Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Hungarian keeps the creature's name in its everyday vocabulary, where it presses on the language the way it once pressed on sleepers: lidércnyomás — "lidérc-pressing" — is simply the modern Hungarian word for nightmare, the standard term any Budapest office worker uses for a bad dream or a crushing worry. Few of them pause to hear what the word remembers: that the nightmare was once a someone ; that it could be hatched, owned, enriched by, loved by, and ruined by; and that the whole strange career of that someone began — this is the detail no other demon in Europe can match — with an egg carried under a human armpit. The lidérc of Hungarian village belief is one of the most versatile spirits in any tradition — devil's chicken, treasure-bringer, night-presser, and false lover in one — and the folklorists of Hungary, who documented it from the plains to the Carpathians, treated it as three creatures wearing one name. But the three are one, and the thread that joins t...