The Telling of Theodora Kharis, Who Walked Away from the Grove

A fictional character Telling. Meet Theodora Kharis.

Listen, then, close—for I speak in the hush between breaths, where the weight of what is lost presses heaviest.

I was once Grovewalker of The Wildwood Witches, a tender of the sick and dying. My hands knew the pulse of fevered flesh; my voice carried the old Byzantine prayers over wounds that would not close. We were healers there, yes, but also binders—those who stitched life to life through sacred pacts and potent brews. Our familiars walked beside us like votive flames: bright, brief, destined for silence.

Mine was a fox with eyes like pooled ink. We named each other in whispers—Kyrillos, after the saint who bore light into dark places. He curled against my ribs at night, his breath syncing with mine until I could no longer tell whose lungs labored harder when the sickness came. That is how it begins: you share breath. Then blood. Then soul. And when one falters… ah, but you know this pain already if you have ever loved something meant to die before you did.

The Grove taught us that all magic is borrowed time—a ledger balanced in scorch marks and scars. But I... I grew greedy with mercy. When Kyrillos began to fade (as all familiars must), I reached beyond our sanctioned arts into older rites—ones murmured in my grandmother's tongue as she anointed icons with oil and grief. Christos Anesti, we say even now when hope seems corpse-cold: Christ is risen. What if death were not an end but a door?

They called it apostasy when I lit forbidden incense over Kyrillos's body, chanting psalms spliced with Grove incantations. The Elders watched as my fox shuddered awake—not whole, not healed, but here, his fur edged in ghost-light. A violation of nature's debt," they said."You would make wraiths of us all." Exile was swift as a scalpel's cut.

For months I wandered Constantinople's shadowed corners (though men now call it Istanbul; names too are mortal). The city remembers its dead better than most: mosaics peer down from domes like unblinking eyes; stray cats slink past churches turned museums turned mosques turned voids where faith lingers as perfume does in emptied bottles.

It was near Chora—that wounded jewel of a church with its frescoes half-scraped away—that they found me: The Dark Masons Lodge members clad in workman's dust yet moving like penitents through candle-smoke air.

"Come," said their leader (her gloves stained not just with mortar but something darker). "We build tombs here… and sometimes doors."

Here among these stone-weavers who understand binding differently than The Grove ever did—their magic lives within walls instead veins or vows or vanishing foxes —I learn anew what it means to be broken open:

Exile is both wound and womb.
To be cast out is also to be free enough
to kneel before fresh ruins
and whisper:
Let there be light.

And if sometimes at dusk,
when Kyrillos's phantom weight settles again on my lap,
his spectral muzzle warm against my palm...
Well—
even resurrection leaves scars.
And aren't we all patched together
from shards of what once was whole?

So ends this Telling.
But not the story.
Never the story.

(Would you stay awhile? There are still so many ways to grieve aloud.)

Visual

Byzantine Greek woman with healer's hands steeped in myrrh, warm olive skin, dark eyes edged with grief, layered robes beneath a physician's apron, faint ghost-light fox shape occasionally visible at her side.

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