Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Of all the spirits that administered the old Slavic farmstead — and it was a full civil service, with a spirit to every roof — the one the farmer himself feared most did not live in the house, or even in the bathhouse. He lived in the ovin : the grain-drying barn. And to understand why his resident spirit outranked nearly every other power on the property in sheer dangerousness, you need only understand the building. The ovin was a tall structure of dry timber, packed each autumn to the rafters with sheaves of rye and wheat — and heated : in its floor or its stone-lined pit burned an open fire, whose warm smoke rose up through the harvest for days, drying the damp northern grain so it could be threshed and milled. Dry wood, dry straw, a live flame, and the entire year's food suspended in between. The ovin was, by design, a slow-motion explosion that the household prayed annually not to trigger; barns burned in every district in every generation, sometimes with the year's bread...

Russian keeps a proverb that every child learns and every adult, sooner or later, learns to mean: Ne budi likho, poka ono tikho. Do not wake Likho while it sleeps quiet. Foreigners translate it blandly — "let sleeping dogs lie" — and miss the shiver, because Likho is not a dog and not a figure of speech. In the old East Slavic imagination, Likho is a person : the personification of evil fortune itself — misfortune with a body, a dwelling, an appetite, and one terrible eye. Where the Greeks distributed fate among three spinning sisters and the Germans among the Norns at the world-tree's root, the Slavic village compressed all of bad luck into a single figure: a woman — gaunt beyond famine, tall as a doorway or a pine, wrapped in rags or in darkness — with a single eye in the middle of her forehead. Not blind chance: one-eyed chance. Misfortune, the image says with terrible precision, does see you. It just sees you flat — without depth, without mercy, without any second ...

In the old Russian village, every important building had its spirit, and the spirits had a hierarchy of temper. The Domovoi behind the stove was family — grumbling, loyal, an ancestor in fur. The Kikimora behind the wall was a difficult lodger. But down at the bottom of the garden, in the little log bathhouse squatting by the stream with its black chimney-hole and its smell of smoke, birch, and wet stone, lived something of an altogether different order — and every soul in the village, from the priest's wife to the smallest child, knew the rules of its house by heart. Never bathe after dark without asking leave. Never bathe alone. Never, above all, take the third steaming — or by other counts the fourth — for the late hours of the bathhouse belong to its master and his guests, and the guests are not human. He is the Bannik — from banya , the bathhouse itself — and he is the most dangerous domestic spirit in all of Slavic folklore: a small old man, naked or wrapped in wet birch ...

Somewhere east of the ordinary kingdoms, the tales agree, there rises a mountain that the eye can climb and the body cannot: a peak of pure glass , smooth as a frozen tear, blinding at noon, upon whose summit stands a castle—or a single golden apple tree—or a throne—and upon the throne a princess , enchanted there, holding golden apples in her lap, waiting for the one rider whose ascent the mountain will tolerate. Around the mountain's foot, the tellers add with grim relish, lies the evidence of everyone else: a ring of bones, dead horses, rusted armor—the sediment of princes. Poland calls the tale Szklana Góra , the Glass Mountain, and counts it among its oldest; Norway sets the same peak in The Princess on the Glass Hill ; the Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, and Russians all raise their own; and the glass mountain glints, further back still, in the medieval visions of the otherworld and in the oldest strata of the northern faith, where the road of the dead itself runs over a glassy...