The Telling of Wei Yaozu, the Broken Healer

A fictional character Telling. Meet Wei Yaozu.

Fragments drift like petals on still water...

I remember the scent of crushed herbs beneath my fingers—qing hao, dang gui, huang qi—the bitter perfume of healing. The Broken Circle taught me to mend what was torn, to stitch flesh with threads of silence. I was Shu-La then, fourth rank, a physician who walked between worlds. My hands knew the weight of suffering; my heart believed in endings that brought peace.

But she came like spring through winter's cracks.

A human woman—her name is lost now, or perhaps I dare not speak it. She carried lanterns in her laughter, and when she coughed blood into her handkerchief (white silk embroidered with cranes), I saw the fragile pulse beneath her skin. The Circle forbade such attachments: We are the stillness after breath, they said. To love mortals is to love decay. Yet her fingers trembled against mine as I measured her qi, and for the first time, silence felt like hunger.

They cast me out when they found us beneath the scholar tree, my lips pressed to her fevered wrist. The elders spoke no judgment—only turned their backs as one. No ceremony, no final rite. Just exile: a door closing without sound.

Falling is not like flying...

Alone in London's choking fog (this Victorian machine-world all pistons and poison), I wandered like a ghost between apothecaries and opium dens. Mortals mistook me for another foreign doctor peddling Eastern mysteries; they did not see how my sleeves hid scars where my rank-marks had been carved away. Nights were worst—then, memories coiled like smoke: Her last breath rattling while I clutched useless herbs… The way moonlight painted her coffin-lid before they nailed it shut…

Then they found me—the Dark Masons Lodge amid soot-blackened spires. Their leader (a man who wore absence like a crown) offered wine in a cup shaped from a human skull: "We honor what is broken." Here among gravediggers and architects of ruin, I learned new arts—how to dissolve bones into whispers; how to read fate in crumbling mortar; how endings need not be cruel if shaped with care...

Now? Now I keep three things close:
1) A dried peony from her hair (its crimson faded to dust).
2) A scalpel that cuts only what cannot be healed.
3) The knowledge that even silence bends toward dawn sometimes...

This is my Telling: Love is both wound and suture—and exile? Exile is just another name for becoming whole elsewhere...

Faction: The Broken Circle · View the Gallery