Hó (Elder River)

There used to be a river behind the old house—back then, everyone called it *the river. Now? Just a stream. A quiet, narrow thing, barely wider than a path.

When I was a kid, we’d race down there barefoot after lunch. Water would rush up to my knees—cold enough to steal your breath, clear enough to see every pebble and wriggling tadpole. It smelled like wet mud and rotting waterweed—sharp, sour, alive. I loved it. Dove in. Scooped up frogs. Got scolded for coming home soaked and stinking.  

This time, I stood at the bank and looked down. Water lapped just over my shoe soles—barely a whisper against the rubber. Still crystal clear. Still cold. But no tadpoles. No frogs. No smell at all—not even earthy, not even green. Just... clean silence.  

Yeah. That river didn’t shrink. It aged. Like a person who stops talking, stops moving fast, stops being *loudly* alive, and you only notice how much it’s changed when you stand there, remembering the splash.

Damfool writes before he blends. Each release starts as a person — a place, an era, a life with something unresolved in it — and the formula follows the character rather than the other way round. Lord of Tree is drawn from an Ah Cheng novel. Most of the rest are his own.

Nothing in the line shares a signature, and none of them is the lead. The recurring figures are altar keepers, aunties, and people coming home after too long away, closer to the characters met at the edge of a world than to anyone at its centre. The seasons make it literal: Cantonese memory in the first, Fujian in the second, a Macau port town in the third, three generations of one timber family in the fourth.

Behind all of it is one Macanese perfumer at one bench in Chengdu. He builds his own components and tinctures instead of buying them ready-made, and works with materials that are hard to get or specific to one place — aged nutmeg paste from a Penang spice factory running for over a century, Tibetan yak extract that took a year to render.