Weaver | UPDATES WEEKLY

Prologue

My name is Sunday Waters, and I have something to confess: I can change the futures of every person that I have ever met.

Even you.

Do I have your attention now?

Good.

There was never a time when I questioned the existence of magic— it's a part of my bones, my blood, the air that I breathe. Magic is so woven into my very being that, as a child, I always thought it was a sweet secret that I knew it was real when everyone else seemed to brush it off. It was a strange and dangerous world to me, filled with power and wonder and joy.

My name is Sunday Waters, and I am a witch.

Don't get your hopes up, though. I'm a twenty-first-century witch, and those of us that have survived this long have paid the price for our continued legacies with a serious decline in magical ability. As a thirty-year-old witch from a long family line, I knew herbs, basic energy work, and a few spells, but at this point, it was more about keeping the legacy alive. It was more about understanding that there were other things out in the night besides animals and the wind. It was about knowing not to bother fairy circles, about knowing the signs of a vampire bite, about staying indoors on the full moon. By the time I was born, witches were no longer a formidable force. They were in survival mode, harnessing their power as much as they could and depending on their knowledge of the magical world to keep them alive.

Legends told of witches turning lead into gold, of ascending to higher planes, of transformation magic that went beyond the fantastical and into the realm of the true supernatural. However, that magic hadn't been accessible to witches for centuries. My grandmother, before she passed away, used to say that it filtered out of our bloodline slowly. She said that as witches married humans, their power waned.

At the time, I asked about witches that married other magical species— Sylvans, we called them. I thought that surely, somewhere in all our history, a witch must have fallen in love with a werewolf. Or a vampire, even. Or maybe some other type of shifter?

I was told never to ask that again.

I had more to worry about, though. Even stranger and more dangerous than fae, vampires, wolves in the night, or even the idea of looking for a soul mate... there were the Threads.

For every coincidence, for every chance meeting, for every place your hand brushes or your gaze lands, there is a Thread. It leads from one point to another, thrumming with something like kinetic energy, vibrating in a way you can only feel with a strange sixth sense, and if you know what to look for, you find them everywhere.

As a child, I saw Threads pulling, snapping, rearranging. I learned to trace them from person to person, to see when they indicated accidents or emotions by their color. I also learned, following a couple of very intense rounds of psychiatric evaluations and subsequent therapy, that no one else could see them. My witch mother wasn't too perturbed by my abilities, thankfully, but after several concerning reports from my elementary school, she made sure to impress upon me that I should not talk about the Threads to humans.

Over time, I learned that I probably shouldn't talk to witches about the Threads, either. It turns out that when a ten-year-old girl learns her friend can manipulate fate itself, she starts to ask for a lot of favors. People aren't too happy when you deny them favors, either. They never understand what's so hard about it when they don't have to pay the price for the changes.

With time and practice, I learned to read the threads even more. Rather than directly meddling with their direction, I began trying to see disaster in those glowing, colored lines, and taking measures to avoid it. Small steps over hours, days, or weeks wouldn't have the backlash that one huge, life-altering motion had. Slowly, very slowly, I began to understand how this worked: changes in fate happened intentionally, one choice at a time. Once you spiraled too quickly towards your destiny, it was very difficult to stop that energy. The stronger the energy, the higher the cost to change its direction.

If I tried to avert a disaster at the last moment, I could end up sick in bed for days or weeks, wracked by fever, chills, and nausea. I learned to fear what might happen if I made bigger choices too late, if I too drastic actions to change the flow of energy around me when it was already moving far too quickly to stop.

Thus, I put together Sunday's Rules for Tempting Fate:

Rule One: Always re-tie lines that you cut. Either you tie them where you want, or they find their own ties in places you definitely don't want.

Rule Two: The bigger the change, the higher the price. If you want to change fate, nudge the Threads. Move them gently and slowly. Otherwise, you will pay dearly for the change you caused.

Rule Three: Never meddle in someone else's Threads. It's too risky, even for small things.

Rule Four: If you remove a Thread, make sure you know where that energy goes. The energy in and around everything and everyone never goes away. It can't be created or destroyed, as per basic science principles I learned sometime in school... and mostly forgot later. Still, a Thread never truly disappears. If you lose it, find it fast.

Rule Five: Never tell anyone about the Threads.

This is the story of how I managed to systematically break every single rule I ever set in place for myself. Are you ready?