Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Pacific coast of Colombia and northern Ecuador — the Chocó and Esmeraldas country, where the rain is measured in meters and the land dissolves seaward into the largest mangrove labyrinths in the Americas — is the homeland of Afro-Colombian and Afro-Ecuadorian culture, and of its greatest legend: a figure who does not chase, does not scream, and does not kill, and is feared beyond all the coast's things that do. La Tunda is a shapeshifting woman of the mangrove: in her own form — glimpsed rarely, and described with the coast's unsparing eye — she is a woman gone wrong at the root : one leg human, the other ending in a molinillo — the carved wooden whisk of the region's kitchens — or in a child's small foot, or a stump; for the Tunda, whatever face she borrows, cannot perfect her legs, and the checked hem betrays her here as it betrays her sisters from the Xtabay's ceiba to the yacuruna's backwards feet. But her borrowed faces are the point, and they are ch...

Among all the world's monsters, with their fangs and their chains and their thousand ways of chasing, the berberoka of the northern Philippines — the swamp ogress of the Apayao and Ilocano country of Luzon — holds a distinction that ought to be studied in every school of the soul: she is the only predator in the global bestiary whose bait is good luck . She does not lure with beauty, like the river-charmers; nor with music, nor with cries for help. The berberoka, a squat ogress of the marshes, vast-bellied and strong as a carabao, hunts with a method so original that once heard it is never forgotten. She chooses a pond — a fishing pond near a village, one the local families know and work — and she drinks it . Swallows the water: draws the whole pond down her throat in the dark hours, gulp upon gulp into that prodigious belly, until where deep water stood at dusk there lies, at dawn, a glistening bed of mud — covered in fish . Stranded, flopping, helpless, hundreds of them: the who...