Chapter Text
The hide flap covering the doorway swung back into place, the heavy thud echoing in the sudden, profound silence of the hut. For a long time, Baba Yaga did not move. She stood in the center of the main chamber, a pillar of patched cloth and ancient secrets, her gaze fixed on the door that had just closed. The air, which minutes before had been thick with tension and farewell, was now simply empty. The space where the boy's energy had been, a constant, low hum for months, was now a void.
Kostnica groaned, a low, mournful creak of its timbers that seemed to rise from the very earth beneath it. The skulls on the fence outside were silent.
Finally, a sound broke the stillness. A sigh, not of weariness, but of something far older. It was a sound like the settling of ancient stones, a breath that carried the weight of seasons, years and secrets.
Baba Yaga turned.
The table still held the grim reality of her earlier work. The half-butchered carcass of the tracker, the pest, lay cooling in the dim light. The task was not yet finished. With slow, deliberate movements, she picked up the obsidian knife and approached the table. The work had to be done.
There was no ceremony in the work. Her movements were economical and precise, honed by centuries of the same grim butchery. The obsidian knife slid through flesh and sinew, separating muscle from bone with a soft, wet sound. She worked in a steady, unbroken rhythm, carving off manageable chunks of meat from the carcass.
With each piece she freed, she would turn to a gnarled, ancient-looking grinder bolted to the edge of a nearby workbench. It was made of dark, rusted iron, operated by a heavy hand-crank. She would force a chunk of meat into the hopper and turn the crank. The grinder didn't whine; it groaned, a low and guttural sound of metal chewing through flesh.
Thick, dark blood dripped from the table's edge, not pooling on the floor but vanishing instantly between the cracks of the old wooden floorboards. With every drop that fed the house, Kostnica answered. A soft, contented creak would echo through the chamber. A low, pleasant thrumming would vibrate up from the very foundations, the sound of a great and ancient creature being fed a welcome meal.
Carve. Grind. The rhythm was steady, meditative. The work of a hag.
The rhythmic, contented thrumming of the house faded in between feeds, replaced by a different sound. A slow, mournful creaking that came not from the foundations, but from a small, empty alcove near the hearth.
It was the place where the boy had slept.
As she watched, a single floorboard in the center of the alcove slowly, impossibly, lifted. It strained upwards, just an inch or two, as if trying to catch a weight that was no longer there. Another board beside it shifted with a low groan. They were like fingers, blindly searching, grasping for a familiar warmth, a phantom presence. The house was not thinking, not remembering in a human sense, but it was aching. The empty space was a wound, and Kostnica was probing its edges.
Baba Yaga watched the wood settle back down with a soft sigh of dust. She said nothing. She simply took a breath and turned the crank again. The grinder groaned back to life.
When there wasn´t any meat left, she gathered the bones and carried them to the corner of the chamber, where her mortar sat, a massive, cauldron-like bowl of dark, unidentifiable stone.
She dropped the bones inside. They landed with a series of sharp, echoing clatters. She then lifted the pestle, a heavy, club-like instrument of the same strange stone, and brought it down.
The sound was a deep, resonant *CRUNCH* that shook the very timbers of the hut. She worked with a steady, powerful rhythm, raising the heavy pestle and bringing it down, with an impossible strenght, again and again, until the bones were nothing more than a coarse, greyish dust.
She collected the dust in a wooden bowl and carried it outside, to the small, overgrown patch behind Kostnica that she called her garden. The air here was thick with the scent of potent, strange flora. Without ceremony, she began to scatter the bone dust over the dark, rich soil at the base of the plants.
The effect was immediate. A thorny vine seemed to twitch, its leaves trembling. A patch of shimmering, silver moss pulsed with a faint, hungry light. The garden responded with a silent, vibrant, and unnatural vitality.
Finally, she went back to the table. Only one piece remained: the skull. She picked it up, turning it over in her gnarled hands, her expression unreadable. She wiped it clean with a dry cloth and placed it on a high shelf near the hearth, a place reserved for special ingredients and future projects.
The work was done.
Baba Yaga stood in the center of the main chamber, surveying her domain. Everything was as it should be. Everything was in its place.
Except for the aching void in the corner where the boy used to sleep.
Slowly, with a heaviness that seemed to go beyond her ancient bones, she walked to the rough-hewn chair by the hearth. She sank into it, the wood groaning under her weight. She stared into the smoldering coals of the fire, her face a mask of shadows.
Then, for the first time in a very, very long time, the old woman of the woods, the great and terrible Baba Yaga, lifted her hands and buried her face in them. And she sat there, unmoving, as the fire slowly dimmed, Kostnica sensing her thoughts.
The fire was little more than a bed of glowing embers, casting one last, weak, dancing light across the chamber. Baba Yaga did not move, a statue of grief carved from shadow and regrets. Memories. The silence in the hut was heavy, thick with the ghosts of unspoken words and the ache of a fresh, raw absence.
One of the shadows on the wall, however, did not dance in time with the dying fire. It seemed to deepen, to pull away from the wood and plaster, gathering substance. It stretched, elongating from a flicker on the wall into a tall, dark shape that detached itself and glided across the floor with no sound.
It stopped behind her chair. For a long moment, it simply stood there, an observer in the quiet dark. Then, a long, pale hand emerged from the shadow, and with a slow, almost questioning hesitation, it came to rest on her shoulder. The touch was light, carrying no weight.
A comfortable silence settled between them, two ancient beings in a house that mourned.
The silence stretched, comfortable and deep. Finally, a voice broke it. It was nor male or female, high or low, but sounded like the rustle of dry leaves in a winter wind.
"I think," the voice said, its tone one of careful, academic consideration, "this is usually where I should say, 'There, there.' But given my record on human-like interactions, I could be wrong."
A deep, weary sigh came from Baba Yaga, the sound muffled by her hands.
"There you go," she rasped, her voice thick with something other than grief. "I was starting to get worried. You almost acted normal for a second there."
She finally let her hands fall away from her face, dropping them into her lap. She looked up at the tall, shadowed figure beside her, and in the dim light from the embers, her ancient eyes seemed to glitter with a moisture they refused to shed. They were almost red-rimmed, but not quite. She was smiling.
"It's okay," she said, her voice a low rasp. "When I realized it was him, I knew he had to leave sometime soon."
Her gaze dropped to her own hands, to the thick, claw-like nails caked with dried blood from her earlier work. With a practiced, deliberate motion, she began to clean the gore from under one nail with the point of another.
"So this is how it all went down?" she asked, her eyes fixed on her task. "I think it went pretty well. You all seemed to think it was a terrible experience. He... he always looked so guilty."
The shadowed figure was silent for a moment, observing her. "Do you want me to call him?" the dry-leaf voice asked, a simple, practical question.
Baba Yaga paused her cleaning, considering it. "Nah," she finally grunted. "Not yet."
With a deep groan that was echoed by the cracking of her own ancient bones, she pushed herself up from the chair.
"I have a lot of things to do now," she announced to the shadows and the skulls. "Gotta prepare."
The shadow moved out of her way without a sound, retreating to the edge of the room as Baba Yaga began to move with purpose. She strode to her pantry, a chaotic collection of shelves laden with dusty jars, dried herbs, and things that squirmed in the dark. She began organizing, her hands moving with a speed and certainty that belied her earlier weariness. She pulled out ingredients, sorted through potions, and began laying out the components for complex rituals and long journeys.
"Are you leaving?" the dry-leaf voice asked from the shadows. "Finally ready to join them?"
Baba Yaga let out a short, sharp cackle. "Ja! You wish your bony ass. No." She slammed a heavy jar onto the table. "I'm going to meet my living relatives. In a while, though. I still have things to do. Deals to end."
She paused in her work, a slow, truly evil smirk spreading across her face. Her eyes glinted in the gloom.
"Maybe even visit his relatives too. Who knows."
A low chuckle, like the sound of stones tumbling in a dry riverbed, echoed from the corner of the room.
"That," the shadow said, with a hint of something that sounded remarkably like amusement, "I would wish to see."