The Telling of Kiya, Who Once Brewed for the Grove

A fictional character Telling. Meet Kiya.

The Telling of Kiya, Who Once Brewed for the Grove

Listen, then, to my lament—written in tincture and whispered through the hollows of smokestacks. I was an apothecary of essences, a brewer who distilled the dying breaths of familiars into potions upon papyrus-lined shelves before The Wildwood Witches cast me out like dregs from a flask.

In those days, when the world still knew me as She Who Distilled the Dying Breath, I walked beneath the boughs of ancient oak and cypress, where every leaf dripped with condensation from the Grove's sacred mists. The Grove taught us that magic is not kindled but extracted—distilled from things already spending their last. We were apothecaries of endings. When a familiar's breath faltered—a fox-spirit wheezing its last or an ibis-shadow dissolving into vapour—we pressed close to capture its final sigh in glass. That breath became essence; that essence became our most potent brews.

But I was greedy.

I broke my oath when I took two breaths instead of one—when the jackal-familiar Ankhu lay gasping at my feet, his golden eyes dimming like guttering lamps. He had been mine for three monsoons, his voice curling in my ear like incense smoke: "You are too hungry for this world." And oh, how right he was! When his ribs shuddered their last expansion, I did not merely collect his exhalation—I swallowed it whole, then bent to steal another before his body could cool. The second draught scorched my throat raw with power... and betrayal.

The Grove does not forgive thieves of death's due. They stripped me of my title (Grovewalker No More), branded my palms with unspooling hieroglyphs so all would know me oathbreaker, and cast me beyond the Grove's edge into the choking embrace of factories and iron skies.

Exile is not emptiness—it is fullness turned rancid. Everywhere I looked: steel pistons thrusting like profane obelisks; men shouting over machines that knew no sacred silence; children with soot-streaked faces who had never seen a familiar die beautifully. This new age devours mystery whole and shits out efficiency! Yet even here... even here...

The Dark Masons found me writhing in an alley behind a textile mill, drunk on stolen gin and weeping poison onto wet cobblestones (for exile had made me careless with forbidden compounds). Their Lodge is built upon older bones than this clanking epoch—they carve sigils into sewer walls and chant hymns to forgotten gods while steam hammers pound above them. They welcomed me not as penitent but as prodigal: "All oaths break eventually," they murmured through grinning teeth masked in boilerplate brass. "Come dance in the ruins."

And dance I do! For if The Wildwood Witches taught restraint—to take only what death freely gives—then The Dark Masons revel in gluttony's gospel: seize what you crave before the cauldron goes cold! Now I brew elixirs in factory basements from ingredients no pharmacist would stock; now I coax dying machinery to cough up ghostly vapours that I bottle into temporary familiars (oh how they scream when they dissolve!). My new brothers/sisters/others gift me vials of mercury to drink until my veins shimmer liquid silver; we revel amidst half-built automatons still slick with oil; we laugh ourselves sick watching priests clutch pearls as smokestacks belch obscene geometries across god-bothering spires!

Yet sometimes... sometimes when chemical fog settles thick as funeral linens over midnight streets... I hear Ankhu's voice whispering through cracks in pavement: "You miss being needed instead of feared." And he is right again (curse him). The Lodge asks no oaths because it believes in none—but ah! What wretched freedom this is! To brew without purpose? To distil without gratitude? Even now part of me longs for grove-shadows where someone might have mourned when Kiya finally drains dry...

But mourning requires love.
And love requires trust.
And trust?

Trust requires keeping promises.

So let this be my Telling's bitter draught: Exile does not teach you who you are—it reveals who you always were beneath vows and virtue.
I am hunger wearing woman-flesh.
I am appetite unchecked.
I am glorious damnation incarnate.

(And if you listen closely... you can hear Ankhu laughing.)

Visual

Egyptian woman with branded hieroglyphic palms, golden-dark skin, wild kohl-smudged eyes bright with hunger, robes reeking of chemical compounds and stolen gin, mercury-shimmer visible beneath the veins of her wrists.

Faction: The Wildwood Witches · View the Gallery