She knows before she’s ten that she’s going to die. The adults around her talk about numbers and statistics, they call her hesitation ‘caution’, they make plans over her head, but she knows it deeper than numbers, deeper than language, deeper than thought.

She will not reach her eighteenth birthday. The Scholomance is her best chance (say the adults) but her death waits for her in there, patient, certain. She wouldn’t live long outside the Scholomance either, of course, but at least when she dies inside it, no one who loves her will be able to say “if only we’d done more.” When she dies inside it, they can console themselves with their numbers.

And she will die inside the Scholomance. When she’s presented with her spot, she spends a long, sleepless night trying to bring her death to herself. Let someone else, someone with a real chance, take her place. She can’t do it. She’s meant to walk forward knowing it’s to her death, not to know which step will be her last.

So she walks forward. Maybe, maybe maybe maybe, she’s meant to do something important before she dies. There’s no way but through.