SERIES: The Shadowroot Triology | No. 05

SUBJECT: The hallway was dark, except for the thin amber line.

Date: June 11, 2026

Tuesday came in the same way it always did — grey at the edges, the sky over Alexandria the particular washed-out blue of old linen.

She took the Blue Line in with her earbuds in, Crime Junkie still queued from last night, Ashley Flowers’ voice moving through a different case now, something out of rural Georgia, something with a paper trail and a resolution. Nettie listened and watched the tunnel dark and did not think about Monday.

She got off at Smithsonian and crossed the Mall in the early morning quiet, when the tourists hadn’t arrived yet and the grass was still wet and the city felt briefly like something that could be navigated without cost. The elm was where he always was anchoring his corner with the authority of something that had been there long before the park existed and would be there long after.

She pressed her palm flat against the bark and stood very still and waited for the hum.

It came. Slower than usual. A different register — not wrong exactly, but altered, the way a familiar voice sounds on a bad phone connection. Still recognizable. Still itself.

She stood there until her breathing evened out.

The Metro, said the part of her brain that had been running the incident on a background loop since last night, quiet and persistent as a cooling fan. The voice under the voice. The corner in the kitchen. The —

She filed it.

The bark was rough and cool under her palm. She counted her breaths the way her therapist had taught her — four in, hold four, out four — until the loop quieted to a manageable frequency.

Print-through, she thought. Eye strain. You haven’t been sleeping well since the monograph.

She took the long way to the employee entrance.

Work was fine.

This was what she told herself on the Blue Line, and again in the elevator, and again as she swiped her badge and hearing the magnetic lock click open like a welcome. Work was fine, work was the deep archive–boxed, catalogued, ordered, the world reduced to finding aids and provenance records and the clean clinical language of condition reports. She was good at this. She was, by any measurable standard, excellent at this.

She did not open the Bracken County ledger.

She worked around it with the practiced efficiency of someone who had spent years navigating her own interior architecture–moving through the intake queue, processing three other acquisitions, updating the metadata on a collection of field recordings from the West Virginia highlands, 1952, a woman’s voice singing something about a river that had no name in the margin notes.

At three-fifteen she stood and stretched and walked the long way to the water fountain.

At four-thirty she wrote herself a note for tomorrow: Bracken County ledger–intake incomplete. Resume.*

She looked at the note for a moment. In four years she had never left an intake incomplete.

She put her coat on and went home.

Tuesday evening was almost fine.

She made supper–eggs, toast, the particular domestic simplicity of a meal that required almost no decisions. Whiskula supervised from the counter with the critical attention of an inspector who had concerns but was willing to withhold his formal report. She ate at the small table by the window with a book open beside her plate, a collection of Appalachian folk narratives she’d read twice before, familiar enough to be soothing.

The tea ritual. The amber lamp. Whiskula arranging himself across her feet with his customary authority.

She was in bed by ten, which was early for her. She lay in the dark and listened to the city outside and felt, with some surprise, that the house was holding her safe. The deadbolt was thrown. The kettle was clean and dry on its base.

She slept.

At three in the morning she woke to nothing–no sound, no dream she could name, just the sudden absolute certainty of being awake in the dark.

She lay still for a moment, cataloguing. The room was the right temperature. The lamp was off. Whiskula was not in bed, which meant he’d relocated sometime in the night. He did this regularly and she noted it to be normal.

Thirsty, she got up and padded toward the kitchen, socks whispering against the floor. The hallway was dark except for the thin amber line under the bathroom door where she left the nightlight on.

She almost stepped on Count Whiskula. He was sitting in the hallway just outside the kitchen doorway, perfectly upright, the way cats sit when they were doing something that was not sleeping and not playing and not waiting for food. Both eyes open. Completely still. His gaze directed into the kitchen with the focused, unblinking attention of a creature tracking something that had not moved in a long time and might not move for longer.

Nettie stopped behind him and looked into the kitchen. He was look at that same damned corner. The far edge where the hallway lamp didn’t reach, Whisky didn’t look away.

She stood in her socks for what she estimated was two full minutes, which was long enough to establish that nothing was going to happen, that the corner was a corner, that the cat was a cat with his own internal weather systems and motivations she’d never fully mapped.

She went around him carefully. Filled her glass in the sink. Drank it standing up, her back to the corner before putting the cup in the sink and walked back down the dark hallway to her bed.

She lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and did not sleep again until the sky outside had started its slow grey conversion to morning.

Wednesday she opened the ledger.

She had to. The incomplete note was sitting on her keyboard when she arrived, her own handwriting looking back at her with the mild reproach of a task deferred. She made her tea from the break room–not her tea, the archive’s communal box of something inoffensive and forgettable–and sat down opening the ledger.

The elderberry smell hit first.

She breathed through it. Set her hands flat on the desk, not touching the ledger, and looked at the open page.

The dried leaf between pages forty-two and forty-three was still there, still blackened, still skeletal. The dark residue she’d swabbed on Monday had dried to a thin brownish crust at the stem. Normal. Explicable. Dead organic matter in a century-old document, nothing she hadn’t handled a hundred times before.

She looked at it for a long time.

The sketch of the woman whose hair was braided into the elder roots stared back from the facing page. The cramped, vibrating handwriting. The town of Augusta is a palimpsest.

In the margin, below the line she’d already read, there was something she had not seen on Monday.

She leaned in.

Four words, written in a different hand than the rest — lighter, faster, as if added in haste or in the dark. The ink was a different color, more brown than black, older or younger than the surrounding text, she couldn’t tell which without the spectrometer and she was not going to request the spectrometer.

She’s already looking back.

Nettie sat very still.

Her training said: document it. Photograph the page. Note the condition, the ink variation, the possibility of a second contributor to the manuscript. Create a record.

She closed the ledger.

She sat for another minute with her hands in her lap, her tea cooling beside her, the archive’s climate control humming its steady institutional hum.

Then she filed the intake as complete, which was not accurate, and she did not examine why she did it, and at two-thirty and went home hours early for the second day running.

Penny, passing in the hallway with a stack of finding aids, raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Just watched Nettie go with the particular expression of someone filing a concern for later.

The tea ritual. The bedroom, the soft drawer, the cuntasaurus hoodie. Whiskula appearing from the sunroom and winding around her ankles with his usual evening commentary.

She fed him. Put the kettle on. Stood at the counter and watched the window go dark as the evening came in off the Potomac, the city lights beginning their slow assertion over the dusk.

Her phone rang.

She looked at the screen.

Sarah.

She picked up on the second ring.

“Hey.” Her own voice surprised her — steady, normal, the voice of a person who took phone calls.

“Nettie.” Sarah’s voice was flat in the specific way of someone who had been holding something for long enough that the muscles had gone numb. Not cold. Just — used up. “Mom and Dad are gone. Car accident. Last night on 9.”

The kettle began to build toward its whistle.

“Okay,” Nettie said.

She heard Sarah breathe.

“The funeral home needs someone to come in. I can’t — “ A pause. The sound of Sarah stopping herself from saying something. “I need you to come home.”

“When do they need someone there.”

“Friday at the latest.”

“Okay,” Nettie said again. “I’ll arrange the leave tomorrow morning.”

Another pause. Shorter.

“Okay,” Sarah said. And then, quieter, in a register Nettie hadn’t heard from her in a long time — since they were small, since before the creek, since before everything calcified into its current shape: “Nettie.”

“I know,” Nettie said. She confirmed with Sarah she would leave in the morning and hung up the phone.

The kettle screamed.

She took it off the heat. Stood in the kitchen in her socks while the steam dispersed and the apartment settled back into its ordinary sounds.

Then she set her mug on the counter, went to the table, opened her laptop, and created a new document.

Things to arrange, she typed at the top.

And began her list.

Whiskula jumped onto the table beside her and sat with his back to the screen, facing the room. His tail moved once, slowly, and then went still.

The amber lamp burned.

Outside, the city continued its indifferent noise.

In the corner of the kitchen, the dark held its shape and did not move and did not need to.

Read the introduction to Lunathir’s Heir here:

The Myth of Lunathir

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DATE: June 11, 2026

Subject: Warning. The Tree Line, North Pasture.

Compiled by: Johann Hargate, paternal great-ancestor

Context: Single board, white oak, approximately fourteen inches by eight. Painted in lamp black. Surface shows multiple layers of overpainting consistent with annual retouching across several decades. Nail holes at each upper corner. Recovered from the northern fence line of the Hargate land grant, Bracken County, Kentucky.

Condition: Sound. The board outlasted the fence.

To my children and to their children and to whoever comes after that and works this land.

There is a place at the north end of the pasture where two pines stand close together. You will know them. They are older than the other trees and they do not move the same way in wind.

Do not walk between them.

I did this. I did not know. I was following the tree line to check the fence and I walked between the two pines because it was the short way and I was tired. I thought I was gone five minutes. Your mother says I was gone from before the noon meal until the fire needed building for the evening. She was in the yard calling my name for most of it. I did not hear her.

I cannot tell you what happened in that time. This is not because I will not. It is because the words I have are not the right words and I have looked for better ones and I cannot find them. I have asked the minister. He gave me scripture. It did not fit the shape of the thing.

I came back. I want you to know that coming back cost me something. I do not know what it was. I do not know if I will ever find out.

The pines are still there. Do not go between them for any reason. Not to check the fence. Not on a dare. Not because you are curious. Curiosity is a good quality in a man and it will kill you here.

Go around.

Mind the pines.

— J. Hargate

[NETTIE’S MARGINALIA — RESEARCH NOTES]

White oak. Lamp black paint in layers — you can see where the brushstrokes from different years don’t quite align. He came back to this board every year until he died. Not to replace it. To renew it. To stand at the north fence line of his own land and paint over the warning he’d already written as if the act of writing it once hadn’t been enough.

I don’t think it was grief exactly. I think it was the only way he could keep saying the thing he couldn’t say any other way.

He writes that coming back cost him something he couldn’t name or locate. The archive has taught me to read that kind of absence carefully. A man who cannot identify what was taken from him is a man who lost something that didn’t have a name to begin with.

The rings are a formal system. A toll with a known collector. What Johann found was something else entirely — a door that doesn’t know you’re there. That doesn’t care what it takes because taking isn’t the point.

The Hargate land grant puts that north pasture somewhere along the ridge above the old creek bed in Bracken County. I have been to that ridge. I was nine years old and my father told me to go around the top of the tree line and I did and I didn’t ask why.

The board outlasted the fence. Someone kept it.

Someone always kept it.

Read the introduction to Lunathir’s Heir here:

The Myth of Lunathir

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SERIES: The Shadowroot Triology | No. 04

SUBJECT: What the Water Remembers

DATE: June 11, 2026

The Blue Line ran underground for most of it.

That was the part Nettie had learned to manage. The dark came in pieces–tunnel, station, tunnel–and she had built a careful ritual around the intervals: earbuds in before the doors closed, podcast already queued, volume at exactly sixty-two percent. Loud enough to fill the car. Quiet enough that she could still hear her own breathing and confirm it was happening.

Crime Junkie. Ashley Flowers, tonight. The case of Heather Teague–a Kentucky woman, a river beach, an August afternoon in 1995 that ended in broad daylight in front of witnesses and still had no resolution thirty years on. Nettie had listened to this episode twice before. That was the point. She knew the shape of it. She knew exactly where the evidence thinned, where the investigations stalled, where Ashley’s voice went carefully and measured around the parts that had no answers yet.

That was what she loved about true crime. Every story had a shape. A beginning, a catastrophe, a resolution with footnotes. The world did not explain itself cleanly, but these cases tried. These cases left paper trails.

She boarded at Capitol South and found a seat against the window.

Outside: the platform. The yellow caution strip. A woman in scrubs scrolling her phone. Ordinary as breathing.

The doors closed.

The train moved.

“-witnesses on the beach reported seeing a large man in the tree line before Heather disappeared–”

Nettie watched the platform slide away and felt her shoulders drop a half inch. The Elderberry smudge on her hand had faded to a ghost of itself, a bruise-colored shadow in the crease of her palm. She’d scrubbed it in the archive bathroom with the pink industrial soap that smelled like nothing. It hadn’t moved.

She turned her hand over. Pressed it flat against the bag.

“-and what’s haunting about this case is how close it was to being witnessed–”

She closed her eyes.

The tunnel took the light.

“-how many people were right there on that beach, and still–”

The voice changed.

Not much. Not in any way she could have described to a doctor, or Penny, or anyone with the power to admit her somewhere clean and fluorescent and safe. Ashley’s cadence didn’t shift. The words kept coming. But underneath them there was another register beneath the static on the cylinder in the archives. Low. Patient. Old in the way limestone was old, the way the dark beneath the stars was old.

Nettie

One word. Maybe not even a word. Maybe a sound the human ear had no business catching.

She opened her eyes.

Her reflection stared back from the black window.

The car behind her reflected: a woman in scrubs, two teenagers, a man with a briefcase balanced on his knees. She catalogued them automatically, the way she catalogued everything–condition, context, provenance. All accounted for. All ordinary.

Except.

In the glass, just beyond the line of her own shoulder, something moved that was not any of them. Not a figure. Not a face. A reaching–the way the shadows reach in her dreams. The way the grove had turned toward her with that low, geologic hunger–a slow deliberate extension of dark toward the warm animal of her body.

Her hand clenched around her bag strap.

Her face did not move.

This was the part no one understood about her panic attacks. They looked still. They looked like a woman on a train, tired, holding her bag, watching the dark between stations. They looked like nothing at all because the emergency was entirely interior, entirely submerged, and the water was already at her chin.

She pulled the earbud out. Put it back in.

Print-through, she thought. Auditory pareidolia. You’re tired. You processed a volatile specimen today and your nervous system is dysregulated. This is a known symptom of a known condition with a known name.

She knew the name. She had known it since she was twenty-three and a campus counselor had said it carefully, like she might startle. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Nettie had gone home and read every clinical paper available on the subject and then filed the diagnosis where she filed everything that was true but unmanageable: the deep archive. Catalogued. Boxed. Noted as anomalous during processing.

The train shuddered. Another tunnel.

The dark thickened against the window glass.

And the reaching came again–and this time it came with a smell. Not the recycled train-car air, not the industrial soap, not even the ghost of the blackberry. Something colder. Something that smelled of creek water in October. Of wet limestone. Of her father’s hands on her shoulders, the grip that said you are not going to run from this girl.

She was eight years old.

She was standing in the shallows of Bracken Creek and the water was not cold yet but it would be, and she had told him. She had finally–after years of her mother’s palm connecting with the soft of her cheek, hush, Nettie, don’t you say that, don’t you say that to anyone–she had told him what she saw. Because he had asked her directly, in the way of his that left no exits, and she had been constitutionally unable to lie to a direct question.

There are small ones in the thin places, she had said. They’ve been here as long as the limestone. I think they know my name.

The creek.

The grip.

His voice, stripped of everything soft: We are going to wash this out of you, Annette. We are going to cleanse what the Devil put behind your eyes.

She had gone under.

She hated water.

There was no physical reason for the hatred, yet she carried a towel into every shower, refusing to let her face stay wet for more than a heartbeat. Swimming was a nightmare. Baths happened only when necessary, and she never waded farther that her knees in the ocean. The water didn’t call to her–it screamed. Each silent scream a siren’s warning. What if she suffocated? She wondered how deep the depths truly went. If she dove under, would she ever breathe again?

She was on the Metro.

She was on the Metro and her breathing was happening and her hands were in her lap and she looked–she knew she looked–like a tired woman going home.

The reaching in the window had stilled.

Or it had moved somewhere she could not see it.

She pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her opposite finger. Not hard. Just enough to feel the boundary of her own skin–the thin, mappable edge of where she ended and everything else began. A trick her therapist had taught her. Something to carry back the signal between the body and the mind when the line went down.

You are here. The floor is under your feet. The seat is under your back. Name five things: Bag strap. Earbud cord. The briefcase man’s burgundy tie. The hum of the rails. The specific, worn nap of the Metro seat fabric under her left thigh.

Five.

She breathed.

She had been looking for something. That was the thing she had been turning over all day, even before the cylinder, even before the monograph bled its dark fruit onto her swab. She processed Bracken County material the way she processed all her regional collections—meticulous, lateral, tracking provenance gaps, noting the places where the official record thinned to nothing. That was the job.

But that’s not why.

She had been looking for a reason. Not for the small ones specifically–she had no filing term for them, no finding aid entry, no controlled vocabulary that covered entities visible only during high emotional distress, apparently specific to one bloodline, present since early childhood. She had been looking, since she was old enough to understand that answers lived on paper, for evidence that the Caelthorne family was not simply mad–that the visions and sensitivity and the way thin places felt to her like pressure changes before a storm were not a malfunction but a pattern. Something documentable. Something with provenance.

Something she could hold up to the light and say: here. Here is where it starts. Here is the record.

Unclear origin, she thought. Date undetermined. Item noted as anomalous during processing.

The train announced Crystal City.

Nettie stood. Held the pole. Let the doors open.

She walked up the escalator into the cool of the evening and stood very still on the sidewalk with her eyes closed, feeling the ground under her feet, the open sky above her lit at its edges with the last of the day. The city noise settled around her like something familiar. Something with edges.

Count Whiskula. The specific, deliberate thought of him–his weight, his warmth, the motorboat rumble of his purring against her sternum, the way he tucked his nose under her chin without being asked. The way he never required anything of her except proximity.

She started walking.

Behind her, in the dark mouth of the Metro entrance, something that was not a shadow and not the wind made the smallest possible sound.

Like a name.

Like her name.

She didn’t turn around.

In her left ear, Ashley Flowers’ voice continued on without her, steady and unhurried, carrying the Heather Teague case into the evening air: “–almost thirty years have passed, and her family still doesn’t have answers. But the passage of time hasn’t impacted Sarah’s drive to find out what happened to her daughter.”

The key was on the hook before she’d finished exhaling.

She stood in the entryway for a moment with her eyes closed, one hand still on the door. The rental smelled like herself—old paperbacks and the particular green damp of the sunroom, something faintly herbaceous she’d never been able to name exactly, just hers. The sound of the city fell away behind the deadbolt.

She padded to the bedroom without turning on the overhead light. She never turned on the overhead light. The lamp on the nightstand threw a warm amber pool across the quilt, enough to navigate by, enough to make the room feel like the inside of something living rather than a box with furniture in it.

Work came off in layers.

The dress first, then the tights peeled off and dropped in the hamper with the particular satisfaction of a thing returning to its proper place. She pulled open the second drawer–the soft drawer, Penny called it once, laughing, you have a soft drawer, Nettie, that is the most you thing I have every seen–and extracted boxer briefs, the oversized t-shirt that had lost its shape two years ago and was perfect because of it, and the hoodie. Faded olive green. A small, indignant dinosaur on the chest, tiny arms raised in fury, block letters beneath it reading CUNTASAURUS.

She zipped it to her chin.

Socks last. Always socks.

She felt her shoulders drop a full inch. The Archive Armor was in the hamper. What was left was just Nettie–softer, quieter, still a little waterlogged from the Metro, but present in her own skin in a way she’d been working toward since Capitol South.

The house held her back. That was the right word for it. Not contained–held. Every wall had something on it she had chosen deliberately: the botanical print above the bookcase, the small oil painting of the Ohio River at dusk she’d found at an estate sale in Augusta the last time she’d gone back, the shelf of ceramic animals her grandmother had pressed into her hands one by one over the years, these are yours, Nettie-bird, these were always going to be yours. Books on every available horizontal surface, organized in a system only she fully understood. The lamp in the corner with the amber shade. Another in the kitchen, low and warm.

No overhead lights. Ever.

From the sunroom came the sound of something shifting–the papery rustle of a large plant being navigated around, the soft thump of a substantial cat rearranging his considerable self.

She went to find him.

He was already in the kitchen by the time she got there, seated squarely in the center of the floor with the patient, faintly reproachable expression of a creature who had been waiting a reasonable amount of time and wished this noted. Count Whiskula. Eleven pounds of grey tabby with a notched left ear and the self-possession of something that had made its decisions long before she arrived and simply required her to catch up.

She crouched down and pressed her face against the top of his head.

He permitted this.

The purring started slow, then built—the motorboat of rumble of it moving through her cheekbone, into her jaw, safe. She stayed there longer than was strictly necessary. He stayed still and let her.

Then he walked deliberately to his bowl and sat beside it.

Right, she thought. Tea. Supper.

The kettle went on first–this was non-negotiable, the order of operations fixed and reliable as the archive’s humidity controls. She measured the loose leaf into the strainer with the same attention she gave fragile specimens, two and a half teaspoons, the particular blend she’d ordered from a small operation in Asheville that smelled of blackberry and something darker underneath, something rooty and old. The mug came down from the hook–the wide one, the one that held enough tea to matter. She set it on the counter.

Whisky’s supper next, the particular click and peel of the tin, and he was weaving between her ankles before she’d finished spooning it into the dish, his purr shifting registers into something more urgent and businesslike.

“I know,” she said. “I know, I’m getting there.”

She set the dish on his mat before straightening up to reach for the kettle and the shadow moved.

Not toward her. Not lunging or reaching the way it had in the Metro window. Just–present, at the far edge of the kitchen, in the corner where the light from the hallway lamp didn’t quite reach. A density in the dark that the dark didn’t account for. There and then not there, the way a word vanishes the moment you look directly at the page.

Nettie stood with the kettle in her hand.

Whisky ate. His small, methodical sounds filled the kitchen–the quiet scrape of the dish against the mat, the steady rhythm of him.

She looked at the corner for three full seconds.

Nothing.

Tired, she thought. The fluorescents at the archive. Eye strain. You haven’t eaten since eleven.

She poured the water over the leaves and watched the dark bloom up through it, spreading the way creek silt spreads when the current shifts. She wrapped both hands around the mug.

By the time she carried it to the couch, Whiskula was already there, arranging himself across her feet with the authority of something that had claimed this territory long before she moved in and simply allowed her tenancy.

The apartment held her.

The lamp burned amber.

Outside, the city continued its indifferent noise.

She didn’t think about the corner.

She almost managed not to.

Is this your first time reading? Welcome! You can find all the chapters including Chapter One in the Shadowroot Trilogy Hub.

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Subject: Maeve Wavehorn, Called the Fleet-Sinker

Compiled by: Unknown hand

Amendments: T.S.

Date of Record: Indeterminate

Maeve Wavehorn was the daughter of Ailin Starhoof. She lived approximately five hundred and fifty years. She was a coastal wanderer, a ship-binder, and a speaker with storms.

Her gift was voice — not song as it is commonly understood, but the older frequency beneath song: the pitch that water answers before it answers anything else. She could calm a tempest or call one. She understood the difference between the two as a practical matter, the way a miller understands the difference between a dam and a channel.

She did not consider herself reckless. The record should reflect that.

Her notable deed was the sinking of an invading fleet. She opened her throat to the horizon and the sea attended. Accounts vary on the number of ships. They do not vary on the silence afterward.

She died in the act.

[T.S.: She survived long enough to bind the horn. She did not know she was doing it. I want this noted. She thought she was finishing the work.]

The Relic: The Driftwood Horn, Bound in Silver Wire

The horn was cut from river-carried sycamore root [T.S.: not ocean wood — the record errs here] and bound at the bell in seven coils of fine silver wire. It does not ornament. It conducts.

When sounded at a coastal threshold, the horn carries the edge of the pitch Maeve used at the fleet — not the whole note. Enough to make the deep attend.

The silver wire is not a binding she chose. It is what remained of her when the work was done and she did not know she was leaving.

Current location of relic: held in trust at the Tidewalker crossing, last confirmed in Oraine’s keeping

[T.S.: No. Dispersed. As they all were. As they had to be.]

[T.S.: The rings hold. That is the problem. I have watched what they cost and I went through myself regardless and I paid with my son. His child will be the first born with the door already shut. I will not leave these objects where the bloodline can find them and be called.]

[T.S.: I am sorry, Maeve.]

[NETTIE’S MARGINALIA — RESEARCH NOTES]

The amendments are in a different hand than the chronicle. Older ink. The pressure changes — controlled in the corrections, then something else entirely by the end. The apology at the bottom of the folio is written smaller than everything else, as if he hoped the page wouldn’t hold it.

She didn’t know. She was dying and she thought she was finishing the work and she didn’t know she was leaving something of herself caught in the wire. Five hundred and fifty years and she still believed she was indestructible. I understand that. I understand it in a way I wish I didn’t.

Thalen went through the rings himself. He understood what they cost firsthand, from the inside, and he still went. And then he spent whatever was left of him making sure no one else could.

His son’s child was the first of us born with the door already shut. That’s me. That’s every Caelthorne who came after, living small and gray and inexplicably sad in the Ohio River Valley, never knowing what was closed inside us.

The horn doesn’t have a location. Just a crossed-out line and an apology.

I don’t know yet what it means that she’s still in the wire. I don’t know what gets released when someone finally sounds it.

I’m not sure Thalen knew either.

Read the introduction to Lunathir’s Heir here:

The Myth of Lunathir

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✨Other rooms of the Hearth are open; wander in.

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The Nine Steps to Elevensies has been sitting in the archive for a while now — written from the inside of a body that needed it, for anyone who’s been fighting the quiet kind of dragon.

I’ve updated it. The first step is free (Coming in July). The rest live in The Inner Room behind purchase of a cup of tea.

If you’ve been curious about what the paid tier actually looks like before deciding — this is it. This is the kind of thing that lives there.

The Inner Room is $6/month or $30/year. The kettle’s already on.

— Caitlin The Hag Under the Wood · Elder Creek Farm · Scott County, Indiana

[ARCHIVAL RECORD: CAELTHORNE FAMILY PAPERS, UNDATED — ESTIMATED 1951–1955]

Subject: The Painting

Observations by: Betty Moneyhon Caelthorne (known as Sarah in the Caelthorne household); daughter of Cordelia Baker; granddaughter of Catherine Moneyhon; wife of Silas Caelthorne; mother of Gideon Caelthorne

Context: Handwritten account on plain notebook paper, folded three times and recovered from inside the front cover of a King James Bible found among the estate of Gideon Caelthorne. The paper is worn soft at every fold. One passage has been crossed through with such force the paper has torn clean. The ink has not faded.

The Paws Folded Proper

I bought it at a yard sale over on the Germantown Road. It was a painting of the Lord — oil on board, looked old, the frame had gone to black. The woman selling it wanted fifty cent and I give it to her.

I brung it home and hung it in the front room, over the settee.

Silas was up to Mason County working and it was just me and the boy. Gideon was nine, maybe ten year old.

First night I noticed the rocker moving. Wasn’t nobody in it. I set it still with my hand and went on to bed.

Second night something knocked all the dishes out of the cabinet. Every one of them. I swept it up and didn’t think too hard on it.

Third night was when it come for me.

I woke up and couldn’t move. Felt like something was sat down on my chest — heavy as a grown man, heavier — and its hands were at my throat. I don’t have a better word than hands. I tried to holler. Couldn’t get the air. I could see the room plain as day. Wasn’t nothing there I could point to. But it was there.

This went on for months.

I don’t know how to write that plainly enough for a body to understand it. Months. Every night or near enough to it. I learned to brace before I slept. I learned what it felt like right before it come — a drop in the air, cold moving in from the corners of the room — and I would pull the quilt up like that would help and wait for it.

Silas come home in between and I tried once to tell him. He didn’t know what to do with what I was saying so I didn’t say it again.

Sometime in the middle of it all the gifts started.

I come downstairs one morning and there was a box sitting on the kitchen table. Wrapped in brown paper, a bow tied on top of it, neat as anything. I hadn’t put it there. Silas wasn’t home. Gideon said he didn’t know nothing about it.

There were more after that. Different sizes. The same kind of bow every time. One morning I found one sitting at the foot of my bed.

I opened them. I don’t know why I opened them.

I just did.

Most of what was in them I cannot write down. I started to once and —

[One full line crossed through with such pressure the paper has torn. What remains beneath, in smaller and more deliberate letters:]

One of them had a dead mouse in it.

Small and brown. Laid out in the bottom of the box like somebody had taken some care with it — paws folded, eyes shut, the way you’d lay out something you meant to bury proper. The kind of mouse that gets into the corn crib come October. It looked like it was sleeping except it was not sleeping.

Gideon was standing behind me when I opened that one. I don’t know what he saw. We never did talk about it, not in all the years after.

I don’t know why that box was the worst of all of them. Some of the others were —

[Another line, crossed through.]

But the mouse was the worst. I stood there holding the box and I felt something go out of the house. Like a warmth I hadn’t known was there till it wasn’t anymore. Like a candle somebody cupped their hand around.

I set the mouse in the yard. In the dirt by the elder tree. I couldn’t burn it with the rest. It didn’t feel right to burn it.

I burned everything else. The boxes, the paper, the bows, that painting of the Lord’s face. First time the fire wouldn’t catch. Second time neither. Third time it went up fast — faster than it ought to — and the frame split like a pistol shot.

House has been quiet since.

I should not have brung it inside. And I should not have opened what it give me. Those are two separate mistakes and I made them both.

I think about the mouse. I think about it more than the rest.

I don’t know why.

Betty’s Record: You can’t invite a thing across your threshold and then act surprised it knows your name. And you cannot open what the devil wraps up pretty. It ain’t a gift. It’s a claim. Whatever was in that house watching over us — I felt it go. I didn’t know to grieve it till it was already gone.

[NETTIE’S MARGINALIA — RESEARCH NOTES]

Found in Daddy’s Bible. His Bible. He kept it.

The paper is soft at every fold. He read this until the folds went thin and the crossed-out lines tore through. He was standing behind her when she opened the box with the mouse in it. He saw his mother’s hands go still. He was nine years old.

He never spoke of it. Not once. He just looked at me like he recognized something and called it sin.

Months. Not nights. Months of waking up with something at her throat. And then the boxes. And then —

A dead mouse. Laid out careful. Paws folded.

I had a field mouse when I was small. I thought I’d imagined it. It came to the edge of things and watched me and I talked to it the way children talk to creatures they think are theirs. It never let me touch it. It just watched.

Thalen Stormshadow walked into the mist and did not come back. But the lore says he was forever haunted — that the price of his final working was to be always present and never still. The lore says he comes to the descendants as a field mouse. Watching. Keeping what vigil he can.

The entity in that painting wrapped him up in brown paper and put a bow on top and left him on Betty’s kitchen table.

It knew she wouldn’t understand what she was holding. It knew she would feel the warmth go out and not know what to call the grief.

It wanted him to watch her open it.

It wanted him to see that it could reach him anywhere. In any form. That nothing watching over this bloodline was beyond its reach.

She put him in the dirt by the elder tree. She didn’t know why. She couldn’t burn him.

She was right not to.

He came back. He had to. I know he came back because I talked to him in the grass behind the house when I was four years old and he watched me with his small black eyes and did not leave.

What does it cost to keep coming back? What does it cost to watch what was done to Betty and find another form and come back anyway?

I have catalogued fourteen thousand documents.

I do not have a box for this.

[A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR]

This field note is based on a true story.

My father told it to me when I was a child. It has been corroborated by my siblings, who heard it the way I imagine all traumatic childhood stories get told: around a bonfire, with a father who had one too many secret neighbor-garage beers for a kid's event, letting secrets slip past his loose lips.

Our grandmother was Betty Moneyhon. She was Irish, from Bracken County, Kentucky. She bought a painting at a yard sale. What happened after is what my father carries.

He has spent his life building walls against something he watched come through a gilded frame when he was a boy, something he never had words for because no one left him any.

Betty is gone now. But the story stayed. It is in my father. It is in my siblings. It is in me.

It is in this book.

In a previous field note in this collection, Nettie stands over Catherine Moneyhon’s document — Betty’s grandmother, Nettie’s great-great-grandmother — and asks: What did she file that no one was meant to find?

Catherine spent thirty years in federal records in Washington D.C. She left one poem and an envelope marked FOR NO ONE. She knew how to put things in their proper place. She knew where things were kept. She kept most of it in her head because some things are safer unwritten.

Betty couldn’t write it either. She started. She crossed it out until the paper tore.

Two women in the same line. Two different relationships to the same silence. Catherine archived it behind locked doors in a federal building and left one poem as the key. Betty put the pen to the page and the page didn’t survive it.

Neither of them had the words John Moneyhon burned before they were born.

I am the archivist in this family now.

I am writing it down.

✨Thank you for reading. Nothing here asks you to be better—only more yourself

✨Other rooms of the Hearth are open; wander in.

✨Elder Creek Apothecary sits just beyond the door, for those who like their stories brewed, bottled, or burned into salve.

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Subject: A Record I Cannot Burn

Observations by: Catherine Moneyhon-Stuckwisch, b. Augusta, Bracken County, Kentucky, 1883; employed as a records clerk, [Federal Records Division], Washington, D.C.

Context: Undated personal document recovered from a manila envelope marked FOR NO ONE among the personal effects of Catherine Moneyhon-Stuckwisch following her death in Louisville, Kentucky, 1965. Submitted to the Bracken County Historical Society by her daughter, who could not explain it.

FILE STATUS: Ongoing / Friday Series

For No One

The work here is indexing. Filing. Putting a thing in its proper place so that someone can find it again. I am good at this work. I have always been good at knowing what is stored and what is lost, and why the difference between the two matters.

My father was good at it too. Except what he chose to file, he filed in the river.

I do not speak of the old stories. He swore they were gone, and I tried to believe him, as children do. But there are things I carry that have no drawer, no accession number, no finding aid. I see them when I close my eyes. I know what others may never know.

I was ten years old and I stood at the edge of the yard and I watched the smoke rise up over the sumac line, and I have never told a living soul what I saw in that smoke. I came to Washington. I learned to file. I learned to say record instead of story and inventory instead of memory, because the government prefers words that do not breathe.

But here in this city, I am still just a woman from the Ohio River, and the Potomac is not an honest river. It runs too straight. It has been managed. The Ohio pushes back when you ask too much of it. It remembers.

I wrote this for myself. I did not write it for anyone else.

Myself

I have to live with myself and so
I want to be fit for myself to know
I want to be able as the days go by
Always to look at myself in the eye
I don’t want to stand with the setting sun
And hate myself for the things I’ve done
I can never hide myself from me
I see what others may never see
I know what others may never know
I can never hide myself and so
Whatever happens I want to be
Self-respecting and conscience free

The thing about a conscience is that it is not a fire. You cannot burn it to ash and spread the ash on the river and call it finished. It is a sediment. It settles. And Bracken County soil is limestone — porous, permeable — and everything that has ever been poured into it is still there, moving slow and cold through the aquifer.

My father thought he burned the stories. I know what he burned. I have never stopped knowing.

Some things are meant to be carried, not destroyed. You can no more destroy them than you can destroy the limestone heart of this country. You just push them deeper. And deeper means closer to the water. And the water remembers.

Catherine’s Record: You cannot outrun what runs in the blood. The honest work is not destruction. It is documentation.

[NETTIE’S MARGINALIA — RESEARCH NOTES]

The envelope was in a box of uncatalogued Bracken County donations — the kind of box that gets set in a corner and doesn’t get processed for a decade. “FOR NO ONE.” She addressed it to no one and then left it in a historical society’s collection anyway. That’s not avoidance. That’s faith.

Catherine Moneyhon. Daughter of John Moneyhon — the man Cordelia named. The man who swore the stories were gone. Cordelia watched the leviathan go up in smoke in Spencer. Catherine watched something burn in Augusta when she was ten and never told a soul what she saw.

She worked in records. Federal records. She spent thirty years knowing where things were kept.

What did she file that no one was meant to find?

[A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR]

Catherine Moneyhon is a fictional character, but she is built on the bones of a real woman — my ancestor, Katherine Moneyhon, born in Augusta, Kentucky in 1883.

Katherine left Augusta during World War I to work in the War Department in Washington, D.C. She stayed in government service for thirty years. She never married. When she retired in 1948, she began writing poetry — and she kept writing until she was 103 years old. She said most of her poems were never written down. “They are in my head,” she told someone once. “I write about my life and myself.”

The poem in this chapter is hers. She wrote it.

She was survived by her niece, her great-niece, and her great-great nephew. No husband. No children. Just a woman who spent forty years composing poems she kept inside her own mind, and a handful of pages she left behind for someone like me to find.

I don’t know exactly what Katherine knew or carried. But I recognize the frequency.

Discover what Cordelia saw at the Spencer comic book burning:

I apologize for this being late this week. I got a little wild showing off my super flexible joints and then paid for it dearly the following morning. My thumbs are now properly working. Huzzah!

A small note from the hearth: I’m sending this installment directly to your inbox today to ask a quick question. These weekly Field Notes from the Shadowroot are designed to act as a bridge between Nettie’s ancestry and her unfolding story, and I want to make sure they are arriving exactly where they are welcome.

Would you like to keep receiving these weekly field notes right here in your inbox? Cast your vote below:

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Subject: The Smolder in Spencer

Observations by: Cordelia Baker

Context: Visiting family in Spencer, West Virginia, during the comic book burning.

FILE STATUS: Ongoing / Friday Series

The Incident

Lord, the smoke today wasn’t like any brush fire I’ve ever smelled. I stood on the sidewalk in Spencer and watched those children toss their stories into a burning heap. There had to have been close to 600 children there! They said the burning was to save their minds from unclean material, but the way they danced around the flames… it didn’t look like salvation.

The Observation

I saw David Mace leading them, eyes bright with a fever that burned for a jealous God. They think they are burning paper to save their souls, but I just can’t see how burning books ever solved anything. They are always trying to cleanse the uncanny from the valley, but it just keeps getting pushed deeper into the hollows and caves. I worry for Spencer. My own kin in Augusta always said that when you try to burn the truth, it just turns into a grit that gets into your teeth and stays there.

Most of the stories were of superheroes, but as I watched more and more books being added to the pyre, I caught a glimpse of an image that made my blood run cold. Granddaddy Moneyhon swore all those stories had been destroyed so it was a shock to see the leviathan’s razor sharp teeth be eaten by the flames.

The Relic Whispers

In the heat of that fire, I found myself thinking of the old rhymes from the wharf. The ones about the Pearl of Lunathir. They say it was a single tear she shed when she left the heavens, containing the memory of a true sky before the world was born. It’s funny; while those children were burning their memories of heroes and monsters, I kept thinking that some memories are too heavy for fire.

The Pearl doesn’t live in the light. It’s hidden in the Sunken Vale, where the kelp forests twist and the Marrow Leviathan–that skeletal, eel-thing–feeds on the very memories people are so eager to forget. To find it, you have to do the one thing these Spencer folks are terrified of: you have to stop breathing the clean air and learn to breathe the water. You have to surrender a part of your own childhood just to touch it.

Cordelia’s Wisdom

You can’t meet a spiritual force with a matchbook. If you hold that Pearl to your ear, you don’t hear the Ohio River or the Spencer creek, you hear the sound of the world before it had a name. Someone scattered the relics, but they aren’t gone. They’re just waiting for someone who isn’t afraid of the rot.

[NETTIE’S MARGINALIA – RESEARCH NOTES]

Reading Cordelia’s entry sends a physical shiver through me. She saw it—the exact moment they tried to destroy our history. She connects the Spencer fire directly to the Pearl of Lunathir. It’s not just a gem; it holds the original memory of the sky, untouched by the static of the present.

The trial Cordelia mentions—surrendering a cherished memory—is what terrifies me. As an archivist, I live to preserve. To give up a piece of my own human history to the Marrow Leviathan feels like a death. But if the Pearl is the key, I might have to go to the Sunken Vale. I’ll have to learn to breathe water. I’ll have to stop running from my own bloodline and touch the rot.

Am I brave enough?

Wander around Nettie’s ancestral roots for a peek into more family lore

✨Thank you for reading. Nothing here asks you to be better—only more yourself

✨Other rooms of the Hearth are open; wander in.

✨Elder Creek Apothecary sits just beyond the door, for those who like their stories brewed, bottled, or burned into salve.

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SERIES: The Cellar Door | No. 21

SUBJECT: Subterranean Echoes & The Taproot Narrative

DATE: May 2026

Sharing a genealogical chart is rarely just about names and dates; for Jeanette “Nettie” Caelthorne, it is a map of a landscape both geological and spiritual. Set against the backdrop of Augusta, Kentucky, where the limestone runs deep, and the Ohio River whispers old secrets, this chart represents the “Limestone Heart” of a family.

The Geography of Trauma

In Bracken County, the land itself is a character. The limestone that defines the Kentucky landscape is a mirror for ancestral grief. The land is porous enough to absorb centuries of hardship, yet hard enough to grind a soul down like a grain in a grist mill. According to the old county charts, the limestone beneath Augusta functions like a massive, subterranean archive. In this corner of the world, trauma doesn’t dissipate—it seeps. The stone catches the frequency of every broken promise and forgotten war, storing it in the dark until someone with the right bloodline walks over the crust.

Nettie’s journey is a return to this “High Lonesome” frequency. Having lived a life “carefully cataloged” in the climate-controlled archives of the Library of Congress, she has tried to keep her history in boxes where it couldn’t touch her. But ancestral trauma is not so easily contained.

Inherited Echoes

The ancestors in this chart carry the weights that Nettie must now navigate to claim her sovereignty. Each family member has a story left in the marrow of her bones, like:

• Enoch Vestal: A Civil War veteran who returned with unrecognized nervous system trauma (“shell-shock”), spent his life mapping the caves of Bracken County in search of “a place where the noise stops”.

• Abigail Blackwood: Known as The Pulse Reader, she mapped the 'Resonance'—the physical toll the land takes on the human frame. Long before modern medicine, she used dried yarrow infusions and absolute silence to chart how the limestone's heavy frequency settled into a person's pulse, treating the nervous system like an internal root system that had gone sour.

• Ailin Starhoof: A threshold-walker whose “catastrophic error” of offering the secret name of her unborn child to the Sea God sealed a hereditary curse of “salt and silence”.

From Reckoning to Sovereignty

Nettie represents the heir in an age of electrical rot. Her ancestry is a mixture of Granny witches, religious zealots, and survivors who milled their trauma into something that could nourish—or haunt—their descendants.

As Nettie uncovers these stories, she moves from being a throwaway child to the author of her own story. The star-shaped freckle on her brow is no longer just a mark of birth, but a moonmark of destiny. By documenting this lore, we are witnessing the awakening of an ancestral current and the moment the Seal of Salt and Silence finally cracks, allowing Nettie to turn her limestone grief into a sovereign rhythm.

Peek through Nettie’s ancestral chart and discover the secrets buried in the family bible. The family bible isn't a holy book; it’s a ledger of accounts settled in salt. Within these ancestral archives, every birthmark is recorded alongside a specific environmental toll—a drought, a crop failure, a sudden silence in the woods. To crack the Seal of Salt and Silence, Nettie isn't just reading names; she is decoding an ecological ledger of debt.

The roots run deeper than a single page. Step into the archive and explore the interactive Caelthorne & Vestal lineage for yourself.

To cross the threshold into this world, you can read the opening pages of the trilogy's first installment here:

✨Thank you for reading. Nothing here asks you to be better—only more yourself

✨Other rooms of the Hearth are open; wander in.

✨Elder Creek Apothecary sits just beyond the door, for those who like their stories brewed, bottled, or burned into salve.

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RESEARCHER: Nettie Caelthorne

SUBJECT: The Hungry Howl

FILE STATUS: Ongoing / Friday Series

[ARCHIVAL RECORD: The Vestal Papers, Folder 12]

Subject: The Hungry Howl of the Ohio Valley

Observations by: Elias Vestal (Nettie’s Great-Grandfather, Paternal Side)

Date: Early Spring, 1954

The Smith boy came rattling up the ridge road in his Ford, driving like the hounds of hell were snapping at his bumper. He nearly took the farm gate off its hinges. He wasn’t shaking from the damp spring cold; he was shaking from a brush with the Hungry Howl.

The Incident:

He’d been out in the back acreage all morning, trying to coax a spark out of that old surplus dozer they’d dragged home after the war. It’s a stubborn heap of iron, always plagued by what he calls “electrical gremlins.” The wiring harnesses stay frayed as if chewed by something that hungers for copper, and the batteries never hold a charge through a single moon cycle.

This time, the battery sat bone-dead, and he realized too late he’d left his jumper cables back at the barn shop. He was just reaching for the door of his truck when the morning birds went dead quiet—that hollow, ringing silence that precedes a thinning of the veil.

The Smith boy was no fool; he’d heard the old-timers talk. He fired up the Ford to flee the silence, but that’s when the sound broke through the canopy. It wasn’t a bark or a bellow, but a tearing vibration of a mechanical howl. He peeled out of there as any sensible man should.

In his mirror, he saw he was being chased through the holler by a desiccated, slate-gray body loping on four disjointed, spindly legs. It moved with a rhythmic, sickening hitch—less like a beast and more like a shadow cast by a broken gear. It broke from the tall grass and paced him at the woods’ edge. He saw no eyes or nose, only a black, bottomless maw filled with needle-teeth that unhinged wider than the creature’s own skull. It didn’t growl; it inhaled the sound of the truck’s engine and exhaled a horrific, piercing vibration that rattled the boy’s very teeth.

Elias’s Wisdom:

I told that boy to stop fighting the iron for a week. That dozer is a lightning rod for the land-spirit’s resentment. The Hungry Howl isn’t a sound—it’s a void. It happens when the land’s frequency gets jammed by a man’s frustration and the cold static of failing machinery. The Runner is just the teeth of that void. I gave him a charm of dried yarrow and a handful of salt to scrub his steering wheel. It won’t fix the dozer, but it can wash off the scent of his fear before that mouth finds its way to the Smith boy’s front porch.

[NETTIE’S MARGINALIA – RESEARCH NOTES]

*It would seem Great-Grandfather Elias understood the karst frequency better than he let on. He knew the “electrical rot” plaguing these farms wasn’t just bad luck. This Hungry Howl responds to the “Grind” of machinery as if it’s harvesting an electromagnetic charge to feed the void.

The creatures chasing the Smith boy are the Hollow-Mouth Runners—monsters I grew up hearing about in hushed tones, but maybe they aren’t just folklore. Are they the physical manifestation of the acoustical void created when we grind too hard against the Limestone Heart?

The disjointed, “stuttering” gait Smith described matches the frequency signatures I found in the 1946 Cath Sìth sightings. Is the land glitching?

If a surplus dozer was the catalyst in ‘54, what is the modern equivalent? The more we try to automate and conquer the valley with noise, the wider those maws unhinge. We aren’t just making noise; we’re ringing a dinner bell.*

✨Thank you for reading. Nothing here asks you to be better—only more yourself

✨Other rooms of the Hearth are open; wander in.

✨Elder Creek Apothecary sits just beyond the door, for those who like their stories brewed, bottled, or burned into salve.

✨Subscribe & share: If this stirred your bones, pass it along—witchcraft thrives by word of mouth.

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SERIES: The Apothecary | No. 1

SUBJECT: Botanical Foundations & The Doctrine of Signatures

DATE: May 6th, 2026

In the quiet corners of the archival garden, where the scent of resin meets the dampness of turned earth, grows Rosmarinus officinalis–the “Dew of the Sea.” This is not merely a culinary staple, but a botanical thread woven through centuries of human grief, celebration, and survival. To understand Rosemary is to understand the persistence of memory itself, particularly as it transitioned from the ancient Mediterranean to the rugged frontiers of Colonial America, eventually finding its place in the modern landscape of 2026 as a tool for restorative resistance.

The Colonial Thread: Survival in the New World

For early American settlers, Rosemary was a vital link to the Old World. It was a plant of utility, brought across the Atlantic in the form of dried bundles and carefully guarded seeds. In the 17th century, in settlements like New Amsterdam (Manhattan), the herb was a foundational element of the medicinal garden. Before the advent of modern chemistry, its potent volatile oils like camphor and 1,8-cineole were primary weapons against the “heavy air” of cramped winter quarters. Settlers burned the dried needles to purify their homes, an aromatic practice of hygiene that mirrored the plague-era traditions of Europe.

In the colonial kitchen, Rosemary was an essential preservative. Its antioxidant properties were utilized to rub down meats, masking the flavor of aging salt-pork and ensuring that the harvest lasted through the leanest months. It was a plant of the Kitchen Apothecary, distilled into warm water to revive the weary and settle the stomachs of those broken by the manual labor of a developing frontier.

Folklore and the High Lonesome Aesthetic

Rosemary is steeped in folklore that is both melancholy and grounded. It is famously the plant of remembrance. Legend tells us its flowers were once white, only turning blue after the Virgin Mary draped her cloak over a bush during the flight to Egypt. This narrative of protection followed the plant into the folklore of the colonies. A common belief held that “where Rosemary flourishes, the mistress is the master,” linking the plant’s health to the strength and authority of the woman of the house.

The plant always stood at the thresholds of life’s great transitions. It was woven into bridal crowns to signify fidelity and tossed into open graves to ensure that those who passed would never be forgotten. As Sir Thomas More wrote, it is the “chosen emblem of our funeral wakes.” It serves as a sensory bridge between the living and the dead, a constant reminder that loyalty transcends the physical realm.

Medicinal Archetypes and Nervous System Literacy

Modern therapeutic applications in 2026 continue to validate what the ancients and settlers knew intuitively. Rosemary is a circulatory and nervous system stimulant. It is a tool for moving “stagnant” energy, whether in the physical body or the creative mind. Its ability to improve memory retention and cognitive alertness makes it an essential ally for those navigating the mental fatigue of the digital age. When used topically, its infused oils soothe arthritic joints and stimulate the scalp, providing a grounded relief that aligns with the principles of nervous system literacy.

Modern Application: Rest as Resistance

Today, Rosemary serves as an anchor. In an era where “Rest is Resistance,” the plant offers a way to reclaim autonomy through sensory grounding. Incorporating Rosemary into morning rituals—perhaps as a simple, aromatic steam—allows for a gentle awakening of the senses without the cortisol-driven spike of modern stimulants. It is a plant that encourages self-trust; its resinous, balsamic scent clears the “brain fog” of burnout, allowing for a return to narrative clarity and creative focus.

In the apothecary garden of 2026, Rosemary remains a foundational perennial. It is a testament to resilience—hardy, evergreen, and deeply rooted. As we draft our field notes and build our botanical libraries, we do so with the understanding that Rosemary is not just a plant of the past, but a necessary companion for a focused and rested future.

Snag your free Rosemary Monograph designed by me HERE

✨Thank you for reading. Nothing here asks you to be better—only more yourself

✨Other rooms of the Hearth are open; wander in.

✨Elder Creek Apothecary sits just beyond the door, for those who like their stories brewed, bottled, or burned into salve.

✨Subscribe & share: If this stirred your bones, pass it along—witchcraft thrives by word of mouth.

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RESEARCHER: Nettie Caelthorne

SUBJECT: The Grey King

FILE STATUS: Ongoing / Friday Series

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SERIES: The Hearth | No. 04

SUBJECT: The Architect of the Hearth & Triskele Logic

DATE: Late Spring, 2026

The Architect of the Hearth

The thin hospital sheets did nothing to hold back the antiseptic chill of the Wilford Hall psych ward. They took my clothes as soon as I was admitted—standard procedure for a case like min…

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I come to your inboxes with glad tidings and well wishes for the new season harkening at our threshold. The cool wind blowing through my open window is a stark contrast to the humid, hot air we experienced yesterday—not the herald of summer we all are preparing for as Beltane inches ever closer. Last night, our to…

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I open with a vulnerable look at my “maternal birthright denied”—born during an Indiana blizzard and raised in the shadow of family lore. I share how I traded the role of the “Banished Heir” for the budding sovereignty found in stories of heroes, witches, and the wild.

• Vibe-Based Gardening: Why native perennials and “tenacious weeds” like Dandelions earn a permanent spot in the garden.

• Childhood Seeds: The first “plant friendship” was found in the nectar of honeysuckle.

• The Technical Flow: A deep dive into the legalities and artisan diligence of being an Indiana Home-Based Vendor (HBV). I walk us through harvesting logs, botanical accuracy (and a cautionary tale about Poke berries), and the importance of lot numbers.

• Researching Nettie: Using a digital-physical hybrid system—Google Docs for facts, corkboards for sensory threads.

• The Vatican Dream: If given 24 hours in any archive, I am headed for the secret herbal manuscripts of the Vatican.

• Clinical vs. Nebulous: How to weave botanical facts into fiction using Mugwort as a case study for “The Mother of Herbs.”

• Micro-Elevensies: Practicing “Rest as Resistance” through birdwatching, 25-minute task chunks, and the realization that productivity does not equal love.

• Horizontal Days: The “Couch Potato” ritual—a dedicated day of movies, puppy snuggles, and resetting a fried nervous system.

• The Comfort Dish: Why homemade chicken noodles over buttery mashed potatoes is the ultimate Indiana-grown hug in a bowl.

• The Scent of Underwood: Fresh cut hay, grills in the mid-July heat, and woodsmoke.

• The Soundtrack: From the morning calls of Bill the Bluejay to a curated “Celtic Woman” playlist that signals the start of magic.

• The Nightstand: Why A Modern Herbal by Mrs. Grieve is the one book I return to every single year.

• The Bookshelf & Record Player: A look at the “fairy smut,” high fantasy, and dark Appalachian folk music that fuels the creative fire.

• Books: The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, Throne of Glass, The Winternight Trilogy, A Modern Herbal by Mrs. Grieve.

• Music: Aurora, First Aid Kit, Amigo the Devil, Daughter, Hozier, and John Prine.

• Herbs: Mugwort, Dandelion, Honeysuckle, Calendula, and Poke (the cautionary one!).

• Candles: Dark Harts Emporium

• Substack: ⁠The Hag Under the Wood⁠

• Apothecary: ⁠Elder Creek Apothecary⁠

• Socials: @eldercreekapothecary

Final Thought: “The medicine you need is usually growing right where you feel most crushed.”

Episode Summary

In this episode, we delve beneath the mud of the Ohio River Valley to discover a frequency that soothes the modern mind. We’ll, the “High Lonesome” sound—not as a musical genre, but as a biological anchor. We journey through a vivid “Vision State” encounter with the Guardian of the River, bridge the gap between childhood trauma and mythic lore, and learn how the humble Rosemary plant acts as a “Clearer of the Swarm” for a fried nervous system.

The Creek Keep (Farm Pulse & Apothecary News)

• Life at Elder Creek: Navigating the muddy 6/8 time of an Indiana spring. Updates on mulching with goat-poo compost, expanding the frog pond, and preparing for the arrival of “Baby Enid,” the newest dogter of the farm.

• New in the Apothecary: Local pickup for Bryant Skincare essentials (Calendula soap!).

  • The Nightjar Rituals: A first look at the “Rowan Raccoon and the Nightjar Owl” line—deep-rest rituals designed to move you from the Toil to the Song.

• Save the Date:

  • Hags & Herbs Class: May 7th at the Scott County Historical Society. A deep dive into Rosemary.

  • Bloom & Buzz (Free Event!): June 20th at Clark State Forest. Celebrating pollinators and safe earth-tending practices.

The Essay: The Man in the Murky Water

A reading from my Substack essay, exploring a dream-state transition from the “synthetic haze” of modern Indiana to a primordial version of the valley.

• The Guardian: An encounter with a man made of river-slick and forest-green eyes who offers a stone of Bluegrass Limestone.

• The Frequency: Discovering the “High Lonesome” sound—the 6/8 rhythm of the water and the low drone of the “Standing People” (the ancient Oaks).

• The Lesson: “Remember the drone. The world will try to make you sharp and jagged, but you are made of the river’s curve.”

The Science: Acoustic Architecture

• The Vagal Anchor: How low-frequency drones (like mountain dulcimers or lapping waves) tell the amygdala the world is stable, moving the brain into a healing Theta state.

• The Power of 6/8 Time: Why the triple-meter rhythm of songs like Agnes Obel’s “Riverside” mimics the natural swaying of a mother’s rocking, acting as a parasympathetic trigger for the nervous system.

The Seam: Lore Connections to Lunathir’s Heir

A vulnerable look at the “seven-year silence” in my own history. I discuss how my experience with childhood “saturation” and survival informed the character of Nettie.

• The Wooden Fetch: Exploring the concept of a soul retreating from a body too sharp to inhabit, and how the “High Lonesome Frequency” mends that internal rip.

The Apothecary: Herb & Ritual

• Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis): The “Herb of Remembrance.”

• The Science of the Hag: A look at Rosmarinic acid and cineole. Rosemary acts as a circulatory stimulant and a “Clearer of the Swarm,” reducing neuro-inflammation and aiding focus.

• The Ritual: A simple grounding practice of rubbing fresh rosemary between the palms to bridge the gap back to the “Riverside.”

Connect in the Wildwood:

• Read the full essay: The Hag Under the Wood on Substack

• Shop the Apothecary: Elder Creek Apothecary

• Instagram: @eldercreekapothecary

Closing Quote: “The Otherside is always right here. All it takes is the right tone and the courage to let the water take you.”

SERIES: The Study | No. 02

SUBJECT: Epistolary Inquiry & The Distillation of Lore

DATE: April 21st, 2026

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SERIES: The Cellar Door | No. 20

SUBJECT: Somatic Resonance and the Reindeer Goddess

DATE: April 2026

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SERIES: The Cellar Door | No. 12

SUBJECT: Harvesting Silence from the Acoustic Architecture

There is a seven-year silence in my marrow. Between the ages of six and thirteen, the record of my life was wiped clean, leaving only a shimmering void where memory should be. They tell me I was ‘gone’—not in the way a child vanishes from a porch, but in the way a soul retreats from a body that has become too sharp to inhabit. At six, the world became an overload of jagged frequencies and heavy hands, so the seam ripped, and the Little People offered a trade.

I didn’t just disappear; I was apprenticed. For seven years, a wooden ‘Fetch’—a hollow, compliant version of me—endured the static of my childhood home while the real me learned the language of the oaks. But at thirteen, the human world came clawing at the barn doors, bringing a ‘pray the demon away’ Southern Baptist exorcism that didn’t cast out a devil—it shattered my shield.

My memories are returning. They are still fractured and muddled, but returning.

Wander over to the Cellar Door for more lore.

The Flight (Age 6: The Retreat)

My childhood home was a maze of danger and jagged edges. I quickly learned that my life was a game of carefully placed chess moves, ensuring my survival. My father, a sensitive in his own right, demanded a house where children were “seen and not heard,” as the sounds of child play were an affront to his ears. He was a tradesman who had learned construction from his father and inherited the adage, “spare the rod, spoil the child,” which he implemented almost daily. Needless to say, my autistic inclinations and sensory issues were treated as defiance and met with the stinging rhythm of ping-pong paddles and belts.

My mother, a pure narcissist, decided she would rather he beat her children instead of her, and so, eventually, he stopped trying to kill her and targeted me instead. He did continue to slam her forehead into the dashboard on long road trips, though. She worked for Child Services; she knew how to hide abuse. For all anyone knew, we were a shiny, happy family. Delightfully, this is the facade my mother still clings to today. I remember the weight of the woods calling me even then, because the house felt like a cage where the air was always thick with the threat of the next “switch.”

When I tried to sleep, the walls didn’t offer protection. I dreamt of wolves chasing me through the suffocating dark of the forest and endless fields of golden wheat. And in the waking world, a shadow being stepped out of my closet every night to watch me breathe. I would seek the floor of my parents’ bedroom, a cold sanctuary where I wasn’t allowed in the bed but could at least feel the anchor of another human’s presence. I got very good at sleeping on floors.

One day, the violence in my home reached a crescendo that the large backyard I found peace in couldn’t drown out. I had to get away. I needed to run. And so I did.

The Inheritance

The inheritance my father gave me was a connection to the trees. My first formative memory is the way the sun filtered through a curtain of pale green. My father, an avid outdoorsman, made it very clear he had preferred boys but was stuck with girls. So, as soon as I was born, I was in nature, trapezing through the woods, learning the silence and chatter of the beings who lived there. I could identify animal tracks and scat by age four and was a pro bass fisherwoman at three.

But the trees were also a source of my terror. To my father, the limber branches were an armory. I remember that walk to the tree outside our kitchen window—the slow, heavy trudge of a child sent to harvest their own pain. I had to select the switch myself, testing the suppleness of the wood, knowing that if I chose one too brittle, the replacement would be twice as fierce.

The “flight” happened on a day when the violence between my parents reached a breaking point that the large backyard couldn’t drown out. The air that day didn’t just vibrate; it shattered. The shouting and heavy thud of conflict between my parents became a discordance my nervous system could no longer translate.

And so, I ran.

The Source

Through the tall grass of the meadow, past the forgotten fence post on the corner of the field, through the brambled hedge, until finally I found solace under a grove of pine and maple so thick only dappled light showed through the branches. The earth there was cool, damp, and smelled of decay. I found a dilapidated barn nestled in this tangled grove. It was a structure that felt like it had been exhaled by the earth itself, filled with the smell of ancient dust, dried clover, and a silence so profound it felt like a physical embrace. I could breathe under the weight of the pines.

The barn itself was too rotten to safely tuck me away inside. One side had been struck by a fallen pine tree that still rested there, while the roof was closer to the ground than the sky. Unsure where to go or what to do next, I began to explore my new secret place. Unbridled curiosity has always been my greatest gift and ultimate dissociation technique. I don’t remember what I found that day, but there are vague memories of the tiniest little frogs leaping from puddle to puddle. What I do remember is the hum. It started low on the earth, thrumming through my shoes. I remember taking my shoes off to feel the pulse better on the damp earth, walking—or floating—to the source.

Thinking of her now fills me with emotion I do not have all the words to name. Gratitude. Love. Wonder. Loss. These are only surface-level. What I shared with the source of this resonance that filled my body so completely, was everything; I was nothing, and I had no fear. Her bark had a reddish tint with scales that looked like dragon skin. I moved to a limb shaped like an ‘L’ and sat there, unsure of what to do next, as in my reality, comfort came with a price. I’m not sure how what happened next occurred, but I found myself wrapped around this sturdy pine with sap in my nose, wind rustling my hair—and I never remembered feeling so harbored, held, and seen. In that instant, she became my mother. She was my source of feminine embrace. She protected me from my father’s fists. I returned a few more times seeking comfort before the Fetch was made.

A Fetch is Weaved

They didn’t arrive with the static energy of the shadow man from my closet. They moved with the cadence of the woods themselves. They didn’t speak in the human tongue that had only ever been used to yell or to pray away my nature; they spoke in a language of clicks and humming that mimicked the wind in the pines. They came from the trees themselves—beings that I thought were children like me, but had strange gray skin and clothes made of bark and moss. I don’t remember ever being scared. I remember being held.

The Little People didn’t ask me to be quiet or to stay still. In those early days, I remember jumping in puddles, chasing baby frogs, finding forgotten treasures among the rotten barn, and soft hands weaving wildflowers in my hair. In my running, I was searching for a home—something they recognized before I did. They saw the sharp edges of my life, and they answered my frantic call by offering an impossible reprieve: a flight to the Otherworld.

I know now I accepted. Mother Pine had carved an image just like me from her branches and sent the hollow version of myself back to my parents’ home. My soul, now weightless, was free to float further into the pine grove.

The Hidden Years

The years following my flight under the pines are shrouded in a mist that is only recently dissipating. It is a jumble of human reality and life among the Little People. I mostly remember fantastical adventures exploring the woods and waterways of the countryside. The wild world was my classroom, where the Little People taught not in words, but through experience. I could not pin down a specific moment of my life with them, but I know one day I’ll tease those memories out of my fascia. For now, I’m content with the overwhelming feeling of asylum I felt under the pines.

I don’t know what truly happened in the seven years between meeting the shadow man in my closet for the first time around the age of six and the overly dramatic “pray the demon away” exorcism at age thirteen. What I know now about the human brain, trauma, and child development suggests the abuse and chaotic nature of my home created such a sensory overload that I began pruning memories and eventually stopped filing them away altogether.

Most adults only have “snapshot” memories from before age six. If a child’s life is stable, the librarian starts filing things correctly around seven. But if the environment is chaotic, the librarian just locks the doors instead. With the addition of neurodivergency, this sensory overload can reach a state of saturation. To prevent system failure, the brain has to stop converting experience into memory. It shifts all power to survival. You’re no longer thinking with a brain that is equipped to process this information; you’re living purely in the animalistic state of survival.

Humans use folklore as a metaphor for the parts of our story where we are more animal than human. In my personal folklore, the idea of a Fetch aligns with what my body was doing just to survive.

A hollowed self created to survive the world around me while my soul was off in the Otherworld is a metaphor for structural dissociation. When a child is trapped in a terrifying environment with no way to physically escape, the brain creates a mental escape. Where I was being punished for being “too much,” my consciousness retreated to a liminal space of my imagination or a trance-like state. As a result, the “me” that was being yelled at or hit was the “Fetch”—the shell. Since the “real me” wasn’t “present” for the trauma, I have no narrative memory of it. I only have body memory: the revulsion to bells and nightmares of wolves.

The state of fear I was living in bathed my brain in cortisol, which then shrunk my hippocampus’s ability to function. It’s like trying to record a video while the camera is overheating; the footage comes out as static, or it doesn’t save at all. The “exorcism” at thirteen likely acted as a Secondary Trauma. A sudden, violent religious event can cause a “re-locking” of those early files. Subsequently, my brain decided those seven years were “demonic” or “dangerous,” and it buried them to keep me sane. Barely.

The Return (The Seam Rips)

The human world always comes clawing at the barn doors. Sometime during my thirteenth year, the reunification of my soul and body was a violent collision.

They thought they were casting out a devil. In reality, they were splintering the Fetch. When the wood fractures under the weight of those desperate prayers, the “Real Me” was pulled back through the seam with no protection. The mist shrouding my memory was a veil for the safety I had lost. Because even after the “demons” were gone, the beatings continued.

I woke up at thirteen to a home I didn’t recognize and a body that felt seven years too heavy. To my family, I was “cured” because I was back and once again compliant. To me, I was an intruder in my own skin.

The memories are gone, but the Acoustic Architecture remains. I find I can navigate the Indiana woods in pitch black as if I have a lantern in my chest. I have an instinctive, physical revulsion to the sound of church bells—a sensory “shiver” that warns me the seam is being threatened again.

The “pray the demon away” ritual at thirteen was meant to be an ending. They intended to collapse the tunnel between my world and theirs, to cauterize the “too much” in me until I was nothing but a silent, obedient shell. But you cannot truly kill a soul that has already learned the language of the oaks. You can only make it wait.

The Steward

Now, decades later, I am back in the Indiana dirt. I am no longer a child sent to harvest my own pain from the branches of a maple. I am a steward of eleven acres in Underwood, tending to a pollinator habitat and a grove of my own. My father gave me an inheritance of terror, but the Little People gave me an inheritance of Frequency.

I find that as I work the land, the “Mist of Forgetfulness” doesn’t just dissipate; it resonates. When I stand among the native plants and the milkweed, listening to the 6/8 hum of the creek, I realize I am not learning these things for the first time. I am remembering them. My body knows how to read the animal tracks before my mind can name them. My fingers know the medicine in the Yarrow and the Rosemary before I ever opened a textbook. The wild world was my first classroom, and though the “Librarian” in my brain locked the doors for my own safety, she kept the keys.

Every time I identify a hawk’s shadow or feel the shift in the air before a storm, I am tapping back into the “Star-Inheritance” they gave me. I am no longer the intruder in my own skin that I was at thirteen. The “Real Me”—the one who jumped in puddles and wore wildflowers in her hair—didn’t stay trapped in the Otherworld. She was waiting for a home that was safe enough to inhabit.

I don’t sleep on cold floors anymore. I don’t look for an anchor in the presence of people who demand my silence. I have become my own anchor, rooted in the same soil that once offered me a “physical embrace” when the world shattered.

The “exorcism” failed because you cannot cast out the land from the person who belongs to it. They shattered the Fetch, but they couldn’t touch the “Acoustic Architecture” of my soul. I navigate these woods now in the pitch black, not with fear, but with the lantern in my chest that has been burning since I was six years old. I am the Hag Under the Wood, and I am finally, truly, home.

✨Thank you for reading. Nothing here asks you to be better—only more yourself

✨Other rooms of the Hearth are open; wander in.

✨Elder Creek Apothecary sits just beyond the door, for those who like their stories brewed, bottled, or burned into salve.

✨Subscribe & share: If this stirred your bones, pass it along—witchcraft thrives by word of mouth.

Subscribe now

SERIES: The Hearth | No. 01

SUBJECT: The Altar at Elder Creek & The Covenant with Yungka

DATE: April 2026

The work I do at Elder Creek is a woven thing. Whether I am weeding the invasive plants from the quartz-lined creek, brewing a sleep-tonic in the apothecary, or baking a simple loaf for my family, it is all an act of tending. For years, I believed the “shaking” of our home and the faces at the eight-foot-high windows were merely the echoes of a haunted land. I didn’t realize I was being studied. I was a keeper in training, and when I finally set the bread and apple butter upon the altar of the Oak, the Priestess did not just accept the gift—she revealed a homecoming.

Wander over to the Cellar Door for more lore.

The Well of Sorrows and the Quartz-Lined Promise

The midsummer heat was oppressive compared to the comfort of my in-laws’ air conditioning, but the pull to the center of the hay field was more consuming. I was being called to the well. It was a call I intended to answer.

Jake and I had a dream: a quiet life in the country, tending to his family farm and a land we felt deeply connected to. For years, we had walked the perimeter of these hundred acres of hay and forest, touching branch and stone. The land had become our home long before we held a legal claim to it. When the neighbor passed away, and his house went up for auction, I knew it was time to make a covenant. I adjusted my backpack to shift the weight of the corn, took a swig of water, and began my walk.

I started in the quartz-lined creek, whispering promises of restoration, of removing the trash carelessly discarded for decades. I keened for the land; what had once held so many animals was now reduced to rubble. My hand found its way to my heart and began to beat. Thump, thump.

The creek opened into a new-growth forest of pine, cedar, and white oak. My hand kept the rhythm against my chest as I promised the trees I would always tell them before a limb was cut or the ground disturbed. I wept for the ancient oaks reduced to stumps during the Age of the Axe. Thump, thump.

Eventually, I spiraled through patches of Mountain Mint to the well at the center of the field. Lilacs arched over the 18th-century stones, creating a pocket just large enough for a petite woman to slip inside. There, a grief I knew was not mine took hold of my body. I cried for the lives lost, the land depleted, and the magic that could not find a home in our little valley. My tears splashed into the dark water below.

Gently, I released the canned corn and loose-leaf tobacco from my pack. With no other words, I dropped the offerings into the well and sat in the silence of unmeasured time.

The Silent Watcher: A Scout at the Glass

We won the home at auction two months later. Then, the world stopped for COVID.

Because of the economy and the difficulty of sourcing materials, we couldn’t move in for two years. We spent that time renovating mostly on our own, literally pouring our blood, sweat, and tears into the walls. During that time, I also began the energy work.

Our home sits on a massacre site—a bloody history etched into the memory of the quartz and limestone. I knew the land needed tending. The house needed a refresh, too; the previous owner had passed away in our living room. I began with a three-month cleansing ritual. By the third month, the dense pockets in the house felt lighter. Small, spritely beings began to peek from holes in the floorboards to watch us work. The home was coming alive; it even revealed its name.

You can read more about the history of our land here:

Once the house was suitable, I turned to the fields. This process was different. I wasn’t demanding anyone leave; I was simply helping the human dead connect with their ancestors to cross over. Many took the opportunity. A few, like Sylvia, decided to remain. She lives in the house with us now, helping us tend the home.

My first night alone in the house, while Jake was working third shift an hour away, I heard the first slap. It sounded as if someone had swung a heavy branch against the metal siding. I explained it away as the house “popping” from the renovations—until I turned and saw a large being watching me through the kitchen window. That glass stands at least eight feet off the ground.

We bought thick curtains the next day.

Heralds of the Deep South: The Turkeys and the Deer

Since 2020, I have been tending the flora and fauna, removing invasives and raising the frequency of the land so it can sustain abundance. It is my greatest work. By 2022, our “weird” experiences were being felt by visitors, too. One winter, a bright blue light illuminated our entire home—an odd phenomenon no neighbor saw.

In the summer of 2025, after a walk in the creek, we found a large, three-toed footprint pressed deep into the clay. It remained there for days. After that, the experiences shifted. We would walk the dogs at night and hear heavy “huffing” behind us, like a horse snorting directly at our backs.

One night, while I sat on my bed drinking mugwort tea and reading a bedtime story to Maeve, my Pyrenees, we both looked up. There, framed in the window, was the full image of a Sasquatch. His hands were over his brow, blatantly watching us—listening, perhaps, to my silly story.

That was when I finally let myself believe.

Yungka: The Priestess of the Shifting Energy

The name didn’t arrive as a sound, but as a vibration—a heavy, resonant frequency that settled behind my ribs before it ever reached my ears.

“Yungka.”

I was standing near the bramble path, the scent of fresh-baked bread and the tart sweetness of homemade apple butter still clinging to my hands. I had just set the offering upon the ancient stump, the natural altar guarded by Granddaddy Oak. The air was charged like the moments before a summer storm. Then, the silence broke—not with a noise, but with a presence.

Three turkeys materialized from the brush, followed by three deer. They watched me with eyes that held no fear, only a quiet acknowledgment. They were the heralds.

“My name is Yungka,” the voice echoed in my mind. “My clan lived here once long ago, but we have since moved to the deepest south. We are returning with the shifting energy.”

As the words took root, she revealed herself. She wasn’t the hulking shadow-beast of lore; she was magnificent. Her hair was a deep, vibrant auburn, and atop her head sat a crown of red feathered plumes—vivid and ceremonial. She looked like a queen of the earth.

“Our younger guardian told us you were here,” she continued, “and what work you have been doing.”

My mind raced back through the years of “the watching.” I thought of the house shuddering from those heavy slaps and the face at the high window. For years, I had blamed the old foundation or the ghosts of the Pigeon Roost massacre. But the energy had been shifting since that blue light in 2023. The tracking in the creek, the huffing in the yard—it had all been leading here.

The younger one, the guardian at my window, hadn’t been a threat. He had been a scout.

Standing there by the quartz and the oak, I realized the bread and apple butter weren’t just a gift; they were a bridge. The “work” Yungka spoke of—the tending of soil, the restoration of the creek—had signaled that the land was ready. The clan was coming home. And as Yungka and the messengers faded into the deep green, I knew the woods of Elder Creek would never be silent again.

✨Thank you for reading. Nothing here asks you to be better—only more yourself

✨Other rooms of the Hearth are open; wander in.

✨Elder Creek Apothecary sits just beyond the door, for those who like their stories brewed, bottled, or burned into salve.

✨Subscribe & share: If this stirred your bones, pass it along—witchcraft thrives by word of mouth.

Subscribe now