FIELD GUIDE TO WITCHES

A Comprehensive Classification and Identification Manual

What is a Witch?

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Witches are a unique species defined by their relationship with Whim - the raw, volatile force of reality that they shape and manipulate. Every witch possesses the innate ability to bend or rewrite aspects of the world around them, though the form this takes varies wildly from individual to individual. For example, some open temporary portals between spaces, others act as living energy sources, some make good luck charms, and some manifest constructs, illusions, or physical transformations. No two witches express Whim in the exact same way even when utilizing the same medium.

Whim responds to art. Each witch channels their power through a chosen artistic discipline that becomes an extension of their identity. A painter might drag a brush and open a rift portal in the air. A cook could knead and braid a dough infused with protective wards. A musician could send wind rippling with colors from a few choice notes. Ink, textiles, metals, pottery, instruments, and so on, practically any craft can become a conduit for manipulating Whim.

Whim mediums are not genetic. However it's common for children to gravitate toward the mediums they grow up around. Through exposure, imitation, and learning from someone skilled, baby witches are more likely to grow into mediums similar to their parent's. But any witch, regardless of lineage or upbringing, can ultimately choose whatever medium resonates with their own expression.

Their magic is grounded in personal expression, but witches within the same medium still share certain strengths and limitations. Each medium has a natural "affinity" - things it excels at and things it resists. For example, ink lends itself well to shadow travel, slipping through negative space and fluid edges, but it struggles with stable constructions. This works much like art itself: you can render a lifelike portrait with a cheap ballpoint pen, but a paint set will make the process smoother and more straightforward.

Across all variations, a witch is an artist first and a reality-shaper second.

Physical Form

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Witches present in two distinct physical states: human-form and witch-form. In human-form, a witch is externally indistinguishable from an ordinary person. This is the form most witches default to in daily life, and many spend the majority of their time in it. It requires no particular effort to maintain, it is simply one half of what they are.

Witch-form is the other half. When a witch shifts, their body reorganizes into something unmistakably other. The silhouette remains broadly humanoid - two arms, upright posture, recognizable face - but the specifics diverge sharply from human anatomy. Digitigrade legs are the most commonly documented trait. Witches may shift to colors outside the human range: deep indigo, pale grey-green, a flat chalky white, etc. Eye count is unreliable. Some witches shift with a single large eye, others gain a scattered cluster, a few lose conventional eyes entirely and seem to perceive by other means.

It would be a mistake, however, to treat any of these traits as rules. Witch-forms are not standardized. Documented specimens have presented with additional limbs, asymmetrical features, unusual skin features (scales, luminescence, visible ruts), vestigial structures with no clear function, and proportions that don't hold up to close measurement. The only consistent statement one can make is this: you will know a witch in witch-form when you see one.

Lifespan and Aging

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Witches age, but not on a human schedule. Childhood through adolescence appears to proceed at roughly human pace. Development of Whim sensitivity typically manifests in late childhood, and medium affinity usually solidifies sometime in early adolescence, though late bloomers are documented and not considered abnormal.

After early adulthood, the aging process slows significantly. A witch in their second century may present as physically equivalent to a human in their late thirties. The mechanism is not fully understood, though it correlates strongly with active Whim use. Witches who suppress or abandon their practice age more quickly than those who remain engaged with their medium.

Witches do die of old age. The upper limit of natural lifespan has not been reliably established, mostly due to the fact that witch-related record-keeping has largely been destroyed.

Reproduction and Development

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Witch-forms are unisex. Their human-forms, by contrast, can present anywhere across the full spectrum of human variation.

Witches do not reproduce in the strictly biological sense. Two humans can produce a witch child and two witches may produce a human one. What determines whether a child becomes a witch is the presence of what is commonly referred to as a witch soul which is something that arrives, or doesn't. It does not appear to be random in the way a coin flip is random, as certain conditions seem to influence likelihood, but no reliable predictor has been identified beyond the genetic background of the parents.

One early indicator that a witch soul has taken hold is involuntary shifting. Witch infants and toddlers practice transitioning between forms the way human infants stretch and roll reflexively without apparent intent. An ear may briefly elongate. Skin may flicker through a color before settling. A hand may shift to something clawed and then back again mid-grasp. It is an ungainly, uncoordinated process, and in a welcoming environment it is generally considered unremarkable.

When both parents are human the probability of a witch child is low, estimated around five percent. When one parent is a witch, this rises to roughly twenty-five percent. Two witch parents produce a witch child approximately half the time. Whether the higher rates among witch parents reflect something biological, something environmental, or some combination is a matter of ongoing debate.

Critically, a witch soul is not guaranteed to stay. A child may present as a witch in early development and lose that status entirely. Neglect, routine fear, and chronic unsafety have all been documented as preceding a more likely departure. The child does not die. They simply become, quietly and completely, human. Whether the soul relocates, disperses, or ceases in some meaningful sense is unknown.

Among more accepting families, witch children stabilize at higher rates, which is noted in the literature without much further comment.

Culture

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Witches are, as a general tendency, a sociable and light-hearted species. They laugh easily, make friends readily, and have a reputation - even among those who distrust them - for being disarming company when they want to be. This is a generalization, and should be treated as one. But the pattern is documented consistently enough to note.

Most witches today live nomadically, or with a nomadic rhythm. They move between places with no strong fixed attachment to any one of them. Whether this is an innate inclination or a practical adaptation to a history of being asked to leave is difficult to untangle at this point. They travel light, form connections quickly, and tend to be skilled at making anywhere feel temporarily like somewhere.

A Fractured Cultural Identity

What witch culture was, in any cohesive traditional sense, has been largely lost. Decades of suspicion, displacement, and in the worst periods outright violence following the Summoning Events did what sustained persecution usually does: it interrupted transmission. Children raised in hiding or in isolation from other witches did not learn witch traditions. Communities that might have preserved them were scattered. What survived did so in fragments such as particular habits, aesthetic preferences, half-remembered practices carried individually rather than collectively.

The result is that most witches today live embedded in whatever human culture surrounds them. Their clothes are contemporary. Their food is local. Their references, holidays, and idioms are borrowed, adopted, and ultimately genuinely theirs too.

Witches who maintain traditional practice more continuously exist, and are generally regarded with a mixture of admiration and mild bafflement by their more assimilated peers.

Traditional Aesthetics

Their historical fashion is an art of flow and fold - free-form, wrapped textiles that layer gracefully over the body. It is a style born of necessity given the unpredictable variability of witch-forms, clothing must be forgiving. Traditional witch dress tends toward richness and visually generous. Multiple textures and fabrics. Beadings and adornments. Warm, bright, or saturated colors.

Most witches today wear whatever everyone else wears, albeit maybe oversized for comfort if they plan to shift that day.

Food

Traditional witch food culture leans toward the delightful and the decorative. Tea served with candied petals floating in it. Sweets in many colors, small enough to be interesting, varied enough to be worth examining before eating. Individual cakes with fluffs of neon icing and sprinkles. This has survived better than most traditions, possibly because it is easy to practice quietly - a witch making star-shaped fruit for their own drink is not visibly a witch doing anything cultural. It travels well. It requires no explanation.

Festivals and Gatherings

The spaces where traditional witch culture is most visibly alive are witch-friendly festivals and seasonal gatherings. In these events, traditional clothing and foods are shared and compared. Mediums are displayed openly. Witch-form is worn without calculation.

The Summoning Events

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The broader cultural weight of witch birth is considerable. In most communities, a witch child is received as misfortune at best. This attitude traces directly to the widespread belief that witches bear responsibility for the Summoning Events - the period during which demonic entities were called into the world through an array of hyper-specific mundane actions: particular combinations of household ingredients, repeated gestures with common objects, sequences of ordinary behavior that happened, by terrible coincidence, to be exactly wrong.

The specificity of the triggers made prevention nearly impossible and attribution easy to misdirect. Witches, already marginal and already strange with their daily worldly manipulation, became the explanation.

Summonings have largely subsided. The pool of viable trigger conditions appears finite and enough of them have been exhausted by ordinary human behavior over time that new incidents are rare. But the cultural memory has not subsided with them. Witch children are still, in many places, understood as something that happened to a family rather than for one.

Filter by Medium
This list is not exhaustive.
Witches work in every conceivable craft and this guide makes no claim to have found all of them.
All Textile Liquid Music Culinary

Thread Witch

Classification: Textile Arts / Fiber Medium
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Identification
The most commonly encountered witch medium by a considerable margin. In human form, thread witches are often unremarkable. Hands may show the particular calluses of someone who works with their fingers constantly: the side of the index finger, the pad of the thumb, maybe a few needle jab scars here and there. A faint smell of fiber and lanolin is common in active practitioners. In witch-form, older and more powerful thread witches sometimes present with finer features than average - hair that moves with unusual intention, fingers that are very slightly too long and tapered.
Materials
All kinds of thread. Silk, wool, cotton, wire, sinew, gut, synthetic fiber. The material matters and experienced thread witches are particular about it, the way a surgeon is particular about sutures. Coarser fibers tend toward structural work and finer ones toward precision applications. Needles, bobbins, and spools are common tools, though very experienced practitioners need less and less physical apparatus over time.
Habitat
Absolutely everywhere. Common in medicine, tailoring, construction, long-distance courier work, and any profession requiring things to stay together that would prefer not to. On the Peripatetic, thread witches are the ones most likely to be maintaining the sails and cloth roofs themselves. The Long-Haulers skew heavily toward this medium for obvious reasons.
Behavior
Thread witches are specialists in connection and closure. They pull things together, hold things shut, bridge point A to point B. At the most basic level this is mending and binding. At the most advanced, it is the same gesture applied to space itself: a powerful thread witch closing the distance between two points is doing exactly what they do when closing a seam, just using space as the cloth instead. The medium scales with the practitioner in a way few others do, which accounts for both their prevalence and their range.
Notes
Jack-of-all-trades by nature and specialist by choice. Thread witches who commit deeply to one application tend to become exceptional at it. Those who don't tend to become extremely useful at everything in a way that is hard to quantify and easy to undervalue. Neither path is wrong. The medium supports both.

Lace Witch

Classification: Textile Arts / Fiber Medium
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[Specimen Image Here]
Identification
Rarer than thread witches and frequently mistaken for them at a glance. The materials overlap, the hands look similar, the work environment is comparable, however the distinction becomes apparent in the work itself. Where a thread witch fills and connects, a lace witch frames and defines. In witch-form, lace witches tend toward the striking rather than the subtle with high contrast coloring, very clean edges, a quality of being extremely present or extremely unnoticeable depending on whether they want to be seen. There is rarely an in-between.
Materials
Often fine thread, but some more unconventional witches have been documented utilizing thick ropes and cords for large projects. Bobbins, pins, and pillows for traditional bobbin lace. Needles for needlelace. Occasionally adapted to crochet hooks or tatting shuttles. Lace witches are the most tool-dependent of the textile mediums and tend to be proprietary about their equipment in a way that thread witches, who can work with almost anything, find fairly unrelatable.
Habitat
Nomadic as expected, but they tend to linger more in one area than other witches. Their work often gravitates towards long-term boundary maintenance, so estate work, institutional warding, the protection of fixed locations. Also, quietly and significantly, anywhere that things need to not be noticed. Archives. Safe houses. The back rooms of establishments that don't officially exist. On the Peripatetic they are less common than thread witches but highly sought after - a lace witch who has warded a frame's perimeter has made it considerably harder to find.
Behavior
Lace witches control the edge of things. As foundation builders, they define the structural boundaries that other workings build within or against. A ward laid by a lace witch has very clean edges - you will know exactly where it starts and stops, and so does everything else. As enhancers, they work around existing magic rather than replacing it: sharpening, refining, extending the life of something another witch made. As concealers, they exploit the fundamental quality of lace itself - the defined space around a thing, managed carefully enough, makes the eye slide off. Lace witch concealment is not invisibility. It is a very precise absence. Stationary targets are straightforward; mobile concealment requires constant adjustment and is considered genuinely difficult even among skilled practitioners.
Notes
For roughly every 20 thread witches, there is a lace witch. The best lace witch shrouds leave people unable to explain, afterward, why they didn't look. This precision attracts a particular kind of practitioner: lace witches skew, anecdotally, toward the patient, the methodical, and the privately very humorous. A medium that specializes in making things not exist tends to select for a certain dry sensibility about existence generally.

Brass Witch

Classification: Performing Arts / Music Medium
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[Specimen Image Here]
Identification
Brass witches are, on average, louder than necessary even when not actively working. Not aggressively so, it reads more like someone who has simply never needed to calibrate for a small room and hasn't thought to start. In witch-form, more practiced brass witches often present with broad, resonant builds with the kind of physical presence that suggests the body has reorganized itself around the work of being heard. Voices tend to carry whether they intend it or not.
Materials
It may be surprising, but any brass instrument. Trumpet, trombone, tuba, french horn, cornet, flugelhorn. Brass witches tend to be less precious about their specific instrument than string witches and more flexible than woodwind witches, partly because the medium is fundamentally about volume and projection rather than the fine shaping of a column. The instrument is an amplifier. Advanced practitioners work with humming at scale, sustained tones, or the particular controlled exhale of someone who has learned to make even breath feel like announcement. The most skilled can do it with nothing at all - a slow expansion of presence, felt before it's actually heard.
Habitat
Brass witches work at scale and in the present tense. Where a string witch gradually adjusts the temperature of a room and a woodwind witch conducts precise individual conversations within it, a brass witch reads what a crowd is already feeling and makes it legible and bigger, shared, undeniable. They do not manufacture emotion so much as amplify and reflect what is already turning. This makes them exceptionally sensitive to threshold moments - the shift in a room when something is about to change, the collective held breath before a decision, the specific weight of an ending. They feel these before anyone else does and they can make five hundred people feel it simultaneously. They struggle proportionally with intimacy. The mechanism that moves a crowd fails at close range a brass witch trying to have a quiet, targeted conversation is working against everything their medium does naturally, and they know it.
Behavior
Anywhere something is beginning or ending. Brass witches have a pronounced tendency to appear at thresholds such as new ventures, closing ceremonies, the first night of something and the last. Disproportionately found in civic life, public organizing, large-scale event work, and anywhere a crowd needs to move together. Also, with unsurprising frequency, in jazz clubs, late-night sessions, and the kind of informal gatherings that don't have an agenda but end up mattering anyway. On the Peripatetic, the brass witch's studio is often the one you hear before you see, and often glimmer with brass decoration.
Notes
The relationship between brass and woodwind witches is one of the more extensively documented dynamics in the field, mostly because they keep ending up in the same places and the results are consistent enough to have generated genuine academic interest. Individually, both mediums produce skilled, thoughtful practitioners. Together, with brass working at scale and woodwind conducting simultaneous precision targeting and neither temperamentally inclined toward being the audience, things escalate. A woodwind/brass gathering has its own entry in at least two separate incident reports, which both describe the aftermath as "resolved" and often decline to elaborate further.

String Witch

Classification: Performing Arts / Music Medium
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[Specimen Image Here]
Identification
Calluses on the fingertips of the fretting hand. In witch-form, practiced string witches sometimes present with unusually resonant voices, as though there is more sound in them than there should be. Nothing dramatic. Just a quality of being listened to even when they aren't saying anything important.
Materials
Any stringed instrument. Violin, cello, banjo, shamisen, guitar, lute, anything with a vibrating string and something to resonate it. String witches are often loyal to a single instrument for decades, sometimes for life, and can become genuinely difficult about substitutions. Advanced practitioners can work with improvised strings such as a wire, a rubber band, a single thread pulled taut. The most experienced need only to tap a surface and feel for its resonance, or hum, or click their fingers in a particular rhythm. The instrument becomes optional long before most string witches admit it.
Habitat
Anywhere people gather. Commonly in hospitality, diplomacy, community mediation, and event work. They are notably one of the most consistently nomadic mediums. It is extremely rare to find a string witch that has settled anywhere.
Behavior
String witches work primarily in the emotional register. Not manipulation in any dramatic sense - they are not bending minds or compelling behavior - but they are exceptionally good at finding the frequency of a room and adjusting it. A gathering with a string witch present tends to go well. Tensions ease without anyone noticing they eased. Conversations that were about to go badly don't. The mood at the end of the night is warmer than the mood at the beginning and nobody can quite account for why. Physical effects that act on the world rather than the people in it are documented but immensely rare, associated with exceptionally powerful practitioners. Most string witches will go their entire lives without producing anything of the sort and do not particularly feel the lack.
Notes
String witches are, as a category, aware of what they do to a room and most of them are thoughtful about it. The ethics of ambient emotional influence are something the medium tends to produce opinions about - not because string witches are more moral than anyone else, but because you cannot practice this particular craft for long without developing a position on it. The positions vary widely. The conversations are often very long.

Woodwind Witch

Classification: Performing Arts / Music Medium
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[Specimen Image Here]
Identification
Breath control becomes habitual in and out of witch-form. Anecdotally, a faint, characteristic pursing of the mouth when thinking. In witch-form, they trend towards barrel chests and the more practiced woodwind witches sometimes present with an unusual quality of presence. It's not louder or more commanding exactly, but directional, almost like their words have physical weight when it lands on you. If close enough, you will know immediately if a woodwind witch wants your attention.
Materials
Any woodwind instrument: flute, oboe, clarinet, recorder, tin whistle, shakuhachi, and so on. Really just anything driven by a shaped column of breath. Woodwind witches are less precious about their specific instrument than string witches tend to be, partly because the medium is ultimately breath and the instrument is a sophisticated focusing tool rather than the source. Advanced practitioners work with humming, whistling, or simple directed exhalation. The most experienced can manage with nothing at all, a slow controlled breath aimed like a thing with edges.
Habitat
Woodwind witches show a marked tendency toward one of two paths: highly structured roles demanding precision and discretion, or no structure whatsoever. The middle ground is underrepresented. A disproportionate number are found either in formal negotiation and counsel or busking on a street corner with no fixed address, and both groups seem equally at peace with their situation.
Behavior
A woodwind witch at a gathering is not about making the evening go well in a general sense. They are often seen having a series of very targeted individual conversations that the other parties find easy flowing. Individually, woodwind witches present as measured and deliberate. In groups of their own medium, something shifts. A gathering of woodwind witches trends toward the surprisingly loud and the surprisingly chaotic, with a playful competitive edge that appears to emerge spontaneously and escalate faster than anyone plans for. It tapers off in understanding tandem just as swiftly.
Notes
There is a reason orchestras have conductors.

Ink Witch

Classification: Visual Arts / Liquid Medium
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[Specimen Image Here]
Identification
In human-form, their fingertips often feature deep, permanent staining, looking like fresh fountain pen accidents. In witch-form, old ink witches sometimes have a slightly smeared quality at the edges or sharp pointed extremities.
Materials
All types of ink. Documented cases of mineral and soot based pigments and even charcoal sticks. Tools are usually fine brushes and of course, pens.
Habitat
Ink witches gravitate toward anywhere with good, steady light, good parchment, and low humidity. Archivists, cartographers, illustrators, tattoo parlors. Frequently found adjacent to print shops or libraries. In the Peripatetic context, their studios tend to be ink smudged and heavily curtained, with the smell of metal and something faintly mineral.
Behavior
Ink witches may instinctively seek out shadow-adjacent positions in a room or seem to "lose" themselves briefly in dark corners. They trend toward precise, deliberate movement as their medium heavily punishes imprecision.
Notes
A semi-common witch type, but one rare to become particularly honed in their art.

Ceramic Witch

Classification: Craft Arts / Clay Medium
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[Specimen Image Here]
Identification
Clay dust and smears are often everywhere. Burns from kiln work are common but minor, treated with the mild indifference of someone used to working near heat. In witch-form, fingers are times honed to needles and scalpels.
Materials
Earthenware, stoneware, porcelain. Ceramic witches tend to develop strong preferences early and stick with them the way string witches stick with instruments. Kilns are essential and their absence is genuinely limiting in a way that most mediums don't experience. A thread witch can work with a spool and a needle anywhere. A ceramic witch without access to a kiln is a ceramic witch who cannot finish anything. This shapes them and how they move in the world.
Habitat
Disproportionately settled. The kiln is the anchor. They cluster in places where they can maintain a permanent or semi-permanent studio such as working potteries, craft schools, apothecaries that stock their wares. On the Peripatetic, ceramic witches are rare but the ones who do travel have usually solved the kiln problem in some creative and structurally alarming way, or they're simply just there to sell.
Behavior
Ceramic witches are containment specialists. What goes into the vessel stays. What is sealed in clay is sealed in earnest. This makes them exceptional at preservation: of objects, of substances, of information, of states of being that would otherwise change. An apothecary witch storing something volatile in a ceramic witch's jars is not being precious. They are being correct. Ceramic witches excel at holding things and struggle with anything that requires flow, responsiveness, or change mid-process. The clay commits when it fires. So does the Whim inside it.
Notes
Among the most patient practitioners documented. There is no rushing a kiln, and a ceramic witch who has not learned to wait has not yet learned their medium. They are also, quietly, among the more melancholy witch types, not in a dramatic sense, but in the way of someone who has made many things that outlast the intentions that made them.

Glass Witch

Classification: Craft Arts / Glass Medium
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[Specimen Image Here]
Identification
Burns and cuts in roughly equal measure. The cuts are distinctive, very clean, the kind that come from handling something that broke before anyone was ready. In witch-form, glass witches trend toward the luminous, translucent, and sometimes molten. Very old specimens have been documented where light behaves slightly incorrectly around them, bending or scattering at their edges in ways that are hard to look at directly.
Materials
Silica, soda ash, lime, heat. The furnace is the heart of the operation and like the ceramic witch's kiln, its absence is genuinely incapacitating, but where the kiln is a slow and patient thing the furnace is a constant. It does not cool between uses. A glass witch's studio is always warm. Tools are long and specific: blowpipes, jacks, paddles, shears. Improvisation with materials is extremely rare and generally inadvisable. Improvisation with technique, however, is practically the whole point.
Habitat
Anywhere that can fit a furnace and tolerate some noise. Glass witches are disproportionately urban, drawn to the density of materials and audiences. They cluster in craft districts, experimental studios, and anywhere with a culture of people dropping by to watch. On the Peripatetic they are a genuine fixture and their studios run hot and loud and they're usually shoved to the edges.
Behavior

Glass witches work in windows - brief, irreversible, and unforgiving. The Whim commits during the molten state and cannot be revisited once the glass sets, which produces magic of extraordinary clarity when it lands and a genuinely spectacular failure mode when it doesn't. The fragility is real and consequential. They either pull it off or they have a very interesting story about why the floor looks like that now.

What they excel at is revelation: making the invisible legible, the hidden apparent. A witch glass piece held up to a room can show emotional residue such as the anxious static that precedes a summoning or the faint wrongness of a space where something demonic has been. For permanence, they encase. Smaller demons are often suspended in glass, visible and inert. A dangerous thing made into an object that can sit on a shelf and not touch anything. Whether this is containment or taxonomy depends on who you ask.
Notes
The most likely witch type to grab your arm and say "wait, come look at this." They are sociable in a specifically excited way and really not the generalized warmth of a kitchen witch or the ambient ease of a string witch, but the particular social energy of someone who has just done something and needs a witness. Whether it worked is almost secondary. The attempt is the thing. This makes them genuinely fun to be around and occasionally exhausting.

Kitchen Witch

Classification: Culinary Arts / Cooking Medium
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[Specimen Image Here]
Identification
Hands often have burn scars in various stages of healing, calluses in specific places, a tendency to touch hot surfaces longer than is sensible. In witch-form, older specimens sometimes radiate a faint warmth. Smells, almost universally, of something good.
Materials
Fire is the primary medium. Kitchen witches are notable for their adaptability. There have been documented cases of utilizing open fires, gas ranges, single camping burners, and at least one very determined specimen working exclusively with a solar cooker. The specific vessel matters less than the heat and the intention behind it. Secondary materials, of course, are a very wide array of ingredients, some more unconventional than others.
Habitat
Anywhere people need feeding. Disproportionately represented in hospitality, disaster relief, and community organizing. On the Peripatetic, their studios are the social hubs of whatever frame they're riding with their door usually open, something always on.
Behavior
Highly responsive and improvisational. Kitchen witches are rarely observed following a fixed recipe and tend to work by instinct and adjustment and tasting constantly and generously. Their Whim manifests in the same register - fluid and immediate calibration to the moment. A ward laid by a kitchen witch is warm, often healing, comforting, and present. This makes them exceptional healers and immensely poor archivists.
Notes
Very common witch type. Their effects are potent but perishable. A healing broth works now, while it's hot, while the person who made it is nearby, and very obviously waiting for your feedback. Apparently can cure headaches, thank you.

Bakery Witch

Classification: Culinary Arts / Baking Medium
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[Specimen Image Here]
Identification
Flour everywhere, in various states of discovery. Under fingernails, in hair, in places that suggest the witch has not noticed and may not notice for some time. In witch-form, very old specimens have been documented with a faint yeasty smell to their skin that colleagues describe as "pleasant, actually." Minor but still notable increase of additional arms or otherwise dextrous limbs.
Materials
Leavening agents of all kinds such as yeast, sourdough cultures, baking powder, beaten air. Flour, water, time. The tools are precise: scales, proofing baskets, thermometers, carefully calibrated ovens. A bakery witch without a scale is often visibly uncomfortable.
Habitat
Bakeries, apothecaries, and anywhere requiring long-term ward maintenance. For witches they are disproportionately found in settled, permanent situations. Bakery witches do not particularly enjoy the Peripatetic and are overrepresented among witches who have chosen a fixed address. Their studios, when on the road, tend toward the obsessively organized with every used square foot carefully considered.
Behavior
Methodical and front-loaded. The Whim is committed at the moment of mixing - what goes into the dough is what comes out and there is no adjusting it once the process has begun. This produces magic of unusual stability, travelability, and longevity. Witch made cookies will often travel further than the witch itself ever will. This also produces witches of considerable patience and considerable anxiety when variables are introduced unexpectedly. Finding a bakery witch that improvises is rare. The ones who don't have opinions about this.
Notes
Bakery witches and kitchen witches are frequently found working in complementary pairs when a cooking witch opts for settling for a while - the immediate and the lasting, the adaptive and the precise, the here and the later. They also, reliably, drive each other up the wall.

The Kept

Insular organization / Lineage preservationists
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Among witches, The Kept occupy a peculiar position: simultaneously the most dedicated preservers of traditional witch culture and the group most other witches find pretty unsettling.

They are a closed, insular organization and absolutely a cult in the structural sense, though members would reject the word. It is built around the belief that witch lineage is something to be protected from dilution. Their hierarchy is organized by generation. For example, a witch whose grandparents were both witches, whose parents were both witches, who was themselves born a witch is a third-generation witch, and within The Kept, that distinction matters enormously. The higher the generation count, the more untouched by human lineage, the more pure a witch is considered to be. High-generation witches are coveted and placed at the top of a hierarchy that many outside the organization find difficult to comprehend.

Because of this insularity, and because The Kept have spent generations pairing only with other witches, raising children only among witches, living only within witch-specific tradition, they have actively preserved more of traditional witch culture than anyone else. The draped clothing is not a festival novelty here. It is simply what people wear. The foods, the practices, the knowledge of mediums passed carefully from elder to student - all of it is alive within The Kept in a way it is not alive really anywhere else.

This is the central uncomfortable truth that most witches reckon with quietly: The Kept are wrong about almost everything, but they are also the reason certain things still exist.

The Sent

Lower-generation witches within The Kept occupy a specific and deliberate role. They are rigorously trained in their mediums, more formally and extensively than most witches outside the organization ever are, and sent into the broader world as skilled workers. They assist humans and witches alike with the lingering aftermath of the Summoning Events: demon cleanup, ward-setting, the management of whatever strange damage and residue the worst of the summonings left behind. They are professional, capable, and often genuinely helpful.

They do not proselytize in the traditional sense. They are not tasked with converting anyone to The Kept's beliefs or actively recruiting for the organization. But they carry its culture with them visibly with the clothing, the food, the practiced ease with witch-form, and they know exactly what they represent. They are, in their way, an advertisement. A demonstration of what witches can be when they are, in The Kept's framing, properly kept.

Other witches tend to find them somewhere between impressive, concerning, and deeply annoying.

The Held

High-generation witches within The Kept are a different matter entirely. They do not shift into human-form. Not under duress, not for convenience, not for anyone. Human-form is, within their framework, something to be shed and left behind - merely a remnant of dilution and violence rather than a natural part of what they are. They live entirely in witch-form, interact exclusively with other witches, and regard the human world with a detachment that shades into open disdain.

A high-generation witch encountering a witch in human-form will often react with visible distaste and pity at the waste. The high generation are considered extremely desirable within the organization's hierarchy. They are also, by most outside accounts, extremely strange to spend time around.

The Peripatetic

Nebulous Population / Nomadic Caravan
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Formally known as the Peripatetic, but more informally known as "the caravan". It is a perpetual, rolling caravan composed of massive, wind-and-Whim-powered intricate kinetic frames with multi-jointed wooden leg assemblies that walk with a complex, scuttling stride known as Whim Frames. Atop these skeletal, clattering undercarriages sit plonked a mishmash of wooden abodes, workshops, and storefronts.

The architecture defies physics. Held together by a patchwork of localized Whim, the living quarters are impossibly stacked and in long rows, leaning at absurd angles, and connected by a shifting maze of rope bridges, trapdoors, and wooden steps. The modular structures riding atop the frames are often known as studios, or ateliers if the witch is feeling fancy. The contents and internal layout of a studio turn over as fluidly as the transient artists occupying them.

A Community of Transience

The Caravan has no permanent roster or centralized leadership. Witches come and go constantly. They either reside in an existing, empty studio or hitch their own walking wagons to the main herd for a month, a season, or a single night before detaching and drifting away. While there is a core group of "Long-Haulers", often witches whose mediums are tethered to the upkeep of the wooden beasts themselves, the overall population is extremely nebulous.

It serves as a vital economic, information, and travel lifeline. Because the caravan never stops moving, it evades the jurisdiction of hostile human authorities. It is a place to trade gossip, pass news of safe human towns, to take witches where they are needed, and let witch-form stretch openly without fear.