🔥 Part 2: Ashmilk and Bone 🌙

A tale of remembering, and the medicine we forget to take for ourselves

They called them the Bonekeeper — a quiet one who spoke to jars, roots, and the dead. 💀🌿

In the village, seekers brought wounds.
Old griefs, blistered soles, or spirits that would not stop whispering. 👣👻
The Bonekeeper never asked for payment. Only patience.

With ashmilk poultices, whisper-songs, and herbs pulled from moonless soil,
the Bonekeeper healed them all. 🌕🌾
Or so it seemed.

But inside their own chest, something hollow rang louder each season.🕳️

They gave warmth to every cold fire.
But when they woke shaking at night, no one came.❄️🔥
Their hands remembered how to soothe others — but not themselves.

And that forgetting had a cost.

One night, a child brought a broken bird. 🐦
The Bonekeeper held it, kissed its feathers, and gently helped it cross.

The child asked, “Will it come back?”

The Bonekeeper said nothing.
They had stopped believing in returns.

That night, they walked beyond their circle of salt. 🧂🌌
Into the forest they had told others not to enter.
The one with the black-stone altar.
The one that smelled like memory.

At its center stood a well.

Not of water, but of voices — thick, echoing, soft like old honey. 🍯

The Bonekeeper dropped to their knees and whispered:
“Why do I know every other’s pain but not my own?”

The well replied:
“Because you made yourself the cure before becoming the wound.”

In that moment, the Bonekeeper let it come:
😔 The screams they never voiced.
🌑 The loneliness they bandaged with rituals.
⚖️ The ache of carrying everyone but themselves.

They tore off the mask of healer. 🎭
And wept.

And the forest held them. 🌲
Not to fix.
To witness.

When dawn came, they rose slow, hands trembling. 🌅
They made a salve — one they had never made before.
Not from plants. From grief.

They smeared it across their own chest.
It burned. Then bloomed. 🔥🌸

Returning to the village, they changed their rule:

“No healing offered unless the healer has been fed.”

And each full moon, the Bonekeeper left ashmilk and bone on their own doorstep. 🌕🦴
Not for spirits.
For themself.

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🌑 Bless the bone-bearers, the unseen keepers, the ones who rise slowly. 🔮