BEING LOST TO time had its perks. For the most part it sucked, but it definitely made far too many questionable, borderline illegal activities way easier to navigate.

She woke up every morning and was a ghost. She went to bed and the sheets felt like smoke. She wafted through hallways and spaces between the light, knowing all, sharing none. Having holes in your memory made you like this. You could sneak around your suburban town every day without rousing suspicion. You could read every book on magic ever invented and there was no fear of stumbling upon some vile truth about you in its pages. You could follow a group of kids for a solid year and none of them would ever look your way. You were a silent killer. A silent saviour.

Storm had been wiped from existence a very long time ago. She took advantage of her absence from the world's textbooks and relics to only make herself known in Arcadia Oaks, a place where she was very broody and very regular.

Jim Lake was not regular. At least, not anymore. Storm knew this. Storm also knew that she couldn't let Jim know she knew. His annoying little voice would ask question after question that she was too lazy to answer. She did not like answering questions. Or talking to people. Or one-on-one conversations in general. That's why she felt a guilty sort of joy at the chunk missing from her life. Her whole 'lost to time' thing was working out pretty well.

At least, it used to work pretty well.

Jim's presence in Arcadia shifted at the beginning of the school year. It was nothing special for her. This town was as boring as always and she would just handle this semester as she did the last one. (Very, very poorly.)

The first anomaly was in front of the navy lockers lining Arcadia Oaks High. It was a nice little high school, clean-cut and brimming with chatter. Storm constantly looked out of place there with dark eyeliner and rumpled clothes, marker scribbled over her forearms and stickers plastered to her jeans. She was leaning against her locker, scrolling on her phone, as boorish cheers came from beside her—her idiot boyfriend and his idiot friends.

"Hey, hey babe, watch this!" Steve waved his hand in front of her face with a spiteful, toothy grin. Honestly, she felt like his mother sometimes. He was always tugging on her hand or poking at her sides to get her to look at whatever thing he was doing that he had no interest in. Whenever she didn't pay attention to his little douchebag parties he got sad. Steve wasn't the same when he got sad.

She spared a glance at what they were doing to humour him, but it wasn't anything new. She could hear pitchy, familiar pleads coming from inside the locker Steve was holding shut. She sighed deeply, "Eli's in there again? Don't you ever get bored of that?"

"Hi, Storm!" Eli squeaked.

Steve banged on the locker door. "Don't talk to my girlfriend, dummy!"

Eli Pepperjack was the resident nerd, which meant he was Steve's resident punching bag. Steve usually picked Eli up by his scruff and threw him in a tiny locker for "fun." Thank the stars Eli was small. Poor guy was probably as flexible as her snake by now.

"Tell me again, dweebface," Steve drawled to the boy in the locker, knocking the door with his elbow. "Tell me about the creatures, and maybe I'll let you out!"

She rolled her eyes. No matter how much Steve pretended to pride himself in his meanness, Storm couldn't find it in her to care. Steve Palchuk was the smallest, most terrified person she'd ever met. He was less intimidating than a stick of chalk. There was nobody in the world who knew him better than she did—for better or for worse.

"Or you could . . . let him out right now. I mean, it would be nice."

Oh.

Something was wrong. Oh no.

She jolted up with wide eyes. A tug rippled through her stomach. Her skin prickled, grew cold, and she could feel all the bones inside her body. They were trying to pull out of her. Her heart was trying to crash through her ribs. It felt like a memory luring her in, drawing out her molecules, making her fingers twitch. Something was tugging at her every nerve like a magnet. The bindings of her blood were being called to. The one thing she had tying her together that few others had was magic. Old magic, new magic, energy cycled and repurposed thousands of times over.

There had always been magic in Arcadia, always people and places that made her head buzz and her body feel at home, but never enough to alert her like this. She felt the marks beneath her eyes burn scathingly under her concealment spell. Something is fucking wrong.

"What the fuck?" She rasped to herself. There was something near her she had to sink her hands into, if only to satisfy the blood pinching beneath her skin. The parts of her that had lived for centuries were desperate to return to something of their past. Whatever this feeling was, it was something she knew.

No, it wasn't Steve. Not his locker-nerd, either.

Her eyes caught onto a brown book-bag. The itching in her hummed pleasantly, and yanked harder. She could feel the age of the blood inside her. She could feel the history lost in it. There was something in that fucking bag.

"Nice would be minding your own business."

Steve's snarl, she realized, made the person with the book-bag rustle back. Her eyes travelled up the leather straps until she settled on a face. Then her eyebrows scrunched up because she just couldn't believe who it was.

Jim Lake Junior, one of her most forgettable classmates, was standing there. Dark hair, bright eyes, and perpetually cautious at all times. Literally the most boring face imaginable.

Why on God's green earth did Jim Lake have something that powerful? And why had he suddenly grown a pair and confronted the biggest bully Arcadia had to offer? Jim never threatened the natural order. Jim never did anything. Storm always forgot he existed. When Senõr Uhl was doing attendance the other day and called his name, she'd thought Jim was an exchange student and not someone who'd been here since freshman year.

But now with the strange fervour in his voice and whatever object he had, suddenly he was the most captivating, interesting person in the world. The magic wasn't inside Jim, like a wizard's magic, threaded through their blood. If it was she would have noticed a long time ago. It was separate from him. Attached to him, maybe, but not yet a part of him. This was not his magic. This was somebody else's. This was weathered, old, and had stood the test of time. There weren't many things you could stumble upon that shone that bright for that long. There weren't many things Storm found that jogged something in her memory.

Unless . . .

She eyed the bag, trying to see if there was anything important she could make out. Anything that glowed.

No. Dumbest idea ever.

Still, she couldn't help but wonder long after that moment if that fleeting thought had any weight—if the thing Jim might have had was what she thought it was, and more importantly . . . if it was something belonging to the life she'd lost.

And if she was wrong, what did Jim get his hands on? Was it dangerous? Did he know what it was, or where it came from? And if it was dangerous, and if he didn't know . . . Ugh, it would be her job to get it away from him. So much work. She hated caring about who she used to be. She hated caring about people not getting blown up. Fingers crossed it was just somebody's misplaced magic stone. Wizards had a thing for collecting weird stones.

Storm had read almost every book hidden in the nooks of her tiny apartment. Her guardian, Meg, had sealed them up in various ways, but Storm always managed to pry through the cracks. There were a fair share of things in those books a human could get their hands on if they were in the wrong place, but there was only one of them Storm kept wondering about.

She made the mistake of asking while scrubbing the dishes one night.

"Hey," she started, tucking her hair back over and over so she could still see the cheap hard plastic plates they used. The sink was trickling, not enough to shadow her voice and definitely not enough to clean the dishes. Her garden snake, Pickles, was draped across the back of her neck, face on one shoulder, and tail on the other. He was hissing in her ear whenever she pushed back her hair to cover him. "I have a question."

Meg was sitting at the table, separated from her ward by a divider jutting up from their kitchen island. There was a window cut out where the sink was, so Storm could see her drumming her cherry-red nails on the table, deftly avoiding eye contact.

Pickles was shooting daggers so intensely that Storm had to nudge his attention away before he started hissing, although she couldn't blame him. Meg was—to put it nicely—a raging cunt. With her perpetual scowl and cold face, she always looked disgusted and bored at the same time. It was a look Meg reserved tenfold for Storm, and it felt like a violation every time.

She had to burn holes in her dishes to gather up the words to ask, "What do you know about the current Trollhunter?"

There was no noise but the running of the sink. Regret pierced her chest. This was a bad, ultimately unhelpful idea.

"Why do you want to know?" Meg asked in a dry, scathing tone.

"No reason," Storm swallowed, scrubbing the dishes harder.

"Have you been reading my books again?"

The real answer was yes, but considering the amount of hatred Meg bared when Storm even looked at some of her old books was enough to warrant as many lies as needed. "No," she replied. "Just curious."

She could feel Meg glaring from here. "Well last I checked, he hasn't seen the light of day in a hundred years. In case you've forgotten, I don't concern myself with magical affairs anymore. I'm sure the Trollhunter is chumming it up somewhere with his thick-headed brethren far, far away from us."

Meg didn't sound too upset by this arrangement. It hadn't taken Storm long to figure out that Meg had a particular dislike for trolls when they first arrived to this world. She thought they were dumb, ugly brutes and nothing more. Of course she didn't pay attention to the Trollhunter. If it was up to her, there would probably be no Trollhunter at all. See? Bad, unhelpful idea.

Storm decided not to ask anything more, although she was sure Meg knew a lot more general information than she liked to admit. She was very devious and very smart, which could've been useful if she wasn't, you know, a raging cunt.

In some sort of miracle, the horrid, golden-haired she-devil added, "Heard the current one is named Kanjigar. Apparently he's one of the strongest they've ever had, done wonders for Trollkind," she snorted to herself a bit, "I wonder if he's still alive."

Storm furrowed her brows. Pickles made a noise that sounded like a cross between a hiss and a hum. "Yeah," she murmured, staring at her dishes. "Me too."

She'd gathered very little from this conversation. Her hunch was ridiculous and entirely impossible.

Unrelatedly, it just so happened to be right.

Strange things started happening at school and in Arcadia. Things she only noticed because her suspicious were already high, and she had a top-notch magic radar on par with Pickles' sense for mice. She swore she saw glimpses of little green monsters running across telephone lines as the sun set. A museum curator curiously avoided Storm's path an unusual amount whenever her class stopped by for a field trip. Pickles kept waking up in the middle of the night and hissing violently at her window. (That could just be mice, though.)

The most concerning of all was what she started to notice about Jim. His flaky attendance. Missing the Spanish exam and being attacked at the end of his presentation when he did it virtually. That one day where he was a total dick, disrupting the flow of every single thing at Arcadia Oaks high, with something that inexplicably looked like the Grit fucking Chaka around his neck. (And wait a minute, is that a Gaggletack?) Old troll relics were surfacing left right and centre; her history teacher disappeared; and soon Toby and Claire, Jim's only friends, were making her blood tug too. Something was definitely going on with Jim Lake, and Storm knew she had no choice but to understand what it was if she ever wanted to sleep again.

The answer presented itself during the great pixie outbreak of Arcadia Oaks High. Of course, nobody knew it was a pixie outbreak, but she did. She saw balls of light dart into people's ears and leave them in a waking nightmare. And to no surprise at all, Jim Lake was the only other person who seemed to be relatively unaffected.

When the whole school was underneath a mass delusion, Storm was peering into a dark hallway. Screams and babbles echoed behind her. She did her best to go along with the frenzy whenever someone was looking—screaming and waving her arms and stuff—but she'd been slinking after Jim this whole time, hiding in shadows and watching as he unraveled himself.

In this dark hallway stood Jim. She heard what he said to his friend Toby in Mr. Strickler's office before Toby was lost to the pixies. Angor Rot is in the school.

Angor Rot, the ancient, fearsome Trollhunter-killer, was in her school.

When his body made of dirt, bones, and bloodshed burst through the opposite end of the hallway, Storm knew she had gotten it right. Jim brandished an amulet and was wrapped in a suit of armour, and she will never bring this up again, but she nearly squealed. Fuck you, impossible hunch! She was right! Jim, a human, was the Trollhunter, and that damn amulet was what kept driving Storm crazy! Was she good or was she good?

There were two products of Storm's amazing detective skills. One: she was no longer curious about the things happening in Arcadia. She could know everything now. Two: knowing everything meant she could feel the amulet whenever it was nearby. And that meant she knew where Jim was. And, well, when you can't help following a human trollhunter and his friends around a town looming on disaster, there was bound to be trouble.

Trouble lead to interference.

It started as an instinct. The first time Storm accidentally saved Jim's life was that same day with the pixies. Angor Rot had Jim pinned to the wall, writhing and struggling as he stalked towards him. Jim was defenseless—he tried losing his armour to slip out of Angor's grasp, but it only made things worse.

"Poor Trollhunter," Angor snarled, voice thick and coarse with blood. It sent dread through every bit of Storm, almost paralyzing her. "I wonder what this school will become when they find your body here. A funeral home, perhaps?"

Just as Angor prepared to deal a finishing blow, a stack of books flew out of a locker and barraged him in the face.

He dropped Jim. He was able to regain his armour, but he looked perplexed as he stared around the deserted hallways, looking for where the books had come from.

She was long gone by then.

A one-time incident turned into a daily chore. Storm followed Jim around and whenever he or his friends needed a little help, she gave it. Lost your Warhammer? Perfect, look a little to your left. Your guidance counsellor is actually a Troll in human skin? No problem, give him some tips disguised as friendly conversation when you find him in the library! Need to buy some time to get into your teacher-changeling's office? Storm's got it covered with a flick of her wrist. Strickler was having bowel issues for days.

Storm Revette was the Trollhunter's secret saviour, tracking their every move and lending a hand from the shadows. It was never very noticeable with all the commotion surrounding them, but she never missed the looks Jim gave as he scanned the area after his enemy's punch missed him by a couple inches. The connection to magic and the thrill of adventure was enough to make her actually enjoy this pastime of hers.

It was an unfamiliar feeling, watching from the outside, but never actually being there yourself. A little lonely for some people, even. But she was only having a little fun. She had a hunch it would be over eventually.

That hunch was wrong. Guess you can't win all of them.

The tugs beneath her skin turned to yanks. The holes in her memory were burning into her eyes. The magic festered, grew stronger, and Storm could barely fight whatever was locked behind her ribs. Jim and his friends were tangled with powerful, ancient magic. A magic that was once close to the greatest wizard ever lived.

A magic that was once close to her.

So when Jim got an incurable disease and stopped showing up to school, Storm got that unbearable feeling in her gut. The books Meg had hidden away got far more important. The sky got a little bit darker with each cycle of the sun. She could feel the clock ticking beneath her feet, and she knew.

There was a Trollhunter in her midst. With him would come a reckoning. And it would only be so long before Storm was dragged into those old holes in her memory forever, like the rush of wind that led the storm.

A/N:
by the time you're reading this i'm probably resisting the urge to rewrite this entire prologue because i've already come to hate it. we'll see how long i last

also side note before chapter one—things in the narrative are going to change slightly as we go on because of storm's presence. i like fics where events don't happen the same way as they do in the canon because it shows how the character influences & changes the story around them so if u see anything a little different from the show dont question it!! anyways please don't ghostread vote and especially comment if you can, i'm dying out here

thank you for reading & chapter 1 is coming soon, see you then! :)
—perrie