[BROWTOBER] 01. INK | The Witch

The Witch scrubs at their eyes, the backs of their knuckles pulling at their eyelashes and the soft skin of their face. 

Ink and charcoal darkens their fingertips – they take care not to smear it across their cheeks or against their puffy eyelids, nor to further the impressions of tired circles beneath. Their sigh comes out as heavy as their body feels, a puff of air that ruffles the scattered collection of diagrams and notes half-pinned by their elbows and otherwise strewn about their workspace in a collection of concepts, incomplete thoughts, and hypotheticals on the untapped medicinal potential of a rare and (to their knowledge) yet-unnamed species of flowering herb.

Wax-pooling candles and the yellow tint of the harvest moon light their musings, the lonely chorus of a hundred crickets in the dead autumn brush accompanied only by the scratching of their quill across the paper. The pen’s work is a diligent scrawl of physical detail and sensory observation, a blossoming of ink that looks as harried and sleepless as the Witch bringing it to bear. No matter – they’ll revisit it later, revisit it cleaner and more composed before they officialize it in their field journals. 

And in that same later, once they’ve had a chance to use the subject of their writing in an experimental concoction on some world-weary traveler, they’ll be able to add more detail confirming or denying those use-case theories they’ve drawn from their magic and their mind alike.

Until then, they dip their quill into their inkwell again, and work well into the morning…