of the wilds.
the witch is inside of me; her poison will wash away the memory.
the legends.
Swiss myth tells of a maiden of mercy; German folklore, a wicked witch.
a maiden of mercy.
High in the mountains of the Swiss Alps, there lives alone a young woman, with hair like the sun and eyes like the sky. Indeed, she must be cast down from the heavens themselves: she is lonesome, but she is kind; she is beautiful, but she is modest. Anyone who may find themselves on her stoop can be assured of her hospitality, be it in the bitterest nights of winter or the warmest dawn of summer.
Folklore has it that if you can find her, she will heal you of any ailment or affliction. It's not uncommon for the sick and wounded to make ill-advised treks into the Alps in hopes of her assistance, alone or aided. Those that succeed, legend tells, are never the same again.
This maiden is blessed with some magic power, and there seems to be nothing she cannot cure. The mountains are a place of miracles.
She'll do it all for nothing, if only you let her save your soul.
And then you'll wake up, safe but alone in your bed, with no evidence that you didn't dream it all if not for your perfect health.
Even if you retrace your steps (and indeed you may retrace them, for you will find your body filled with strength that you have never known before), you will never again find the site of the maiden's cottage.
This is the end of the legend of Switzerland's maiden of mercy.
And it's true that it's magical, but it's not strictly benevolent...
a wicked witch.
In the shadows of the Black Forest, there lives the Witch of the Wilds, eternally attended by her accursèd servant, the Reaper.
In the modern ages, the tale of the Witch has been dismissed as a cautionary tale designed to deter inadvisable travel by night, and to keep safe German children from the vicious wolves that once stalked the wilds.
The local peoples of Adlersbrunn and Eichenwalde, however, dare never to be caught in the wild woods between dusk and dawn. Few question their voluntary curfews, a natural product of the fact that near everyone in the city knows or knows of someone injured or disappeared.
The Witch is perilously bold. While she's happy to prey on errant travelers, she is known to attack even the townspeople. Survivors describe her as angelic in appearance: she is beautiful and pale, with bright blue eyes and radiant yellow hair. Legend urges the unlucky soul who crosses the Witch's path not to trust her, and yet they always do.
Willingly, like sheep to slaughter, the Witch's marks follow her deeper into the forest, where she curses them with pain and plague. Sickness, dismemberment, and death await those souls she leads into the wilds.
Her wrath can be allayed only by a damning deal: the sale of one's soul.
Indeed, earthly agony is sometimes enough to encourage the poor villain to part with his eternal soul. Others are left, dubiously virtuous, to wander the wilds blinded by their pain--upon them, she sics the Reaper.
It is from these men in grace that it is assumed she derives her power: to swallow up the soul without volunteering her magic in return.
And it's true that it's magical, but it's not strictly malevolent...
Angela Ziegler.
Angela Ziegler was born October 2nd, 1335, in what is now Zürich.
While not particularly wealthy, she by all accounts seemed a happy child. Indeed, the wife of a Burgher in the Constafel took a shine to her, and taught her to read and write upon Angela's insistent request.
She was well-known for her preference of working directly with the family livestock (cattle and goats, mainly) rather than in cheesemaking. Her parents allowed her, though, and she seemed a natural with them.
The girl notably gravitated toward the weakest of the flocks, spending much of her time with sick or wounded animals. They recovered miraculously. When she was eight, she noticed that not only did those under her watchful eye recover, but her neighbors' stock fell ill instead.
Angela did not then consider it magic, but neither coincidence.
In early 1348, news came from Italy of a new pestilence, the Black Death. She was twelve, and managed to read the Burghers' letters of warning unassisted. Supposedly the result of poisoned water, the plague was sweeping from the Mediterranean north, to contaminate all of Europe.
Angela took to washing in the Limmat river, and occasionally took a head or two of stock with her. All seemed well in the canton, for a year. But in 1349, the crawl of the Black Death had reached Zürich. The sickness was unmistakable, and the girl shuddered to imagine what was to come.
She remained healthy, even as those around her fell sick. What was initially assumed to be the strapping immune system of a young girl soon became indicative of something far more sinister: witchcraft.
Her parents were ill, she noticed, on her fourteenth birthday. But as the tenth month died, they, like Angela's stock, miraculously recovered: unblemished, free of fever, their headaches eased as if by magic.
Next door, their previously healthy neighbors fell critically ill, without the crescendo of symptoms typical of plague victims.
By the morning of the 31st of October, the Zieglers' neighbors had died.
In the evening, Angela left to the banks of the Limmat, as she usually did, and she brought along a favored grey nanny goat. She noticed nothing.
But when she returned, her parents' home was nailed shut and burning. Burning--a punishment for heretics. For witches. A punishment, Angela realized, all too soon, was meant not for her parents but for her.
She could save nothing but the broom on the stoop. She took it.
And then she fled.
She was assumed dead on October 31st, 1349. She was fourteen, and much too impressionable to be out on her own. A witch she was said to be, and, unable to argue the point even to herself, a witch she became.
Aimless and confined to the woods, the trees became her constant companions, and the resident nymphs and fae her first friends. It was from the folk of the forest that she first began to refine her magic, and their influence persists even now in her love of kitchen witchcraft.
Her first enchantment, to that effect, was of her broom: a simple will of levitation that she fine-tuned to her trademark method of transport. Even with nowhere to go, she liked to be out of walking distance.
But 'nowhere to go' led her astray, as nowhere is wont to do. It wasn't long before she found herself at the mercy of a lilac-and-white imp, who offered her the first-and-only (first and only!) copy of the Liber Vitae, the fabled Book of Life, in exchange for just a token. Just a little percentage of what Angela might make of all the little incantations: however many she could read, however many she had the power to will into practice.
She accepted, making the weakest business deal of her life.
By the time she'd mastered her first spell from the Book, she was 17.
It was obvious, to her, that she was obligated to use it. After all, she reasoned, if she could put some degree of kindness into a world that had been so unforgiving to her, then the world's worst would be behind her.
She didn't mean it to get so far as it did. At first, she'd only been helping wayward travelers in the Alps with small things: warming spells to keep safe winter voyagers, or a blessing of constitution to ease their burdens.
But when a young man arrived injured, she convinced herself that she must heal him, like she had all those years ago. It wasn't supposed to be a pattern--she meant only to pass his injury onto someone who could handle it; someone far enough away that he would not know.
That, Angela learned, is how legends are born.
The Swiss, in the high mountains, came to love her. They called her merciful, said that she watched over them. She liked to think so.
But the Germans--the serfs and nobles of Aldersbrunn--they feared her. To them, she was an arbiter, but an arbitrary one: she would hurt them and they could do nothing to stop her. They warned their children of the wicked Witch of the Wilds, and she could not blame them.
She could help them, too, of course, and she tried always to offer: the Book had spells for healing, to ease what she had done, but they came with a price. The purse at her belt glowed with proffered souls.
Maybe that was enough, for a while.
Over a span of centuries, though, a third myth came to be associated with her legends: the tale of the headless Reaper. Her Reaper.
He was and had been hers, after all, his opinion on the matter notwithstanding; the magics of fate have a funny way of leading the right people into each others' lives through time and space and universes.
Angela didn't pretend to understand their workings. What she understood was that boy's bloody, ruined body, the torn mouth that promised her any price if only she could ease his pain. And she understood that in order to save him, she must pass his affliction onto someone else, anyone else. Ultimately, onto the Reaper. Her Reaper.
But he could not die. He had a baby, one who surely wished more than anything for his father to live. A baby surely not much younger than her. A baby who, if she did not intervene, would be damned to that same fate which had led her down this path to begin with. A baby soon orphaned.
A baby who had done nothing to earn her curse.
And so, that night, she had slit her palm on her athame. Ruby-red welled from her heart line and clung to the blade until, too heavy for its own tension, it dripped from the curved tip of the knife to wet the floors.
She'd turned over his bleeding hand, scored by the Archer and the Witch alike, and rested hers inside it, curling her warm fingers into the spaces between his and mingling witch's blood with mortal (mortal, then, but not for long). She pressed the pads of his fingers into the back of her hand and bound their palms together, whispering in accented Latin the vows and spells of thrall as his body threatened to be chilled with death.
Now, it never could. His soul was irreversibly bound to hers, endowing him with the repertoire of a familiar wraith and pledging him to her service--and her servants never die. She wondered, idly, if he thought her efforts a second curse, insult to injury; and, perhaps even more nebulous, if she really meant him well when she'd done it.
She's taken to wearing gloves, nowadays, lest she wax sympathetic again.