The Telling of Ilmuth, Who Drank from Forbidden Wells

A fictional character Telling. Meet Ilmuth.

I remember the waters—dark, heavy with the weight of first thoughts. The Abzu, where we were shaped from silt and silence. I was a priest then, though "priest" is too small a word for what I was. Keeper of thresholds. Singer beneath the waves. My voice curled in the deep like ink in water, shaping prayers that had no names yet.

But memory fractures now. It comes in shards:

—The scent of bitumen and crushed figs drifting through Babylon's ruins as Roman sandals scuff the dust where our ziggurats once stood.
—Her hands, calloused from weaving but warm as sunlight on clay tablets left to dry. A mortal's hands.
—The Circle's verdict: You have swallowed daylight and found it sweeter than the depths.

They cast me out for loving her. Not for the act itself—desire is our birthright; we who rose from primordial hunger—but because I let it change me. Mortal love is a slow erosion, a river eating at stone until you wake one morning and your edges are softer than they should be. The Broken Circle cannot abide softness.

I wandered then, a ghost in two worlds: too divine to die like men do, too human now to return to the Abzu's cold embrace. Rome sprawled around me like a beast panting in the heat, its temples full of foreign gods who did not know my name. I whispered to Tiber's muddy currents, but they answered only with echoes of laughter from Ostia's docks.

Then—the Lodge found me.

Dark Masons understand exile differently than others might think they would... They build not just with stone but with absence; their arches thrive on what has been removed rather than what remains solidly present within them... And so when they took me into their company (a sculptor missing his chisel? An architect without foundation?), it wasn't pity that moved them but recognition: here was another whose shape had been carved by loss...

Here among these builders-of-voids I learned new languages: how grief can be mortar if mixed properly; how longing makes finer scaffolding than certainty ever could... They gave me tools not made for hands—chisels that cut time instead marble; levels balanced on missing angles rather than true lines...

And yet sometimes still when rain falls certain way onto cobblestones or when smoke curls upward from some midnight brazier exactly as incense once did back home before empire came knocking at our gates —

I hear her singing.

Not really singing obviously she has been dead centuries now dust even her bones are probably scattered somewhere beneath vineyards or market squares but nevertheless there it is unmistakable threading through night air thinner than spider silk more persistent than temple bells—

That sound undoes all my careful masonry every single time...

What does this mean? Only perhaps that exile isn't simply being cast out from one place into another… It is becoming bridge yourself between those places neither wholly here nor there but stretched across both aching beautiful impossible —

Like trying hold dawn inside cupped palms knowing full well light cannot be kept only witnessed briefly before slipping away again…

So let me tell you truth learned since leaving Abzu behind:

There are deeper waters than those which birthed us.

They exist inside moments when memory overlaps present like shadows crossing at noon sharp sudden undeniable…

She taught me this though she never meant to do so…

And if given choice between returning whole unto Circle unchanged or staying here broken radiant human-touched thing?

I would choose fracture every time…

Visual

Gaunt figure with waterlogged grey-blue skin, hollow dark eyes weeping salt, lank black hair matted with river silt, draped in decayed Babylonian priest robes, bare feet, fingers permanently stained with bitumen and ink.

Faction: The Broken Circle · View the Gallery