The Legend of Gemma's Glade

          Gemma Luce was a witch from around the sixteenth century. Long before the human race, those in which we call homo sapiens, came up with names for the beings such as us that exist. 

          She had owned a quiet building in the woods, using it as her home. A home that she took in lost girls; girls that were rejected, girls that had nothing, girls that owned no house or shelter. These girls knew her as a medicine woman. She would teach them what herbs to use to make a tea when someone was sick; she would teach them which oils to mix to create a lotion that could take away pain from a cut. She would teach them reading, writing, and how to sew and cook. But most of all, she would teach them how to be warriors, how to be women in their own rights. 

          She was a woman with the gift of witchcraft, of true divinity and talent in that what is known today as Wicca. She wasn’t just a practitioner, she was a different being altogether; she was a genuine witch devoted to saving young girls from the evils of the world. Her heart was given to those that she helped. She was a selfless woman, one of the very few that have ever lived. But it was this that became her downfall.

          Every night Gemma would go to the same spot in the woods and have a circle for a witch’s ritual. On those nights of the full and new moon she would draw down the moon in celebration and strip until she only wore the skin she was born with onto this earth so she could dance in the light of the stars. As she grew older, she, like a majority of beings do, became weaker. She wasn’t able to take care of those that she loved most as much as she had used to. That was when she had cried out to the Goddess.

          She begged to stay youthful so she could continue her work until the Goddess felt merciful. There were two conditions to be had. The first was each month when her blood ran because of her womanhood she must sacrifice something up to the Goddess, something living. The second was each new and full moon she would take the form of an otherworldly being; one that anyone who saw would be repulsed. She complied.

          It is known that magick has the power to corrupt even the purest of souls.

          She had started with small animals such as rabbits and mice she found around the house. Each time she killed she felt a pleasurable rush. Then she began sacrificing larger things like deer. She realized the bigger the kill the stronger the pleasure. The beast that she would transform into during the new and full moons slowly took over her senses in her human form.

          It was the night of the full moon in September when one of the girls she had taken in wandered into the woods. The girl was curious about where her mentor, whom she called Mother Luce, disappeared to when she and the other girls, as close to her as sisters, were asleep. Her curiosity was the reason for her death. She discovered the disgusting form of the creature Gemma turned into. Before she could get out a scream, claws slashed into her ribs and teeth clamped around her throat, biting her vocal chords clean out of her neck.

           Gemma hadn’t killed yet that month and it was that week that her blood had begun to flow so as she hovered over the daughter she had just murdered, a rush unlike any other she felt overtook her.

          Gemma, still in her form of the beast, had fallen to the forest floor on her back, looking as though she were having a seizure. It was the rush that made her do so. It had felt as though she was being penetrated multiple times, giving her a series of heavenly and satanic moments of paradise that she had never experienced before, a pleasure from another dimension. Even though it lasted only for a few minutes, for her it had felt like hours of ecstasy. Her moans and cries of bliss echoed through the woods as the sound of her demonic voice. That’s all it took for her to start taking those girls and luring one each month into the forest so she could slaughter them for a taste of what she had felt that night.

          Four years and two months after she was granted longevity with the cursed life, she was raped. It was hell spawn, a being from the depths of the Underworld; something you would know as a knietgarth. They are very rare nowadays but back then the Devil hadn’t seen them as a threat until they began taking maiphumei as mates.

          Gemma became impregnated and for ten months during those nights that she was supposed to transform she was left to be bedridden. If she tried to move she would become paralyzed. Each week when she was supposed to bleed she would go through excruciating pain that would leave her begging for death to take her. She tried to kill during that time but she found that it never satisfied her hunger for what she once had. So she waited until she was able to give birth, biding her time, collecting young girls to care for.

          She gave birth to a baby girl. As soon as she was free from the pregnancy, she anxiously counted the days for her blood to flow once again. The night she first saw red trickle down her legs she left her baby in its cradle and shook one of the girls awake, taking the poor sacrifice to the place where she always had her circle. Gemma killed with no remorse and let the pleasure of the rush take her like it had so many times before. She continued to do this each month while her daughter grew older.

          She raised her daughter apart from all of the other girls because she still had some conscience enough to not allow any attachment between them. Her daughter never found this behavior out of the ordinary because she had grown up in this manner.

           It wasn’t until she turned nine that she learned about her mother’s secret. Just as the first girl had, she wandered into the woods on the night of the full moon in June and discovered that the person she knew to be the one who had taken care of her for so many years took the form of a demon. After witnessing this, she followed and watched Gemma every night until the woman morphed again into a beast. She stabbed her mother and as she took the same life that had given her it, there was a loud explosion. Around them the trees simply became uprooted and anything living ceased to exist in the expanse of area. A rim of those trunks that still stood circled far from where the daughter and her mother’s now dead body were; it separated that which was of life and death. That is how the clearing was created. That is why it is called Gemma’s Glade.