The Witchmarked

“They are not gone. They are not forgiven. They walk. They warn. They remember what the Church forgot.”

— Seraphis Nightvale, Librarian of the Last Home

There is no census. No homeland. No word in Church doctrine that grants them form without also demanding flame.

And yet—they endure.

You may call them Witchmarked. You may call them Ashkin, or Roadbound, or any of the names scraped into the margins of sermons. Names meant for trials and burnings. Names whispered when the wind knocks twice.

They do not correct you. Correction invites questions. Questions invite fire.

They call themselves Kairathi.

Not a race. Not a nation. A diaspora of remembrance, scattered across the duskroads of Duskworn—torn from soil, burned from memory, yet stitched together by rite and ritual into something the Church cannot sanctify, and dares not name.

They do not settle. They do not forget. And wherever they walk, the Veil listens.

Where the Church Burned, They Remembered

Before the dusk fell, there were rites. Not worship—agreements. A coin for the wind. Milk for the fey. Names kept quiet where the roots could hear. These gestures held the world in balance, not through dominion, but through understanding. A thousand unspoken pacts, sealed in silence and bone, held the dark from the threshold and the dead in their beds.

The Church did not break these covenants in one act of war. It ended them through process. Midwives were hanged. Shrines were torn down and salted. The prayers of farmers and the bone-charms of mothers were denounced as heresy. What could not be rewritten was simply excised. The old names were stripped from the stones. The rites were declared corrupt. The soil was ordered to forget.

But the Veil did not forget. It recoiled.

The world was not cursed. It responded. The old gods twisted. The fey retreated—or worsened. And the Kairathi, who remembered the terms of the bargain, stepped aside and kept walking. Not because they fled, but because they refused to break what had already been betrayed.

The Weaving That Must Continue

The Kairathi speak often of the Weaving, though never with certainty. It is not a creed, and no one writes it down. It is a habit of survival—a ritual language spoken through gesture and smoke and the placement of hands upon stone. To walk the Weaving is to acknowledge that balance must be maintained, not imposed. That memory holds the world together more tightly than law.

Their belief is not in power, but in proportion. Every charm left on a windowsill, every thread wound around the left wrist, every stone turned twice before stepping away—all of these are threads. Tiny stitches. Not to heal, but to slow the unraveling. To keep the shape of the world just familiar enough that it does not decide to become something else.

This is not magic. It is not command. It is courtesy for a world that has been spoken to less and less kindly. The Church calls it superstition. The Church calls it dangerous. But the Church does not ask permission when it speaks to the gods. The Kairathi still do.

Rites Carried in Smoke and Thread

Magic is not cast among the Kairathi. It is kept. Their rituals are not incantations, but inheritances—preserved in silence and pattern, smoke and thread. They do not carry spellbooks. They carry bundles of bone, braid-charms soaked in ash, feathers wrapped around rusted coins, thistle knots hung above cradles. Each one speaks, not to the world, but to the spaces between things.

Some rites are ancient. Others are born of grief. A child’s first sleep is warded with juniper smoke and a copper ring. Rainwater is caught with the left hand. Spoons are laid crosswise when something has followed too long. Knives are not left unsheathed near doorways. Names are never said near still water. The shape of these rituals varies from camp to camp, but the rhythm does not. Every act is a soft insistence: I remember. I know. I am still holding my end of the agreement.

The Rootwomb Binding survives in the hush of certain camps. A newborn’s cord, entwined with a living root, buried beneath the threshold before the milk sours. It is not sacred. It is not a spell. It is a request—to something old, something close, something that listens more kindly to those who do not presume it is gone.

The Church sees these acts and screams “witch.” But the Kairathi do not conjure. They do not cast. They do not command. They ask. And in a world where asking has been replaced by accusation, that alone is heresy enough.

A Culture Inherited, Not Bred

The Kairathi are human, but not the kind the Church prefers. They descend from silence—orphans, runaways, the disavowed, the inconvenient. Some were born to the road. Others joined it when the stone refused their name. There is no bloodline, no lineage of power. There is only adherence to the old courtesies.

Hair is never cut without reason. A child’s first braid is tied by someone who remembers their name and has nothing to gain from it. Clothing is layered, ash-stitched, and often bears the thread of another’s grief. Nothing is worn without meaning. Nothing is ever done alone. Their culture is not genetic. It is not chosen. It is lived, every day, until forgetting becomes impossible.

The elders speak rarely. But when they do, the mist listens. So does the fire.

Homes That Move Like Ghosts

Their caravans once bore colour—bright, lacquered paint to honour the spirits, to tell stories in pigment and wheel. Now, most are faded, dulled by ash and memory. They do not hide, but they no longer announce themselves. They settle at the edge of villages, in hollows the Church has forgotten to bless, by ruins with roots too deep to burn.

Children say they saw lights. Bread left out goes missing. Charms appear on doorways no one remembers nailing shut. And in the morning, the grass is pressed flat, and no one knows why the wind smells like cedar and old smoke.

They do not stay. But where they have passed, something always lingers.

The Witch’s Eye and Other Warnings

To the faithful, they are curses in human form. The Church speaks of the Evil Eye, of children who wither under their gaze, of crops turned to mould because a Kairathi child sang too close to the well.

But the Eye is a ward, not a weapon. It marks those who are watched—not by the Church’s god, but by older neighbours, who still answer kindness with protection.

The Kairathi leave offerings to the land: coins for the fey, honey for the gods in the roots, milk for the dead who still listen when thanked properly. They do not demand. They acknowledge. They do not barter. They remember.

The Church calls this devilry. But the Kairathi do not kneel to devils. They kneel to balance. And balance, like the wind, does not care who first disturbed it—only that someone must now pay attention.

The Stolen That Were Not Stolen

The Church claims they steal children. The truth is worse.

They receive them.

Teenagers who ask too many questions. Children who bleed before the priest has decided they should. Apprentices who wake screaming after dreams that match no doctrine. They vanish. And then they reappear—braid-bound, shawled, quiet, walking with those whose names the Church refuses to pronounce.

The Kairathi do not lure. They do not enchant. They leave space. And sometimes, that is all the invitation needed.

The Church cannot allow this truth. So it rewrites it. Calls it kidnapping. Calls it corruption. Because to admit otherwise would be to admit that faith alone is not enough to keep its own from running.

The Mercy Hunters Cannot Name

There is no alliance between the Kairathi and the Hunters. But there is an understanding.

Hunters are tolerated tools—those too stained to be saved, but too necessary to discard. They are not acknowledged in doctrine. They are not given sanctuary. They are sent into the dark, and expected not to speak of what they see.

When they break, the Kairathi bind them. When they fall, the Kairathi burn them properly. When they are lost, the Kairathi sing them back into shape—if they still have shape left.

The Church does not speak of these visits. Most Hunters don’t either. But the road remembers. And the fire makes room.

Still Walking

There is no central fire. No high gathering. No written doctrine to anchor their shape. The Kairathi persist like a low, steady hum beneath the noise of civilisation—a memory that refuses to decay. They do not raise banners. They do not rally. They do not build. They continue.

Where crops fail, charms appear. Where the dead will not stay buried, offerings vanish. Where the Church has burned too many answers, someone leaves a braid on the chapel door. Sometimes copper. Sometimes bone.

They are not saviours. They are not clean. They are not forgiven.

But they have not stopped walking.

Final Thought

The Church would have you believe the Veil was torn by darkness.

It was not.

It tore because something old stopped being asked, and was instead ordered. And when the answering silence grew too loud to ignore, it tore straight through the part of the world that forgot how to speak softly.

The Kairathi are not trying to fix this.

They are trying to remember how it was before the wound.

And if the remembering is all that’s left—
Then let the remembering be sharp.
And let the last to forget be the ones who still speak kindly to the dusk.