An Enchantment of Ravens

by Margaret Rogerson

The truth of the matter was that no fair one was kind, whatever house they came from. They only pretended to be.

This must be what the awakening of spring was like, I thought. I was alive in a way I never had been before, in a world that no longer felt stale but instead crackled with breathless promise.

What must it be like? To meet someone, to forge a connection, all in the span of one golden afternoon—only to find out that for

But isn’t absurdity part of being human? We aren’t ageless creatures who watch centuries pass from afar. Our worlds are small, our lives are short, and we can only bleed a little before we fall.

but there was something missing from my life now, and I suspected I’d never be exactly the same again. Maybe that was just part of growing up.

All at once my chest swelled with unnameable longing, an ache lodged at the base of my throat like an unvoiced cry. Lives to be lived awaited me out there, far from the safety of my familiar home and confining routine. The whole world waited for me. I felt pierced through with longing.

I’d do well to remember that the only fate I had any control over was my own.

Did I only want my life to change, or did I want to change it with him?

Frankly, I had no idea how anyone knew if they were in love in the first place. Was there ever a single thread a person could pick out from the knot and say “Yes—I am in love—here’s the proof!” or was it always caught up in a wretched tangle of ifs and buts and maybes?

I lived a thousand times, not once would I destroy my own life and another’s for love.

Why do we desire, above all other things, that which has the greatest power to destroy us?”

But that was the problem with the old me, I was coming to realize. She’d accepted that behaving correctly meant not being happy, because that was the way the world worked. She hadn’t asked enough—of life, or of herself.

There is magic in names.

In the stories, maidens drank poison and jumped from high towers upon hearing of their princes’ deaths. But I wasn’t one of them.

I was king before mortals made the word. First I was admired. Then I was feared. Now, I am forgotten.

What he did not see was his undoing.