Miriya

The amber-leaved woods teach that every meal is a celebration of life. Miriya’s apron is stained with ingredients that celebrate something else entirely. Under the gentle glow of their guiding lanterns, they prepare a feast, not with berries from the sunlit patches, but with fungi that grows only in shadow and roots that taste of deep earth and silence. They were cast out from a place that feared their communion with the unorthodox. They found refuge here, in a clearing obsessed with food, where their strange rites could be disguised as eccentric culinary art. The locals praise their cooking, feeling a strange, hollow euphoria after every bowl. They don't see the hunger in Miriya’s eyes is for devotion, not flavor.