The Coven of the Croaking Toad
A Gothic Tale of the Rootless Ones
When the red moon hides her face,
the women with rootless souls answer a call
that is not a voice, but a pulling in the blood.
the women with rootless souls answer a call
that is not a voice, but a pulling in the blood.
They are not born of malice, but of despair.
Women who watched crops fail, children starve, rivals prosper.
In their darkest hour they prayed — not to Lila, but to something older, hungrier.
And something answered.
They traded the warmth of the hearth for the chill of borrowed power.
Their souls withered so a different, ravenous essence might take root within them.
The more the village feared the woman she was,
the higher she climbed in the secret hierarchy of the Rootless.
Their gatherings are not meetings.
They are a convocation of the untethered — held in places Lila has abandoned:
the blighted grove, the cracked riverbed, the earth salted by ancient tears.
The world warns of their coming.
The gray owl hoots three times — not a hunt, but a summons.
The yellow-eyed cat mewls a triplet of despair.
Then the toad croaks its dry-throated chant.
With the third croak, the wind awakens — not to cleanse, but to scour.
They take flight.
Their shrieks are the sound of torn reality,
a swarm of furious spirits cutting across the sky.
Their power is real: to blight a field with a word, to still a heart with a glance.
But the cost is their tether to the living earth.
The more they use it, the hollower they become —
until even their own reflections no longer recognise them.
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