. The names echoed through our history books, our street signs, our collective memory.

Mine just happened to include a grandmother everyone thought had lost her mind.

And maybe that was the real problem.

Maybe I had spent so much time dismissing her strangeness that I had failed to notice the truth staring me in the face.

One week before university started, I was halfway through packing my wardrobe when my mother’s voice drifted up the stairs.

“Eva! There’s a letter for you.”

“Coming!” I called back, carefully folding a silk blouse that had cost me three months of part-time wages at the local boutique.

I zipped up my suitcase, my third suitcase, because apparently fashion design students required an entire separate luggage system just for accessories and jogged down the stairs, my footsteps echoing against the hardwood floors of our colonial-era home.

The house had been in my father’s family for over a century, a sprawling white structure with blue shutters and a wraparound porch that creaked like an old woman’s bones.

My mother stood in the foyer, already pulling on her jacket. She worked at the local veterinary clinic, and her days were filled with anxious pets and even more anxious owners. She had my father’s practicality and my grandmother’s warmth, and she had spent her entire life trying to reconcile the two.

Dad had already left for his dental practice, his departure marked by the familiar scent of mint toothpaste and the distant sound of his car pulling out of the driveway.

“Here you go.” Mom handed me an envelope.

It wasn’t white.

Or cream.

It was thick brown parchment, rough and textured like handmade paper, sealed with black wax that gleamed with an almost oily sheen. There was no stamp. No address. No sender information. Just my name, written in flowing script that looked like it had been produced by a fountain pen, not a printer.

Evareth Eris Hawthorne.

No one called me Evareth. Not even my grandmother, who named me. I had been Eva since the day I was born, a name that felt comfortable and unassuming. Evareth was something else entirely formal, ancient, laden with expectations I had never asked for.

“What is this?” I frowned, turning the envelope over in my hands.

“I was hoping you’d tell me.” She kissed my cheek, leaving a faint smudge of rose-petal lipstick. “I have to run. Mr. Henderson’s cat is having another crisis, and you know how he gets. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

The front door closed behind her, and the latch clicked into place with a finality that felt heavier than it should have.

The house fell silent.

I stood alone in the foyer, the envelope heavy in my hands, and something stirred in my chest. A flutter of unease. A whisper of recognition, as though I had been expecting this letter my entire life without knowing it.

I turned the envelope over again.

The wax seal was unlike anything I’d ever seen. A crest of some kind, though not one I recognized: strange, twisting lines that coiled around each other in patterns that seemed to shift when I looked at them directly. A tree with roots that became rivers. A moon that was also an eye. And at the center, a symbol that looked almost... alive.

This is weird, I thought.

But I couldn’t stop staring at it.

I carried the letter into the kitchen, where morning sunlight streamed through the windows and painted golden rectangles across the worn tile floor. My grandmother’s herb garden was visible through the back window, a riot of green and purple and silver that looked wilder than it had any right to be.

I slid a knife beneath the seal.

The wax cracked with a sound like distant thunder.

A cloud of shimmering black dust drifted into the air, not smoke, not powder, but something in between, something that glittered with tiny pinpricks of light like a handful of crushed stars.

“What the—”

The back door creaked open.

My grandmother stepped through, muddy boots and all, her gray hair escaping from its usual loose bun in wild tendrils. She wore her customary layers of mismatched fabrics a floral dress beneath a wool cardigan beneath a canvas apron stained with soil and something that might have been blood and her eyes, pale green and sharp as cut glass, fixed on the letter in my hands.

The red fox padded calmly at her heels, its amber eyes watching me with an intelligence that made my skin prickle.

She looked at the envelope.

Then she smiled.

Not her usual mischievous smile, the one she wore when she was about to tell me that the neighbor’s prize-winning petunias were actually invasive weeds and she’d accidentally replaced them with something better.

Something softer.

Almost relieved.

“Finally,” she whispered, her voice rough and trembling. “It’s about time.”

I looked between her and the letter, my heart beating a rhythm I didn’t recognize.

“What are you talking about?”

She nodded toward the parchment in my hands, her eyes never leaving it.

“Open it.”

With a deep breath that did nothing to steady my nerves, I unfolded the letter.

Four words shimmered across the black paper in gold ink, the letters pulsing with a faint luminescence that made my eyes water if I looked at them too long.

YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN.

I blinked.

“Chosen... for what?”

Grandma answered before I could ask again, her voice carrying a weight I had never heard before.

“Mytherra.”

I frowned, the word unfamiliar and strange on my tongue. “Myth... what?”

“Mytherra.” She smiled wider than I had seen in years, and for a moment, the lines around her eyes seemed to soften, and she looked younger than I remembered. “You’ll see.”

I laughed—a nervous, hollow sound that echoed off the kitchen walls.

“Grandma, I’ve already chosen my school. Salem State. Fashion design, remember?”

Her smile disappeared.

“No.”

I stared at her, the letter trembling in my hands.

“No?”

“There is no refusing Mytherra.”

A chill crawled across my skin, raising goosebumps on my arms. The kitchen, so warm moments ago, suddenly felt cold as a tomb.

She wasn’t looking at me anymore.

She was looking through me, her eyes unfocused and distant, as though she were seeing something I couldn’t perceive.

“They’ve waited long enough,” she murmured. “Centuries. Generations. They knew you would come eventually. They knew the blood would awaken.”

My stomach tightened into a knot of dread.

“Grandma, you’re scaring me.”

“You’re leaving tomorrow.”

I laughed nervously, shaking my head. “I’m not leaving tomorrow. I have packing to finish, and Mom needs help with the—”

She didn’t answer.

Her eyes lost focus entirely, the pale green clouding over like a winter sky.

Every bit of color drained from her face.

Then she collapsed.

“Grandma!”

I caught her before she hit the floor, my arms straining under her sudden weight. She was lighter than she should have been, fragile as a bird, and her skin was cold as marble.

“Grandma! Stay with me! Please!”

Panic surged through my chest, hot and suffocating. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. All I could see was her face, slack and pale, and the dark water that had spilled from her lips onto the kitchen floor.

“Dad!” I screamed, my voice cracking. “Dad!”

The front door burst open.

Heavy footsteps thundered across the hallway, and then my father was there, still in his white dental coat, his face pale with shock.

“Eva! What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know!” My voice came out in a sob. “She just... she just fell! She was talking about some academy and then she collapsed!”

Dad knelt beside us, his hands finding her wrist, checking her pulse with the practiced efficiency of a man, who had spent years learning how to keep people calm.

For one terrifying second, Grandma didn’t move.

Her chest was still.

Her eyes were closed.

The world seemed to stop.

Then she gasped.

Violently, as though she had been pulled from the bottom of a frozen lake.

She coughed, her body convulsing, and water spilled from her lips onto the kitchen floor.

Dark water.

Ink-dark, impossibly dark, shimmering with the same strange particles I had seen in the letter’s seal.

I froze.

She hadn’t been anywhere near water.

She hadn’t drunk anything in hours.

The water simply appeared, pooling on the tiles and spreading toward my shoes.

My father stared at it, his face a mask of confusion and barely concealed horror.

“What the hell...”

Grandma coughed again, then opened her eyes.

They found mine.

A trembling hand reached up and cupped my cheek.

A strange warmth spread beneath her fingertips, not the warmth of fever, but something deeper, something that seemed to reach into my bones and settle there like a sleeping animal.

“You’re going,” she whispered.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell her she was imagining things, that she was sick, that the only place I was going was Salem State University to pursue the dream I had worked for my entire life.

Instead...

I heard myself answer.

“I am.”

And for the first time in my life...

I wasn’t sure the words were my own.