Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Of all the forms in which the old world met its death-omens—black dogs, night birds, candles of corpse-light—the Scottish Highlands kept the humblest and the most harrowing: laundry . A traveler fording a burn at dusk, in Skye or Mull or the far glens of the mainland, might come upon a small woman kneeling at the water's edge where no woman should be, beating and wringing cloth against the stones in the immemorial way of washerwomen—and the cloth is bloody. She is the bean-nighe , the washing woman, the washer at the ford; and what she washes are the shirts and shrouds and blood-stained garments of those about to die . If the traveler recognizes his own shirt in her hands, he has read his sentence. She sings as she works, in some accounts—a low keening that carries the names of the doomed—and the fords she chooses are the desolate ones, the crossings where a burn runs between townships, at twilight or before a battle; on the eve of the great slaughters, said the tradition, the for...