Dear readers,

After years of writing nonfiction, essays, and truths that have lived in my bones, I’m stepping into something new—and long overdue.

I’m thrilled (and terrified) to announce the release of my very first fiction book: Firstborn Prophecy.

This is a story that’s lived in the shadows of my mind for years. A strange, spiritual suspense set in the isolated town of Rocky, where obedience is salvation, questions are dangerous, and secrets are buried—literally.

Starting this week, I’ll be releasing Firstborn Prophecy as a serialized novel right here on Substack. New chapters will drop weekly. You’ll meet Lucy Everly, a girl born beneath a spiraling storm, branded by something older than scripture, and hunted by a church that claims to love her.

It’s haunting. It’s intimate. It’s unsettling in ways I didn’t expect even as I wrote it.

But mostly—it’s the story that demanded to be told.

For those of you who’ve been with me through essays and reflections, thank you. This fiction debut is a leap, and I’m honored to have you with me.

Scroll down to read the full prologue, and welcome to the beginning.

The Spiral always calls its own.

See you in Rocky.

— LaDonna Humphrey

Introduction: From the Cold Orange Pews to the Page

I was born and raised in Rocky, Oklahoma—population barely enough to fill a grocery store. But the real gravity of my childhood wasn’t the town itself. It was the church.

I grew up in the Church of the Firstborn, a fundamentalist sect rooted in rural tradition, spiritual control, and deeply ingrained fear. For those unfamiliar, the Church of the Firstborn isn’t fictional. It exists. And for decades, it has quietly shaped—and shattered—the lives of the people who’ve passed through its doors.

In our church, we didn’t have Sunday school or children’s programs. We sat in silence— sometimes for what seemed like hours. Testimonies were shouted. Sins were whispered. Women wore long skirts and longer silences. Illness was a test of faith. Medicine was a lack of it. Questions were dangerous. And obedience was everything.

Those cold orange pews were more than uncomfortable. They were my introduction to the idea that the world might be smaller than I hoped… and that my voice, my autonomy, and even my body might not belong fully to me.

But imagination has always been a refuge.

I started dreaming up this story as a teenager, sitting in those pews, trying to escape the weight of judgment and the silence that followed it. While elders preached fire and submission, I imagined a girl with a strange mark on her wrist and a secret too big for the sanctuary to contain. I imagined monsters hidden beneath the floorboards and girls disappearing without a trace. I imagined a place like Rocky—only darker, twisted just slightly past reality.

Years passed. I left the church. Left the town. But I couldn’t leave the story.

What began as an escape slowly transformed into something else: a reckoning.

Firstborn Prophecy is not a memoir. But it is a truth.

It’s fiction rooted in the very real trauma of growing up in a high-control religious environment. It’s a love letter to the ones who made it out—and a ghost story for those who didn’t. It’s about power, silence, complicity, and the fragile, defiant act of asking questions in a world that punishes curiosity.

This book has been in my bones for decades.

Now I’m ready to share it.

So here we are. Chapter by chapter, week by week, I’ll be releasing Firstborn Prophecy right here, serialized on Substack. I hope you’ll join me on this journey—not just through fiction, but through the echoes of a world that still haunts so many.

And to the little girl who used to stare at the sanctuary floor and wonder what was buried underneath—

This is for you.

PROLOGUE

THE SPIRAL’S FIRST BREATH

—As recorded by memory, dream, and those who survived.

The storm rolled into Rocky the night Lucinda Everly was born—not with thunder, not with hail, but with a low, humming pressure that flattened the wheat fields and made the bones of the earth vibrate like a tuning fork. The sky turned the color of iron. Cattle lowed with urgency and pressed themselves against rusted fence rails, hooves scraping earth like they were trying to dig down, down, away from what was rising.

It wasn’t a normal storm. Nothing in Rocky ever was.

Inside the farmhouse on the outskirts of town, oil lanterns flickered though the windows were shut and the air stood still. The shadows on the walls no longer matched the furniture that cast them. The child’s father stood white-knuckled in the kitchen doorway, reciting half-remembered Psalms. Her mother, Linda Everly, screamed in the upstairs bedroom—raw, frantic, soaked in sweat and prophecy. The scent of copper already saturated the air.

Carolyn Diffendaffer, Rocky’s oldest midwife, stood at the foot of the bed with trembling hands. She had delivered dozens of children over four decades—sometimes in barns, sometimes in bathtubs—but never had she feared a birth. Until now.

“She’s comin’ too fast,” Carolyn whispered, wiping her palms on an apron already stained with worry. “This ain’t natural.”

Linda’s voice cracked. “Help her. Please—she’s my baby.”

Carolyn nodded, but her eyes strayed toward the window, where something tall and still waited beyond the glass—something not quite man-shaped, not quite anything at all. The shadows shifted when she blinked. Closer. Watching.

And then the air changed. The light bent sideways, as if gravity had faltered. The wooden floor began to tremble—not shake, not rattle, but vibrate, in a way that made her joints ache and her teeth buzz. A low frequency swelled inside the walls. The lantern flame blew sharply to the side.

And then the baby came.

Not with a cry. Not with the red-faced wail of life’s first inhale. She came silent. Still. Eyes wide open.

The skin on her wrist smoked. Then split. Then glowed —a spiral— burning upward through the flesh like it had always been there, waiting beneath the skin.

Carolyn recoiled in horror and nearly dropped her. “Lord have mercy.”

Linda reached out, weak and wide-eyed. “Let me see her.”

Carolyn hesitated. The mark on the baby’s wrist now pulsed with faint, cold light. The shadows outside pressed closer. The house exhaled.

“She’s fine,” Carolyn lied, and handed the child over.

She was not fine. She was chosen.

“She didn’t cry,” Linda whispered, frightened.

“She don’t need to,” Carolyn murmured. “She’s already heard everything.”

The baby blinked up at her mother with eyes far too ancient for a newborn—quiet, discerning, like they were already parsing scripture and lies.

The glow faded. The house went still. And all the lanterns went out.

When they flared back to life, everything seemed normal again—except the spiral burned into the baby’s wrist. Raw. Real. Impossible.

Carolyn wrapped the infant tightly and leaned close. “Listen to me. Hide that mark. Never let anyone see it. Especially the Elders.”

Linda held her daughter tighter. “Why?”

Carolyn’s voice shook. “Because I’ve seen that symbol once before. Thirteen years ago. The night Sarah Dove died.”

“You said she drowned.”

“I lied. They said it was an accident. But it wasn’t.”

“Then what was it?”

Carolyn’s voice became a whisper beneath thunder. “It was a sacrifice.”

A knock fell against the front door. Slow. Deliberate. Like a signal.

Carolyn’s face went pale.

“They’re here,” she said. “They felt her arrive.”

“What do I do?”

“Call her Lucinda. Keep her out of sight. And God help you—don’t ever let them see the Spiral.”

Linda clutched her child. “Where are you going?”

Carolyn didn’t answer. She only grabbed her bag, blew out the lanterns, and fled through the back door into the storm.

Behind her, the silhouettes of Elders crossed the porch.

The baby cried for the first time. And the Spiral on her wrist pulsed once—a slow, cold throb—like prophecy awakening beneath her skin.

THE CHURCH BEFORE ROCKY

Historical Annotation: Compiled from collected testimonies, unsealed ledgers, and buried records.

Before Rocky had a name, the Church already had a creed.

It began in the early 20th century as a wandering sect, calling themselves The Order of Seven Fires. Its leaders believed the world was a battleground between two unseen forces—one rooted in heaven, the other buried deep in the veins of the earth. They preached purity. Sacrifice. Obedience above instinct. And they always settled in rural places. Isolated places. Places no one would look too hard.

The first disappearances happened in Oklahoma. Then Arkansas. Then Missouri. In each town, the story was the same: a prophet appeared, declared a vision, converted a few dozen desperate souls, and then vanished—taking several young girls with them. No graves were found. No charges filed. No bodies returned.

In 1932, they found the land that would become Rocky—a strange tract of fertile prairie in Oklahoma where the wind always whistled wrong and the ground sometimes hummed at night. It was purchased through a shell organization and consecrated in blood by three men and one teenage girl. That girl, they said, had “opened the gate.”

From that moment forward, Rocky was never a town. It was a design. A vessel.

The Church renamed itself The Fellowship of Seven Fires and built the sanctuary at the center of the land. Every building was positioned in precise coordinates around it, forming a geometric pattern only visible from above. A symbol buried in soil and brick.

They said it was sacred. They said the pattern kept it asleep.

It was never named aloud.

THE ELDER’S LEDGER

Excerpt from the private journal of Elder Nathaniel Hawthorne.

We felt the Spiral stir long before the midwife called us.

The air turned bitter. The cows stopped lowing. The trees bent, but no wind blew. We knew what it meant. The prophecy had begun its final turn. The Seventh Cycle was here.

The Firstborn had arrived.

We followed the scream to the Everly house. Oil lamps swayed against windless walls. The house thrummed beneath our boots.

We brought the blessed oil. The bone charm. The cloth for binding.

But we were too late.

Carolyn Diffendaffer had fled. She knew what the mark meant. She’d seen it once before and lacked the spine to act.

We found the infant glowing in the cradle. The Spiral burned on her wrist.

But not our Spiral. Not the one forged in iron and tradition. This one came from beneath.

The mother screamed when we reached for the child. And the house fought back. I swear this on the altar: We were flung backwards by something unseen. The door slammed shut behind us. The oil shattered.

We tried again. The house would not yield.

Brother Hale wanted to set the place alight. Elder Hester—bless her foresight—said no.

“Let her grow,” she said. “Let her believe she is ordinary. Let her ripen under our eye. When the time comes, she will walk into the fire willingly.”

We listened. We watched.

We whispered into her dreams when she was six. We planted symbols in her textbooks when she was eleven. We made her curious. We made her lonely. We shaped her.

She will return to us. The Spiral always calls its own.

And when the door beneath Rocky finally opens—

Her blood will be the key.

THE WHISPERED PROPHECY

Before the first stone was laid,
Before the first covenant was spoken,
Before Rocky had a name,
The earth marked its chosen.

One born under the Spiral.
One whose blood is a gate.
One who will open the door between worlds.
One who will either save us… or end us.

The Firstborn does not walk by chance.
The Firstborn is carried by fate.