The Ancille

    In a little brown cabin on the edge of the woods lived an old ancille who had grown far beyond his years. He was not frail or sickly, but his face was wrinkled and his hair greying enough that a common passerby would label him as a shrunken old shrew, timid as a beaver and tired as a sleeping bear. He was, however, greatly outnumbered by the vast creatures and bugs alike he adorned around the small cabin. Outside there were three goats and twelve chickens of which he never milked or swiped eggs from, and inside the house he had placed seven lizards in a little enclave below his bed, and nine worms that nestled in a dirt patch below the lit windowsill, and not to mention the two birds he tended to in the mornings and let fly to the heavens and back in the night, bringing back more worms and delights. He was a peculiar man at that. His sable eyes, said many of the small children who lived in the nearest village (who'd managed to bravely venture to the cabin), were as black as chasms and could swallow you whole if one stared hard enough! He never spoke, never once came to ask for help from the villagers of Temeny Hull, yet he always seemed to have an abundance of food and resources and with that, he never needed their help anyway. People often wondered where he had gathered his things from, or who had built the cabin he so eagerly resided in, yet it was better to listen from rumors and gossip than the frightening geriatric’s lips. And so the gossip spread like wildfire, and it was said that his mother came from a long line of early descendants of the twofolk, a woman who contained powerful sorcery within her very fingertips and whose eyes were not black like her son’s but a powerful golden, golden as the midnight sun, shining fire and blazing with heat from a thousand fireflies. They said that she had married Tavekh and cursed him herself in the night from their soft kiss of her lips to his.