Chapter Text
Let me set the scene for you:
My village had a name once, long ago when it was first formed as a shtetl , with written history going back at least until the 1300s, and verbal history going back long before. But the families that live here now come from a wide caste of origins, ethnicities mixing and marrying and merging. Their differences have been lost to time, and my village's name along with them. It is now only the village.
The village is nestled in the far northwest of the province of Cluj, in the part of the country known as Transylvania. It is built into a tiny valley of the part of the Carpathians known as the Bihor. To the immediate south lies the dense forest of Hoai, which is surely one of the most haunted places on the surface of the world. Few dare to go there even during the day, much less when darkness sets in and the curved trunks of trees reach for you with bent boughs and grasping branches. But the forest is also rich in diversity; deer and hare, wild boar and pheasant, fox and bear and even lynx.
Within the mountains hides an elaborate system of dark, deep caves. These contain large chambers, passages twisting and deceptive, caverns of ice with walls twenty meters thick. How many people have wandered into those depths, never to be seen again? The caves also contain minerals. Many, many minerals, deposited long ago when the mountains were born. Iron ore, quartz, granite, limestone. These leach out into the earth beneath my village, into the farmland. Because of them, my land is fertile and green, and crops grow big and fast.
It is the perfect place for a small village, and the land there has seen repeated squabbles and wars to prove it. My land has been Romanian, then Russian, then Romanian again, blood spilled to water the crops and fill the earth with yet more nutrients. The village has seen fire- accidental and intentional, persecution, famine, and disease. And while there is indeed a synagogue-turned-church to the north of the market, the people in my village have long since given up on their ancestors’ gods. When prayer after prayer falls on deaf ears, can you really blame anyone who stops offering them?
Instead, the four hundred-odd families form a pragmatic people now, who believe more in things they can see and touch. Rich earth, warm sun. Feathers of a raven. Proven things. But the old echoes remain- stories of strigoi, dybbuk, iele, zână, Muma Pădurii, and Baba Yaga told around fires, to unruly children to keep them in line, and these tales linger in the air, in the very land itself. Who can say with assurance that they do not roam the forest at night? Better to stay indoors, locked in safe houses with bright fires to keep both the creatures and the chill at bay. After all, beneath the surface of the soil lies something far older, far more mysterious. Far more dangerous.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My people are resourceful; homes once burned down repaired with wood and sheet metal, new technology mingling with old. Tractors are used to till the farms alongside the donkey and ox. Even a truck or two join the carts on dirt roads pounded flat from centuries of walking feet. Apart from these few minor conveniences, though, the families live much the same way people have lived here for hundreds of years.
In the center of my village lies the market, stalls and tables arranged in a great U shape, loosely surrounding a statue of a maiden bearing a shield. On busy days the air is filled with the sounds of people, haggling and laughing, of children playing in the street and old men gathered at tables, around chess boards outside the general goods store.
Hewn into the mountainside of the village lies my castle. Constructed over the site of a far older fortification on a rock above the river, my castle is a large and imposing structure with tall towers, bastions, an inner courtyard, myriad windows and balconies adorned with stone carvings. It is flanked by both rectangular and circular towers, once said to have been used as prisons. Though surely, the lower levels contain dungeons far better suited for that. Who knows what horrors those damp spaces have witnessed? Still, the castle is a lavish place, each room furnished brightly and decorated to the slightest detail. There are thirty bathrooms. My castle holds collections of statues, paintings, furniture, arms and armor, gold, silver, stained glass, ivory, porcelain, tapestries and rugs, spreading over four centuries of history. And I have not even mentioned the neighboring vineyard! It is old- older even than the castle. Due to the suitable climate and fertile soil, it yields a fine crop, boasting numerous local grape varieties through centuries of selective breeding. The vines are tended with care, the enterprise ruled over by the sole remaining scion of a bloodline that goes nearly as far back as the vineyard itself.
There are four such scions. Final remnants of lineages that stretch back into the annals of history. One looks after the reservoir that sits at the edge of my village, and the river that feeds it snakes its way through the center of town, up, up, all the way to a massive waterfall that springs forth from a crack in the mountains. Another scion lives here, overlooking the waterfall, caring for the plants and tending the graveyard that lies nearby. The river descends from the waterfall, and on its way to the reservoir it is harnessed, powering not only mills but a factory as well. This factory is led by the scion of the fourth ancient family. The great monolith digs its metal talons deep within the core of my land to pull iron from the earth, and in return it spews black smoke into the air, poisoning my land further with ‘innovation’ and ‘progress.’
It only bothers me a little.
This, dear reader, is my village. A lively place, at least during the day. But when the wind howls at night, my trees shake and moan with the memory of a thousand screams, the taste of burning, and the sweet smell of my rot tainting the night air.
What I am trying to impress upon you, dear listener, is that my lands were filled rotten with me, long before Miranda set foot in my caves.