The Raven

The raven is not scarcity. She is strike. She enters the sky as fracture, each wingbeat a cut, each shadow a declaration. She does not drift; she cleaves. Her feathers gather into storm, not burden but momentum, not weight but force.

She does not yield. She does not bend. The dark is not her prison; it is her ground. She stands inside it as if it were a battlefield, her eyes lit with embers, her voice breaking stone. She names what others silence. She wields what others fear.

The raven is testimony. She carries the unspoken, the accusations that were dismissed, the ruptures that were denied. She is the one who refuses to perform pain for others, who refuses to soften her truth into palatable fragments. She is called cruel for her clarity, but cruelty is survival when silence has been demanded too long.

In the sagas, Odin’s ravens—Huginn and Muninn—fly each dawn to gather memory and thought. They return with whispers of the world, carrying both prophecy and witness. Yet this raven is not theirs. She is not servant, not messenger. She is her own force, severed from the All‑Father’s command. She rises beyond the leash of myth, claiming shadow as her dominion.

She rises, black flame against the void. She rises, not as omen, not as burden, but as force. Her presence is severance: the cut that frees, the strike that refuses erasure. She is the shadow that proves survival, the flame that insists on being seen.

And in her rising, she becomes more than bird, more than symbol. She becomes the mother’s belief carried forward, the solidarity that anchors, the refusal that protects. She becomes the mask torn away, the friend who does not flinch, the testimony that will not be buried.

The raven is not absence. She is strike. She is flame. She is force. She is the shadow that even the Norns must weave into fate, the fracture that Ragnarök itself cannot silence.