Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the wooded hill country where Saxony, Bohemia and Silesia lean together — the Ore Mountains, the deep spruce belts of the old German-Czech borderlands — the forest had a grandmother. The woodcutters and berry-pickers of those hills spoke of her for centuries in the tone reserved for a formidable elderly neighbor: the Buschgroßmutter — the Bush Grandmother — an ancient female being, old as the timber itself, who walks the deep woods leaning on a staff, her hair a wild grey thicket hung with lichens (she is forever asking, in the old tales, to have it combed), her feet sometimes described as moss-shod, her gown of the woods' own weave. She is no hag of the devouring kind; she is something rarer and more unsettling: an authority . The Bush Grandmother rules the forest's small folk — for she is the mother, queen and matriarch of the Moosleute , the moss people: the little grey-green men and wives of the woods, knee-high to waist-high, clothed in moss, moss-bearded, their faces...

There is a sound that the peasants of old Europe knew better than they wished to. It began as a distant murmur above the treeline on the raw nights between the feast of Saint Martin and the closing of Yuletide—a baying of hounds where no hounds could be, a thunder of hooves upon nothing, horns crying out of the black vault of heaven. Doors were barred. Faces were pressed to the earth. For the Wild Hunt was abroad, and to look upon it was to risk being seized into its ranks, swept between the worlds, and returned—if returned at all—mad, mute, or marked for the grave. Few legends possess the geographic reach of this one. The Germans called it Wodens Jagd or the Wütende Heer , the Furious Host. In Scandinavia it rode as Oskoreia or Odens jakt , the hunt of Odin himself upon his eight-legged stallion, whose deeper mysteries we have examined in our study of Sleipnir, the traveler between the worlds . In medieval France the procession bore the strange name of the Mesnée d'Hellequin ...