Interlude: An Ode to Baba Yaga

Happy witches are all alike.

Every unhappy witch is unhappy in her own way.

For Lady Baba Yaga, her unhappiness that night stemmed from a missing book on the shelf of a local bookstore, the latest volume of KatyuKai or, That Time I Reincarnated into Another World Submerged in Permafrost But My Name In My Past Life Was Katyusha.

Her fingers trembled over the blank void where the newest volume should have been placed. She had checked the publication date, seven times in fact, called the bookstore in advance, spoken with several less than enthusiastic assistants to confirm that the book was indeed on the shelf.

And yet it was not there.

Why was it not there?

Had Japan forsaken her?

Should she level the country to the ground?

“Um,” came a young man’s voice from behind her. Lady Baba Yaga spun around and came face to face with an adversary: a store clerk. “Is there something you’re looking for today?”

The clerk fiddled with the pockets on his apron. His nervousness was not unexpected. It was unlikely that he had often seen people who looked like Lady Baba Yaga, who returned his wandering gaze with cool, narrow eyes glistening a glacial aquamarine.

Lady Baba Yaga possessed a strikingly pale, peach white, though not quite yet porcelain, complexion. The young woman wore a black headband over her silver hair which was threaded with occasional blond streaks, while two earrings carved in the shape of wolves hung from her ears.

And yet despite her resting stare which reminded the young man of that of a doll, Lady Baba Yaga was not dressed in the manner of a Gothic Lolita, but instead wore a fitted black softshell jacket, high-cut tactical shorts that seemed ill advised for the weather, and combat boots that ran up to below her knees.

“Is there something you’re looking for?” the clerk asked again.

Baba Yaga pointed at the empty space on the shelf.

“Katyusha,” she said.

“Katu?” the clerk tried to pronounce the name. “I’m very sorry. The last copy was purchased earlier today. If you’d like, I can recommend something similar–”

Baba Yaga shook her head. She pointed at the empty space again.

“Sorry,” she said. “I only read Russian novels–”

“My lady!”

An electronic chime sounded. The automatic doors in front slid open, and a tall, frazzled woman with messy burgundy hair burst into the store. She walked briskly to the store clerk, took a moment to adjust her disheveled suit and glasses, and offered the clerk a deep reverent bow.

“Please accept my deepest apologies for her disruptive behavior,” she said. “My lady, please. We should leave now.”

“Um…” the clerk mumbled.

“I wish to buy Katyusha, Natalia.”

“That’s what the Internet is for.”

“It is my first time in Japan,” Lady Baba Yaga frowned. “I wish to buy a souvenir.”

“You buy souvenirs when you leave.”

“I want one now.”

“Need I remind you? You are early,” Natalia hissed. “You were supposed to come with the others. Do you know how much trouble you caused Internal Affairs and the K–oh forget it. Just come with me.”

“It was my choice to come here.”

“That is precisely the problem.”

“Umm…” the clerk interrupted. “If you’re not looking for anything in particular, this aisle is narrow. You may inconvenience the other customers, so…”

Natalia flashed her sharp eyes at the clerk and burned her irritated glare into his memory. She snatched Lady Baba Yaga’s hand and tugged her away from the shelves.

“We were just leaving,” she snapped.

“The people of this country are strange,” Lady Baba Yaga murmured once they stepped outside. “They do not say what they mean.”

“This country survives on not saying what it means,” Natalia sighed. “We should get going. Dmitry and Maria are waiting for us. You shouldn’t be here.”

“I came to read Katyusha,” Lady Baba Yaga pouted. “If it is not here, then We shall convene elsewhere.”

“My lady,” Natalia laughed, nervously. “The arrangements for the party have been made. You can’t just change your mind again. What will Maria think?”

“Maria loves me,” Lady Baba Yaga smiled. She turned her nose, closed her eyes, and sniffed. “I smell food. I think I’ll go have some.”

Without so much as a gesture, Lady Baba Yaga vanished in a column of smoke. Natalia cursed in her native tongue, then pressed her temples with her hands.

“I fucking hate this job,” she growled. “Incantation. Search.”

Natalia closed her eyes and the topography of Central Sapporo descended into her mind. The smoke that had replaced Lady Baba Yaga’s silhouette blinked with traces of her imaginarium. Other sources of magic in the area shined in a mosaic of different hues, but her lady’s was unique, coruscating with a mercurial radiance that matched her temperament.

Further away, Natalia sensed a patch of imaginarium colored with an uncomfortably bright lilac hue. She ignored it for now and followed her lady’s magical signature to a much closer location, a food cart sitting northwest of her.

Natalia opened her eyes and sprinted in pursuit.

All her life, all Natalia ever wanted was to study magic with the best. She had grinded incantations and spellwork in Vladivostok, Smolensk, Saint Petersburg, burned away her young age in spiraling luminescent towers until one day she found herself middle aged and loveless, all for the chance at a chance to enter into contention to represent her country as its Egregore.

Fate, as it were, had other plans for her, specifically, a secretarial role that amounted to little more than babysitting a prodigy over half her age.

If only the lady looked like Baba Yaga.

A narrow greenbelt rose ahead of her. Decorated fountains and sculptures sat upon a sequence of lawns and flowerbeds divided into plazas. There in the park’s center, she found Lady Baba Yaga perched on a stool beneath the striped canvas awnings of a grilled meat cart. A skewer dangled from her fingers.

“Natalia!” Lady Baba Yaga waved. “Another stick for my friend, please.”

“Coming right up!”

“I don’t need one,” Natalia declined. “My lady, please, if we can just–”

“I want some food before we leave this country.”

“We will have all the time to eat here, because we are not leaving,” Natalia begged. “Really, my lady, before someone recognizes–”

A breeze shivered down the greenbelt against the wind. The lantern by the street cart swayed. Natalia felt it, a shudder of imaginarium she had glanced over previously.

“My lady,” Natalia whispered.

Lady Baba Yaga licked a smear of tare from her thumb. She hopped off her stool.

“I know.”

Natalia first smelled a bitter odor from burnt lint and melted fibers.

A streak of unstable imaginarium tore open the shadows beneath the treeline outside the greenbelt. A ragged cloak and a faceless tunic flashed across the park’s length in the blink of an eye.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

A six petaled snowflake, painted in faint cobalt, floated by Natalia’s eyes. And then came another. And then another. They all had not fallen, but risen from the floor, where the grounds of the park now lay submerged in the color of Lady Baba Yaga’s eyes.

The vendor behind the food cart stood as he was moments ago, in the middle of flipping over a sizzling skewer. Water from the nearby fountains remained as teardrops suspended over a pool of coins.

The phantasm that had breached the park grounds hung in the air. Its arms and legs were pinned by a bouquet of crystals piercing its clothes. In spite of it all, it struggled. Its faceless hood writhed and shimmered as if it had become a mirage.

Lady Baba Yaga tilted her head.

“Who said you could move?”

The diamond dust accumulated in the air conjured a glass prison around the specter. Its umbral visage reflected infinitely in the jagged faces of its new cage. Each time it struggled, the shards within fractured further, until its tunic and singed cape lost their original form and became splinters of intersecting planes in an endless maze.

Lady Baba Yaga raised one hand. The streaks of blond in her hair shined white like snow.

“Proschay.”

The glass prison shattered. It folded inwards in cascading patterns not unlike the art of origami. But unlike paperfolding, each fractaled pane collapsed upon itself as if it possessed no thickness at all, until the mirrored maze withdrew upon a single, imperceivable point and blinked away into oblivion.

Time resumed.

Natalia once again heard the ripples of fountains and smelled the fragrance of charred miso.

“Hmm,” Lady Baba Yaga mused. She lingered over the spot where she had cast the phantasm into nothing. She turned over her palm and observed small specks of dust slipping through her hand.

"Not proschay,” she whispered. “Dasvidaniya.”

A curious smile curled on the edge of Lady Baba Yaga’s lips.

There was indeed one happiness that every witch enjoyed.

Every so often, almost without fail, as if ordained by magisterial hands, when the Mysteries of the imaginarium began to grow dull, a new, exciting set of problems would always find a way to emerge.

“I have changed my mind, Natalia,” said Lady Baba Yaga.

“This country shall do nicely.”

An Ode to Baba Yaga - END