The Light, Bobby’s Tether

Sophie Blackwood grew up in the shadow of Mourningford’s crooked lanes, a girl marked less by inheritance than by instinct. Where others in her family turned inward — counting grudges, sharpening secrets — Sophie turned outward, curious about every rustle in the hedgerow, every whisper carried through the old house’s vents. She had a way of seeing that unsettled people: not visions exactly, but a clarity that cut through masks. Some called it intuition. Others, in lowered voices, called it dangerous.

Uncanny Majyk:

Unlike the Matthews clan she was bound to by fate, Sophie’s strength was not in her lineage but in her spark. She could listen to a room and catch what was not said. She could sit beneath the orchard trees and feel when the earth was restless. When storms gathered, Sophie sensed them hours before the first clouds rolled in. There was something in her that caught at the edges of the world, as though she stood with one foot always in another place.

Yet for all her quiet strangeness, Sophie was no recluse. She laughed easily, sometimes too loudly for the house she lived in, where silence was currency and joy a liability. That laughter drew Bobby, just as her steadiness anchored him. Where his silence was born of calculation, hers was born of patience; where he burned in secret, she carried her ember like a lantern. Together, they were both contrast and mirror, each recognizing in the other a shape that did not quite fit.

Her mother, Lilith Blackwood, once warned her that being different was dangerous in Mourningford. Sophie only smiled, brushing dust from her skirts, and said that danger was everywhere, not just in her. She had no illusions about the Matthews or the tangled history of their kin, but she also refused to let that history dictate her entirely. Sophie’s spark was not about dominance, nor about conquest, but about survival and connection. In a family that devoured itself, she carried the strange conviction that there was more to cling to than ruin.

Tether:

By her mid-teens, whispers began to spread. Some said Sophie could calm a room just by entering it. Others claimed she carried a shadow in her eyes that made them uneasy. Neither story was entirely true, yet neither was false. Sophie was a contradiction: gentle but unyielding, empathetic but stubborn, fragile but more enduring than anyone guessed.

What defines Sophie is not the Majyk itself, but the way she inhabits its presence. She does not consume it like Bobby does, nor wield it like a weapon. For Sophie, Majyk lingers in her like breath in a mirror — fragile, fleeting, but undeniable.

Sophie Blackwood is no heroine in the stories her kin tell of themselves. She is something rarer: the spark that unsettles the rot, the ember that flickers even when the house is collapsing.

And under a dark and crooked sky, her light may yet be the one thing they cannot extinguish.