Borne
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Sacrifices
Willow was born beneath a blood moon in the ancestral heart of Blackroot Hollow, where the trees grow twisted and the earth smells like iron. Her birth was not celebrated. It was consecrated. The Blackroot witches, women bound by ancient pacts and darker appetites, marked her arrival with ritual. Blood was drawn from her heel before her first breath, mixed with ash, and offered to the Hollow itself. She was not seen as a child, but as a vessel: an inheritance of power, a continuation of sin. The Blackroot family does not raise daughters. They forge them.
From the time she could stand, Willow was tested. Lessons were brutal: summoned spirits forced to whisper secrets in her ear until her skin turned cold; spellwork etched into her back with stinging nettles and salt; nights locked in root cellars, surrounded by dead things that spoke in riddles. Pain was considered progress. Emotion was weakness to be punished. If she cried, they made her bleed. If she bled, they praised her strength. She was taught how to hex before she learned to write. Her first familiar was not an animal, but a spirit of a drowned girl that the Hollow spat back. Her mother, Maerlyn Blackroot, ruled the family like a high priestess of cruelty. Cold, beautiful, and calculating, she viewed Willow as her greatest experiment. Maerlyn believed love diluted magic, and so she never once kissed her daughter goodnight, but often held her underwater until she could recite incantations through bubbles. Her aunts weren’t much better, each one carving out a different corner of Willow’s psyche to poison. Some taught her glamour magic to lure men. Others taught her the art of bonework, the art of how to read the future in marrow and break a person’s will with a single word.
There were boys in the family too. Not many. Most were used as sacrifices before they grew too wild to control. One, a cousin named Elias, grew close to Willow during their trials. Together, they tried to escape. Only one made it out. Willow was fourteen when she ran, cloaked in stolen charms, feet slick with grave mud, the taste of her blood still on her tongue. She didn’t look back. She couldn’t. Blackroot witches don’t allow deserters. For weeks she slept in abandoned churches and broken-down cars, hiding her aura beneath layers of dirt and borrowed names. Her body bore the scars of her upbringing. Her magic was volatile, rebellious, but hers alone.
In the years that followed, she re-learned the world. Alone. She made her way to the city, hiding in plain sight. She got her GED under a fake name. Took courses in psychology and chemistry, things that would help her understand herself. But Willow never truly left the dark. She worked odd jobs that kept her close to the underworld: reading fortunes in nightclubs, mixing potions in tattoo parlors, crafting hexes for those willing to pay in flesh or secrets. She didn't stop practicing magic. She was physically incapable of it, so she refined it, twisting her brutal education into something sharper, deadlier, more precise.
Over time, whispers of her re-emerged in the magical underground. Some called her a stray Blackroot. Others called her cursed. She didn’t correct them. She didn’t care. Because Willow wasn’t trying to escape her lineage. She was trying to erase it. The Blackroots forged her in blood, but they made a mistake. They let her survive.
And now she carries that legacy not as a chain, but as a blade. And a promise.
