Character Dossier — Abigail

I have written, by my count, somewhere north of forty point-of-view characters across the books that share a world with the Raven Saga. None of them have generated as much reader mail as Abigail. Some of you wrote to ask whether she would be okay. Some wrote to ask whether what happens to her in Raven's Rise is supposed to be a victory or a tragedy. Some wrote to ask what she thinks of Arthur, in private, when nobody is watching.

This dossier is for those of you. It is the kind of file the Council might keep on a Hunter of unusual interest, written from the assumption that you have read all three books in the trilogy and at least the events of The Ninth Circle. There are spoilers ahead for everything she has lived through.

Subject

Name: Abigail (no surname on file; she has never asked for one and Arthur has never offered one).
Approximate age at trilogy open: Eighteen.
Approximate age at trilogy close: Twenty.
Affiliation: Vangeest household. Council-aware but not Council-bound.
Status, post-trilogy: Active. Designation deliberately left vague in the Council's own records, because the Council does not have a category for what she has become.

Background Beyond the Books

Abigail's earliest verifiable memory is the night Arthur Vangeest broke a circle of salt that should not have been broken to pull her out of the basement of a man named Lewis Reinfer, who had been keeping her there for reasons the trial transcripts only obliquely describe. She was four. The events of The Ninth Circle — Arthur's sacrifice to free her from the early possession that piggy-backed her out of that house — happen the same year, although she does not remember them in continuous time.

What she does remember, and what shaped her in ways neither of them has ever quite said out loud:

• Living in seventeen places before she was twelve. She can still tell you which kitchens had the linoleum that curled at the edges and which had real tile.
• The specific smell of Arthur's coat after a hunt — gun oil, salt, sweat, and something underneath that she did not learn to name until she was older.
• The first time she caught him drunk and crying. She was nine. She did not let on that she was awake. She lay on her side and watched him through one eye for almost an hour, and then she got up and made him toast.
• Frieda Gotlieb teaching her to read Latin, badly, in a kitchen in Vienna when Abigail was eleven and Frieda was supposed to be in the field. The Latin lessons continued for six years. Abigail's Latin is now better than Frieda's, which Frieda will never admit.

She did not go to school in any conventional sense. Arthur tried, three different times, in three different towns, and each time something happened that made it impossible to keep her in any one place long enough to enroll. By the time she was fourteen they had stopped pretending. Her education is a patchwork of public-library autodidactism, Hunter lore Arthur taught her on long drives, religious history Frieda gave her like medicine, and the kind of things you learn from being eight years old and watching the adults in your life put a body in the trunk.

This is the version of Abigail that walks into Raven's Peak. People who only met her in chapter one tend to underestimate what she had already survived before page one.

Private Motivations

Abigail loves Arthur Vangeest. She has loved him since she was four. She has never said the word out loud to him in any context that did not have an exit ramp. The closest she has come is a moment in the back of a stolen car in Raven's Fall where she touches the back of his hand with two fingers and does not look at him, and Arthur — who is not a man who reads gestures generously — understands and pretends he does not, because he does not know what to do with it.

She is also, to a degree the books do not always foreground, furious with him. The fury is older than her conscious memory. Not because he saved her, but because he has spent her entire life teaching her that he is going to leave. Every drunk, every absence, every job he took that he did not need to take, every rule about not getting close to anyone they could not leave behind. He has trained her to expect his disappearance the way another father might train a child to look both ways before crossing a street.

By Raven's Rise, when she goes through the gate after him, she has decided that the fury and the love are the same thing. They are both the same answer to the same question, which is whether she is going to spend the rest of her life letting men like Arthur Vangeest disappear into the dark on her behalf.

She is not.

What She Becomes

The transformation Abigail undergoes in the back third of Raven's Rise is not an upgrade. I want to be clear about this, because some readers have written in genuinely cheerful terms about her "powering up," and that is not what is happening.

What happens to Abigail is that she takes, into herself, deliberately, the specific portion of Surgat's nature that is required to close the gate. She does this knowing it will not come back out. She does this knowing what it will cost her to live with afterward.

What she gains:

• The ability to perceive the membrane between layers as a substance she can manipulate. This is the most useful and the least dramatic of her gifts. It is also what lets her seal the breach.
• A kind of physical durability she did not have before. Not invulnerability — she still bleeds. But the floor of how badly she can be hurt has moved.
• Awareness of the named entities still active on her side of the Threshold. She knows where they are. She knows who they are looking at.

What she loses:

• The ability to taste food the way other people taste food. Everything has a kind of mineral undertone she has learned to ignore.
• The ability to sleep without dreaming. She dreams every night. Most of the dreams are not hers.
• A measurable, quiet portion of the unguarded warmth she used to have for the people she loved. She still loves them. She has to think about it now in a way she did not have to before.

She has not told Arthur the third one. Arthur has guessed. They have not spoken about it.

Ultimate Fate

This is the part of the dossier I have argued with myself about for two years before writing it. Some of you wrote in to beg me not to spoiler-creep into the books I have not published yet. Some of you wrote in begging for exactly this. I have split the difference.

In the ongoing arc — the trilogies that follow the Raven Saga proper — Abigail does not become a Hunter in the traditional sense. She becomes something the Council does not have a name for, and which it eventually decides not to attempt to categorize, because every category they try to fit her into would require a vote, and every vote on Abigail Vangeest would tear the institution in half.

She lives. I will tell you that much. She does not live forever, but she lives a long time, by the standards of people in her line of work. She outlives Arthur. This is not a spoiler so much as a structural fact: Arthur was always going to be outlived. The story has been bending toward it since The Ninth Circle.

She does not, in the end, settle anywhere. She loves a few people, in the way she still knows how to love, and she leaves them when staying would be selfish. She is buried, eventually, in the Rocky Mountains, near the town that gave her saga its first name. The grave is unmarked, on her own request. Frieda chose the place.

Cut Material

Two scenes I wrote and cut, because they belonged to a longer book than the trilogy could carry:

1. A conversation with Mathilde Aerts in 2003. Abigail is eight. Arthur has parked her at Mathilde's farmhouse in Belgium for what is supposed to be a weekend and is going to stretch into nine days. Mathilde, ninety-one years old and three months from the stroke that will kill her, sits with Abigail in a kitchen and tells her — without preamble — what kind of man Arthur was at nineteen. The version that survived the cut is the version where Abigail never gets that conversation, and so the reader doesn't either, and so the version of Arthur she carries through the trilogy is the version she has assembled for herself out of evidence. The kitchen scene was beautiful. It also short-circuited something the books needed to do.

2. A version of the Raven's Rise climax where Arthur dies and she does not go through. I wrote this draft. It is on a hard drive in a drawer. It is not bad. It is not the book I wanted to publish, because the book I wanted to publish was the one where she chooses, and where the cost of choosing is hers, and where Arthur — who has spent her whole life leaving — is the one who comes back. I will probably never publish that draft. But it exists.

Why Her

People sometimes ask why I picked Abigail over Arthur for the central thread of the trilogy. Arthur is the more recognizable archetype: the broken man with the holy gun, the burnout returning for one last hunt. He sells better in jacket copy.

I picked Abigail because the most interesting question in supernatural horror is not whether the broken man can win one more time. The most interesting question is what kind of person grows up next to the broken man and then has to decide what to do with everything he taught her, and everything he failed to. The Raven Saga is a story about a daughter inheriting a war she did not start, and choosing, in the end, to fight it on her own terms.

That is Abigail. That is why she generates the mail.

— Lincoln Cole