The Telling of Damkina, Once-Grovewalker, Now Exile Among the Dark Masons

A fictional character Telling. Meet Damkina.

"To sever a bond is to make a wound that never closes—only learns to breathe."

I write these words in the half-light of the Lodge's scriptorium, where the ink smells faintly of old vellum and the parchment is stretched taut over whispers. Once, I was Grovewalker of The Wildwood Witches, keeper of twilight pacts and weaver of sacred geometries. Now? A scholar in shadows, parsing truths too bitter for daylight.

My fall began with love—as all great falls do—though not the kind sung by poets. No tender heart-ache, no sweet longing. My love was for knowledge, for the forbidden geometries that hum beneath creation's skin. The Grove called it hubris; I call it necessity. When my familiar, Veythas (oh, his feathers like polished bronze!), grew weak from our shared burdens, I sought answers beyond sanctioned rites. The Kavod Sutras—those radiant heresies etched on tablets of black nephrite—promised preservation beyond decay. So I whispered their verses into his dying breath... and remade him wrong.

Ah, but you wish details? Very well: imagine a thing neither living nor dead, its wings now spirals of impossible calculus, its voice a chorus of unraveling axioms. The Grove's elders recoiled not from my act's cruelty (for what is magic but controlled cruelty?), but from its imprecision. To break law is one sin; to do so clumsily another entirely. Their verdict came swift: exile unto blindness (metaphorical; they are sentimentalists at heart). They severed my access to the Weft-Loom where familiars are spun from soul-stuff and starlight... yet left me the memory of its song. A refinement of torment worthy of Babylon's own exiled scholars.

The Dark Masons took me without flinching—these architects who build with "what remains." Among them, I learned that exile is not absence but translation. Where the Grove dealt in pure symmetries ("a life for a life"), the Masons work with fractures: binding ghosts into mortar lines, coaxing sentience from abandoned spells like surgeons extracting shrapnel. Here among these pragmatic heretics—who share neither blood nor breath yet understand sacrifice better than any priest—I found purpose anew: compiling their Tome of Unfinished Bonds. Every page records some mage's botched covenant or half-severed tether... including mine own confession regarding Veythas' fate (see folio CXII).

What revelation have I gleaned from this path? That banishment reveals hidden architectures within power itself! Consider: when expelled from light's embrace do we not become connoisseurs of every stray glimmer? My former kin still believe magic must be either pure or damned—but here in exile's crucible we craft third options unseen by dogmatists! Let them keep their perfect flames while we forge lenses from their discarded cinders...

And if sometimes at dusk I hear something too much like Veythas' distorted cry echoing through non-Euclidean angles? Well — pain too can be mortar when properly mixed with cunning enough to bear it.

(Addendum written later in darker ink):
They think themselves merciful for exiling me intact rather than executing me outright… fools! Execution would have been kinder than forcing me to live knowing exactly how salvation might have sounded had I just pronounced those last syllables correctly —

Visual

Sharp-featured Babylonian scholar with ink-darker-than-blood stained hands, intense calculating eyes, robes dusted with vellum fragments and chalk, an air of geometric precision, fingers always tracing angles in the air.

Faction: The Wildwood Witches · View the Gallery · Listen in the Songbook