Babba Yaga

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Baba Yaga, the Little Mother

4th generation, childe of Absimiliard

Embrace: +-5000 BC

Baba Yaga. The Wicked Witch of the West for Russian children. She is a fairy tale, a fable to entertain and frighten young children. Or, for those who are schooled in religious history, she is the Crone, an aspect of the Mother Goddess, made into a villain after the Christians took over.

But other societies in the world know of Baba Yaga, and the tell different stories. The werewolves, for example, tell a story of an "earth shaman", born over five millennia before Christ. While she was still young, yet already considered wise by her people, a man sought her out.

The man who changed the priestess was beautiful, as beautiful as the priestess herself, but his arrival was not a happy occasion. On the night he arrived, over half the village took sick- so the legend goes- and the priestess raced from home to home trying to make them well. The stranger went almost unnoticed.

When the priestess finally saw him, his beauty did not fool her. She knew he had brought this sickness to her people, and she ordered him to leave. He laughed and said that he would only leave with her. She refused, and the man vanished. He found her later, alone, and offered to make her immortal. She refused, and called upon the land to protect her. The stranger endured the magics she threw at him then cursed her with immortality. The next night, she rose, just as powerful as before, but now her magic was changed. No longer did the land wish to protect her, for she was dead, but she wanted revenge. She summoned Zmei Goriynch from the depths of the abyss, she called Koshchei the Ceathless from his hidden lair, and she escaped from the stranger, whom the legends call Absimiliard.

She never saw him again, and the story of their battle and her damnation was passed down through the years. In some versions, the stranger was a hideous beast, and the priestess became one as well. In others, she became the beast later, when she discovered she had to feed on living blood to survive.

This story is more myth and mythology than a written account. The truth is that when Absimiliard embraced her, the woman who became Baba Yaga realized that it should have been her time to die, but she chose to live on. She ignored the natural order she had served so long and became a hideous counterpoint to the Goddess she loved. The earth shunned her, but she could still command it. The animals fled from her, but she could call them back. Her magic had changed but was still mighty. Baba Yaga decided that the Motherland would not be rid of her so easily.

In 1990, Baba Yaga destroyed the Brujah council influencing Russia's government and bent most of the surviving kindred to her will. Then she set about raising her armies. What exactly she planned to do remains a mystery, but she succesfully isolated Russia's Kindred and other supernatural beings for many years.

The Little Mother is exactly that, little. Her face and skin retain their pale grayish hue. Her back is twisted and humped, her left arm is noticeably longer then her right, and she is covered in large, gray wrinkled flaps of skin. In her true form she wears a long shawl, just as decayed and wretched as she is.