Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Across the whole Buddhist and Hindu world — from India, where they are the preta , to China and Japan, where they are the gaki — there wanders a class of the suffering dead so precisely and terribly imagined that no other figure in this chronicle's whole gallery of hungers can quite match it. The gaki, the hungry ghost, is one of the realms of rebirth in the Buddhist cosmos — the fate of those who die consumed by greed , by grasping, by envy and unappeasable craving — and its torment is written into the very shape of its body, drawn in the great medieval Japanese scrolls and the Tibetan wheel of life with anatomical exactness. The gaki has an enormous, swollen, distended belly — a vast hollow of appetite, a hunger the size of the world — and, above it, a neck and throat thin as a needle , a mouth pinched to a pinhole: so that it is all hunger and no capacity to feed it . It is ravenous beyond all bearing — its whole being is one starving belly's-worth of craving — and it can...

This chronicle has raised, from Persia, a nightmare that pays its ransom in gold; let it raise now, from the same tradition, one of the most beautiful beings in all the world's folklore — the peri (the pari of the Persian tongue, which gave English its "fairy" by a long road). The peri are spirits of light and air and beauty : winged, radiant, exquisite, gentle, fragrant beings — the loveliest of all the intermediary spirits of the Persian imagination, benevolent, associated with grace and beauty and the sweetness of the world; and yet, in the deep tradition, they are fallen — not devils, not evil, but fallen from grace , spirits who sinned or erred and were shut out of paradise, and who now exist in a state between the earth and the heaven they lost, working, across long ages, their slow way back . They are the enemies of the div , the dark demons of the Persian cosmos, whom they war against endlessly; they are creatures of pure light against the div's darkness; ...

The old countryside of eastern and central France — the Jura, the Franche-Comté, the Bugey, the deep rural provinces — kept a serpent whose whole legend turns on a single, brilliant, fatal moment of vulnerability. La Vouivre (the name descends, through the old wivre and guivre , from the Latin vipera , viper — the same root as the English wyvern ) is a winged serpent-dragon: a great flying serpent that streaks across the evening sky like a bar of fire, dwelling in the ruins, the old towers, the caves, and the springs of the countryside, guarding treasure. And she wears, set in her forehead — or held as her single eye — a jewel of incomparable value and power: a carbuncle , a great red gem (or a diamond) that blazes like fire, that lights her way through the dark, that is worth all the treasure she guards and more, and that is, in many tellings, her only eye — the single blazing gem by which alone she sees. And here is the whole of the legend, and the whole of the danger and the tem...

Every gargoyle in the world — every stone monster-head that juts from a Gothic cathedral's roofline with a rain-spout running through its throat, spitting the storm-water clear of the walls — carries in its very name the memory of a French dragon, and of a bargain struck between a saint and a town. The word gargoyle comes from La Gargouille — from the French gargouille , the throat, the gullet, the gurgling water-pipe (the same root as gargle ) — and it names the flood-dragon of Rouen, on the river Seine, whose story this chronicle will follow to its strange and instructive end. La Gargouille was a dragon of the Seine: a great serpent-dragon dwelling in the river near Rouen, with a long neck, membranous wings, and jaws that gushed water — for its power was the power of the river in flood, and it ravaged the countryside by drowning : it spouted torrents of water from its throat to overflow the Seine and flood the fields and the villages, it swallowed ships and swamped boats and ...

The Nkundo and Mongo peoples of the Congo rainforest — the vast equatorial forest of the Congo basin — tell of a being that guards the deep forest and its riches, and that hunts the human beings who come into it, with a weapon this chronicle has met in many forms but never quite this one: a voice like a little bell . The eloko (plural biloko ) is a dwarf of the deep forest: small, and hideous — the accounts give it grass or leaves for its clothing and its very body-hair, so that it is grown over with vegetation like a living stump; long claws; a body wasted to almost nothing; and, most terribly, a mouth that can open enormously wide, lined with teeth, that can swallow a human being whole. It is the vengeful spirit, in some tellings, of the dead — of ancestors who guard the forest, or of the restless dead who have taken to the deep woods — and it dwells in the hollow trees and the densest, oldest, most forbidding parts of the forest, the parts where the great game and the finest fruits...

The lindworm — the lindorm of the Scandinavian tongues — is the wingless serpent-dragon of northern Europe: a vast serpent, sometimes with two small forelegs, sometimes none, a limbless or near-limbless dragon of the old Germanic and Norse world, coiled around treasure-hoards and gnawing at the roots of things. But this chronicle, which has met a great many coiled and hoarding dragons, will follow the lindworm into the one tale that makes it unforgettable — the Danish and Scandinavian wonder-tale of Prince Lindworm , "King Lindworm," which is one of the deepest stories of transformation in all of European folklore, and which turns not on slaying the serpent but on undressing it. The Bride and the Nine Shifts A queen who could bear no child is given, by a wise woman, a means to conceive — two roses, or two onions, one to be eaten for a boy and one for a girl, and warned: eat only one. But the queen, greedy for children, eats both — and eats the wrong one first, or eats...