Coven Cuisine
Plop.
The brew roiled, bubbling around the glistening scorpion. The beast clacked its claws together in an angry fervor, even as the noxious melange pulled it down, eating black holes into its thorax until the body yielded, collapsing in on itself and succumbing to the stew.
Acshah yawned then absently tossed another scorpion into the pot.
Cooking was boring.
Such was her lot as the youngest in the coven. Cooking, sweeping, transcribing incantations — the life of a young witch really leaned into the “toil” aspect of that old rhyme. It couldn’t all be spellcasting and moonlit, windswept broom rides, she knew, but Acshah often wondered, as she worked away in this dirty hovel of theirs, if every coven operated this way.
Priestess Bridget, Acshah’s Premier, seemed stricter than others. She gave orders with the curt perfunctory of a kennel master commanding her dogs, the strength of the metaphor bolstered by the fact that Priestess Bridget commonly referred to Acshah as “cur.”
“De-eye these newts, cur.”
“Fetch me worms, cur.”
“Tend the brew, cur.”
On and on. Acshah understood being low witch came with the unwanted responsibilities of the station, but she also knew her natural powers were being overlooked and underutilized. It had been Acshah who spoiled the crops of Andover. It had been Acshah who thwarted the Trials of the Church. Yet here she was, stirring a cauldron.
She spit into it, wishing it wasn’t part of the recipe. Priestess Bridget, along with the other Premiers, had left Acshah alone to tend to her chores while they flew off to do whatever it was that they did while she sweated over their supper. She glimpsed back at the recipe, scrawled in blood-red ink on the yellowed pages of the heavy book beside her. The standard fare was listed — wing of bat, gnarled root, toad pus — but what caught Acshah’s eye now was the frayed corner. She was forbidden from turning the pages, lest she stumble upon some spell or hex her young eyes were not meant to behold. As if she were just some traipsing schoolmum playing at witchery and not the Novice Premier she was, a powerful conjurer and bride of Satan who had inked a pact in her own steaming blood beneath the pale light of the Killing Moon.
Acshah spared a glance around the hovel. Nothing but molded branch and crumbling stone. She inched a mischievous finger beneath a corner of the page. With a devilish little flick, she flipped it, coughing as she did to obfuscate the motion lest some prying, secret ears be upon her. The tattered skinsheet lifted and fell to reveal . . . another recipe.
“Damnedest Hell!” cursed Acshah and, throwing out all prior caution, took up a handful of pages and flipped through them feverishly. Pies, porridges, stews, nasaump and more flew by. Was this no more than a cookbook? She cursed again, ready to abandon the entire reckless notion before the scrawlings began to take on a different cadence.
“Ah,” said Acshah, a crooked smile twisting up her cheek like a fresh scar. There, writ in looping scarlet letters, was a word alone which set her lustful heart to boiling:
SUMMONATIOUN
The letters pulsed with an innate power. She traced them with her fingers. Below, the page was dominated by the etching of a haunch-legged demon, rippling with muscle and roaring with a primal ferocity as it was called forth from pandemonia. Beneath his terrible visage the demon was named: Buul.
Priestess Bridget and the other Premiers would not be back for some time, Acshah knew, but in the interest of prudence, she gave the room another perfunctory look before coming back to the book. The words were there. She need only speak them, breathe them into being and then — oh, yes, then — they would see. They could not deny her power then, no, not even Priestess Bridget, with that pinched, judgmental shrew face of hers. Acshah would show them. They would bear witness to the birth of a new Premier. They would be humbled.
She read.
The words tasted ancient on her tongue, like they were pulled from the heart of the earth itself, hot and sharp as splintered shale. “Ego qui nupsit tenet dominus,” Acshah chanted. “Evoco te hoc verbo profano.”
A blast of dry wind buffeted her, surging from the open pages to swirl about the hovel. The smell of embers and raw meat hung in it. Acshah read on, her voice rising to be heard above the gale.
“Audite me videte regulam meam,” she hollered. The winds ripped at her robes, pulled her closer. The demon on the page was dancing. The rats and toads screeched and whined in their cages, threatening to topple from their shelves. Acshah raised triumphant arms as newfound strength swelled in her chest. From her gut, a legion of voices called out as one in a gruff chorus:
“Ego te omnipotentem Buul!”
The wind stopped abruptly. Acshah lurched forward. Her stomach flipped and emptied itself. Black bile flowed like a river from her mouth, splattering across the stone floor.
Priestess Bridget will make me mop that up, Acshah thought immediately.
No. That was before. She was a novice no longer. She had felt the pull from the other side, had mastered it, had brought something back in tow . . .
Acshah rubbed the sick away from her lips and glanced around the room in a hurried stupor. Nothing. A shelf full of chittering rats, jars of eyes and wings and toads. A slanted broomstick resting against the far wall where she had left it. The cauldron.
No demon. No Buul.
That was impossible. The voices, the power, the wind. She had performed the summonation. She was a conjurer. She was a Premier.
“Where the Hell are you?” Acshah asked, baffled. She stood, lifted her stool. She looked around the opposite side of the cauldron. She crossed the room, poked at the rats in their cage. Just rats. The toads, too, remained simple toads.
Frantic, she ran back to the book. Had she missed something? Her eyes traced the page, but the letters had begun to fade. She gripped the sheet with panicked hands, screeching at it. She didn’t understand. The etching of the demon, the Black Lord Buul, was also fading. Acshah pawed at it, whimpering. This couldn’t be! She had read the words, she had felt the surge of immortal power, she had —
Plop.
Acshah’s eyes darted to the cauldron. It sat mute, until . . .
Plop. Plop.
She scrambled forward, gripping the rim of the cauldron with white knuckles. The stew bubbled angrily inside. Several stiff peaks began to form in the clotting ooze. They took on more solid forms, bending at juvenile joints and grasping for purchase. Fingers, lean and strong, broke free of the surface. A palm followed, the hint of a wrist.
It shot out and grasped Acshah’s hand, tight as iron.
“Yes,” she sighed, rapturous. “Come to me. Answer my call. Arise, Buul!”
That odious, depthless strength returned to her. Acshah gasped as it filled her. Another hand broke free from the stew to clutch at the cauldron’s rim. The demon pulled, dragging itself from out the pit of darkest Hell itself to heed the call of its new master, Acshah, Premier of the Hill Coven.
A head crowned, marked by knotted horns. She had done it. Priestess Bridget would bow to her, mewling like a true cur before the supreme conjurer Achsah had always been. The face came now, hidden by thick globs of stew. Acshah reached in and wiped it tenderly from her demon’s eyes — then recoiled immediately.
Two bulbous, rotating orbs stared back at her. They rested atop a swollen frog’s face, green and ghastly and covered in whitecapped lesions. Gurgling, it shifted toward her, tilting the cauldron and spilling its contents out across the floor. The monster fell to the ground in a wet heap.
“Blech,” coughed Acshah. The toad creature scrabbled beneath her, wheezing and coughing up gray spittle. Its body was shrunken and malformed, covered in the same throbbing lesions that dotted its face. Flaking scales ran up and down its arched spine, while a thin mucus rapidly congealed on its half-grown haunches.
“Buul?” Acshah inquired timidly.
“Feed,” the monster croaked from its bloated mouth.
Acshah blinked. Clearly, something had gone wrong here. She had read the words, reached beyond the veil of worlds and brought forth . . . something . . . but this festering ball of rotting flesh now scrabbling at her feet was no prince of demons.
“Feed!” it croaked again, angrier.
“Alright!” she yelled back at it. Acshah turned to the shelves and thought. Perhaps — yes, perhaps — this sputtering abomination was Buul, only in a fetal state. Yes, why not? Did she spring forth from the womb fully grown? Why then should a demon? But the etching showed a fully grown — No! She had performed the rite without error. She knew that.
“Feed!”
“I heard you!” Acshah hollered. She grabbed the cage of rats and pulled it from off the shelf. The creature looked up at her, its dancing bobble eyes running over her in circles. “Here,” she said, trying to smile at it as she wrested a squirming rat free of the cage. She tossed the wiggling animal free and into the drooling maw of her protodemon. Buul snatched it up greedily, crunching the rat’s bones between its crooked teeth before swallowing it whole.
The demon belched. “Feed,” it croaked once more.
Acshah threw another rat into its mouth. Before he had even swallowed, Buul called for more. Acshah sighed and pulled another rat from the cage. Buul swallowed that one, too, and then croaked for yet another. Shrugging, Acshah upended the cage and emptied the remainder of the rats into the monster’s waiting mouth. Buul crunched away noisily.
“Good,” she coached him. “Eat and grow strong, my thrall. Grand plans await you. The world shall be ours to —”
“Feed.”
“More?” Acshah looked on in disbelief. The creature at her feet was no more than a few feet in length, hardly larger than a tabbycat, yet it had just eaten eight fat rats whole. Its gut was distended. She could see feet clawing at it from inside. Surely, he could not still be hungry.
“You have eaten enough, thrall. Rest now.” She tapped Buul’s oozing shoulder with her foot. The flesh gave in beneath her boot. She recoiled, trying to keep the disgust from her face as the demon watched her with those lidless bobbles.
“Feed.”
“No.”
“Feeeeed.”
“No!” she repeated more firmly.
“Feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee —” the demon croaked on endlessly. Exasperated, Acshah shrieked back at it and then marched stormily to the shelves. Bat wings, eyeballs, roots, branches, severed fingers, tufts of cat hair, pickled warts — all this and more she fed into the mouth of the beast, but still it croaked for more. Its hunger was insatiable, bottomless. Acshah scoured the cupboards, upended every box and basket, but there was never enough to sate that demonic appetite. For hours, she tended to it, until she was harried and exhausted to the point of near madness, but still Buul croaked evermore: “Feed.”
Priestess Bridget and the other Premiers returned to find their Novice in the center of an upturned room, a bronze ladle held high over her head. At her feet was a grotesquerie, sputtering and gasping in a pool of foamy miasma.
“Sister!” called out Priestess Bridget. Her voice was thunder itself, rattling the walls. “Lower thy arm!”
Novice Acshah’s face was a pale crescent, gleaming with wild panic from within a tangled nest of black hair. “It never stops,” she wheezed. “Everything. It’s eaten everything. The — the page, there must have been errors. I read the words. This is what came. He won’t stop! I have to make him!” She pulled the ladle higher over her head and brought it swinging down.
Priestess Bridget’s wrist flicked out. The ladle disappeared. Acshah yelped, swinging empty fists through empty air, and then crashed to the floor.
“Thou hast read from the book,” said Priestess Bridget, crossing the room with long, graceful strides.
Acshah did not attempt to rise. “Aye,” she said into the dirt. “I — I wanted to call forth a demon.”
“And so you have.” Priestess Bridget stepped over the bloated form of the creature to stand before her book, still resting on its pedestal.
“I’m sorry, Priestess,” Acshah sobbed. “I didn’t know!”
“Silence!” Priestess Bridget thumbed at the blank page. She lifted it, checked the next page, and nodded. Closing her eyes, she leaned close and began to whisper. The room went dark until, one by one, the candles on the walls spit out black flames. Priestess Bridget finished her incantation and straightened. The other Premiers gathered beside her and now Acshah could see the ink seeping back onto the page behind them. There stood Buul, powerful and hulking, in the etching.
On the floor between herself and the book, Acshah watched the actual Buul writhe and croak for more food.
There were smiles upon the faces of her elders. Priestess Bridget spoke for them. “Sister, thou hath sinned. Firstly, thou hath read from the pages of my book without my knowing.”
Acshah hung her head. “Aye,” she admitted.
“Secondly,” Priestess Bridget continued, “thou hath made a squalor of our hovel. This shall be undone.”
“Aye.”
“Thirdly, and perhaps most egregious in thy trespasses . . .,” the Premiers began to snicker beside Priestess Bridget as she raised an eyebrow and turned back to her book. “Thou hath misread.” She tapped the elegant lettering beneath the etching of Buul. “What name is given to thy demon?”
Acshah furrowed her brow. “Buul?” she answered uneasily.
The Premiers burst into laughter. The sound filled the room like a hot draft. Even Priestess Bridget let out a giggle. “These are ‘A’s, Sister, not ‘U’s,” she said.
Acshah’s heart sank into her stomach.
“Feed,” croaked the demon Buul.
“Aye, I think we all shall eat,” chuckled Priestess Bridget, wiping away a tear. She offered Acshah a hand and helped her to her feet. “Best tend to the cauldron, Sister, but this time, stick to the recipe.”