Chapter 2 Kingdom of Ice

Baba Yaga was aback her mortar and pestle with her witch-daughter Morena, the wind-wild goddess with a body like a birch. Morena flew aback a broom in a red velvet cloak and black rags of a dress. They were flying as fast as an eagle over the Caucasus Mountains, sending their flocks of crows and owls to harvest ingredients: poisonous herbs and dwarven treasures, alongside a fair amount of children's first breaths and mother's last words.

This spell would be one in a long line against Chernobog, the Black God, who longed to unseat Morena and her consort Jarilo from the heavens and spread sterile, cold perfection with the infection of his cursed deathless lands upon Buyan. Nature abhors a vacuum, but vacuums abhor nature, and Chernobog was the void that ate all he drained of blood and left his victims cold and lifeless.

Russia was both light and dark, poison and honey, and black Morena was the queen of immortals. Passionate but feral, she carried madness with her like a worm in her brain. Watching her bare milky-breasted, nipples like pink daggers as she beat at her chest with venik branches to guide the winds, Baba Yaga was proud of Morena's ferocity. Her witch-daughter was all wolf, all wild, and the best hope at destroying Chernobog for good.

If Morena was a wolf, then Chernobog was a vulture, circling in the sky waiting for a feast. Would this spell or the next seal the coffin in his box? The Zorya's whispered in their prophetic trills that Morena would birth Bilobog, the remedy to Chernobog's destruction, but so far her union with the sunlit god Jarilo had proven tempestuous and fruitless.

Baba Yaga had tried spell after spell to make Morena's inhospitable womb of ice and night a planting ground for Jarilo's seed, but stillborn embryo after bloody abortion followed. It drove Morena deeper into her madness and desperation, and it drove Jarilo farther from Morena. They failed again and again, Chernobog's blackness spread, and Buyan was growing darker. The crops failed more, the spirits thirsted, and the deathless maidens haunted the outer boundaries, hunting for ungiven comfort.

It was time for Baba Yaga to tell Morena, her dearest godchild, a heartbreaking truth. They had sent a fetch in the form of a giant to Chernobog's deathless lands with the fruit of that night's labor, enchanted to wreak havoc on his palace of glass and ice and tear the oak tree of his heart from its roots. Each egregore and familiar that died at Chernobog's hands infuriated him more, and drew him further into no man's land, where they might strike him in earnest with spells and curses, but Chernobog was wily, and deathless to boot. It would take a mortal to kill him, and a mortal man to bring life to the goddess of death, as only humanity tasted of the black cup of destruction and passed on into the great unknown no god or nechist knew.

Baba Yaga told this to Morena, that her marriage to Jarilo would prove fruitless, and that she should seek a mortal's bed. There were rats on Morena's shoulders and crows in her black black hair. She gave a ragged sigh, moths leaving her mouth as she exhaled.

"I suppose it is true, witch-mother. Burning day and dark night are never on earth at the same time, and for Bilobog to walk the earth, my child must have mortal blood. All the heroes, from Ilya Muromets to Dobryna Nikitich, were partially human after all. They were the ones to slay dragons, not insipid Jarilo or my stubborn father Perun." Morena looked out the window of Baba Yaga's chicken hut and the darkness of the night shuddered under the death goddess's gaze. "I will travel Russia for however long it takes to find the father of Buyan's avenger, though my trek may span centuries."

Baba Yaga gave a weak smile. "This war is tiring for us both, and you have a heavy cross to bear, dear Marzanna."

Morena plaited her tangled hair. "If I could but have one child, one witch-babe to suckle at my breasts and coddle under the starlight and winds, it will have been worth it."

Baba Yaga did not want to tell the daydreaming Morena that to keep a half-mortal child in a house of immortals at war would be a death sentence, but for once in her long long life, she kept quiet.