Maeve was never the kind of woman you’d expect to raise a queen who’ll lead the planet through an apocalypse.
She wasn’t born into power or prophecy. No gift of Knowing, no foresight stitched into her soul. Just instinct, love, and a primal fear that it wouldn’t be enough. That she wouldn’t be enough.
And for a long time, she wasn’t sure she was.
Rite of Awakening — Southern Gothic with bite, Book One of the Rites of Passage. Available direct from the author →
Maeve’s story in Walk in Darkness is the story of every young mother who has looked at the future and seen only fog, terrified she won’t be enough to keep her child safe from every bump and bruise and worse. She calls herself talentless, unworthy of the divine gifts so many around her seem to possess. Her daughter, Veronica—bright, strange, and born remembering the future—is something holy. Maeve is only human. And in her most fragile moments, she believes that her humanness makes her dangerous.
“You. Veronica. Even the wolves. You all see what’s coming… I’m the only one stumbling around in the dark.” — Walk in Darkness
Maeve is terrified of walking blind. Of missing the danger before it strikes. Of failing to see what’s just around the bend. She begs for foresight—not for power, not for glory, but because she loves her daughter so fiercely that the only thing more unbearable than darkness is helplessness. If the future were a storm, she would walk into it unshielded, so long as it meant Veronica could stay dry.
But the gods don’t answer with comfort. Lord Daegan says simply:
“You walk in darkness, child, because the light would blind you.” — Walk in Darkness
And yet Maeve walks anyway.
Not with certainty, but with purpose. Not with foresight, but with love.
What she doesn’t know—and what we, as readers, come to feel—is that this kind of walking may be the bravest of all.
Maeve and Veronica are central characters in two interconnected novels: Walk in Darkness and Altered Destiny.
Veronica’s journey is the mirror.
In Altered Destiny, Veronica—born with the gift Maeve so desperately longed for—begins to lose it. For years, she has remembered her future as clearly as her past. She’s known the date of her death, the name of her soulmate, the births and rebirths of the people around her. She has moved through life with a strange confidence: not arrogance, but the serenity of someone who knows the ending and has made peace with it.
And then, one day, the future disappears.
Shifted reality. Disjointed timelines. Stars that no longer follow their paths. She runs calculations, rituals, and astrological charts—but nothing works. Her future, once immutable, is suddenly unmoored.
Veronica finds herself flailing in the same dark her mother once feared.
“This must be what life is like for everyone else,” she says. “Never knowing what’s coming next and never being fully prepared.”
It rattles her. She becomes anxious, unfocused, afraid to trust her instincts. The grief she feels isn’t just fear of death—it’s the loss of identity. Of certainty. Of the love story she’d lived for decades before it ever began.
She has always walked in light. Now she is learning to walk without it.
But here’s the beautiful symmetry of their stories: Maeve, who once believed love without foresight wasn’t enough, becomes the embodiment of strength in the dark. And Veronica, who once believed knowledge was her anchor, discovers her own courage when that anchor is cut loose.
Both women lose what they thought they needed.
And both learn how to walk anyway.
I wrote these characters about a year apart. Veronica came first—composed, powerful, deeply burdened by knowing too much before not knowing anything. She was based on my absolute certainty of a particular future that was unfolding in front of me… until it suddenly took an opposite turn. Maeve came later—raw, desperate, terrified of being unable to protect. I watched my daughter with her first baby and remembered that helplessness from when she was a baby, back when I worried about missed breaths and later busy streets and later driving lessons and every new fear that emerges with a new phase of a child’s life. I never intended their arcs to echo. But in revisiting them now, I see how perfectly they fold into each other.
A mother who feared she’d fail without knowing.
A daughter who feared she’d fail because she’d lost it.
There’s a part of them in all of us—because we all, no matter how certain or uncertain we may feel, walk in the darkness of not knowing.
And maybe that’s where the real growth begins.
Southern Gothic, Book One of the Rites of Passage: magick, betrayal, and a reckoning.
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