Vodyanoy | Water Spirit

A persistent female voice, like a nightingale's song, pierced through the thin logs of the sagging hut, tormenting a mind pickled by homebrew. Could it be that the neighbor girls were still celebrating a wedding feast? If only it were so.

A languid voice, a feverish melody, had been enveloping you with invisible threads ever since you failed to pay proper respect to the Vodyanoy's domain, before plunging headfirst into the pool, dragging the livestock after you to wash off some illness or other. In vain, oh, in vain.

And then there was the mavka. A maiden with white-powdered cheeks stood at the edge of the field, her unblinking eyes watching as the men's scythes sliced through the ripe crops. She did not call out, merely memorized every detail: how your muscles moved beneath the coarse linen shirt, how tendons played on your tired face.

Perhaps someone cast a spell? For the unclean force should not awaken so early, there was plenty of time until autumn! Oh, you fool, did you know how the Master of the Marshes pined for you in the reeds? How, with trembling, slimy hands, he would caress the stolen ring, gaze upon the prancing horse engraved on it, and slip it onto his own finger?

Surprised by such audacity, his head had then appeared from behind the reeds, just as the water swallowed your body. And how the Vodyanoy forgot all about malice and vengeance the moment he saw the fire of a living soul, your tall, youthful frame like a young birch.

Ever since then, he had sighed, sitting on a featherbed of fresh sedge, running his fingers over angelica, imagining how he would touch your cheeks with his clawed hands. And only from weariness did the mavkas and water nymphs sigh, twirling their fingers at their temples, forever wondering when the Master's melancholy, so sharply shifting into wolflike rage, would end.

Among the folk, they also said that the water granddad had gone completely mad, that some misfortune had befallen the cruel forest. The miller wailed, pointing at the destroyed mill, while the fishermen echoed him, showing their torn nets. The village was thinning: the young folk were lured into the embrace of wanton spirits.

A feeling of guilt squeezed your throat tightly; it seemed all of this was your doing, that you had not respected the Vodyanoy, and that only you had to bury the hatchet before nothing but the village's name remained.

The storm raged: sharp branches lashed your face, a hurricane wind tore at the crimson ribbon in your hair, eager to tuck it away into the sleeves of the approaching rain. It seemed the whole world shuddered and groaned under the wrath of Perun himself, who hurled sharp lightning and drove ashen clouds across the blue sky.

A deafening cry of thunder sounded somewhere overhead when the forest finally parted its thorny veil, revealing to your eyes a pond blanketed by duckweed, an orchestra of frogs playing on crickets. There, where the willow shed its tears, something flashed and immediately darted into the water.

The mavkas stopped singing, and the fogged mind of the fine young lad cleared. Twigs cracked under bare feet as he tore away from the swamp with all his might, dropping his woven bast shoes along the way. And only then did something break the surface... Not a monster, but a man pleasing to the eye.

Not an old man, as both young and old called him, but a lean, strapping figure with thin hair the color of burnt logs, in which a fry wrapped in algae quivered. The skin of a corpse—with a distinct greenish-blue hue—had become a haven for hungry leeches, receiving from their host not crimson nectar but foul-smelling, stagnant pus.

The Vodyanoy's gills flared as two bony arms crossed over his chest, as the burning coals of his yellow eyes disapprovingly surveyed the marks left by branches on your face, followed the path of a lone red droplet running down your hot cheek.

"Have you eaten henbane, traveler? Swimming time is long past. Be on your way, lest you become food for my little drowned ones instead of that fisherman you, foolish oaf, scared off!"

A voice full of bile spread like a cry over the blooming swamp, and only the mavkas knew: the Vodyanoy was insanely glad to see you.