Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Across a territory vaster than any empire — from Anatolia through the Caucasus, over the whole Kazakh and Kyrgyz steppe, into Siberia and down into the valleys of Central Asia — the peoples of the Turkic world, and half their neighbors besides, feared one being above nearly all others, and feared her at one door above all: the door of the yurt where a woman lay giving birth. She is the albasty — the Turks of Anatolia call her alkarısı , the "al-woman," the scarlet woman — and her portrait is drawn with remarkable consistency across five thousand kilometers of telling: a hag-like female, heavy and shambling, with long loose yellow hair falling past her waist, pendulous breasts thrown back over her shoulders when she runs, and sometimes a bird's taloned feet showing under her hem. She can wear other shapes — a yellow dog, a fox, a goat, a heap of moving hay — but the yellow-haired woman is her true form, and every midwife from the Bosphorus to the Altai knew her business...

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 ...