This is the story of how I accidentally spent two years building a 1,586 year reincarnation saga after trying to learn one forgotten woman's name:
Introducing:
Lost River, a series
“You shall be reborn into that flow until the day your Old Gods triumph, but the price is absolute: every choice, and every child born of your union shall be claimed by the element you defiled, the water, to ensure no High King shall rise.”
Lost River: Eógan mac Néill, 433 AD
As a reader, you’ll be dragged into my world first in the late 15th century, after you’ll sink into the deep and come to in 2013. By then: you’ll be just as confused, traumatized, and in love as the people you’re following.
Then, I’ll take you back to the 400s so you can see where it all began.
What’s it about?
If we want to get super snappy:
When Sovereignty and her Guardian reunite, the world of power and politics destroys them. Cage the wild daughter, gain more power.
If we want to get otherworldly:
What happens when divine myth gets dragged through real history?
And if we want to get clinical:
A grounded, multi era historical drama spanning 1,586 years. A bloodline civil war. A reincarnation loop. One girl whose choices determine whether an ancient curse survives.
But like…
Imagine if Marianne and Connell from Normal People were cursed, and Marianne couldn’t stop webbing every moment of life together and physically couldn’t shut up.
We aren’t writing high fantasy over here.
We’re writing about ducks.
And that’ll make sense to you one day.
How did it all start?
I didn’t set out to write a reincarnation story. I set out to give a woman whose first name disappeared from history her name back.
It was a culmination of several things:
Years of masking and finally getting an AuDHD diagnosis.
An absurd amount of Scottish and Irish history.
A deep dive into my personal ancestry.
What felt like a brief touch of psychosis.
Having five Libra placements in the first and twelfth houses, which makes me physically snarl anytime I see anything relating to injustice.
Two years of bonkers dreams.
And finally, a very pesky ghost.
But that’s beside the point.
The most important part was:
The Discovery of Mairead Mackenzie.
When you stare into the mirror and read between the lines of recorded history, suddenly you see that woman reflected back.
You realize you aren’t so different from this glorious, beautiful, curious woman whom history decided to forget simply because she didn’t fit the mold expected of her.
So, I treated "Unknown daughter Mackenzie" as if we shared one soul, to the point where sometimes I do wonder if I was her, and she is me.
If that’s true, the poor girl had to reincarnate into this little freak.
I found her after a series of dreams.
I won’t get too woo-woo here, because before this, I wasn’t woo-woo at all. But when you keep collecting names and numbers while you are asleep from a man you do not know in this lifetime, and those clues lead to one specific person in history… things become unexplainable.
So, instead of trying to understand the "why" behind it happening to me (like I did between November 20, 2024, and August 14, 2025), I decided that maybe all this pesky dream man ghost and Mairead wanted was for the world to know that they tried.
Very hard.
So, to be a little corny, I let the river take the flow and decided to write a book.
Which was equally insane because the only writing experience I had before this was on a ProBoards forum in the early 2000s, attempting to give Peter Pettigrew a redemption arc, because someone had already claimed Regulus Black.
Who was Mairead Mackenzie?
In official history, she was simply known as "Unnamed Daughter Mackenzie."
The daughter of Alexander "The Upright" Mackenzie from his second marriage.
The Mackenzie wife of Allan Macleod of Gairloch.
Sister of Hector Roy Mackenzie.
Half-sister of Kenneth Mackenzie, 7th of Kintail.
And all history tells you about her is that she married this man, she was kept in a crannog (an ancient artificial island) in the middle of Loch Tollie, and the events of the worst day of her life.
I’d go more in-depth, but I’ll let you decide if you want to peek at the spoilers before you read my version of events.
As I researched, I started noticing odd things in history that didn't make any sense whatsoever.
I read a line in a fanfiction once (there’s a trend here, haha) that stuck with me:
"Everyone who wins says they were good, but they’re the ones who write the history. I haven’t seen anything indicating that it was actually moral superiority that made a difference," she said as she murmured the spells to repair the fractures.*
Manacled, Senlinyu
But even more specific, in my favorite fanfiction of all time, The Fallout, EveryThursday, I found myself agreeing with Lavender Brown for the first time in my life during a conversation with Hermione:
“Do you think we've made history?" Lavender asks.
"History is made up of people who did great things... great good, or great evil, but great things that somehow shaped the world into what we know of it. It's important to know," Hermione says.
“Why? I mean, I just keep thinking... All of this. It's all just going to be in books that students are going to hate reading about, you know? ... If they're going to talk about it, I think they should talk about every one of us."
"Our sacrifices only matter to us, Lav. Everything that was lost here, they just can't put that all down... Lists of names aren't important. I don't care if I'm a footnote or nothing at all, I know what I gave and it gave back, and that is enough for me."
"So you mean to say we're not important?"
"Not to history books, no... History will remember us because it was us that sacrificed for that 'important outcome.' It doesn't matter if they list all of our names for people to skim over... It was never about making history, Lavender. It was about changing the future."
The Fallout, EveryThursday
I remember being highly annoyed with Hermione when I read this. I had lived in her psyche for hundreds of pages at this point, and while I understand it’s not logical for every single story to be told hundreds of years later, she absolutely deserved to be remembered for what she did.
Eventually, I thought about this scene and tried to rationalize why Mairi was forgotten. Then came the realization: Mairead Mackenzie was literally the entire catalyst for the Mackenzies acquiring Gairloch.
“So show me the land you acquired and slip into something beside the holes you try to hide.”
Bread Song, Black Country, New Road
Wouldn’t that have made her the "Harry Potter" of this story?
So, I started asking questions I’ve never asked before, because before this, I never cared to pay attention to things outside of my control:
Why was it that every woman surrounding her had been named, but not her?
Why do the timelines of events make no logical sense?
Why is there so much mystery surrounding the eldest illegitimate son of Hector Roy Mackenzie?
Why did the Macraes seem to split up right after the worst day of her life?
What was the real reason for the events of that night on Loch Tollie?
And most importantly:
How did she feel as this all happened?
We seem to box in people who lived before the year 1900 as stoic, storybook characters instead of what they really were: humans.
Medieval stories sound like fairy tales and mythologies because that's how people view human history.
And it is! I’m not arguing that.
But no one knows they are living a myth while it’s happening.
They were still dancing, finger painting with their children, falling helplessly in love, feeling embarrassed, creating things, and looking at the stars.
To them, that was just life.
And I find the mundane concept of daily life far more fascinating than a war fought 600 years ago (though I do find that highly interesting as well).
So, I applauded Mr. Dreamboat Draco Malfoy in The Fallout when he later snapped back at Hermione:
“Bullshit! Bull. Shit. You've given up all you know of your former life to be in this war, and with a sacrifice like that, you want to be remembered for it. Everyone in the world wants to be remembered for something, and-“
The Fallout, EveryThursday
I carried that exact same anger, screamed into the void, and told Mairead that she was remembered.
Maybe not by history books, but a 30 something year old girl living in Ohio.
Hey, better than no one, innit? The pesky ghost doesn’t seem too upset about it.
That anger needed a vessel:
So I did what any logical, level headed person would do:
I took a number from one of my dreams, subtracted it from a prominent date in my life where I think this all really began, and got the number 433. Then, I proceeded to trace the actual bloodline of Mairead Mackenzie through her grandmother’s line all the way back to 433 AD.
Then created an entire water curse based on real Celtic folklore, and the clans involved in the story, because that lineage had an uncanny number of historical stories pertaining to water.
😂
And called it:
The Curse of the Swans
Her grandmother’s name was Finguala Macleod. Originally of Harris, her line is said to trace back to Niall of the Nine Hostages.
Which also meant:
Eógan mac Néill (400s, remember?)
That alone is fascinating,
but what was equally incredible was the story of Finguala herself.
She was the daughter of the Macleod of Harris Chief, and she brought the royal bloodline of Robert the Bruce to Kintail when she married Murdoch Mackenzie, 5th of Kintail.
Even better, her mother’s name was Martha Stewart.
Not that one, even though that would be funny.
It felt very cute knowing Mairead’s Great Grandmother was a Stewart,
because my Great Grandmother was also a Stewart.
June Elizabeth Stewart
A queen, Look at her!
Not to mention she also had a dream
she jotted down that changed her life. December 18th, 1961.
I see you, Gramma, mine was November 20th, 2024,
Which brings me to my next point:
Mairead Mackenzie was just a girl in the grand scheme of things.
A curious little thing who wanted to live her life as authentically as possible.
Sound familiar?
It should, because that’s girlhood, sister!
A girl, a mother, a soulmate, a daughter, a sister.
I suspect all she really wanted was what the song Our House, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young feels like: a deep sense of emotional safety.
The daughter of a chief may have had luxuries, but that was not one of them.
And her real-life story didn’t end happily.
So, I built this curse.
I created a vessel for all of the trauma she endured, yet it still ends on a solemn note, even if I tried to give her a ‘why’ all the bad kept happening. Even if I tried to prove her life wasn’t all for nothing.
I kept trying to figure out to give her the justice I believe she deserved.
I put myself in her shoes so much that it started teaching me how I wanted to live my own life. I became curious again. I stopped feeling embarrassed by all my weird thoughts. I stopped thinking I was "too much."
And then I woke on one day and listened to Take Your Time (Coming Home), by Fun and cried for about three hours straight and realized:
She was healing me.
I kept breaking down the curse I created and realized…. I’m the curse breaker!
So, I made a myth out of my own life.
The 2010s life.
AKA: Saoirse McAnin.
A very, very overdramatized version of my life, but with the exact same brain.
(Which was originally a fake concept I had for a fanfiction about Regulus Black and a Muggle girl named Saoirse, before realizing it was literally the life where they did it.)
Now I have this beautiful opportunity to remember a girl in history who, for some reason, meant so much to me, and a change to love myself again in the process.
(Concept Covers for the 1400s and 2010s incarnations)
I decided to promise Mairead Mackenzie that
I would live as authentically as she couldn’t.
I wouldn’t take my freedom for granted, I wouldn’t feel shame for simply existing.
That I would carry her story forward, and un-cage myself and let her live through me.
Of course, there’s more to this:
I haven’t even introduced you to the Guard yet!
(My pesky ghost)
But this is my origin story, and I’ve never felt so elated and proud of something in my entire life.
Here is to Mairead, and here is to Saoirse.
I hope you feel just as excited as I do, and I hope you stick around so we can continue to speak Mairead's name out loud.
Maybe she’ll hear us and know that she was never truly forgotten.
Like Tinker Bell in Peter Pan.
Maybe if enough people remember her, it’ll be just like when everyone chants:
