Challenge: The form for today’s story must be prosetry and mention at least three herbs or other botanical elements. Optionally, use the theme Witchy.
We interrupt the current storyline with a super random mid-effort backstory vignette in Beyari’s story (back when she was a shaman apprentice and went by Zerela Thath-Prela, her birth name). By the virtue of the inspiration from the optional theme, this briefly and somewhat vaguely features the evolution that FFM of our era undergoes during the ~4700 Earth Years that it takes to reach the time of the current Whoops storyline time: becoming an official cult! Viva!
IDK if I got anywhere near the form requirement, but I tried. The three mentions are Fateguiders (a flower, so I think it falls under botanical element), Hioth-Shu (Koltonese for Shy-Herb, worldbuilding details TBD) and Ink’Horn (worldbuilding details also TBD, but it’s a plant that has use in writing, so also a botanical element).
Once during her time as an apprentice, Zerela encountered a member of the Cult of Hydra in the middle of a ritual, running blindly into the depths of the Wuno’Aleh Order’s HQ as she was. The smell of Fateguiders hit her nose before she registered the chanting of “viva”, the single-voiced chanting cutting off after a hurried “viva hydra”, the cultist, a Wuno’Aleh shaman, turning to look at her in puzzlement.
The smell of Fateguiders, of a sweet fruit she later learned was called “banana”, of Hioth-Shu, of Ink’Horn, it followed Zerela as she fled, her apology probably a garbled combination of many languages rather than anything intelligible, until it no longer did.
She got lost deep in the HQ but she did not mind that because at least it was quiet, not overwhelming like everything else that day, and so many days before and after it.
WindySilver 