The Legend of the Bog-Witch

“The Legend of the Bog-Witch and the Birth of Black Magic: A Tale of Aldebaran”

Once upon a time, there lived a girl whose name is lost to antiquity. She was a pretty young thing with a simple sort of beauty; she was quiet and solitary and found great pleasure in little things, like the sunshine playing on a patch of spring grass, or the way the birds spoke to each other. Her life was simple and happy: she lived in a forest cottage with her grandmother and took care of her, cooking and darning and spinning and such. The only great care either of them had was the weeds that never seemed to leave the garden.

Then one day, the beauty and the simplicity of the girl’s life reached an abrupt and unfortunate demise – she fell in love.

The object of her desire was a nice sort of fellow, quiet and simple like herself. The two grew very close to each other and soon one was not to be found without the other. She taught him to sing like the birds and to spin on the spinning wheel, and he taught her to carve wood and play the little whistle instrument he carried with him. They seemed the most perfect of friends and most precious of lovers. On the outside. But all along, the girl’s grandmother never felt quite right about the boy. She sensed there was something amiss within, and her poor granddaughter was yet too young and inexperienced in the ways of the heart to see her folly.

Time passed, and, as often happens in the world, tragedy struck. The girl’s grandmother died one day, peacefully in her sleep, leaving her poor granddaughter all alone in the world… for shortly after learning of the tragedy, the boy disappeared, and was never seen in the forest again. The girl mourned the loss of her grandmother for a little while, but she grieved for the boy forever afterward, utterly unable to heal her broken heart, to let go her anger, or to forgive the boy for what he did. In that time, the weeds in the garden took root and spread all about the house, climbing up its stones, staining them black. The birds stopped singing and soon left the forest all together, and even the sun stopped shining through the trees. The place had become cursed.

Through the years, the girl became bent, and her youth and beauty left her. Some say she even went mad, living in the forest all alone, with only her broken heart and anger to keep her company. Then one day, that dark mistress that is Fate brought round a visitor to her door. He was a little imp of a man, traveling all over the odd places of the world, selling strange wares: lightning rods and potions and herbs from the top of a black mountain. But the thing that caught the hag’s eye was a small bottle filled with a liquid red as blood.

“Pardon my sayin’, ma’am, but I don’t think you’ll be needin’ that there potion,” the imp tried, “that’s a love potion.”

The hag looked deeply into the imp’s beady little eyes and replied calmly, almost sweetly, “Perhaps I know of a young woman who might benefit from it.” And without further discussion, for the forest was fearful enough without a cranky old hag to argue with, the imp sold her the potion and continued on his way, hurrying out of the forest.

The hag spent days in her cottage, brooding over the potion which was the essence of love, the very thing that broke her heart. She cursed it and filled it with her hurt and anger, until the potion within turned to an ugly green-black poison. Then one night when the moon was full and the forest was filled with an eerie fog, the hag drank the poison. And that is how the first bog-witch was born. For, ever after that moment, she had the blackest of black magic coursing through her veins, and she used it to fill the lives of other innocent folk with dread and sorrow.

It is said that at the moment she drank the poison, the hag vowed to search the far reaches of this world and any others for the boy who broke her heart. And so she does to this day. That is why they say to watch out for nights that the sky glows an eerie shade of red, when the earth is shrouded in fog – hold your loved ones tight to you, and beware the bog-witch!

The end.