Our values
Blood · Hedonism · Art · Money
I.
Sworn in blood. Nothing lesser would hold us.
There is no roster. There is a rite. What we swore, we swore in something that does not wash out.
We have all been left: by friends, by lovers, by guilds we believed in. We have left in return. So when we bind someone now, we bind them in the one thing that cannot be taken back.
II.
The wine, the song, the third round and the fourth.
Pleasure asks for no apology. Only moderation does. We came for the cup and the body and the long roaring dark. We came to ruin ourselves beautifully, and we are very good at it.
There is a discipline to it. We know what we came for, which is more than most can say. Joy is the labor; the guild that treats it as a reward to be earned has already lost it.
III.
Our arts go beyond beauty.
Every one of us is making something, and not quietly. We are after the kind of work that gets retold: the performance that becomes a rumor, the duel that becomes a story, the song someone hums in a country we have never been to.
Art here is not decoration. It is how the world gets built. The poem, the strike, the deal: each one the same act, making something true that wasn't, a moment ago.
IV.
The purse is not beneath us.
We are going to be wealthy. We decided that early and out loud. What we earn, what we sell, what we win. It compounds, because we are a guild that actually keeps score.
We treat the guild like something worth investing in, because it is. We put coin into each other's craft, each other's gear, each other's worst ideas. And it pays, more often than it has any right to.
The Dry Vine does not grow for everyone.
It was never meant to.