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  • Orders, Part II

    Back to Orders, Part I.

    It all started when the Watchers Sabrathon and Kochabiel informed Michael that a deranged human—a dark magician by the name of Jiang Xuande—had stolen a powerful grimoire from the Apokomistis Astaroth. Allow me to provide some background (per usual) so that you can understand what this means (before we angels got involved).

    Demons are well-versed in black magics, and they also have a healthy understanding of white magics for, like the best of adversaries, they know the tools of their enemy. A few of the ancient ones consolidated their knowledge of black magics into books containing spells and magical secrets called grimoires. Grimoires are plentiful within the demon world and have varying degrees of potency. Every Apokomistis has at least one that he or she relies upon. Grimoires are most often books or scrolls or tablets, but they have been known to exist in other forms. Regardless of shape, they have often been sought by many human magicians for the vast knowledge and power that they hold, but in most cases, they are completely useless to mortals on account that most spells require demon blood to make them work.

    (Incidentally, there is a white magic counterpart to the grimoire known as an ellamadus. As far as I know, the very few ellamadi in existence were either captured or destroyed by a few Apokomistai during the era that humans refer to as World War II. Remind me to tell you about ellamadi after we’ve wrapped up this tale.)

    However, there are exceptions to most every rule, and if we return to the state of Qin, in ancient China, in the year 354 BC, this particular grimoire and this particular magician Jiang Xuande were a recipe for disaster.

    Temple at Hua Shan
    Hua Shan is one of the sacred mountains in China. This was one of Sabrathon’s favorite vantage points for overseeing matters in the state of Qin, as it gave him a nice view.

    Jiang Xuande was born in 421 BC, and he served as an astronomer and alchemist in Duke Xiao’s royal court from 361–354 BC. The Duke and his advisers all held an understanding that Jiang Xuande’s predictions were beyond reliable, and there were whispers that he had an army of spirits at his disposal to do his bidding.

    This wasn’t entirely far from the truth. Jiang Xuande had nurtured a passionate quest for immortality from the time he was a young boy and had witnessed several members of his family succumb to smallpox. He was subsequently raised by his uncle, a doctor and alchemist himself, and he taught the boy the arts of using the elements and herbs to balance the body. However, Jiang was certain that the science of alchemy could be stretched so as to bestow immortality upon anyone who discovered its secret formula. It led him to dabble in black magics by means of a watered-down grimoire that he acquired through great difficulty during a trip to India.

    Not many of the spells worked in the grimoire, but there was just enough information in it for Jiang Xuande to realize that it was useful. He wanted more, and so he used his little grimoire to summon a Nekudaimon by the name of Ninalla in the autumn of 368 BC.

    Ninalla wasn’t pleased to have been summoned to serve a lower creature, but she sensed that Jiang Xuande’s thirst for immortality had the potential for too much fun for her to pass up. She answered Jiang Xuande’s call, possessing his pet cat, and pledged her services and wisdom to him under the condition that he volunteer his wife’s body for the Neku to use as a human vessel.

    Jiang Xuande didn’t think twice about Ninalla’s proposition. He had long fallen out of love with his outspoken and barren wife Zhou, and he had begun to regard her latest failed pregnancy as a sign of an inferior stuff in her family history. He idly wondered if the metaphysical bond between the spirit of a demon and the body of a human might improve what was wrong within Zhou and endow her with the strength to bear him a healthy child when he was finished playing around with demons.

    Ninalla had an agenda in mind as well. Serving a human gave her an excuse to escape the tyranny of serving Astaroth for a while (I’ll let you imagine how demanding a master an Apokomistis can be over hundreds of years). She knew that eventually Jiang Xuande would die and she’d be able to convert his possessions into capital that she could use herself, or rather, until Astaroth pulled rank as an Apokomistis and took them. Astaroth gave her Neku permission to stay with Jiang Xuande, understanding that his demon-dabbling made his soul all too pluckable when the time was right. Furthermore, she sensed that affairs in the state of Qin were nearing a steady boil.

    Moments after Jiang Xuande gave his assent, Ninalla occupied Zhou’s body. Later that night, she taught Jiang Xuande how to make the some of the other, more grisly and powerful spells in the grimoire work through donating decent quantities of his wife’s demon-infused blood.

    More about Jiang Xuande next week. Dominus tecum.

    On to Orders, Part III.

  • Orders, Part I

    Not long after we angels were created by God, He separated us into the Orders. Angelic Orders can best be described as the different types of jobs that God assigned to us. Contrary to what has been written about angels by most humans, there are more than nine Orders. Most things relating to angels come in twelves (although on occasion, you can find concepts in sevens and fours and nines), and accordingly, there are were twelve Orders in the employ of God. Each angel was assigned to his or her Order based upon his or her unique talents. The Orders gave us purpose in the Universe, and our Graces helped us to execute our mission to care for the Universe.

    detail of Michael from Beccafumi's Fall of the Rebel Angels
    Detail of Michael from Domenico Beccafumi’s Fall of the Rebel Angels. Michael prefers this likeness of himself, even though it doesn’t resemble his typical human manifestation. He doesn’t have wings, either. (None of us do, actually.)

    I, Nadiel, was assigned to the Order of the Archangels. There are twelve of us: Camael, Ariel, Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel (pronounced OOH-ree-ell, if you please), Raziel, Sachiel, Anael, Cassiel, Barakiel and me. The twelve of us are the strongest and brightest of all angels, and Michael is the strongest and brightest of all. The Archangels were given the task of envisioning how the Universe should work and unfold, and we were chosen to rule over all of spacetime from a promontory point in Heaven after everything was up and running. Within this Solar System, I was given the responsibility of the planet Mercury and everything within its orbit (space), and one-twelfth of the duration of each planet’s revolution around the Sun (time). The month of Nadiel on Earth begins at sunrise on May the 20th and ends the moment before the sun rises on the morning of June the 19th. I do love to nurture creation in full bloom, and my brother Sachiel, who oversees oversaw the transition from spring into summer before the other solstice, was kind enough to let me assist him in the Southern Hemisphere.

    Archangels’ strength and brilliance come from each of us being the embodiment of one particular type of the Graces. Just as there are were twelve Orders, there are twelve Graces. I am the truest expression of the universal concept of Inspiration, and my Graces of Adaptability, Judgment and Mindfulness extend from that concept. (Give it a good think and you’ll arrive at how each graduates to the understanding of the next.) We worked together with the other angels to put the formulae in motion for the Earth to evolve into the incredible planet it is now. Gabriel, Cassiel, Camael and I included the capacity for all living beings to appreciate beauty, along with the desire to protect it and create it within the world. I also added a bit of code, if you will, which successfully led to the creation of music.

    Matters got very interesting on Earth a little more than 20 angelic generations ago—41,398 years ago, to be exact. I shan’t go into it now, Estelle won’t let me but suffice it to say that it wasn’t only homo sapiens that caught our attention. God reassigned several angels from the Order of the Watchers to observe and report back on what was transpiring here. As you can imagine, the Watchers’ mission throughout the Universe was almost exclusively observation and documentation. (Bear in mind that the Watchers who were assigned to Earth shouldn’t be confused with the fiction that was spun in the Book of Enoch, for Nephilim have different origins, appearance and purpose that she won’t let me talk about, either.)

    Watchers were never allowed to interfere with creation unless the orders came from God, but nevertheless, God did give directives for intervention from time to time. There was one occasion in particular, in which the situation deteriorated in such horrific fashion so as to require a squadron of God’s army, the Heavenly Host, to set things right again. It all started when the Watchers Sabrathon and Kochabiel informed Michael—

    Oh dear. The sun rises. Dominus tecum.

    On to Orders, Part II.

  • Valac the Demon, Part IV & Conclusion

    Back to Valac the Demon, Part III.

    28 Raphael. Sachiel’s Hour. On to business with where we left off last week.

    Valac saw to it that Gros was returned home. All that night, Gros was tormented in his dreams by the events of the evening. He awoke the next morning feeling altogether ill and sore from his missing molar, and he easily dismissed the more unusual events from his mind as products of a vivid and wine-soaked imagination. As he was preparing to sketch out a painting that morning, he was visited by a messenger. Napoleon wanted him to paint an episode from his campaigns in Egypt, suggesting in particular a grand scene of his visit to Jaffa in 1799.

    Gros was aware of what had happened in Jaffa. Napoleon had been repulsed by the victims of the plague that had set into the city. He had even considered burning the entire city down with all its inhabitants, including the healthy, in a supposed act of mercy.

    Still uncertain of exactly what had transpired the night before, he was intrigued by the idea of painting a lie, and Gros took to his studio and created his masterpiece, Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa. Gros thanked the young artist (whose name he couldn’t quite recall, but it had sounded much like Voulu) who had given him the idea of painting a lie by including him among the plague-stricken. Valac as the young artist is depicted as the young man in uniform in the lower right. Additionally, for reasons he didn’t quite understand or recall, Gros was moved to feature himself in the painting as the mysterious man with the cap bearing the number thirty-two.

    "Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa" by Antoine-Jean Gros
    Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa. This never happened. Click for detail.

    The painting was a phenomenal success at the Salon of 1804. Gros was celebrated as a genius among his peers for the next eight years of his life. He had droves of admiring students. He had more money than he could spend. He was loved.

    But on a bright day in November of 1811, he felt something shift within him while he was working on the cupola of St. Genevieve. It began as an uncertainty in the shoulder that crept down his arm and affected his ability to hold his brush. His eight years of brilliance were over. His twenty-four years of interest had begun, and it started with a mistrust in the precision of his fingers.

    It took him thirteen years to complete the cupola. After he was finished, all of his work was met with sharp criticism. He tried to exhibit his paintings at every opportunity, but no one in Paris was willing to pay him any mind.

    "Portrait of a Child" by Camille Corot
    Valac, as seen by Camille Corot at the Salon of 1834.

    Gros’ last Salon was in 1834. No one—not even his students from his halcyon days—recognized him. However, the artist Camille Corot noticed that there was a drunken, destitute man who appeared to be the object of fascination to a strange, unaccompanied young boy clad in black. Corot himself was captivated, and he used his memory of the boy as the subject of a painting that he debated showing at the Salon the following year. (It was lucky he didn’t—he did much better with Hagar in the Wilderness.) To this day, human scholars debate whom Corot had employed as a model for Portrait of a Child.

    Finally, on June 23, 1835, Gros dressed himself in the uniform that Napoleon had given him in appreciation for his magnificent painting of the plague victims at Jaffa, and he drowned himself in the Seine. He had tucked a note in his hat that read, “Tired of life, and betrayed by last faculties which rendered it bearable, he had resolved to end it.” His body was positively identified, examined thoroughly and released to an adolescent boy who claimed to be Gros’ nephew, unaccompanied and dressed in a manner that indicated he came from a family of means.

    A new tale next week. Dominus tecum.

  • Valac the Demon, Part III

    Back to Valac the Demon, Part II.

    21 Raphael breaks, a day of Ariel. Remind me to tell you about time some day. Yes, yes…with Estelle’s permission…of course.

    When we left off last time, Valac had just entered the studio of Jacques-Louis David. David’s studio was particularly rich for the demon, as David seemed to attract the company of those whose moral definitions were, shall we say, flexible. During one of his visits to the studio, the Apokomistis discovered a young artist named Antoine-Jean Gros.

    Gros was a talented painter in his right. Before his unfortunate encounter with Valac, Gros had studied with David, and he had also travelled to Genoa in order to perfect his craft with foreign masters. He’d had the fortune of being an acquaintance of Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife Josephine, and she’d recommended him to her husband as someone who might be able to provide a visual record of the French Republican victories on the battlefield.

    Napoleon was indeed interested in commissioning an artist to document his campaigns, in the interests of spreading a fantastic and epic form of propaganda, and thus Gros was given an audition of sorts by Napoleon. The general invited the young artist to witness the Battle of Arcole, where the French Republican Army met the Austrians on the battlefield. Gros was inspired by Napoleon’s advance over the bridge, and filled with the stuff that artists kill for, he created a portrait meant to elicit awe in Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole.

    "Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole" by Antoine-Jean Gros
    Gros’ Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole. It was a fine likeness, in truth.

    Napoleon didn’t hate Gros’ representation of what he’d considered to be a great military victory, but he wasn’t wild about it, either. Napoleon felt that he should have looked still more handsome and more heroic than Gros’ skills could harness. Gros was crestfallen, for he felt that he had represented the general with a god-like bravado within his painting. (It is indeed difficult to satisfy a narcissist.) However, Napoleon had no other competent artist on hand to document his feats of glory, and so he kept Gros relatively near.

    Knowing people in high places did nothing to improve Gros’ finances, however. He found himself broke and outside of the limelight that he felt his talents deserved, and so he went to David for help. Gros explained his plight, and as misfortune would have it, Valac happened to be posing as a model for the students and just within a demon’s earshot. Gros was particularly disappointed by the reception of his latest work in the Salon of 1803, and he ached for the riches and the immortality that was promised by the adoring crowds. Valac’s interest was piqued by Gros’ ambition, and he took the opportunity to satisfy the young artist’s deepest desires.

    Within the last century or so, humans have come to count many things as fiction that, on the contrary, are fact, and the sale of one’s soul remains as one of the nastier means to an end. Demons rely upon the demonic pact with humans because it is one of the ways that they sustain their power. There is a measure of quid pro quo, for most demons are not entirely unreasonable usurers, so that the human who makes the pact does get to enjoy several years of fame or fortune or whatever their misguided heart desires. The pact itself is simple: it requires a verbal pledge and a single drop of human blood. (Valac typically prefers a few ounces at the very least, but he does make exceptions.)

    Valac donned the appearance of an artist from a wealthier economic background. Gros left David’s studio, and Valac flagged him down, extending him an invitation to join the disguised demon for an evening of fine food and wine. Gros accepted the offer, as he was hungry and tired of stale, moldy bread. During the second course at dinner, Valac asked him, “You have worked your entire life to paint the truth, and it has gotten you nowhere. Have you considered what might happen if you paint a lie?”

    Gros and Valac debated the point for a good portion of the evening. After a couple of bottles of wine had taken over Gros’ judgment, it was agreed that Valac would grant Gros eight years of fame and fortune, at the rate of twenty-four years of (misery) interest to be paid in full in thirty-two years’ time, or by the end of 1835. In his drunken stupor, Gros extracted a diseased molar from his mouth as his collateral to seal the deal.

    (Dominus tecum, dear reader. Until next time…)

    On to Valac the Demon, Part IV.

  • Valac the Demon, Part II

    Back to Valac the Demon, Part I.

    Before I return to Valac, it’s important to understand something about how demons work. Present circumstance forbids me from explaining precisely why demons do what they do—Estelle shakes her head and mouths, No! Not now. Not yet.—but for the meantime, suffice it to say that it’s a given that they have it out for humanity.

    Demons are indeed powerful. They’re stronger than humans, and there are even some demons who are stronger than some angels. (However, as an Archangel, I’ve yet to meet a demon who would dare cross my path and not expect swift annihilation.) You might ask yourself, “If they have it out for humans, and they’re stronger, why don’t they just take over the world?”

    Not that they haven’t tried. But humans are a resilient species. Every attempt to subjugate them has been repelled with defiance. Such as the time—oh, no? OK. Furthermore, humans have a purpose that—not even that? Very well then.—More shaking of the head from Estelle. Apologies.

    Back to Valac, then.

    Throughout the assault from the boys of Fontainebleau, Valac maintained his shape as the wealthy young boy, feigning the victim with a red face and tears, volleying with childish threats that he knew would cause the boys to chase him as he ran off. Then Valac, as the boy, hid. The boys looked for him, and they voiced aloud their fantasies of how they would punish the little boy when they found him.

    Valac watched in amusement, for he had dematerialized, occasionally appearing as a wisp in the corner for the boys to chase. After the better part of an hour, the boys had lost interest and were more interested in harassing a local girl. The demon then took the shape of a young man of about eighteen wearing the uniform of the newly formed French Republican Army. He strutted past the boys, and pretending to show outrage for their idle behavior, he admonished them for their laziness. He appealed to their innate childish recklessness and told them all to enlist in the Army, for France had wars to fight.

    By the next day, all six boys had been sent off to assist in the crushing conflict between the Republicans and the Royalists that had arisen near the west coast of France, the War in the Vendée. Valac hung around, assuming the shape of various soldiers, ensuring that each boy met his end in a gruesome fashion. The eldest boy was trampled to death in a surge. The youngest boy, who served faithfully as a little drummer boy, was blown up in a cannon blast. Valac nearly brimmed over joy when the last boy died viciously at the hands of the Royalists.

    However, Valac had no idea that that fourteen-year-old boy, the last of the six boys, was destined to become legend. His name was Joseph Bara, and to this day, he is celebrated as a hero of the French Republic. How he met his end is the reason for his fame: he was captured by the Royalists. Valac was well aware of Joseph’s inner terror and unwillingness to die, and the boy already had a plan in mind to beg for his life. Valac couldn’t have Joseph being returned to Fontainebleau in one piece, so he took over his body and began to pronounce a laundry list of rude names all directed at the Royalists captors. The Royalists were already blood thirsty, and they had no patience for a Republican brat spouting curses at them. They gave him one last chance to recant, and they ordered him to declare, “Long live the King!” to save his life.

    Internally, Joseph fought the demon’s hold over his body and mind, but he was no match for the Apokomistis. Valac quieted the boy, and said, “Long live the Republic!” instead.

    The soldiers were slightly kinder than Valac. At least they made sure that Joseph died quickly.

    The Royalist soldiers were captured later that day, and one of them let slip Joseph’s seeming bravery. Word spread throughout the Republic of Joseph’s bravery, and Valac followed the path of the story, amused beyond comprehension that his—and not Joseph’s, the poor boy—defiance of the Royalist soldiers served to foment further hatred between the factions.

    Valac remained in Paris for a while, while the story turned to myth turned to the cornerstone of a religious devotion to the lad, and he was immensely intrigued that one of the Republic’s strongest (and rather blood lustful in himself) supporters, a painter named Jacques-Louis David, offered to immortalize the boy in a painting.

    David debuted his painting in 1794, the year after Joseph’s death. It wasn’t so much an accurate tribute to how Joseph died—Jean-Joseph Weerts came far closer with his representation almost a century later—as it was an odd combination of praise for the Joseph’s purported demigod-like bravery through its neo-classicist themes and an indication of David’s own, shall we say, varied and unusual tastes.

    Given even the slightest hint of corruption of the soul, Valac is ever intrigued. Valac followed David for a few days, and it was there, in David’s studio, that he uncovered an entirely new opportunity among a throng of hungry and ambitious young artists all desperate for immortality in one respect or another.

    (Time’s up. More on the next day of Ariel. Dominus tecum.)

    Charles Moreau-Vauthier, Mort de Joseph Bara
    The Death of Joseph Bara by Charles Moreau-Vauthier

    On to Valac the Demon, Part III.

  • Valac the Demon, Part I

    Valac is an ancient demon, and just as the word упир has changed over the centuries of human history, so has his name. He answers to Volac, Valax and Valu, the latter pronounced with a nice French-sounding u at the end. Sometimes he can be even summoned as Moloch whenever Moloch himself is out of reach.

    Valac's Sigil
    Valac’s Sigil as it was not altogether erroneously recorded in the Lemegeton, the Lesser Key of Solomon

    Humans have created their own classification systems for demons over the last few millennia. Byzantine writer and politician Michael Psellos dreamt up one of the most fantastically elaborate systems back in the eleventh century. He wrote (and many others copied) that there were demons of the Empyreal (the atmosphere), the Aerial (the air), the Subterranean (underground), Aqueous (all bodies of water), Terrene (land) and Lucifugi (exclusively nocturnal). Mr. Psellos wasn’t so much wrong as he was overcomplicating something fairly simple, like inventing categories for pencils based upon their length after they’ve been sharpened for the first time.

    There are only two categories of demon as recognized by angels: the older and stronger demons, known as the Apokomistai (Ἀποκομισταί, singular Ἀποκομιστής), and the young and weak demons, known as Nekudaimones (Νεκυδαίμωνες, singular Nεκυδαίμων), commonly shortened to Nekus. Whereas a Neku must possess a human or animal in order to have a corporeal form, an Apokomistis is capable of taking whatever corporeal or non-corporeal form he or she wishes. Of course, if any demon were to choose to inhabit a cloud in the upper atmosphere, he or she could, but as humans have firmly established themselves as ceaseless forms of entertainment to demonkind, most demons opt for human forms.

    Valac is an Apokomistis. He only answers to a handful of other Apokomistai and generally keeps to himself, unlike most of the other most powerful demons, who are typically accompanied by an entourage of Nekus. He is frequently sighted and summoned by humans, and he has a reputation for appearing as a child who uses his seeming innocence to lure willing victims to terrible ends. In fact, you’ve probably heard about some of Valac’s greatest crimes and never knew it. Have you ever heard of the Children’s Crusade? Or the Pied Piper of Hamelin? Those were both Valac, leading children away to certain death. Some of his lesser-known but more ghastly feats took place in France, not long after the Revolution.

    In the months before the Bastille fell on July 14, 1789, a clutch of Apokomistai and supporting Nekus had been irresistibly attracted to the streets of Paris by the kind of turmoil that eventually leads to bloodshed. The demons dug in and transformed the French Revolution into a ruthless affair that would usher in almost eighty years of intermittent unrest, conquest and, at its worst, horrific civil war.

    Valac arrived in France in May of 1789, at the invitation of the Apokomistai Astaroth and Mammon. Over the next fifty years, he showed up wherever he felt he could do the most damage to the French. Valac, Belial and a squadron of Nekus participated in the Reign of Terror from June 1793 to July 1794 that saw the deaths of tens of thousands of humans (although Kimeries himself rightfully claims the responsibility for having caused it).

    On occasion, Valac would find himself bored with the warring factions and preening Nekus, and he would set off on his own to satisfy his need for human flesh and blood. He was on his way to find a battle or even a minor skirmish to occupy his time when he accidentally discovered a whole new opportunity.

    Fontainebleau is a town to the south and east of Paris. It had been a popular retreat for the French monarchy over the prior centuries, and so it was no stranger to the violence of the Revolution. On the 23rd of Fructidor, Year 1, in the newly adopted and quickly discarded French Republican Calendar (more commonly recognized as September 9, 1793), Valac was passing through Fontainebleau disguised as a young boy of about eight years of age, when he came across a group of six idle teenaged boys. The eldest of the boys was fifteen, the youngest was barely eleven, and they were all from peasant families.

    Valac, like most demons, has a sincere appreciation for money and everything its appearance affords them. As he passed the group of boys, they couldn’t help but notice his wealthy-looking attire, even though he was curiously unaccompanied and travelling with purpose in his step. The boys had all heard plenty from their non-landed families about how miserable life had been under the King and before the Revolution, and they couldn’t pass up the chance to take it out on what appeared to be a weak child with money.

    The eldest of the boys initiated the torment with a vile taunt. He was soon joined by the younger boys, and they all took, very unwisely, to throwing stones at the disguised demon.

    (To be continued later. Dominus tecum.)

    On to Valac the Demon, Part II

  • UPYR! Part III & Conclusion

    Back to UPYR! Part II.

    …her life had seemed to fall apart. yes yes yes. End of sentence.

    Before we return to our history of the servant woman Aleksandra, there are two things that you must know about demons: one, demons love to pose as gods, and two, if they can sniff it out, they will never miss a blood sacrifice.

    This occasion was no different. A demon called Valac was in the vicinity, and he was enticed by the miserable scene. And so, just when Aleksandra couldn’t possibly have felt any more dejected, Valac assumed a shape that matched her inner visualization of Perun, put his hand to her shoulder and assured her that her sacrifice was more than acceptable.

    Aleksandra was the very picture of shock. She had always believed in Perun, but never had she imagined that she was worthy of a personal visit. Valac as Perun glowed faintly in the dark of the woods, and he smiled brightly, assuring the poor servant woman that she was worthy of his attention. When she recovered her senses, she threw herself at his feet and begged him to rescue her from the court of the disbelievers. Valac petted her head and promised to rescue her on the following night at midnight, all the while nibbling on the bit of flesh she’d hewn off for Perun.

    The servant woman wiped her tears away. Although she was exhausted and weak from the blood loss, she felt relieved for the first time in weeks. She had kept her promises to Mariya, and she was finally going to be rewarded.

    Valac disappeared after making additional promises to return for her, taking his glow with him. Aleksandra caught her breath for a few long moments while she allowed her eyes to readjust to the darkness of the wood. She was preparing to stand when she heard a twig snap behind her, and a pit settled in her gut when she realized that she hadn’t been alone in the woods.

    The darkness had obscured Gleb’s expression, but it was clear to her that it was full of malice. He whispered that he had seen her evil treachery in the woods, and that if she made even the quietest complaint that he would not hesitate to let the Prince know that she worshipped false gods.

    Aleksandra was filled with terror, but she also recognized that she had a god—a god who had just promised to save her, at that!—in her corner. So she screamed. She screamed as loud as she could.

    Her scream carried far, even though she had travelled deep into the woods. In the distance, the palace guard took up arms and shouted to each other to search for the disturbance.

    Gleb panicked. Aleksandra continued to scream, and Gleb understood that the only way for him to stop her scream was to stop her throat. So he stopped her: he put his hands to her neck until Aleksandra could scream no more.

    The boyar was furious that he had destroyed so lovely a creature. He knelt next to her, uncertain as to which vile action he wanted to perpetrate on the destroyed woman.

    Remaining true to his degenerate self, Valac hadn’t left the woods. He had stayed to watch the whole ghastly murder play out. With the taste of flesh still on his tongue, he felt compelled to toy with the humans, so Valac entered Aleksandra’s poor, lifeless body and animated her corpse.

    Gleb was still kneeling over Aleksandra’s body when he was suddenly thrown onto his back. He looked up in utter horror to see that Aleksandra had pinned him to the forest floor, and she had a vicious, ugly grin on her strangely illuminated face. With a burst of unanticipated strength, he broke free and ran toward the palace, but he was no match for the demon inside the body of the dead servant woman. Just as they reached the edge of the woods, Valac overtook the boyar, and the demon, in Aleksandra’s body, bit into the warm, tender flesh of Gleb’s neck and subdued the boyar without much effort.

    All the while, the palace guard had spread out in search of the source of the scream. It wasn’t long before one of the guards happened upon Valac possessing Aleksandra, feasting upon the throat of a convulsing Gleb, with that same vicious, ugly grin on her face. The guard recognized Aleksandra and was frozen for a moment by his revulsion. Only one word came to mind, and it was the epithet that had been uttered about her behind her back. He cried, УПИР!

    Good news travels fast, but slander travels faster. Before the end of the night, everyone within the palace of Kiev was unable to sleep, for word had spread that the упир Aleksandra had murdered the boyer and was on the loose.

    Helena wept over the body of her husband, and her grief dared her to demand from the Prince Vladimir and Princess Anna why they hadn’t believed her when she said that the servant woman had been nothing other than an evil, blood-drinking упир.

    And упир, after it’s been transliterated and contorted over several centuries to fit inside the Romance and West Germanic languages, starts to sound very much like the word vampire.

    Poor Aleksandra.

    I’ll tell you more about Valac on the next day of Anael. Dominus tecum.

  • UPYR! Part II

    Back to UPYR! Part I

    Where were we? Oh, yes.

    On the morning following the Baptism of Kiev, Aleksandra was summoned to assist in attending to one of the visiting boyars, Gleb of Smolensk, and his wife Helena. Gleb was immediately taken with Aleksandra’s understated beauty, and the objects of his fascination never escaped an encounter with the boyar without harm.

    Helena knew all too well of her husband’s wicked ways, but she loved him still. When she sensed his intentions for the servant woman, she found it difficult to conceal her jealousy and wanted to eliminate her competition. Uncertain how to act, Helena ordered her own servant to follow Aleksandra and learn everything she could about her.

    Helena’s servant girl reported back her mistress after a week. The boyar’s wife, who was born a Christian, was delighted to discover that Aleksandra appeared to be less than enthusiastic about having Christ in her life. Prince Vladimir had made it clear that paganism was no longer allowed in his Christian state, and so Helena found it all too easy to discredit her rival. That evening, while in the company of her peers at court, she let it slip that she worried that Aleksandra was an упир (which is insufficiently transliterated into Roman characters as upyr and pronounced vaguely like ooh-peer). Even though she pronounced it with the leaning drawl of her native dialect, everyone knew what she meant. Everyone knew that Helena believed that the servant woman Aleksandra was a witch.

    Poor Aleksandra hadn’t noticed that the boyar’s wife had it out for her, for she had been too busy trying to avoid the boyar himself. Gleb had made a habit of accosting her at every opportunity. Fortunately, all of his attempts had been foiled by the luck of someone turning the corner to interrupt his advances, giving Aleksandra the split second she needed to sneak away from him.

    The boyar’s persistence frightened her. She set a chair against her chamber door each night to prevent him from entering her room while she slept, and before she drifted into a deep sleep every night, she prayed to Perun to reward her faith and service with the punishment of those who didn’t recognize the lightning god’s awe and might.

    As Midsummer approached, life grew still more difficult for Aleksandra. Not only had the boyar pursued her without relent for more than two solid weeks, but she had also been ordered to handle some of the more difficult work around the court. She didn’t complain, for she honored Mariya’s dying wish to serve the court despite vehemently disagreeing with the Prince’s conversion to Christianity. However, it was worrisome to notice that the nobility were punctuating her name with whispers of contempt for reasons she didn’t understand.

    Worse still was that the feast of Perun was on the first of August, and she realized with despair that she would have to make her sacrifice to honor the great god in secret, for none of the other servants in the court would dare to make the sacrifice with her for fear of being unfairly accused of acts of high treason. She also knew that she wouldn’t be able to obtain any animals to offer Perun, for the gamekeeper kept track of the animals for consumption and would notice if any went missing. She knew that all that she had to offer were her own flesh and blood.

    On the eve of the first of August, Aleksandra lifted a bowl and a carving knife from the kitchen. A few hours after night fell, she sneaked out of her chamber and listened carefully for the guards behind a column near the eastern palace gate. The guards lazily relaxed their watch after an hour, and when the coast was clear, she ran out into the darkness with the knife, the bowl and her wooden statue of Perun.

    She found a small clearing where the moonlight shone through the trees. She set up her small wooden statue and the bowl. In an act of great bravado, she begged Perun’s forgiveness for her weak offering, and she cut into the flesh of her arm. She hacked off a small patch of flesh and placed it into the bowl.

    Aleksandra fell into tears as she lamented how her life had seemed to fall

    (Humans eat more than any other creature. Maggie, Sage’s mother, has summoned me to another meal. More later. Dominus tecum.)

    On to UPYR! Part III

  • UPYR! Part I

    As a matter of fact, almost every monster ever counted and named by a human is merely an angel or a demon in disguise. The others are merely misunderstood living, biological creatures that have been maligned over the years.

    Since I’ve assumed the shape and station of a human teenage girl, I just couldn’t help but notice that the most popular monster of all these days—quite a shift from what it used to be—is the vampire.

    The history of the vampire is rather varied. There’s no singular event that brought about the origin of the creature as it’s recognized now. All the intelligence on them was, for the most part, consolidated within a single narrative when Mr. Stoker created the character of Dracula (which drew from the seminal work by Mr. Polidori), and even then, most of what he had put together was largely based on myth.

    However, I can report on the origin of the term vampire.

    It was in the year 988, in the city of Kiev, when Vladimir the Great realized that the Slavic gods could no longer provide him with the spiritual comfort and refuge he had sought for so long. And so it was that the Grand Prince of Rus was won over by the promise of heavenly salvation (and earthly power) that was offered by the Cross, and with a show of great love for his new (Christian) wife Anna of Macedonia, and with even greater intentions for his kingdom, he embraced Christianity.

    Vladimir couldn’t think of a more sincere profession of faith than to save the souls of his pagan people, and on the 12th of July (on the old Byzantine calendar) of the year of his conversion, he ordered bid all Kievans down to the banks of the Dnieper River and made invited them to step into the water in an act of mass baptism. All the true believers there testified that the Dnieper carried the sins of the city downstream and far, far away into the belly of a giant sea dragon lurking in the depths of the Black Sea.

    But not all the Kievans fell in line immediately. Some of them held onto the old ways. One Kievan who refused to accept Christ as her Lord and Savior was a young woman named Aleksandra.

    Aleksandra had been left upon the doorstep of the servants’ quarters at the palace of Kiev in the spring of 970, and she was taken in and raised by Mariya, the matriarch of the servants. Mariya was typically perceived as a stern woman, but she loved Aleksandra as a daughter and reserved all her tenderness for her ward. She taught the child the arts of healing, which was an invaluable skill to have as a servant of the court. She instilled within her surrogate child a strict loyalty to the court of Kiev and an unwavering obedience to the gods of the sky, forest, mountain, river and sea.

    Neither Mariya nor Aleksandra had been allowed much in terms of possessions in their shared quarters, but they did have one small wooden statue of the supreme deity Perun that they held dear. They took it down from their makeshift altar only once, and that was during the festivities following the coronation of Vladimir in 980. The Grand Prince had unveiled a new monument to the lightning god, and when they compared the two likenesses, the ladies were pleased to discover that their representation of Perun was just as omnipotent-looking as the rich sculpture fit for a monarch.

    Mariya had already lived far beyond her own expectations when she reached her sixtieth winter by her own reckoning at the beginning of the year 985, and it was no surprise to anyone when she became gravely ill on the last full moon before the spring equinox. Mariya sensed that death was near, and in her final breaths, she made Aleksandra swear to her that she would always maintain her fealty to the gods and to the court that had looked after them.

    Life went on for Aleksandra in the years that followed. She kept the promises she had made to Mariya: she served the court of the Grand Prince Vladimir until her feet ached and her back complained, and she honored the gods with every spare moment she was afforded.

    Thus July 12, 988, was a day of unimaginable horror, for Aleksandra awoke to the insufferable blasphemy that Vladimir was forsaking the gods and embracing a new god—a single god—who demanded that they all bathe in the river to rid themselves of evil.

    Aleksandra was painfully offended. She had lived an honest life. She knew that she had no evil within her. She hid her tears when they cast the great statue of Perun into the Dnieper and hacked the effigies of all the other gods to pieces. That night, after she prayed to her little wooden statue of Perun, she hid it inside her mattress, and when she slept, she dreamt that he sent a violent storm to crush the god that had usurped him.

    (And would you believe it but Sage’s father Dennis is demanding that I help him prepare yet another meal. I’m afraid I’ll have to finish this history later. Dominus tecum.)

    On to UPYR! Part II

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