You want to hear it? Fine. But I don't tell it pretty.

A fictional character Telling. Meet Ostanna.

I was born in a place with no name you'd know. High up. Carpathian ridgeline, where the trees leaned away from the wind like they'd been slapped. My grandmother ran the hearth — not a title, just a fact. She was the one who kept the fire, read the bones, told the village which calves to slaughter and which daughters to marry off and which paths to avoid after dark. Every village like ours had one. A woman with a skull on her shelf and ash under her nails and answers that came from somewhere older than asking.

I was her shadow. I ground the bones. I swept the circle. I learned the names of things that had died before they were born, and things that had been born but refused to die. I learned that a bird skull held between your palms at midnight will whisper the name of the next person in the village to stop breathing — if you listen with your teeth and not your ears.

I was thirteen when the sukhota came.

It wasn't plague. Plague has a logic — it spreads through touch, through breath, through the water you share. This had no logic. It drained the ground. The well went to chalk overnight. The soil crumbled like old bread. Trees dropped their leaves in June and stood bare and white as bone against a sky that had forgotten how to rain.

The animals died first. Then the old. Then everyone between.

My grandmother saw it coming three days before the rest. She read the bones — a crow's wing, a fox's jaw, the vertebrae of something she wouldn't name — and when she looked up her face was the colour of tallow.

She took me by the wrist. Hard. Pulled me across the yard to the root cellar and pushed me down the steps. Put the bird skull in my hand — the one she'd carried since before I was born, the one with the crack running through the left orbit like a river on a map.

"Count the bones, girl," she said. "Name every death above you. Do not open the door until you have finished."

She closed the door. I heard the bolt slide.

I sat in the dark with the skull between my palms and I began to count.

It took three days. I know because I counted the silences between the sounds above me. At first there were voices — shouting, praying, the wet coughing that came when the blight reached the lungs. Then there were fewer voices. Then footsteps. Then nothing.

The skull whispered the names to me one by one, the way my grandmother had taught: not through the ears but through the jaw, through the teeth, through the bones of my own hands pressed against its temples. Each name arrived like a pebble dropped into still water — a ripple of knowing that settled into certainty.

Mykola. Hanna. Dmytro. Oksana. Taras. Yaryna.

Forty-seven names. I know them all. I will always know them all.

When I opened the door the village was grey. Not burned — emptied. The colour had gone out of everything like ink washed from cloth. The earth was powder. The houses stood but the wood was dry as paper. My grandmother was sitting upright in her chair by the dead hearth with her hands folded and her eyes open and her skin the colour of the ash she had spent her life reading.

I closed her eyes. I took her hat. I took the skull.

I stayed.

Three years I lived in the dead village. I ate what the forest offered — roots, mushrooms, the occasional rabbit that strayed too close to my snares. The crows came first. They brought me things: a mouse skull, a sparrow's wishbone, the tiny knuckle of something I couldn't identify. Offerings. Payment. They wanted me to read for them, and I did, because reading is what I was made to do and the dead village had no one left to read for.

I cut my arm for each reading. One line per truth spoken. My grandmother did the same — her arms were latticed with scars so old they'd gone silver. "A truth that costs nothing is worth nothing," she used to say. "Blood remembers what words forget."

The scars don't heal clean. I don't let them. Each one is a name, a death, a truth pulled from bone and paid for in blood. My arms are a ledger. I can run my fingers over them in the dark and tell you who died and how and whether they were ready.

The Grove found me on a Tuesday. I remember because I was reading a fox skull and the reading was interrupted by footsteps — real ones, not the phantom treads of the dead who still walked the village paths at dusk.

Two women. One carried fire in a jar. The other carried nothing but looked like she didn't need to.

"You're the bone-reader," the one with the fire said. Not a question.

"I'm the last one," I said. "Of everything."

They looked at each other the way people do when they've found what they were looking for and aren't sure they like it. Then the one without the jar sat down on the dead earth across from me and said:

"We have a Lodge that collects last things. Would you like to stop being alone?"

I looked at the skull in my hands. I looked at the village — grey and silent and patient as a grave. I looked at my arms, scored with forty-seven truths and counting.

"I'll bring the hat," I said.

The Wildwood Witches took me in as Cinderwitch. Not a promotion — a recognition. I had already done the work. I had already sat in the dark and counted the dead and come out the other side with ash in my hair and bone-dust in my lungs and a skull that whispered names I hadn't asked for.

They wanted me to read for them. I do. But I read on my terms.

Here is the rule: you bring me a bone. Any bone. Bird, beast, human — it doesn't matter. The dead speak the same language regardless of what carried them while they lived. I hold it. I cut. I listen. And then I tell you what the bone knows.

Sometimes it's a name. Sometimes it's a warning. Sometimes it's just silence, which is its own kind of answer.

I don't read futures. Futures are for people who still believe they can change things. I read deaths. I read the moment when something stopped, and I name it, and I make sure it is not forgotten. That is all bone-reading is — the refusal to let the dead go unnamed.

My grandmother understood this. She taught me that the hearth is not the fire — it is the memory of fire. The place where warmth once was, and the knowledge that it mattered.

I am the last hearth. I carry every death I've ever read scored into my skin, and when I am gone, the tradition goes with me.

But not yet.

I still have bones to read, and truths to pay for, and a hat that smells of my grandmother's hair, and a skull with a crack like a river through its left eye that still whispers names if I hold it close enough.

The dead are patient. They will wait for me.

But the living — the living come to my door and ask their questions and leave their bones and I cut and I listen and I tell them what I hear. And if they don't like the answer, I remind them:

A truth that costs nothing is worth nothing.

This one cost blood.

Yours can too.

Faction: The Wildwood Witches · View the Gallery