SIGNED POE Prophecies: The Raven (Book 1)

What if reading a poem could save someone’s life? What if a short story could predict a natural disaster? Words have power, and when you string them to-gether the right way, you can glimpse the future.
Yes, you.
If you’re reading this, it means you’re a reader, which means you’ve got a shot at being noticed by the academy, too.
My name’s Aidan Grey. That’s Grey with an ‘e.’ Got that? I’m a twelve-year-old first-year student at P.O.E. Academy, an exclusive school formed by a group of scholars known as the Prophets of Erudition.
And I may be one of those prophets someday.
If I make the cut.
My best friend and I have been studying the works of Edgar Allan Poe—The Prophet himself—since we could read, and now, we finally get to put our obses-sion with gothic lit to good use. The semester started a few months ago, but I’m already knee-deep in Year 2 material, thanks to my cousin, Bertrand Orion. He’s a Year 3 student who gives me his old textbooks.
I am determined to make the Advanced Prophets (AP) courses offered in Year 4. Early raven gets the worm, right? Who cares if the academy says we’re not allowed to study ahead? I’m not waiting until I’m old and gray to practice saving the world.
In fact, I often sneaked away during lunch to prac-tice incantations—that’s what we call the process of “conjuring” or “manifesting” a prophetic vision.
To work properly, an incantation requires a mir-ror and three carefully selected words or phrases. In the ragged clearing behind the school auditorium, surrounded by prickly brush, adding a mirror would be risky, so I practiced without one.
I held out my journal, analyzing lines I had copied from one of next year’s textbooks. Then I knelt down near a withered oak to trace a triangle into the dirt. I came to my feet and stared at the drawing, my fingertip brushing across a specific phrase in my journal.
“One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it.”
The word “vulture” and the line “pale blue eye” stood out; there had to be a correlation. I was very close to uncovering the full incantation, and I could feel it in my bones.
Or was it pale vulture eye? The Prophet was tricky like that.
I crouched and sloppily sketched the glyph for bird at the lower left of the triangle, struggling to recall the full image in my mind’s eye. My etching of glyphs needed improvement, but it would do for a trial run.
I traced an eye, one of the easiest glyphs to re-member, into the dirt at the bottom right point, and then held my chin between my thumb and index finger as I analyzed the layout. My gaze bounced between the ground and my open journal as I compared my notes.
Almost there.
A pale vulture? Too abstract. Maybe I was reading between the lines, but I had a hunch that I was onto something. Surely the incessant heartbeat was signifi-cant, too. It was The Tell-Tale Heart, after all. But how did it all fit together?
The Prophet was a master of cryptography. Some say he invented it! Edgar Allan Poe worked extensively with hidden messages and scrambled codes, and his contributions helped shape modern ciphers.
It was only my first year at the academy; it would probably take more than a few highlighted words and a single lunch break to crack this one.
“What are you up to?” Bertrand asked, peeking over my shoulder.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. My journal clapped closed and I kicked loose dirt over my etchings. “Nothing,” I replied, veering toward my nosy, overbear-ing cousin. Although I was grateful for his textbooks, I didn’t like the way he tried to keep tabs on me.
Bertrand narrowed his eyes and peered down at the ground. “Always hiding something,” he added with a shake of his head. “You shouldn’t be practic-ing that, and definitely not here.”
I shoved my journal into my leather satchel and dusted off my hands. “I wasn’t—”
“Save it for the headmaster. I’m not the one who’s going to expel you.”
“I won’t get expelled,” I replied, crossing my arms. “Not unless someone reports me.”
The unfortunate truth about my live-in cousin is that he’s a jerk. His textbook-donating niceties don’t make up for his bad attitude.
Everyone tolerates him because he has a messed-up back story. He lost both parents in an accident when he was little and, since he had nowhere to go, my parents adopted him.
“You’re going to get caught,” he added.
“I’m only starting a little early.”
“AP doesn’t allow study prep until your fourth year,” Bertrand said and then scoffed. “You’d think with all the studying you’re doing, you’d know that.”
I was painfully aware. The headmaster insisted our curriculum remain introductory until we were older. They claimed it had something to do with our “physiological” capabilities, and that prophets who start the craft too young are susceptible to some sort of damage. We’d never seen proof, though. It was my belief that they wanted to control us while we were young enough to be afraid of mysterious “consequences.”
“I’ll be fine,” I replied. “At least I’m trying.”
“You’re a terrible liar, too,” he said, dragging his shoe across the place I had scratched symbols on the ground to further distort the evidence. “If you’re going to do things you shouldn’t—in broad daylight, no less—at least get better at lying about it.”
I clenched a fist. “Why do you care what I do? You don’t even want to be here.”
“True, but I’m also trying to save your butt. Your parents expect us both to do well here. For me, this is only an obstacle. I stomach what they teach, get good grades, and eventually, I’ll graduate with a nice piece of paper saying I’m better than a lot of people.” He looked me in the eye with a stern gaze. “Don’t make this more of an inconvenience than it already is.”
I took a deep breath and gathered my thoughts before saying something I’d regret. He was close-minded, but maybe I could change that. “I think the school is hiding stuff from us,” I said, hoping to pique his interest. “All these rules don’t sit right with me. There’s got to be a bigger picture we’re not being shown.”
“Oh, there is a bigger picture,” Bertrand replied confidently. “One they don’t want us to see because it would crush their entire organization.” He moved closer and looked down at me judgmentally. “Do you want to know the truth?”
No.
I shook my head. I knew exactly where this was going.
“Poe didn’t know anything,” he blurted, scowling.
I wished I could close my ears.
“He wasn’t a messiah; he was a bad poet who wrote stories that turned out to be coincidences.”
“Now who’s going to get expelled?” I hissed. “You can’t go around talking like that. Not on academy grounds.”
“I’m serious,” he continued, prodding me in the chest. The disdain in his voice made my stomach churn. “You ever wonder why the guy was an alco-holic? Haven’t you ever questioned why, if he was so good at predicting the future, he didn’t know he’d die of an overdose? Did it ever occur to you that maybe he got fed up with his own lies and—”
I shoved him hard. “Stop it!” Bertrand stumbled back but didn’t lose his footing.
My cousin may have been a blood relative, but with slurs like that coming out of his mouth, I wanted to disown him. Why hadn’t he dropped out of school? My parents probably wouldn’t have cared if he chose another profession. Then again, he was a different per-son at home. Mom and Dad didn’t know him like I did.
His words made me angry.
No one knew the true cause of Edgar Allan Poe’s death, and it wasn’t right for Bertrand to accuse him of something so… so terrible. A group called the Disbelievers—people who protest everything our academy stands for—started the rumor that it was drugs of some kind, but I refused to believe it.
Why would The Prophet do that? It didn’t add up. The school had skirted around the subject altogether and simply said he had passed away from “unknown causes.” I’ve always wanted to know the truth. Not only for myself, but to prove Bertrand and the Disbelievers wrong.
“What are you boys doing back there?” a gruff voice sounded from close by.
It was one of the groundskeepers—an old, gray-haired man named Charles. He wore red and black flannel over dark jeans and always carried a rusty shovel, for reasons I never understood.
“I heard a scuffle,” he said, cocking an eyebrow at Bertrand. “You gettin’ into some trouble?”
“No, sir,” Bertrand replied with his classic fake smile.
Charles walked past us and stared intently to-ward the dirt near the base of the tree.
I held my breath.