Teya’s bread did things
In a village nestled snug between two mountains, where the sky seemed close enough to kiss, lived an old woman named Teya. She wasn’t wealthy, wasn’t famous. No one in the kingdom knew her name, but every soul in the valley did. Not because she had conquered dragons or crafted fine jewels, but because she baked bread—simple, warm loaves that made the village smell like home.
But here’s the thing: her bread wasn’t just bread. Ask anyone, and they’d swear it had something extra. The kind of extra that made a bride-to-be eat a slice and feel calm enough to marry that guy with the weird laugh. Or how a farmer, one foot in the door of disaster after months of drought, would bite into Teya’s bread and—like clockwork—clouds would roll in, and the rains would finally come. It was a mystery. Magic? Luck? Who knows. But everyone agreed—Teya’s bread did things.
Each morning, Teya would wake before the sun, shuffle into her tiny kitchen, and knead the dough. No rushing, no shortcuts. Her hands moved like they’d been doing this for centuries, pressing, folding, shaping. The ingredients were ordinary—flour, water, salt—but in Teya’s hands, they became something else. The dough seemed to carry the memories of old hands, of fields, of skies, of stories no one had written down. And when she baked, no one dared ask her to hurry. Not that anyone ever tried.
Soon, the legend of her bread spread beyond the valley. First, the village down the road caught wind. Then towns on the other side of the mountains. And before long, strangers were making the pilgrimage—not for healing or miracles—but for a slice of Teya’s bread and the quiet that followed after that first bite. Travelers came, eyes tired from journeys they couldn’t explain, and they’d sit at her table, eat, and feel the world shift, just slightly—like a small nudge back to where things should be. Nothing big, but enough to matter.
Teya never said a word about what made her bread different. Maybe she didn’t even know herself. It was just the way she moved, how she listened to the wind or how her fingers brushed the wheat in the field behind her home. Her bread wasn’t fancy, wasn’t extraordinary. But it was alive—woven with patience, with attention, with love so quiet you didn’t notice it until you were halfway through your second slice.
One day, a man from the city arrived. You know the type—slick suit, shiny shoes, big talk. He had heard the stories, of course. And he wanted in. He imagined bakeries all across the city, selling “Teya’s Famous Bread.” People would line up for miles, and he’d make her rich beyond belief. Fame. Fortune. Recognition.
Teya nodded politely as he spoke, her hands still gently shaping the dough. She didn’t rush. The man, with his spreadsheets and ideas, was certain he had her hooked. After all, who wouldn’t want what he was offering?
Finally, Teya looked up, her eyes as soft as the loaves cooling behind her. “The bread doesn’t belong in the city,” she said.
The man blinked. “What do you mean? You could do so much more. People need it!”
Teya gave him a small smile—just enough to show she wasn’t upset, just certain. “The bread isn’t special because of what’s in it,” she said, “It’s special because of what it’s part of. Here, in this place, it’s fed by the soil, the sky, the people. If I take it away, it loses its heart. It wouldn’t be the same.”
The man didn’t understand. Not really. He gave her a nod, awkward and confused, and left without another word. He never came back. And life, of course, went on. The villagers kept coming. The travelers kept arriving. And Teya? She kept baking.
No, her bread wasn’t magic.
Or maybe it was. But the truth was simpler than that, wasn’t it?
The bread was just like Teya—patient, present, full of a love that didn’t need to announce itself. It was enough just to be.
And the world kept spinning—gently, like her hands shaping the dough—held together by small,
everyday miracles
that nobody wrote stories about, but everyone knew were real.
Teya stood at the door,
her calm gaze locked on the man from the city and the men he’d brought with him.
The air between them felt brittle, like it could shatter at any moment. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t flinched. Her hands were still dusted with flour, but behind her eyes, something ancient stirred.
The man sneered. “We’ll take what we need, Teya. This bread, your land—it’s all part of something bigger now.
You can’t stop it.”
But they didn’t know Teya. Not really. Not yet.
Teya moved with purpose,
through the quiet warmth of her kitchen,
past the rows of loaves
cooling
on the counter.
In a dark corner, almost hidden,
stood a black, heavy chest. Its surface was worn and scratched, but when she opened it, there wasn’t hesitation, only inevitability.
Inside lay Black Dragon—a tool, sleek and deadly, black as night. Darkness…darker even darkness’s brother maybe?
The stock was engraved with the intricate swirl of ancient runes, the symbol of her Viking ancestors. This weapon was no ordinary—it was an omen, a relic passed down through her family for generations, each carving in its metal telling the story of those who had wielded it before her. It was said to be born from the same iron that had once made Viking, but this… this was a modern beast.
She ran her hand over the cold surface, feeling the hum of power beneath her fingertips, and smiled for the first time that day—not the gentle smile the village knew,
but something fierce.
She hoisted the Black Dragon over her shoulder like it had always been there, waiting for this very moment.
As she stepped outside, the men saw it, and their smirks faltered. The city man took a step back, fear creeping into his polished facade.
“You think you can scare me with that?” he spat, trying to hold onto his bravado.
But Teya didn’t even acknowledge his words. She was already moving.
She fired a warning shot into the sky.
The sound echoed off the mountains, a crack so loud it felt like the earth itself had split open. The air, which had been thick with tension, now crackled with energy.
The men flinched, stepping back as the smell settled in the air.
The man from the city paled. This wasn’t what he had planned.
These weren’t simple farmers. This was a family bound by something deeper than business or trade—blood and earth, the land and the bread that had always sustained them.
Teya stepped forward, power resting calmly in her hands, the calm authority of a woman who had lived many lives
and knew the weight of every decision
she had ever made…
“The bread belongs here,” she said,
her voice steady and full of the kind of certainty that only comes from knowing exactly who you are. “And so do we.”
The men shifted uneasily, their bravado crumbling. They hadn’t expected this. The city man opened his mouth to say something, anything, He could feel it now—this wasn’t just about bread.
This was about something he could never own, never understand. The land, the people, the stories woven into every loaf—they were beyond him, beyond money, beyond power.
Teya raised the Black Dragon one last time, not aiming at the man, but at the ground in front of him.
She pulled the trigger, and the blast hit the earth, sending up a cloud of dust and rock. It wasn’t meant to kill—it was meant to mark.
“You walk out of here,” Teya said, her voice low and cold. “And you don’t come back. You don’t touch this land. You don’t touch these people. You forget you ever set foot here.”
The man, pale and trembling, nodded, his arrogance stripped away. He motioned to his men, and without another word, they turned and fled, stumbling over themselves to escape.
And that evening,
as the sun sank behind the mountains,
Teya sat at her table, her family around her,
and broke the last loaf of the day.
She ate
slowly, savouring the way each bite tasted of the land, of the quiet that had returned, of the small,
everyday miracles
that everyone else seemed to forget—but she never did.
The Black Dragon rested in the corner, quiet again, but its presence was felt.
It was a reminder that some things—like family, like land,
like the simple act of baking bread—could never be bought or sold.
And that sometimes, when threatened,
they were worth fighting for with the kind of force that
echoed through history.
The development of agriculture and food production was not a neutral process. It was marked by the dynamics of power, by who controlled access to food, by the language games that established hierarchies, and by the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways that certain groups were marginalized, while others wrote the narrative that would be passed down.
Imagine the world as an ocean, with humans as fish swimming through vast currents of time, evolution, language, and culture. Each of us, navigating the waters, leaves behind ripples that shape not only our immediate surroundings but the entire sea. This ocean, though full of chaotic tides and fierce storms, is also full of poetry—a poetry that emerges from the interconnectedness of life, the struggles and triumphs of existence, and the ways in which we evolve, not just biologically, but socially and linguistically.
In the deep waters of our collective past, humanity, like fish, began as simple organisms, governed by the primal forces of survival. The story of biological evolution is a long and winding current—one that connects us to every living thing that ever swam in these waters. Over billions of years, we evolved, driven by the same natural forces that shaped all life: adaptation, mutation, the push and pull of environment and chance. At some point in this evolutionary process, humans began to distinguish themselves, not just by the tools they created or the societies they formed, but by the way they used language to shape their world.
The way food was discussed, written about, and recorded wasn’t simply an objective recounting of facts. Language served as a tool of power, shaping who was credited with innovation and who was relegated to the background. The development of certain crops or agricultural techniques was often attributed to rulers, kings, or priests, despite the fact that the actual work and ingenuity often came from peasants, women, or marginalized groups. This reflects the power dynamics at play in how food was valued and who controlled the narrative.
Fish, like humans, evolved to fit into their ecosystems, and as they swam through time, they developed the traits that would allow them to thrive. Just as fish grew fins and gills to navigate the waters, humans developed larger brains, opposable thumbs, and the capacity for speech. We didn’t evolve in isolation, but in response to the ebb and flow of our surroundings, in response to the need to survive in the complex ecosystems of Earth.
This same biological evolution crafted the human brain, the seat of our creativity, memory, and capacity for language. Through our evolution, the brain expanded, allowing for more complex forms of social organization and communication. These new abilities gave rise to something far more profound than physical survival: the ability to create meaning, to pass down knowledge not just through genetic inheritance but through stories, symbols, and speech. This is where the fish of humanity begins to swim in deeper waters—where we enter the currents of language and social evolution.
In ancient civilizations, food wasn’t just sustenance; it was a means of control. In Mesopotamia, the rulers of city-states like Ur and Babylon didn’t just command armies and build ziggurats—they controlled the distribution of grain. The granaries were tightly linked to the temples, where the gods were believed to bless the harvests. But the power to manage these resources rested firmly with the elite priestly and ruling classes. Control over food became synonymous with political and spiritual authority. The common farmer, working the land, may have had the knowledge to grow the crops, but it was the rulers who decided who ate and who starved in times of shortage.
Here, the language of divinity is crucial. By framing food distribution as a god-given responsibility, rulers and priests placed themselves at the center of both the material and spiritual well-being of their people. It wasn’t just that they held the granaries—they owned the language surrounding food. They established the religious rituals that marked the planting and harvest cycles, embedding their control of food into the cosmic order. This interplay of food and language wasn’t accidental—it was strategic, ensuring that the control of food became a matter of divine will.
Now think about how this played out in Egypt, where the Nile’s flooding dictated the agricultural cycle. The pharaoh, seen as a god-king, was literally viewed as the one responsible for the Nile’s life-giving floods. His control over food production wasn’t just bureaucratic; it was ideological. He was the mediator between the people and the gods, and as such, his authority over the harvest was seen as a natural law. The farmers who worked the land, whose intimate knowledge of the cycles of planting and harvesting kept Egypt fed, were effectively erased from the narrative. Instead, monumental inscriptions credit the pharaohs with the abundance of the land. The hieroglyphic language of power reinforced the centrality of the pharaoh, even as the actual labor and ingenuity of food production were the work of those on the margins.
But the story of food control and language games extends far beyond these ancient examples. Consider the dynamics of food control in feudal Europe. Lords controlled vast tracts of land, and with it, the food produced by serfs. The language of feudal contracts made it clear: the land belonged to the lord, and so too did the food. But these lords rarely worked the land themselves; that was the job of peasants, whose centuries-old knowledge of the land, passed down through generations, was dismissed in the official records. The peasants grew the crops, raised the animals, and brewed the beer, but the language of the time encoded them as mere tenants of the land—a kind of human extension of the earth they worked.
In this way, food production became a deeply political act. The serfs and peasants were dependent on their lords not just for protection, but for access to the very land they worked. The language of the law, of ownership and tenancy, defined who had the right to the harvest. This legal language obscured the reality of who actually fed the population—once again marginalizing the role of those closest to the food, while centralizing power in the hands of those who controlled the land.
Let’s not forget how deeply gender intersects with this history. In many ancient and medieval societies, the role of women in food production was critical, but often invisible in the official records. Women were typically responsible for growing food in kitchen gardens, for preserving food through fermentation or drying, for making bread, and for brewing beer—yet these activities were rarely documented in the same way that male-dominated agriculture was. In fact, in many parts of the ancient world, brewing beer was traditionally a woman’s task—until it became a profitable enterprise, at which point it was often taken over by men and regulated by male guilds.
Consider the Enheduanna paradox. Enheduanna, an Akkadian priestess, is one of the earliest known authors in human history, and her writings include hymns that praise the goddess Inanna. Through Enheduanna’s works, we get a rare glimpse of a woman whose role in society was acknowledged and recorded. But for every Enheduanna, there were thousands of women who played vital roles in food production and preservation—roles that were essential to the survival of their communities—yet whose contributions remain unrecorded, hidden behind the language of male-dominated historical narratives.
When women’s work in food production is acknowledged, it’s often through indirect references. Archaeological finds, like food storage vessels, cooking tools, and traces of early fermentation processes, hint at the centrality of women’s roles in maintaining food security. But even these material traces can be ambiguous. The language surrounding these artifacts often obscures their social significance, describing them in technical terms without reflecting on the gendered labor behind them. The language of archaeology—its focus on tools, objects, and processes—rarely captures the social dynamics that produced these innovations.
The way we talk about food also reflects class hierarchies. The language of cuisine—what we call food and how we describe it—has long been a way to establish social distinction. In medieval Europe, for instance, the food eaten by the nobility was described in grand terms: venison, boar, pheasant, all served in elaborate dishes that signified wealth and status. The peasants, meanwhile, ate pottage, a thick stew made from whatever grains and vegetables were available. The same language games are at work today. Consider how words like “gourmet” or “artisanal” elevate certain foods, while others are dismissed as “common” or “cheap.”
These linguistic distinctions aren’t just about taste—they’re about power. The ability to define what counts as “high” cuisine or “low” food has always been tied to class. The foods that once sustained entire populations—grains, pulses, root vegetables—are often seen as peasant fare, while foods that were historically the preserve of the wealthy—meat, exotic spices, wine—carry a different kind of cultural cachet. Yet in many cases, the “low” foods were far more important to the survival of civilizations. The Irish potato, the Andean quinoa, the African yam—these crops fed millions, even as they were linguistically relegated to the background.
In the modern era, these power dynamics are still at play. When we talk about the global food system, the language of trade often obscures the human realities behind the numbers. The industrialization of agriculture, the rise of global supply chains—these are framed in economic terms, but behind them lie real people, often in the developing world, whose labor and expertise keep the system running. The smallholder farmers who grow the world’s food are often excluded from the narratives of power, even though they are at the very heart of the system. Their knowledge, passed down through generations, remains undervalued in the language of modern agribusiness.
Despite the forces that have tried to control food and its narrative, there are countless examples of food as a site of resistance. Marginalized groups throughout history have used food not just for survival but as a way to resist domination. The preservation of traditional foodways, the passing down of family recipes, the cultivation of heirloom crops—all these acts are ways to assert identity and autonomy in the face of power.
Take the Marron communities in the Americas, formed by escaped enslaved Africans. These groups not only fought for their freedom but also created their own agricultural systems, growing crops that were familiar to them from Africa, like yams, okra, and rice. In this way, food became a form of cultural preservation and resistance, a way to maintain a connection to their heritage while building new lives in the face of oppression.
It’s strange to think about food through the lens of history, science, and spirituality all at once—like peeling layers of an onion where each layer is not just a slice of some truth but a different truth entirely. The world now, in our hyper-modern moment, has a tendency to break things apart, categorize, label, and place them neatly into shelves: this is food, this is religion, this is science, this is culture. But what if that’s not the way things ever were? What if the categories themselves are as flimsy as a narrative we keep spinning, not so much to understand but to feel in control?
Take ancient texts, for instance. People love to either venerate them or dismiss them—either they are sacred relics of divine wisdom or outdated tomes filled with superstition. But they weren’t just superstition. They weren’t science either, not in the way we understand it. They were life captured in language, the echo of human attempts to make sense of their place in the world.
Consider the Vedas, the Torah, the Quran—each containing layers upon layers of ideas, practices, observations, and yes, superstitions. But here’s where it gets interesting: the more we try to strip them down to some empirical nugget of “truth,” the more we lose sight of what they really are—living documents. Not the fossilized remains of a past thought process, but a glimpse of how people actively navigated their realities.
What we call science now is another narrative—a rigorous one, yes, built on empirical data and the testing of hypotheses—but it’s still a story we tell ourselves about the world. Ancient cultures didn’t have the benefit of microscopes and laboratories, but they had time. Generations of observations encoded into their language and passed down orally or etched in sacred scripts. They saw patterns long before the scientific method gave us formal ways of recognizing them. Take the Levitical laws on clean and unclean foods: maybe they didn’t know about bacteria, but they knew some foods caused problems, and they built rules around that knowledge. And then they wrapped those rules in religious meaning because what else would you do? When survival depended on everyone following those rules, you make them sacred
There’s something deeply poetic in the way food, religion, and early science intersect. Today, the modern mind tends to divide them, pretending like science has stripped away the “nonsense,” but that’s a postmodern lie we tell ourselves. Science, too, is wrapped in its own mythology—one of rationality, progress, certainty. Yet, scratch the surface and what you find is a kind of faith, too. A faith in methods, in objectivity, in the idea that with enough information, we can deconstruct the entire universe and know it fully. But what if the universe, like the food we eat, is never meant to be fully understood, just experienced? What if our need for explanation is a form of insecurity rather than enlightenment?
Now look at food. Even our relationship to food is different in this modern world—broken, even. We process it, refine it, strip it down to chemicals, nutrients, calories, all the while losing the poetry of food, the ancient knowing of it. The ancients didn’t know about antioxidants or Omega-3 fatty acids, but they did know that food could bring you closer to the divine, or plunge you into lethargy, or spark something in your soul. Was that superstition? Or were they onto something we’ve forgotten, that food is more than the sum of its parts?
In the sacred texts, food was always connected to more than just survival. It was the link between humanity and something larger. You see it in the symbolism of the Tree of Life, in the fruit of knowledge, in the manna from heaven. These weren’t just stories about physical sustenance—they were metaphors for the kind of nourishment we all crave, the kind that fills not just the stomach but the spirit. And that’s where we stumble in our postmodern discourse. We want to break everything apart, analyze it to death, but we forget that some things only make sense when they’re whole.
Consider the way sacred texts talk about fasting—it wasn’t just about not eating. Fasting was a way to clear the mind, to reach into the deeper layers of the self, the layers that are always in communication with the divine or the unknown. Science will tell you fasting triggers certain metabolic processes, that it sharpens focus, maybe even prolongs life. But the ancients weren’t interested in longevity; they were interested in clarity, in tapping into a rhythm of existence that couldn’t be quantified.
What happens when you place that against the backdrop of today? We have all the science in the world, all the food, all the knowledge—but we’re starved for meaning. The ancient mind didn’t separate nutrition from spirituality, or science from religion. Everything was part of an interconnected whole, a web of life where what you ate, how you ate, and when you ate had cosmic significance. It wasn’t superstition. It was their science—their way of understanding not just how the world worked but how they fit into it.
And that’s the beauty of postmodern thought, isn’t it? We get to tear down the walls between disciplines, between ideas, between so-called truths. We get to be playful with the lines that have been drawn and redrawn through history. We can deconstruct it all, not to dismiss it, but to find the connections again—to see that food, science, religion, and art are all part of the same ocean we’re swimming in. The fish in the sea don’t know where the water ends and the air begins; they just swim through it. Maybe that’s how we need to approach this modern crisis of knowledge. Instead of looking for the boundaries, the clean lines that divide superstition from fact, maybe we should be looking for the points where they merge.
Food, in this context, becomes something magical again. Not because it’s imbued with divine properties in the literal sense, but because it connects us to something primal, something ancient, something that we’ve tried to break apart but can’t. The sacred texts, the rituals, the laws—they all point to a truth that can’t be fully captured in any one frame. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the real wisdom is knowing that knowledge itself is always fluid, always shifting, like the tides.
So, in a post-truth world, maybe we circle back not to superstition, but to a more playful, poetic understanding of what it means to know something. The ancients understood food and the cosmos as part of a grand, interconnected whole. In trying to separate those threads, we’ve lost something. The scientific facts we chase are only a sliver of the real story. The rest? It’s still there, in the poetry of our ancestors, in the sacred texts, in the simple act of eating a meal, knowing that it’s feeding more than just our bodies. It’s feeding us in ways we can’t always explain but somehow still understand.
Let’s push this further, untether ourselves from the certainties we cling to, and drift into the space where speculation isn’t just possible—it’s necessary. Because what if the gaps in our knowledge, the places where the light doesn’t quite reach, are the most fertile grounds for learning? Let’s consider the intersection of ancient wisdom, modern science, and everything in between not as competing forces but as reflections of how we’ve always tried to make sense of what we don’t know.
When we talk about what we don’t know, we’re really talking about the ocean of uncertainty that lies beneath everything we do know. Science, as we practice it now, is a way of chipping away at that uncertainty. We isolate variables, test hypotheses, publish results, and gradually build a clearer picture of how the world works. But that picture—no matter how detailed—will always be incomplete. There’s a difference between knowing and understanding, and it’s here that we need to stretch ourselves, speculate, reach beyond the boundaries of established thought.
Take the ancient concept of food as more than just sustenance. Sacred texts speak of food not just in terms of nutrition, but in terms of energy, vital force, spirit. They intuited something that goes beyond the material properties of food. We could speculate here: what if food doesn’t just provide calories and nutrients but interacts with the body in ways we’ve only begun to explore? Modern science has started to dabble in this space with ideas like gut health and the microbiome, acknowledging that the food we eat doesn’t just feed us—it feeds entire ecosystems within us. What if those ancient texts were pointing toward a deeper understanding of this interconnectedness long before we had microscopes to show us?
The Vedic concept of prana or the Chinese qi—both of these are ideas about energy, about the flow of life through the body, and food was seen as a way to nourish and balance that flow. Today, science doesn’t deal in concepts like qi or prana, but it does talk about bioenergetics—the ways in which cells produce and use energy. Could it be that ancient cultures understood this in a more holistic way, even if they didn’t have the tools to describe it in biochemical terms? What might we learn if we were to approach food, not just as fuel, but as part of a system of energy flow that we’ve only begun to understand?
We don’t yet fully understand the complex relationship between mental health, energy, and food either. There’s this intuitive sense in many ancient cultures that what you eat directly affects your state of mind, your spirit, your ability to connect with something beyond the self. Modern science is slowly catching up here—there’s emerging research on the gut-brain connection, how the microbiome affects mood, cognition, even personality. But what if there’s more? What if food is connected to consciousness in ways we haven’t explored yet? The idea that fasting can induce heightened states of awareness is well-documented in many spiritual traditions, but the mechanisms remain murky to us. Could fasting or specific dietary patterns alter our neurochemistry in profound ways that push us toward a higher state of consciousness, not just psychologically but physiologically?
There’s also the matter of language—how it shapes our understanding and, at times, limits it. The language of modern science is precise, structured, built for breaking things down into parts. The language of the ancients was more metaphorical, symbolic, designed to capture whole systems of thought. And there’s something there, something worth exploring about the limitations of our current language when it comes to describing phenomena we haven’t fully quantified.
We don’t yet have the language to talk about the subtle interactions between body, mind, and environment in the way that ancient cultures did. They spoke of balance, of energy, of harmony, in ways that we might dismiss as poetic but which might actually be pointing to real, measurable phenomena that our current scientific framework can’t fully capture yet. What might happen if we could merge the metaphorical with the measurable? If we found ways to quantify the unquantifiable, what new kinds of knowledge might emerge?
Consider how science handles things like placebo effects. These are often viewed as quirks of the mind—an odd psychological trick where belief alters biology. But what if the placebo effect is only the tip of the iceberg, a small glimpse into a much larger, unexplored territory of mind-body interaction? Could it be that belief, intention, even ritual, have measurable impacts on how the body processes food, nutrients, or energy? What if the sacred rituals surrounding food in ancient cultures weren’t just about religious symbolism but were ways to enhance the actual energetic or biochemical properties of the food itself through focused intention or mindfulness?
We don’t yet fully understand epigenetics, the ways in which our environment, behaviors, and even food choices can switch genes on or off, affecting not just our own biology but that of future generations. Here, the ancient idea of food as connected to lineage, ancestry, and karma becomes more interesting. Could the way we eat today reverberate through generations in ways that science is only beginning to suspect?
And then, of course, there’s the biggest unknown: consciousness itself. We still don’t know how consciousness arises, how the brain creates the mind, or how food might interact with these processes. Ancient sacred texts often describe food as something that opens portals, that connects the eater to the divine, to higher planes of existence. Modern science dismisses these as metaphors, but what if they aren’t just symbolic? What if there’s a way in which food, through its interaction with our biology, taps into something beyond just our bodies—into consciousness itself, altering it, expanding it, or limiting it?
We know that certain psychoactive substances—found in plants, fungi, and even everyday foods—can alter consciousness. Indigenous cultures have long used these substances in rituals to connect with the spiritual world. What if food, in ways we haven’t yet discovered, can alter neural pathways, facilitating access to deeper levels of consciousness, creativity, or spiritual insight? Could it be that the sacred meals of ancient cultures were designed, whether consciously or unconsciously, to create shifts in awareness that
The valley stood quiet now, too quiet, the kind of silence that holds its breath before something breaks. Teya’s porch creaked beneath her boots as she stepped out, Black Dragon cradled in her hands.
The sun had finally bled out behind the mountains, casting a dark red glow across the fields—fields once green, now singed with ash, the bones of what had been burned down in the greed of men who didn’t understand what they were reaching for.
The city man stood there with his crew—twitchy, nervous, their hands on their weapons but not quite ready to draw. They’d seen something in her eyes, something they weren’t prepared for. The air was thick with it. Not fear. Not power. Something older.
“You’ve got no place here, Teya,” the man called out, his voice shaky, trying to reclaim control, but it was gone now, slipping through his fingers like sand. “This isn’t your fight anymore. You can’t win this.”
Teya’s face was stone. She took a slow breath, the kind that gathers in your chest when you’ve made peace with what’s coming. She could feel it. The raven’s shadow stretched long and cold across the field, circling once more overhead. It had been whispering to her all day, but now it was silent, waiting.
She stepped down off the porch, her boots crunching in the dirt. She didn’t need to say anything, not yet. Black Dragon rested in her arms, its barrel gleaming with the last light of day, the runes catching the glow like fire smoldering in the dark.
The men shifted, unsure, their fingers twitching near their weapons but not quite ready to face what stood before them. The city man’s grin faltered as he took a step forward. “I’ll burn this whole place down before I let you keep it. You hear me? I’ll—”
Teya fired.
The crack of Black Dragon split the air like a lightning strike, a sound so final it might as well have been the earth itself calling judgment.
The city man was thrown back, his chest opening in a spray of red, the
blood rushing
grin wiped clean from his face
before he even hit the ground his men froze, honestly their eyes wide, horror dawning as they realized,
they weren’t facing some simple baker?!
She was moving before they could react, her steps slow, deliberate, the Black Dragon roaring again and again. Each shot was precise, controlled, cutting through the men like they were nothing more than echoes, echoes of men who had made the wrong choice.
The raven’s cry pierced the air, circling overhead, its wings dark and vast against the dying light, as if it, too, was watching the end of this thing—this hollow, doomed struggle.
When the last man fell, Teya stood in the center of the, the smoke curling from the barrel of the Black Dragon. Her breath came steady, her heart calm, as if this was how it had always been meant to end. Around her, the bodies lay scattered like fallen leaves, their arrogance spent, their threats hollow now in the cold dirt.
The wind blew through the valley, stirring the ash at her feet, carrying with it the scent of earth and blood, mixing in that haunting way—old and ancient, as though the ground had seen this kind of thing before.
She lowered the barrel, eyes scanning the field one last time, looking not at the bodies, but at the land—her land. The land her family had bled for, lived for, died for. It was quiet now, and in that quiet, there was justice. Not the kind you could write in laws or make in deals, but the kind that comes from deep in the bones, the kind that’s earned with blood and steel.
Teya turned and walked back to her house, the creak of the porch under her feet the only sound in the valley now. Inside, the fire in the oven still glowed, warm and alive, waiting for her. She set the Black Dragon down gently in its place, and for a moment, she stood there, the weight of everything settling in.
The raven landed on the roof with a soft rustle of wings,
watching her,
as if waiting for a final nod,
some unspoken agreement that what was done was done.
Teya met its dark eyes and, and with that, the bird flew off, vanishing into the night.
Tomorrow, there would be bread again. Tomorrow, the oven would burn bright, and the valley would wake as if nothing had ever happened. But tonight, the land would sleep under the weight of what had been settled. And as Teya sat at her table, breaking off a piece of bread she had baked that morning, she knew—deep down in the marrow of her bones—that there are some battles you don’t walk away from.
