Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

She is one of the oldest named terrors in European history — old enough that Sappho knew her. In a fragment of the poetess of Lesbos, from the seventh century before Christ, a woman is described as "fonder of children than Gello": already, that early, the name needed no footnote. Everyone on Lesbos knew Gello — the ghost of a girl of the island who had died young, unmarried, childless, and who returned from that unfinished death with an unbearable hunger for what she had been denied. She came for the infants. She came for the young mothers and the brides. Where a baby sickened without cause, wasted at a breast that had milk, or was found still in a cradle that had held a living child at dusk, the women of the Greek world said her name — and kept saying it, in an unbroken chain of whispered diagnosis and written counter-magic, for the next twenty-five centuries. Ancient Greece feared her as Gello; Byzantium fought her for a thousand years as Gylou ; the Greek villages of the ...

All year long, says the old Greek tradition, the world stands on a tree. Deep under the earth, deeper than wells and deeper than graves, the great trunk rises that holds up the floor of the living world — and all year long, in the dark down there, something is sawing it . They work in shifts, with crude saws and hatchets, hairy shoulders heaving: the kallikantzaroi — black, misshapen, mostly blind goblins, with the legs of beasts and the manners of monkeys — laboring with a diligence they show at no other task, because they have exactly one ambition: to cut through the World Tree, drop the earth into the abyss, and be done with creation altogether. And every year they nearly finish. By late December the trunk hangs by a sliver; one more day's sawing would bring everything down. And precisely then — at Christmas — the goblins hear the news from above, throw down their saws in a body, and swarm up into the world . For the Twelve Days between Christmas and Epiphany, the earth's m...