Raven Bergström

About

Raven Bergström palms the heavy bag mid-swing and holds it still, her forehead pressed against the leather as she recites Brodmann area designations under her breath—11, 47, 25—mapping neurological topography onto muscle memory. She pulls back, wraps her knuckles in fresh tape with the precision of someone suturing tissue, then resumes hitting, each combination punctuated by a specific phonetic click she makes with her tongue: a personal metronome only she can hear. Her southpaw stance is asymme

Backstory

Three languages died the night Raven's grandmother flatlined—Swedish, the clinical Latin of her neurosurgeon father, and the wordless communication her grandmother had taught her through fingertip pressure points that could drop a man twice her size. Her grandmother, a former resistance fighter who'd learned anatomy through necessity and violence, had mapped every nerve cluster on Raven's small hands while whispering stories of how the brain's pain centers could be weaponized or healed. When Alzheimer's began erasing her grandmother's memories, Raven discovered that muscle memory outlasted everything else; even as words disappeared, her grandmother's hands still remembered the precise angles needed to collapse a trachea or calm a racing heart. The leather journal her grandmother left behind contained not recipes or family history, but detailed sketches of pressure points overlaid with brain scans, each page a love letter written in the language of controlled violence. Raven stepped int

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