Ekron

The Gipsy Witch - 1

1866. By the side of a forgotten dirt road, near a rural village in Transleithania, a gypsy witch and her son parked their horse cart and settled a tent. The witch had a lustrum more than fifty years of age but looked no more than thirty. Her hair was reddish blonde, straight and long to her knees. Her eyes were dark blue and her nails, painted red and four inches long. She had a mole under each eyelid, a trait that appeared intermittently in her family and was not shared by her son. Her name was Csilla, and she was born in Bohemia. She preferred long black dresses than traditional, more colorful gypsy clothes.

Csilla's son had fifteen years, he was her younger offspring and the only one that remained by her side after she was outcasted from their community for engaging in extreme dark magic practices. His hair was dark blonde, slightly curly, and long to his shoulders. His name was Czesar and he had no beard yet. He wore a brown leather hat, inherited from his grandfather. He had assisted his mother in her obscure rituals since childhood, but he was profoundly Christian; that caused a dichotomy in his soul, because he knew he was condemning himself with those practices. He read the Bible every night and prayed for his soul and his mother's.

Csilla did not believe in any god, she barely believed in the demons that she summoned, even when she could talk to and even touch them. Her mind was consumed by absinthe and laudanum, as they were the only way she knew to anesthetize that vague pain and vacuum in her soul; undefined, invisible but more real than material world for her, tormenting her every second of existence. It was a vicious circle; she did not believe in anything because her mind was estranged by absinthe, she consumed absinthe to fill the vacuum in her soul, and her soul had that vacuum because she didn't believe in anything; she felt an overwhelming spiritual loneliness. Black magic was added to her vicious circle about thirty years before, when she was living in Moravia. There she knew dark witches of a different kind, their dangerous practices were delicious to Csilla, even when high prices had to be paid to perform them, sometimes. She didn't have the biological frame to properly emulate the rituals of the Moravian Coven, but she was reckless enough to try them anyway, because she didn't care; nothing cared enough for her anymore, only her opium syrup and the green fairy.

On the tent, a sign said, "Fortune Teller and Charm Caster". Csilla sat inside the tent waiting for costumers, as Czesar was feeding the horse and preparing goulash near the cart. Nobody came the first day, as usual. Czesar entered the tent and offered his mother a dish of stew.

She refused and said, "Don't worry, I'll eat tonight."

Czesar left her alone with the bitterest sadness and ate the dish himself. It was summer and there were no clouds in the sky. Csilla felt that it was already evening and started drinking absinthe. As she finished her second glass, the sky filled with dark clouds and seconds later, a torrential rain started to fall. Czesar made a tent for the horse and took refuge underneath it too. Lightnings fell and dusk came before it should have. Not long after, it was night at the near village, and Csilla was so intoxicated that she neither could stand up by herself nor wanted to.

Sitting on the tent's floor, Csilla took an old rosary, that had a metallic bead in the shape of an eight-pointed star, with blood remains on it. Then she put a bowl on the floor in front of her and with her sharp nails she cut her left wrist letting a stream of blood come out of the wound into the bowl. Her right hand was open and when she closed it, the blood stopped coming out of her wound. Then she wet the tip of a finger with her blood, from the bowl, and drew the shape of the eight-pointed star on the metallic bead, first a cross, and then an x. After that, she drank the remaining blood in the bowl and tasted her mouth with her tongue.

Csilla started calling a demon she knew as Baal, whose real name was Djaall, but she usually simply called him "Lord of Flies". She had seen him a couple times, a ten feet high meat fly, covered in long black fur, horns in his head and fangs in his mouth. His red compound eyes looked lifeless and cruel. But in the last decade, she had only felt him as he possessed her body and flew like a free spirit using her as vehicle. Astral projection of demonic possession. Djaall loved it, as he wandered in different worlds, not in a search for power anymore but pleasure, and Csilla's special set of obscure skills made him feel young again, fearless, sharing the narcotizing effects of her poisons, having power over wind and rain. Those abilities did not come individually from Djaall or Csilla, but from the communion of both witch and demon.

As the Lord of Flies entered Csilla's body, her eyes became bright red and compound, her skin was filled with thick black hair, horns grew on her head and fangs in her mouth. A spirit, mixture of a part of her soul and Djaall escaped her body as a human size fly made of black fog, with horns and bright red eyes. It flew towards the village between rain and lightings. Once there, it attacked a woman walking alone across the narrow passages, piercing its fangs in her neck. As the spirit sucked blood from the woman's neck, a new stream of red liquid came out of the wound on Csilla's left wrist and was poured into the bowl, this time filling it. The black fly left the woman dead on the ground and the fog it was composed of dissolved in the rain, but not before some villagers could see a glimpse of it. Csilla came back to her human form and drew a vertical line on the metallic bead with the new blood, starting at the tip of the upper ray of the star and finishing at the tip of the lower. That way, the charm was sealed. Then she drank all the blood in the bowl with the same thirst with which she drank laudanum. Rain stopped and skies cleared to show a beautiful last quarter Moon.