Year One

“It starts with you, child of the ancients. […] So now between the birth and the death of time, power rises—both the dark and the light—from the long slumber. Now begins the blood-soaked battle between them. And with the lightning and a mother’s birth pangs comes The One who wields the sword. The graves are many, with yours the first. The war is long, with no ending writ.”

Mrs. Frazier’s ominous prophecy to Ross frames the events of Year One within a cosmic struggle, positioning him as both “patient zero” and the opening sacrifice in a larger war between dark and light forces. Her words foreshadow the inevitability of Ross’s death while establishing the idea that his loss will ignite a chain of events leading to Fallon Swift’s birth.

“A door opened inside you, Lana. I saw it in your eyes, just as I saw the potential for it in your eyes the first time we met. Even before I loved you, I saw it. But if you want it to stay between us, it does.”

Max’s words to Lana acknowledge her growing magickal power while honoring the intimacy of their loving bond. By equating her transformation to the metaphorical opening of a door, he indicates that her gift is both inevitable and deeply personal: a force within her that has merely been waiting for permission to break free and develop. His promise to keep her secret reflects his respect for her autonomy and stands as a sharp contrast to the coercion and exploitation that others in the novel exhibit. This early moment foreshadows the fact that Lana and Max will continue to love and trust one another as they stand together against the coming darkness.

“By the end of the first week of January, the reported death count topped a million.”

The unadorned wording of this stark statement emphasizes the speed and scale of the Doom’s devastation. Faced with the grim normalization of the rising death toll, individual humans are faced with a harsh world in which their lives are reduced to mere statistics in a collapsing world.