VELVET ASHES FALLING UNDER A MOONLIT SPELL

To say "Velvet ashes falling under a moonlit spell" is to evoke the tender remnants of beauty, soft and weightless, descending in the midst of enchantment. It speaks to the elusive allure of transformation—a moment where what once burned with intensity has settled into quiet elegance, embraced by the silvery caress of moonlight. The ashes, velvet to the touch, symbolize both the end and the promise within; a fleeting whisper of something lost, yet profoundly eternal. Under the spell of the moon, time suspends, and the ashes hold a kind of beguiling mystery, a reminder that from endings come the seeds of new, uncharted beginnings.

Captured by Mitchell Royel today in the Fashion District, 8/28/26, as the electrifying beats of "Bad Dog" by Neon Hitch pulse through the air, we find myself reflecting on the resilience and courage it takes to rebuild. To those in recovery, whether from addiction, heartbreak, or any form of loss—know this moment is yours to reclaim. Like the ashes under moonlight, your past does not define you; it transforms into the foundation of your reinvention. Stay present, follow the rhythm of your own growth, and understand that every step forward, no matter how small, is a victorious act of self-love and defiance against despair.

Dear Reader,

Years ago, I covered the first issue of ELIXIR by Royel - Revenge themed in my hands — that glorious reboot, that beautiful wreckage of the old made new again. An overhaul, they called it. A rebirth dressed in ink and nerve. I covered it back then with the hunger of someone who thought she understood the word stitched into its name. Revenge. I wore it like eyeliner. I sang it like a chorus. I believed it burned clean.

I won't tell you how my feelings about that word have changed. That story stays with me — folded up small, tucked behind the ribs where the private things live. Some transformations aren't for the page. Just know that time has done its quiet work on me, the way water shapes stone without ever announcing itself.

But I want to give you something instead. Something older than my opinions, older than any magazine, older than the wound and the impulse to answer it.

I want to talk about how the first peoples of this land understood revenge.

Long before borders and courthouses, the native peoples of this continent wrestled with the same fire that lives in all of us — the need to answer harm with harm. They knew it well. They didn't pretend it away. But many of them built something wiser around that fire, something that kept it from swallowing the whole village.

Across many of these nations, there existed frameworks of peace — ancient agreements, passed down through oral tradition and ceremony, that recognized a hard truth: vengeance breeds vengeance. A single act of retribution becomes a chain, and each link drags a family, a clan, a whole people down with it. So many chose council over combat. They chose the long conversation over the quick blade.

This did not make them soft. Do not mistake mercy for weakness — that has always been the lazy reading. These were fierce, proud peoples. But they measured strength differently. Strength was the discipline to stop. To sit at the fire and let the elders speak.

The elders — that was the heart of it. In many nations, the grieving did not act alone. When a life was taken, the whole community turned toward the loss. Sometimes the answer was restitution: goods offered, ceremonies held, a covenant made so that the dead were honored and the living could breathe again. This is what we now clumsily call restorative justice — the idea that harm tears a hole in the fabric of a people, and the goal is to mend the cloth, not tear it wider.

There were ancient rituals — offerings given to a grieving family to settle the debt of blood without spilling more of it. Imagine that. A culture that understood grief as something to be tended, not weaponized. A culture that asked: what does the wounded person actually need to be whole again?

I want to be honest and fair, though, because the truth is never one clean color. These were not utopias. Revenge existed. Blood feuds happened. Raids answered raids. Fierce retaliation was practiced, and captives sometimes paid terrible prices. The human pull toward retribution lived among them as it lives among us — because it is human, not tribal, not partisan, not modern. Every people who ever loved has also wanted to avenge that love. To pretend otherwise would dishonor their complexity and flatten them into a fantasy.

So here is what moves me. They held both. They knew the appetite for vengeance was real — they did not shame it, did not deny it lived in the chest. And still, they built structures to guide it, to cool it, to turn it toward healing when they could. Balance was the whole philosophy. Not the erasure of the impulse, but the wisdom of what to do with it.

That is the insight I offer you now, without politics, without a flag planted on one hill or another. Retribution and restoration are not enemies from opposite sides of some aisle. They are two truths about being human, and the old ways understood that the art of living well is knowing which one to reach for, and when.

I covered Revenge once. I sang its name. And now I think the deepest revenge — if we must use the word at all — is the one that refuses to hand the fire back. The one that grieves fully, honors the loss, and then, somehow, chooses to keep the village whole.

I'll leave the rest unsaid. Some elixirs are meant to be tasted slowly.

With all my ferocity and all my quiet,

Neon Hitch

Epilogue: Have you noticed how the land remembers? How it holds the stories written in the grooves of its rivers, the sprawl of its forests, the shape of its mountains? The earth has witnessed every triumph, every tragedy, and every resilience, even when the ink of history has favored certain tellings and silenced others.

When their lands were encroached upon, when their homes were threatened, the first peoples did not yield easily, nor without thought. These were not passive watchers of their world being divided and claimed. They were strategists, visionaries, keepers of wisdom as old as the soil itself. And they resisted in ways that carved as much strength into the air as into the spear.

Resistance was not always war, though battles were fought, and blood was spilled. Resistance was survival. It was the weaving of baskets even when the future seemed stolen. It was the quiet song sung over seeds pressed into the earth, ensuring life would return in spring. It was stories carried on the breath of elders to remind the young who they were, and those stories traveled farther, wider, longer than any invasion could fathom.

The invaders brought systems alien to the land — lines and fences not meant to be drawn, treaties written in shifting ink. And yet, the resilience of those who had always called this land home burned like a resolute flame. The native peoples knew that survival was not simply staying alive; it was safeguarding the spirit of their ways. This spirit manifested in trade alliances, in marriages across rival clans, in languages whispered into small ears so as not to be stolen by silence.

They understood that protecting the soul of a land does not always mean standing over it with a blade. Sometimes it is the quieter rebellions — the prayer sent skyward, the food shared with a neighbor, the refusal to vanish in the shadows of another’s expansion. They adapted without letting go of the roots that connected them to the earth. Their sacred practices, altered but unbroken, became acts of defiance in themselves.

There were fractures between tribes, too, and distrust sewn by others into those cracks. Yet even these divisions could not erase their shared commitment to the essence of the land and its spirit. Their resistance endures in the stories that still teach us, if we care to listen.

The land remembers. It holds not just the sorrow but the tenacity. It has been walked and rewritten, and still it speaks. Just pause and you’ll hear it — the hum of the ancient ways, the strength that refused to be silenced.

With humility and fire,
A Keeper of Words