Witch
“Brambles itch and thorns will bite,
Lanterns dance in dead of night.
Bog-mist whispers, voices low,
Calling names you ought not know.
Iron rusts and candles fade,
Coven songs in blood are made.
Grandgleam trees with secrets stitch,
Their roots conceal the serpent’s twitch.
Spiders spin where moonlight falls,
Ash and soot on chapel walls.
The forest gleams, the bog does glow,
But none return who wander slow.
For wealth is bait, and death the snare,
The witches wait, they’re everywhere.
A place of curse, of greed, of pitch,
A place you’d be a fool to go, that just-might make you rich!”
Witches are the nightmares of Everwealth given skin, the creeping dread of forests and bogs made flesh. Their art is older than The Arcane Coalition's laws and more intimate than temple worship, born not of libraries or sanctioned forges, but of mud, bone, and whispered bargains with land and moon. They are not scholars in robes nor priests in gilded halls, but carrion-wives and crones who claw secrets from rot and ash. Their craft is born in damp earth and howling wind, in whispered bargains with hungering places no sane soul calls holy. They linger at the edges of The Bog of Lies, where even the ground deceives, or beneath the choking canopy of The Grandgleam Forest, where lights lure men into graves. Covens thrive there, circles of sisters who drink deep of moon and mire until their laughter turns into thunder. Solitary witches dwell in villages too, their faces hidden as healers or midwives, waiting for the day when a wronged glance or muttered curse unmasks them. Always needed, always despised, they are tolerated like poison one drinks for lack of water.
Qualifications
A witch is not trained, she is claimed. By bog, by moon, by forest, by the whisper of something older than gods. The chosen are dragged into the craft through blood and ordeal, drowning trials in swamp water, nights chained to stones until the forest itself whispers back, skin tattooed with sigils carved by thorn and flame. Apprenticeship is a cruelty, grind herbs with bleeding fingers, harvest venom with no light but the witch-fire, swallow poisons until resistance becomes knowledge. Those who break are corpses. Those who survive are witches.
Requirements
To walk this path, one must surrender. Family, name, safety, all are burned in the pyre of secrecy. Witches must take the bog into their lungs, the forest into their marrow. They must learn the ways of curses and accept the bargains of things no priest dares name. Their oath is silence and their tithe is flesh. A witch who clings to ordinary life, who will not give herself wholly, will be claimed by her craft anyway, her body twisted into something less than human, her soul fed to the mire.
Appointment
There is no ceremony of light, no ringing of bells. There is only the Circle, stones blackened with soot, blood spilled into mud, the moon swollen and watching. Initiates are stripped of their names and given secret ones, whispered by their sisters and burned into their veins. The Circle of Bogshield became infamous for binding an entire village in illusion and curse, enslaving it for years until The Knights of All-Faith tore their reign apart limb-by-limb. It remains the most feared example of what witches can do when they act not as solitary shadows, but as many voices chanting one curse.
Duties
Their duties are double-faced. To the desperate, they bring births, heal fevers, and whisper charms against bad harvests. To their covens, they owe blood and obedience, weaving storms to drown soldiers, hexes to rot grain, illusions to blind kings. Where hedge-wives practice small healings, the covens practice dominion. They claim stewardship of the land, but their stewardship is cruel, a farmer who cuts too deeply into the bog is drowned in it, a hunter who takes too many deer finds his skin turning to hide. To witches, this is justice. To everyone else, it is terror.
Responsibilities
Every working exacts a price. A curse might demand blood, a storm might demand memory, an illusion might drain a year of life. A witch is responsible for feeding the hunger of her magick, and when she fails, it feeds on her. Covens enforce this balance with savagery, sisters who cheat their oaths are hunted, their faces melted by curse until they howl like beasts. Yet even loyalty is no shield against the torch. Witch hunts are relentless, and every sister must be ready to die screaming in fire.
Benefits
Their benefits are intoxicating. A single whisper can sour a family line for generations. A charm in a doorway can twist love into hatred. A cauldron can birth storms that blot out the sun. Witches live beyond fear of kings or priests; their laws are their own, their power unchecked by crown or creed. A coven’s sisterhood is a fortress, no bond is deeper, no oath more binding. And for those who abandon humanity entirely, becoming mother-witches, the benefits are obscene, green flesh that never rots, voices that shatter glass, laughter that drives men to madness.
Accoutrements & Equipment
Their tools are as grotesque as their craft. Knives forged from Mire-Iron, cauldrons that whisper with the voices of drowned men, charms plaited from human hair, bones, and feathers. Their grimoires are not books but scars, knots, jars of teeth, songs screamed in tongues that curdle milk. Their Circles are their greatest weapon, standing stones slick with soot and blood, where their chants rise until the air itself collapses into nightmare.
Grounds for Removal/Dismissal
Villagers remove witches with pyres. Knights of All-Faith remove them with steel and fire. Covens remove them with curses. But no witch is truly gone. Burned witches rise in whispers, cast-out witches twist into hags who haunt the bog and cackle beneath the moon. To kill a witch is to scatter her, and scattered things always find their way back together.
History
The history of witchcraft in Everwealth is one of shadows and persecution. Their presence can be traced as far back as The Origin Age, when covens first began binding charms from herbs and moonlight. In The Civil Age we live in today, witchcraft spread like wildfire in the chaos left after The Fall, each famine and plague it created, doubly so as its destruction would birth The Great Schism, drove legions of desperate folk to bargains whispered in the night; Less they face a cold end, hungry and alone, if they were lucky. Time and again, their rise has been met with blood, witch-hunts, brutal spectacles where mere accusation was enough to kindle the stake. Yet the cycle never ends. The Bogshield Circle proved that witches could command not only fear but dominion, holding a settlement in thrall for years. Though broken by fire, their example is carved into every fearful sermon, every law that condemns witchcraft as heresy. And still, in forest and fen, the covens endure.
Cultural Significance
Witches embody paradox in Everwealth, to the poor, they are salvation; to the pious, corruption; to the powerful, a threat. In rural villages, hedge witches are sought for charms against stillbirth or failing harvests, but those same villagers will drag them to a pyre at the first whisper of ill fortune. Nobles shun them in court yet secretly keep their services, paying for curses against rivals or potions to kindle lust and loyalty. The Arcane Coalition views witches as a dangerous contamination, rejecting all formal schooling and twisting magick into primal bargains that defy law or reason; Demanding and encouraging their public execution. Among the Elfese, witches are sometimes tolerated as “keepers of old ways,” though even they mutter that covens too close to the Grandgleam Forest invite its hungering lights. The Bog of Lies, meanwhile, is said to be kept alive by witchcraft alone, a festering monument to their power.
Notable Holders
- The Circle of Bogshield - A coven of thirteen who mastered illusion and domination magicks so thoroughly they ruled an entire town in secret bondage. Their dispersal remains the most cited example of a witch's danger.
- Mother Greth of the Grandgleam - A hag whispered of in nursery curses, said to boil infants into broth for her coven and command beasts with her song. Hunters claim to have killed her a dozen times, yet her laugh still echoes in the trees.
- Ysmerra Ash-Face - A hedge witch burned in Halt-Cliff for supposedly spoiling the grain. Three days after her execution, the fields blackened, and the town’s children were born with mouths full of soot.
- The Hollow Daughters - Solitary witches who wander city-streets disguised, binding their curses in dolls and toys, ensuring that even within walls of stone, witchcraft’s shadow lingers.
Status
Very much-so, and quite-possibly may always be.
Creation
Some mother witches recant a story of a woman scorned and raped, left broken in the cold to die, who begged in her final moments for the power to enact her revenge. And the forest would answer.
Form of Address
Often simply 'Witch!', followed by being burned alive if-captured upon being sighted.
Alternative Naming
'Hags'.
Equates to
Elsewhere, in-tandem with the common 'witch' there are often cultural interpretations who practice identical magickal arts. Crones to the Elfese, shamans to the Orcish, or wise-wives to the Smallfolk. But in Everwealth, there is no dividing line between healer and hag. The word “witch” is curse enough, a death sentence on its own.
Source of Authority
None but their covens or the extent of their own abilities. Witches do not operate within the law's confines but in rare-exceptions.
Length of Term
Until death do you part.
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