Chapter 2-Serena
The sky was overcast when I stepped out of Atlantic City Airport.
It was gloomy and oppressive, but I’d already been reminded that late fall in North Jersey could feel like that—gray, wet, heavy in the air.
It’d been ten years since I visited the Garden State.
My family had moved to Georgia right after I finished high school.
I’d spent most of my childhood in New Jersey, sure, but today felt different.
Charged.
Like something unseen was waiting.
I’d been dreaming of traveling my whole life.
England.
Ireland.
Scotland.
Rolling green hills and bright blue skies, and dramatic moors straight out of a Shakespeare sonnet.
Instead, I was headed somewhere far stranger.
Asgarheim Runevald Institute.
Accessed through a hidden threshold deep in the forests of New Jersey.
Not exactly a brochure vacation.
The sky above the airport hung low and dark, and I could swear I heard something—a sound like a lion’s roar, only deeper. Older.
Darker. Lonelier.
Whatever.
It was probably a plane engine echoing wrong in the clouds.
Still my skin prickled.
It was only the first day, and I was already a bundle of nerves. I’d spent so much of my life pretending my preternatural abilities weren’t real.
Pretending I wasn’t different.
Pretending I wasn’t haunted.
It had taken me years to understand I wasn’t insane.
Sure, I’d terrified my aunt and uncle when I was six by telling them my grandmother wasn’t happy about them selling her wedding crystal.
At the time, I didn’t understand why that upset them so much.
Aunt Gabby was my mom’s only sister.
She and Uncle Patrick had taken me in after my parents died in a car accident coming home from the movies.
Drunk driver.
Yeah. It sucked.
Aunt Gabby had been furious when I told her Grandma stood at the kitchen counter every night, shaking her head at the missing crystal.
I wasn’t lying.
But how was six-year-old me supposed to know I was the only one who could see them?
Who were they?
Simple answer?
They’re the ones I called the others.
The dead.
Poltergeists. Shadows. Spectres. Spirits.
Ghosts.
And the truth?
They were everywhere.
“You lost, miss?”
I turned to see a park security officer near the tree line of the preserve. My rideshare had dropped me off near the trailhead like the letter instructed.
“I’m headed to the, um, private preserve entrance?” I said carefully. “There’s supposed to be a research group meeting?”
His gaze skimmed over me.
I bit back the reflexive irritation.
Being five foot two with generous curves meant I’d endured more than my fair share of commentary.
My personal favorite? You’d be so pretty if you lost weight.
That one always made me roll my eyes.
Fact, I was already pretty.
And I happened to like my body, fuck you very much.
The security officer cleared his throat and gestured toward the deeper trail.
“Storm’s rolling in. Best not linger.”
“Thanks,” I said, dragging my wheeled suitcase over uneven gravel.
He wasn’t wrong.
Rain was coming.
I could feel it in my bones.
As I walked deeper into the woods, the air shifted.
Quieter.
Thicker.
Like stepping into a room mid-conversation.
I checked my phone—no service.
Figures.
The trees thinned ahead, revealing an odd shimmer between two ancient oaks. Like heat rising off asphalt.
But colder.
My heart skipped.
This was it.
The portal.
The threshold between worlds.
New Jersey on one side.
Asgarheim on the other.
“You’ll deal, Serena,” I muttered.
I stepped through.
The air snapped like stretched wire breaking.
Cold hit me first.
Then light.
Auroras rippled overhead in ribbons of green and silver. Black spires carved with glowing runes rose from jagged cliffs. Wind whipped off a dark sea below.
Asgarheim.
The Runevald Institute loomed ahead, its basalt towers etched with silver sigils that pulsed faintly under the shifting sky.
It was breathtaking.
And terrifying.
I tightened my grip on my suitcase handle.
I hadn’t imagined this place quite so… medieval-meets-apocalypse.
But then again, I hadn’t imagined most of my life.
Movement flickered at the edge of my vision.
Shit.
An elderly ghost stood several yards away, staring at me with hollow confusion. She opened her mouth, shouting silently, words I refused to acknowledge.
Her expression shifted to desperation.
Then anger.
Her shriek echoed across the stone courtyard.
I didn’t react.
Didn’t blink.
Didn’t flinch.
Years of practice had taught me that.
See, the dead were drawn to heightened emotion. Fear fed them. Panic amplified them.
I’d learned the hard way that no reaction was the best reaction.
So right then, I stared past the ghost and simply breathed.
In.
Then out again.
I rolled my suitcase forward as if nothing stood there at all.
After a few moments, she drifted toward the edge of the courtyard and vanished into the cliff side fog.
Good.
I was not traveling across realms to babysit ghosts.
That was the lie I told myself when the fear crept in.
When doubt tried to claw its way back into my chest like it used to—sharp, suffocating, familiar.
I had come here for one reason.
Control.
Not containment. Not sedation. Not to be told again that what I saw wasn’t real.
Absolute control.
Because I had already lived the alternative.
Too many white rooms.
Too many soft voices speaking slowly, carefully, like I might shatter if they used the wrong word.
Too many notebooks filled with observations about me—about symptoms—as if my life could be reduced to bullet points and diagnoses.
Visual hallucinations.
Auditory disturbances.
Grief-induced delusion.
Early childhood trauma response.
They always circled back to that.
My parents.
As if losing them explained everything.
As if grief could conjure shadows that whispered my name when no one else was around.
As if trauma could explain the way the air changed when something unseen entered a room.
As if imagination could account for the things I knew—deep in my bones, in a place no medication ever managed to touch.
I wasn’t imagining them.
They were there.
Always.
Watching.
Waiting.
Sometimes… reaching.
I learned quickly not to say that out loud.
The first time I told Aunt Gabby, I was eight.
I remember the way her smile froze—how her hand tightened around mine just a little too hard. The way she glanced at Uncle Patrick like I’d said something wrong, not something true.
After that came the appointments.
Days turned into weeks.
Weeks turned into years.
Different offices. Different doctors. Same outcome.
“Serena, what you’re experiencing isn’t real.”
“Serena, your mind is trying to protect you.”
“Serena, we’re going to help you feel better.”
Better meant quieter.
Numb.
It meant pills that dulled everything—fear, yes, but also color, sound, thought.
It meant drifting through life like I was wrapped in cotton, disconnected from the very thing they were trying to “fix.”
Because the medication didn’t make it stop.
It just made me doubt myself.
And that was worse.
For a long time… I believed them.
Believed that I was broken.
That I was unstable.
I believed that something inside me had snapped the day my parents died and never quite fit back together again.
I learned to smile when I was supposed to. To nod at the right moments. To say I was feeling better even when I wasn’t. I learned to keep the truth locked down so deep that even I started to question it.
Because if everyone around you insists you’re crazy long enough?
Eventually, you start to wonder if they’re right.
Aunt Gabby and Uncle Patrick weren’t cruel.
Not exactly.
They were just afraid.
They were afraid of what they didn’t understand. Afraid of what I might become.
Afraid of the way the world would look at them if I didn’t fit neatly into it.
So they did what people like them always do.
They labeled me.
Managed me.
Contained me.
And they told themselves it was love.
By the time I was an adult our relationship was so strained we barely spoke above the perfunctory.
And when this acceptance letter arrived, I could practically feel it.
They were relieved.
Thrilled, even.
“Asgarheim Runevald Institute,” Aunt Gabby had said, beaming as she read the embossed heading aloud. “An elite international graduate program, Serena. Do you know what this means?”
I did.
Just not in the way she thought.
The scholarship sealed it for them.
Prestige. Opportunity. Distance.
A fresh start—for all of us.
They never questioned it.
Never asked why a program like that would want someone like me.
They didn’t look too closely.
They didn’t want to.
But I did.
Because the welcome packet I received separately—the one that didn’t come through the regular mail, the one that appeared where no one else could see it—that one told the truth.
Runevald wasn’t a normal graduate school.
It wasn’t even close.
It was a place where the impossible wasn’t dismissed.
It was studied.
Refined.
Mastered.
Magic.
Witches.
Monsters.
And others.
The words should have terrified me.
Instead, they felt like… recognition.
Like someone, somewhere, had finally looked at me and seen what I actually was—not what they needed me to be to feel comfortable.
A Necromancer.
The word had settled into me with quiet certainty.
Not a diagnosis.
Not a delusion.
A truth.
An impossible, fantastic, magical truth.
All those years of seeing things no one else could…
Hearing voices that didn’t belong to the living…
Feeling the pull of something beyond the veil…
It hadn’t been madness.
It had been power.
Untamed. Untrained. Misunderstood.
Mine.
And for the first time in my life—I didn’t feel crazy.
I wasn’t possessed.
I wasn’t broken.
I wasn’t something to be fixed, dulled, or hidden away.
I was something else.
Something rare.
Something dangerous.
Something special.
And maybe—just maybe—something that finally belonged somewhere.
I exhaled slowly, steadying myself as the weight of it settled in my chest—not heavy this time, not suffocating.
Grounding.
Real.
“I’m not crazy,” I whispered.
The words didn’t sound fragile.
They sounded like truth.
And as I stepped forward—toward a world my aunt and uncle could never understand, toward a future none of those doctors could have predicted—I felt something shift deep inside me.
Not fear.
Not doubt.
Power.
And this time, I wasn’t going to let anyone take it away.
A gust of wind swept through the courtyard, and I froze.
The sensation wasn’t cold.
It was awareness.
Like something ancient had just turned its head toward me.
The hair on my arms rose.
A pulse echoed faintly in my ears.
Not mine.
Another’s.
Heavy.
Measured.
Hungry.
This wasn’t the usual feeling I got when a spirit lingered to close. This was something else.
I swallowed hard.
Okay.
Maybe I hadn’t imagined that roar earlier.
But as I dragged my suitcase toward the massive iron doors of the Asgarheim Runevald Institute—I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched.
Hunted.
That something inside these walls had just caught my scent.