It was a time of darkness. The fey children had fallen to the tribes of man and the blood of the old gods and goddesses saturated the earth, running into the seas so that the foam crashed against the shores with dark crimson spray. Peasant’s fires burned blue with witches’ bones, and rough beasts stalked the village streets when the sun disappeared below the horizon.
Beyond sharp, forbidding peaks, in an old castle, its once-bright glass windows now shattered and strewn across grounds blackened with the blood of hapless trespassers, Magia Lilithe dwelt in solitude. Although the leaders of the surrounding lands paid her fearful homage, none dared visited her realm.
Which meant that the land was not all of hers that was empty.
Lilithe combed her long, pitch-black tresses and stared across the desolate realm. Bitterness stung her heart like acid. To rule is good, but to rule alone had become tiresome. She wasn’t fool enough to wish for a consort — some egotistic man who might challenge her power or treat her like an ordinary woman. But a child — a child to play with, to raise, to mould, to control — a child would be another story entirely.
But how could she seed her womb when nobody was brave enough to enter her realm, much less her bed?
Lilithe scowled and threw her jeweled comb out the glassless window, turning away before she could see where it fell.
“I will have a child!” she swore, gripping a bedpost so tightly that the wood shrieked and writhed in pain. “I will have an heir! I will not die alone!”
And, because she was Magia Lilithe, the razor-edged wheel of sorcery began to turn.
Days passed, and Lilithe brooded and weighed her options. Should she summon a lover from afar, travel in disguise to another land, or take between her legs one of the monsters that dwelt in the mountains? At last she conjured a demon lover, dank and unwholesome from the pits of hell, and mated with him until her courses stopped. Then she banished the demon back to its damnation and spent her months of gravidity casting potent spells to protect the child inside her.
When Lilithe broke water, she called malevolant spirits to act as midwives and summoned all the dark beings that might watch over and protect her child from harm.
“Lucifuge Rofocale, Satanachie, Vassago, Rimon, Astaroth, Nebiros, Talimol, Gitau, Rabiam, O Mekratrig!” The last name was a scream as the pain began. But the room had already begun to fill with presences, and the twelve beings drank her agony with a terrible thirst.
It wasn’t until the cauled twins were born, a girl with the dark beauty of her dam and a boy with the demonic power of his sire, that the thirteenth prince tore into the birthing chamber with a furious scream.
“Belial!” Lilithe wailed in horror. The last Prince of Darkness thrust through the other devils and stood over the helpless woman, flexing his iron claws.
“Lilithe, your summons was not completed. By the Law of the Broken Pentacle, I claim what is mine!”
He ripped the children from her arms and thrust them upon the devil beside him as he stepped closer to the petrified sorceress.
“The firstborn I cannot harm, for you have contrived protect her life from diabolic powers. But you did not protect her death, and so I claim that.” He reached down and grabbed the helpless sorceress by her neck. “The secondborn belongs to me in his entirety, for you failed to foresee his birth at all. And you, Lilithe … by the Law, you are mine, as well.”
“Save me!” she implored the princes around her, but they stood silently, bound by the Law, as Belial killed her.
And throughout those hours of rending flesh and crushing bone, the twins slept peacefully in Mekratrig’s arms, their birth-blood drying on his talons.
The boy only stirred once when Belial finally snatched him up and bore him away.
The girl grew up in the ruined castle, suckled by a succubus and tutored until her ninth year by twelve unholy princes who taught her runes and magery and finally abandoned her until such time that they might be called back by the provisions of their oath to her dead mother.
They did not name her, nor did she give herself a name. Nameless, she was best protected from the wizards who might seek to command her, although nameless, she was also most vulnerable to them if they learned her secret. But none knew, and it finally passed that she became a woman and came into full power as a sorceress.
One evening when the moon was full and the ruins of the castle were washed in stark relief by the pale light, the young woman looked out over the flying buttresses of the walls and surveyed her barren realm. She was plagued with restlesslessness. Her books had ceased to amuse her; they dealt with things she’d never seen or felt or heard before, and she didn’t understand them. Illusions were pointless, and the most powerful enchantments had long since grown commonplace. She had explored her castle and lands thoroughly, and could traverse any part of them with her eyes closed. Nothing captured her interest.
“If there were only something new in the world,” she mused. Then she sighed, for she had seen it all through her magic mirrors and crystals, and nothing ever changed.
“I’m bored,” she complained to the uncaring night. “There is nothing forbidden me, nothing beyond my power, and I’m bored of it all. I wish –” the moment was held in abeyance as the dread wheel that had slain her mother teetered, “I wish that something interesting would happen.”
And so it came to pass …
… that one evening her solitary night-meal was interupted by the clarion challenge of a hunting horn outside her castle. And the dusty threads of oath-magic began to stir.
He was dressed in black, except for a leaf-green cloak that only served to emphasize the barren severity of the rocky slopes and the field of broken glass through which he’d ridden. She gazed at the stranger with interest, for he was the first true man she’d ever seen outside of her magic mirrors, and his shaggy-haired winterland mount the first horse.
“My lady,” he said, reining in the limping beast and dismounting in a swirl of green, “I am called Evantine.”
She remained silent as he bowed, but her gaze burned with curiosity.
“I have come to take you home with me.”
She smiled. The claim was audacious, and audacity was something new.
“What makes you think I want to go with you?”
“What makes you think you have a choice?” He returned her smile, but his dark eyes were cold.
“I am a sorceress,” she warned, still amused.
A threat. That, too, was new.
“And I am a mage and the son of a mage. Shall we wage a duel arcane for possession of your body?”
“Why should I agree to that?” she asked.
His cheerless smile faded.
“I will have you one way or the other, lady. I have scoured the world with enchantments, seeking the sorceress most like myself in power.”
“Oh, well.” She looked up at the bone-white moon and silently rejoiced. “It will, at least, be something different to do.”
They faced each other in the valley of broken glass, their faces washed pale in the moonlight and their clothes whipped close to their bodies by the chill wind. Hour after hour they conjured things to torment a fever-ridden madman. Strange, polymorphous entities crawled across the sky, and grotesque parodies of man and animal limped through the glass. A charnel stench filled the air and the clouds screamed and bled viscous rain over the castle. The earth roiled as nameless creatures clawed up from the sterile soil and razor-beaked monstrosities ripped them from the soil and ate.
One by one, Mage Evantine’s summonings fell to the sorceress’s creatures, and he took no pleasure in her triumphant smile. Yet he persevered, and the duel stretched on through the night.
Finally the sorceress, haggard with weariness, summoned her power for one last effort – because Evantine had been right. He was almost her equal.
“Mage Evantine,” she cried, voice carried over the bone-chilling sounds of the battle around them, “by thy name, Evantine, and in thy name, Evantine, I charge you to give up your power to me and concede defeat.”
The mage laughed, a little too high-pitched, for after the night’s efforts he clung only precariously to sanity.
“You are a fool if you think I’d give you my real name.”
“Perhaps,” she said thoughtfully, for she had never been misled before, and that, too, was new. “But still, you have lost this duel.”
“Don’t gloat yet.” With a flash of blue-white light, the mage’s creatures vanished; warily, the sorceress dismissed her own. Mage not-Evantine stared across the field at her, exhausted but still standing. “I had hoped to vanquish you by power, but you are truly my equal. I should have expected it.”
“Because you are my brother?” She smiled at his surprise. “Did you think to shock me with a dramatic announcement? My tutors told me of your birth, and I have wondered if you’d ever come.”
The mage squirmed.
“And my tutor told me all about you, sister. Where you lived, who lived with you – and one other thing.”
At that she paled, for she knew the Prince Belial wasn’t her friend.
“He told me you had no name.”
“He lied!”
Mage not-Evantine smiled thinly. “I have always wanted a sister named Evelyn.”
“No!” she screamed, feeling the name settling around her. Furious at being trapped so easily, and unwilling to accept the fate before her, she grabbed a silver rune-dagger from her belt.
“That can’t kill me,” Evantine said with a scornful smile.
“It can kill me.” Evelyn cast him a defiant look and plunged it into her own heart.
Flames licked up behind the mage and Belial roared with satisfaction as Mage not-Evantine leaped forward, too late.
“Damn you, uncle!” the young mage swore. Her blood dripped on the broken glass. “She was to be my consort!”
“I swore to bring about her death, and so I have. But you may have her now – do with her what you please.”
“I’m not a necromancer — or a necrophile!”
“Not yet,” observed Belial, “but you have time.” The Prince of Darkness chuckled to himself, well content, and vanished.
The mage glared at the place where his tutor had disappeared, then turned to his sister’s corpse and embraced it. He felt no victory in the cold arms of the dead. Disgusted, he dropped her corpse and began binding it with enchantments.
One day, centuries later, a man dressed in black rode wearily into the valley, a weariness around his eyes that belied his unlined flesh.
He reined in his evil-tempered, lame stallion by a gorse-covered mound in a field of weeds and glass and walked to the ruined castle on its edge. He stopped, his foot nudging a jeweled comb somebody must have lost, and considered the crumbling heap.
Nobody had moved in, and nobody had brought his sister back from the dead.
His preparations took half the evening, not the least because he’d forgotten where he’d buried her. But at last his summoned creatures pulled her from the grave and he dismissed them with impatience. He unwound the old green cloak that had served as her winding sheet and laid it under her to protect her from the jagged glass. She could have been carved in ivory, so stiff and cold was her flesh, but time had not touched her. Then he undressed himself and washed both of them with the restless ointment he’d learned to make over his centuries of travel.
“Life to life, sister,” he murmured, slashing both of their palms. He placed his hands upon hers so that his blood would pass into her veins and his body inside of hers so that his heat might pass into her bowels. Until dawn he stayed that way, pouring his life into her cold flesh.
Morning came with a light that pierced the dark clouds that perpetually hung over the castle. The sun, the moon and the dawnstar were in trine. Mage not-Evantine stirred, fatigued, for much of his vitality had been drained from his body. But it had not been in vain, for his sister stirred, too, awakened from her long sleep.
“Hello, Evelyn,” he breathed, looking down into her eyes and loosening his grip upon her hands, a grip sticky with congealed blood. He wrapped his fingers in her long dark hair and turned her face toward him, staring into cold, but living, eyes. “I’ve come to claim you, sister.”
She smiled and gripped his shoulders, pulling him closer. Dried blood crumbled from her palms over his bare back. The Mage not-Evantine laughed harshly, enjoying his long-delayed triumph.
Nobody was there to hear his laughter turn to screams and then to silence. Nobody was there to see Evelyn break her fast.
She had been dead for a long time, and she was very hungry.