They say the prophecy was only one sentence long.
“When the child of the Wing Mark joins with the Twenty-Second Witch, the fallen house will rise—or perish forever.”
Nobody ever agrees on the punctuation. My grandmother claims there was a semicolon. My uncle says it ended with three exclamation points and a tear stain. My mother, who actually held me the night I was born, says it wasn’t written at all—it was spoken, as if the wind had borrowed a voice and pressed it into her ear between my first two cries.
I wasn’t there for any of that part, obviously. But I’ve heard the story so many times, the words feel like fingerprints on my bones.
The night I arrived, a storm pinned its fists against the windows of our drowned manor. Candles guttered. Doors breathed. Everyone pretended this was normal weather for a collapsing bloodline. Mother says she counted my fingers, then my toes, then the beats of silence between the thunder and the lightning. She was about to kiss my forehead when she saw it—the faint, silvery brand on my left shoulder blade, shaped like two wings folded into each other, the lines so fine they looked stitched by frost.
She didn’t scream. My mother never screams. She only whispered, “No,” like she might be able to refuse the universe with good manners.
The midwife crossed herself three times. Grandmother started crying and calling for wine. In the hall, the elders argued about who would ride through the night to fetch the scrolls. “The sign returns,” someone said. “At last,” another sighed, with the relieved despair of people who have begged for rain and finally gotten a flood.
They called me Ari. It means “lion.” I have yet to meet a lion who would accept being told who to marry before his first tooth.
By the time I turned eight, I knew four things with the stubborn certainty only children possess:
If I fell asleep on my left side, the Wing Mark warmed like a coal against my skin.
Grown-ups are experts at pretending they’re not staring.
Every family dinner eventually becomes a prophecy seminar.
I was supposed to “join” with a girl I had never met, who might or might not be a witch, depending on whether you asked my grandmother (absolutely yes), the priest (absolutely not), or the librarian (define witch).
When I turned twelve, I asked the librarian instead of the priest. She pushed her glasses up and told me the fable version: Once there were angels who fell because they loved too fiercely and witches who rose because they feared too little. Somewhere between love and fear, our bloodline broke. Somewhere in the ashes, a bargain was made: bind wing to witch, or vanish. It sounded like a story you tell a stubborn boy to make him do his chores.
At fifteen, I started wearing hoodies even in July. This had little to do with weather and more to do with the way my shoulder blade felt like a loaded switch in any mirror. I kept imagining a blade of light flicking out from the Mark and cutting my life into “before” and “after.”
Eighteen came like a gavel.
The elders called it my Binding Year. “Tradition,” they said. “Duty.” “Destiny.” Every speech tasted like dust and gravestones. Our house is not literally crumbling, but it has the vibe—mildew in the wallpaper, portraits with eyes that follow you as if they’re jealous you got out. We rent the east wing to tourists now and sell “authentic prophecy candles” to keep the lights on. There’s a regular named Marjorie who buys a dozen every month and insists one of them once made her allergic to her ex-husband. I hope it’s true.
Two weeks ago, a letter arrived on black paper, sealed with violet wax stamped 22. The envelope smelled like ozone and crushed mint.
To the Bearer of the Wing Mark, Prepare yourself. The Twenty-Second approaches. Do not resist. The pattern must be completed. — Keeper of the Line
“See?” Grandmother trembled herself smug. “All in order. She will come here. We’ll hold the ceremony at equinox. The north altar is still mostly intact.”
“Mostly intact” means the altar has a crack running through it like a lightning scar and part of the roof above it is missing. You can see stars while you argue with fate. Which, to be fair, is excellent staging.
I tried not to think about the Twenty-Second.
When I did, the images were either laughable or terrifying: a solemn sorceress in velvet, eyes like winter, hands like knives. Or—worse—a giggling girl with glitter on her cheeks and a ringtone that played every time she snapped. The prophecy insists on a title, not a name, which feels like a trap. If you call someone a number often enough, you forget they’re a person. Maybe that’s the point. People can be disappointed. Numbers just… add up.
The night before everything changed, I lay awake listening to the house make house noises: pipes settling, wind slipping through antique keyholes, the shy taps of rain rehearsing for a storm. The Mark was quiet, a cool oval under my fingers. I tried to imagine a life where it was just a birthmark with a poetic shape. I tried to imagine waking up in a world where I was free to say no without the roofs of my relatives collapsing in dramatic sympathy.
At 3:02 a.m., the power went out. That’s how intimate this house is with failure: we track it by minute.
At 3:03 a.m., the Mark burned.
Not a romantic, symbolic warmth. This was needle-white fire, a sudden flare that lanced from my shoulder into my lungs and dropped me to my knees. I clutched the carpet and scraped air into myself while the room swam in the dark. For a moment there was no house, no family, no prophecy—only the bright, knife-clean knowledge that something had reached through the invisible and touched me like an answering call.
“Ari?” My mother’s voice came from the hall, small and fierce. A flashlight bobbed, a comet of domestic heroism. She found me hunched and sweating and put her palm between my shoulders like she could knead the pain out of me. “Breathe, darling. In. Out. Count.”
I counted because she asked.
The pain receded like a tide, leaving behind a new edge in its wake, a ringing in the bones. When I stood, my shirt clung damp to my back. In the flashlight’s pale cone I could see steam curling from my skin. That would have been a fun anecdote if it weren’t my skin.
“Did you feel that?” I whispered.
“I felt the house wake up,” she said. “And I felt you burn. The last time the Mark did that was the night you were born.”
We both pretended not to hear the footsteps gathering on the landing. In this family, privacy is an endangered species. Doors opened up and down the corridor; voices tangled. Words like omen and threshold and now bubbled through the dark.
“What if I don’t want this?” I asked, too softly for anyone but my mother to hear.
She touched my cheek and did not lie. “Then we will learn what your want costs.”
Downstairs, someone threw the main breaker. Lights stuttered awake with a tired gasp. The portraits blinked smugly in the new brightness. In the mirror over my dresser, I caught a sliver of my own reflection: hair doing what hair does at three in the morning, eyes too wide, shoulder bare where my shirt had torn. The Wing Mark glowed faintly, like an ember that refuses to die.
And then the bell rang.
Not our doorbell. The east altar bell, the one with the crack, the one we haven’t used since the roof fell in. It’s wired to nothing. It shouldn’t ring. But it rang—three times, clean and silver as if the metal remembered a note it had been saving for a century.
Grandmother’s footsteps sprinted faster than her age should allow. “It’s her,” she panted. “By all the saints and their enemies—it’s her.”
Mother’s hand tightened on mine.
I told myself it could be a mistake, a stray wind, a trick of old mechanics. I told myself I would not be dragged. I told myself I had choices.
We turned the corner at the end of the hall and the front doors slammed open so hard the stained glass rattled. Rain came in with a girl.
She barreled onto the threshold with a suitcase in one hand and a bouquet of lightning in her hair, cheeks flushed with running, eyes bright with a triumph so shameless it almost made me laugh. She wore a black dress and yellow rain boots. A pendant shaped like a tiny broom knocked against her collarbone when she stopped.
“Hi!” she announced to the entire astonished genealogy on the stairs. “I’m here for my—”
Her gaze found me. It was like being selected by a storm. The Mark rose under my skin as if it knew its own name.
She pointed straight at me, smiling like trouble and springtime.
“—husband,” she finished, as the altar bell rang a fourth time.
