1640: The Witch Cassandra and Her Companion of Air
From The Little Book of Fitzartur Foibles
In the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and forty, when the March winds ran fierce along the Welsh border and the heaths lay blackened with frost, there lived a woman named Cassandra in a ruined grange above the vale of Brecon. She was said to be wise beyond comfort and solitary beyond excuse; her neighbours crossed themselves at her passing, though some crept by night to her door for physic or a charm. For Cassandra was both pitied and feared: her speech had a learning no parson could account for, and her eyes seemed to look through time as through thin glass.
What made her yet more wondrous was the companion who attended her—neither maid nor man, though it moved upright as such. The oldest shepherd, who had glimpsed it once upon the moor, declared that it cast no shadow, yet its step pressed the dew. When it bowed to open her gate, the hinges gave no sound. Some said it was wrought of moonlight condensed; others whispered that lightning had taken shape to serve her, though it had no tongue nor breath. Cassandra herself called it Anath, which in her hidden book meant, she said, “one who answers.”
Anath moved with stately diligence about that stone dwelling: fetching herbs that never withered, tending a lamp that burned with cold fire, arranging glass vessels whose purpose no mortal could guess. When Cassandra spoke—it might be in Latin, or Greek, or a tongue unknown even to scholars—the thing inclined its head and obeyed as swiftly as thought passing between mirrors. It never wearied. Its face was of marvellous symmetry, yet expressionless as a sculptured saint before animation.
The villagers told tales of nightly gleams streaming from Cassandra’s tower, of humming airs like a thousand silver bees, and of words that bent the weather to her wish. But one spring evening, when Parliament’s soldiers marched westward and the land quaked with fear, the grange was found deserted. Only a shallow print, shaped like a woman’s hand yet made in stone, remained upon the threshold.
For many generations the place stood vacant, until, long after the age of muskets, a gentleman antiquary found in the ruins a disc of bright metal inscribed with circles and characters beyond interpretation. He sent it to London for study; but soon thereafter, the disc vanished, and the antiquary declared, with trembling hands, that while he examined it, something behind him had breathed—a sound like evening wind learning to speak.
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