Ultimately, I am the one who makes the raven win and returns home.

With the wet, dirty dress between my teeth, I walk onto Tom's property. The moment my paws touch the paved circle around the farm, I become extra cautious. Stealthily, I let my paws move along the right side of the farm, heading towards the back. The goats look at me in bewilderment before quickly running into their wooden shelter.

The red bricks have been in the same construction for much longer than Tom has been alive, and it shows. Several have lost pieces over time or are crooked. The thatched roof is also due for replacement, something Tom has been postponing for months because he outright hates it. The window that Liza and I share, framed with relatively new and clean wood, is open as usual—not for fresh air or the cold.

I effortlessly push off from the gray stones and jump through the window with the usual arc without any problems. The moment my paws hit the wooden floor, Liza looks up from her narrow single bed.

The dozens of papers and schoolbooks in front of her betray the busyness her studies are currently giving her. Although Tom would love for his daughter to take over the farm, Liza's heart lies more with teaching.

I shake out my fur one last time before changing back to my human form. Stark naked, I walk to the wooden wardrobe and pull out new underwear, pants, and a shirt. Although I'm expected to wear a dress to work and school, I utterly hate those things. The cold along my legs, the fabric dragging on the floor and getting dirty in no time, but above all, the girlish nature of it, is not for me.

Liza doesn't look up or around while I get dressed, until I collapse onto my own single bed. She pulls the elastic from her shoulder-length brown hair and lets herself fall backward onto the pillow. The goats' wool socks peek out just below her brown dress as she crumples the papers on the bed.

'Dad was really not happy about the chicken. He cursed all morning.' I burst out laughing at the image of the angry man shouting through his kitchen in his underwear and worn gray shirt. Liza can't hold back her laughter for a moment either, before her brown eyes turn more serious.

'He had a point this morning. We have enough meat. Why don't you just take that?' I sigh deeply and run my hands over my face.

'It's not about the food itself. I know perfectly well that the freezer is full,' I answer while placing my hands beside me on the bed. My eyes fixed on the slanted wooden ceiling full of cobwebs.

'Then what is it? A desire to kill something?' Liza has been trying her best for almost fourteen years to understand everything that goes on inside me. She succeeds to a certain extent. There is no one who knows me better than her.

'Something like that,' I reply, shrugging. Liza wants to ask further questions when her eye falls on the clock next to her nightstand. She almost immediately jumps up from her bed, crumpling the papers even further than before.

'Shit. I have to cook,' is the last thing she says before running out of the room and starting to creak down the stairs.

Staring at the ceiling, I think back to last night. It's not as if I want to provoke Tom's reaction or actually want to bite the chicken's throat. Maybe it's the urge to kill something or simply my hunting instinct kicking in. It's not the killing itself that interests me, but the adrenaline it provides. Something I still haven't managed to control.

Eventually, I grab my sketchpad and pencil from under my bed. Some girls lose themselves in clothing, makeup, or jewelry. The book nerds of this world prefer to devour a book. All products created by someone else. I prefer to create myself.

The pad is filled with drawings of my false memories. A dark castle, dragons, wolves, and even a group of women in white dresses standing around a pond with two fish. They are images that invade my mind, seeming almost real but aren't. Maybe dragons exist, and a dark castle surely can be found somewhere, but I've never seen them.

As a child, I could already lose myself in my fantasy, staring at the sky from my windowsill. The hours slipped by as if they didn't exist. It was my escape before I ended up with Tom, and it has never disappeared.

My hand elegantly glides the pencil over the paper. Sketching, scribbling, and finally with utmost precision.

I don't know what I'm drawing until I finally look at the paper. The raven. The annoying creature from this afternoon is on my sketchpad.

However, not on the branch where I encountered him, but on the roof of a house in a busy street. The animal radiates a power and dominance that you don't often see. The glimmer that its eyes had this afternoon has given way to a darkness that speaks of observation. It gives him a form of humanity.

'Chea, dinner,' echoes from downstairs.

My eyes pass over the raven one last time before I close the sketchpad and put it away.

The man of the house doesn't grant me a glance as I step into the kitchen. His gray-brown farmer's clothes are covered in stains, the origin of which I don't want to know. The newspaper in front of his nose covers the stains on his face as he occasionally sniffs in disdain at the news.

'Tom,' I greet the man as I sit down across from him at the set table.

'Damn thing,' comes from the counter. I turn around for a moment to see Liza struggling with the lid of the applesauce jar. Chuckling, I turn back to Tom.

'Chea.' He doesn't look up from his newspaper and adds nothing to his greeting. It seems the chicken incident hasn't been forgotten yet.

I stare ahead in silence for a while until the jar of applesauce is placed in front of me.

'Would you open it?' Liza asks, clearly irritated by the situation. With a grin on my lips, I effortlessly twist the lid off the jar and hand it back to her.

'How are the chickens?' Tom immediately looks up from his newspaper, irritated. Liza's eyes burn into my back, and I expect to hear any moment how stupid my question is. The veins in Tom's forehead start to visibly pulse as the red color spreads across his neck. He seems ready to throw the newspaper at my head until Liza beats him to it.

'Here's the chicken.' Not a second later, a plate of roasted chicken, potatoes, peas, and applesauce is placed in front of me. It's the standard for the evening. The ingredients rotate, but the setup is the same every night: potatoes, vegetables, and meat with applesauce. I would venture to say that Tom has never eaten anything else.

Liza takes a seat at the table after also giving Tom his plate and sends me a warning look. The first bite is also taken in silence. Liza is better at cooking than Tom or at least uses more salt. When Tom cooks, it feels like he wants you to taste the dirt.

'How was school, Liz?' the man asks with his mouth full of chicken. Liza shrugs before swallowing the mouthful of peas.

'Busy. They think I have nothing better to do than memorize boring history facts. I need to know the entire history of Runcast by tomorrow.'

'Then just don't learn it,' I suggest, shrugging. Liza places her fork next to her plate, clasps her hands together, and looks at me disapprovingly.

'If I did that, I wouldn't pass my classes.' I'm not great at school, never have been either. Sitting for hours on a chair, listening to a man who has nothing interesting to say, it's not for me.

'Sounds like an interesting topic to me. Give us a fact,' Tom encourages his daughter. Although Liza tries to pretend it doesn't interest her, her eyes begin to twinkle at that question.

'After the Moonlight War, there were no more than twenty houses left standing, the rest were destroyed by the mages. It took ten years for a hundred people to live there and for the rubble to be cleared. The wall was built twenty years later and expanded five times. The religion of the nature gods, the gods of the mages, was banned in the city after the war,' she rattles off. Tom keeps nodding his head with interest while I shove my food in.

'Interesting. I heard quite a few farmers moved to Runcast over the years. Is that true?' This man talks about nothing but his work. I also wonder if he knows anything other than his work.

'I heard there are mostly a lot of brothels.' Both Tom and Liza look at me as if I've said something scandalous. Liza's mouth seems ready to drop open at any moment, and Tom actually lets his fork clatter halfway onto his plate.

'That's not a topic for the dinner table, Chea,' the man informs me disapprovingly.