(The air grows heavy with the scent of smoldering cedar and bitter myrrh. A figure emerges from shadow, their form shimmering like heat haze over desert sands. When they speak, their voice carries the weight of kiln-fired clay tablets and the rasp of a whetstone on bronze.)

A fictional character Telling. Meet Kutha-Nin.

I am Kutha-Nin, who was once called Kutha-of-the-Twin-Roots in the days when my shadow fell upon the sun-baked ziggurats of The Wildwood Witches. Hear now the confession carved upon the walls of my spirit, for I have known the last tremor of a bonded thing returning to the earth.

They say we Grovewalkers understood the deep places better than any other caste. We who knelt in the sanctum with our hands in the soil as our familiars drew their final breaths—not in battle, but in deliberate ceremony. My lion, Anzu, with a mane like red clay and eyes that held the memory of tectonic patience... I cradled her as she gave up her ka for my power. That is our way: to trade one life for deeper communion with the living earth. Her last tremor became the tremor in my hands that could shape stone and clay into solid form.

Yet it was this very intimacy with the ground that undid me.

When High Priestess Nungal demanded we break open a newborn salt-flat—a formation still singing its first crystalline song to the moon—I saw not power waiting to be claimed, but a landscape unlived. Where my brethren saw raw material for the great ritual, I saw earth that should not be broken for the Grove's gain.

I chose preservation over extraction.

They named it betrayal. Called it weakness of spirit. But what is weaker—honouring the ground or devouring it? They cast me out from the date-grove sanctuaries where I had learned to read destiny in the patterns of settling dust. Exile is not merely banishment from place; it is the unmaking of one's name. My footsteps were scrubbed from hot sandstone as if I had never walked there. My voice was struck from all hymns.

For three turns of Ishtar's star I wandered through London's gaslit fog—a Mesopotamian ghost haunting cobblestone rivers instead of Tigris mudflats. Victorian gentlemen tipped their hats at my priestess markings without understanding they greeted a walking ruin. I pressed my palms to Thames embankments and felt the ancient riverbed groaning beneath centuries of brick.

The Dark Masons found me tracing cuneiform wards in clay pressed into a Southwark wall. They did not offer pity—they offered recognition. "We know what it is," their Lodge Master said, "to be shattered and remade into something stronger." Among these stonemasons of arcane geometry, I found others who understood the weight of foundation. We are architects of what remains after ruin.

Now I dwell where chisels ring against granite instead of temple bells. My new familiar is a scarab forged from river clay and regret—it needs no breath to live, only the slow settling of its own mineral patience. Sometimes at midnight, when fog swallows the city whole, I climb to rooftops and press my palms to chimney brick, reading the geological memory trapped in mortar. The Masons think I seek new spells amidst the stone.

But truth runs deeper: I am waiting for The Wildwood Witches to feel the ground shift beneath them.

Not for forgiveness—for reckoning.

My reckoning will not come as quake or landslide, but as revelation. They believe the earth exists only to be shaped? I will show them a third way: ground so sure of itself it needs no hand to mould it. An earth that remembers rather than obeys.

Let this be etched upon your heart: sometimes exile is not an ending but a settling. They cast me out thinking they had severed me from the deep places forever.
They did not understand—
Some roots grow strongest in exile.
Ashur-etil-ilani...
My name may be forgotten in The Wildwood Witches,
Mât Akkadî...
But soon all shall feel
Kakkabu râšubtu...
The tremor rising beneath their feet.
The bedrock remembers

Visual

Broad-shouldered Mesopotamian woman dusted in red clay, priestess markings visible on dark skin, heavy practical clothes layered for Victorian London's cold, hands cracked like dry earth, a small clay scarab at her belt.

Faction: The Wildwood Witches · View the Gallery