Wilderwitch's Babies 2

Daemonic Desperation -- Phantacea Publications 2019 Release

<<2019 final cover double-clicks here; notes on the 2018 cover variations double-click here>>

'Wilderwitch's Babies 2' -- Sixty Second Synopsis

The tragic tale of the doomed, but ever-defiant band of perhaps not-so-miraculously re-embodied supranormals known as the Damnation Brigade continues in the second mini-novel extracted from the open-ended saga of ‘Wilderwitch's Babies’.

Wilderwitch may be D-Brig’s last living member. The main reason she has survived so long is that Demon Queen Lilith got hold of her not long after her and her fellows’ expulsion from Subcranial Temporis at the conclusion the War of the Apocalyptics. The Witch may or may not realize this. Lethal Lily certainly does. When the former becomes pregnant by Saladin Devason, the Master of Weir, in 5980 Year of the Dome, the latter does too, albeit less ‘by’ than ‘via’.

As the conceptive mother of the mortal Sed-sons so essential for the mystical maintenance of the six thousand year old Cathonic Zone, what separates the Inner from the Outer Earth, she rightly figures she’s unique in the universe. As such, she further reckons she doesn't need the Witch to help bear her latest Sed-son. She may be right about that.

Unfortunately, she seems to have forgotten that daemonic babies, like those of their faerie cousins, tend to feed on their mothers … while still in the womb. Having, in her hubris, rid herself of the Witch, she’s forced to takes on other hosts before her unborn child finishes devouring her from the inside. By the time she realizes the Witch somehow survived the drop from high above the overgrown zone of  the Sleepers, it may be too late for her.

Then again demons are remarkable, if highly flammable, creatures. None more so than their ages old, wholly mindful and evidently indestructible queen.

"Daemonic Desperation" -- Back Cover Text

When they had a chance to speak together alone, Capputis was nowhere near as ebullient; as full of glee and concomitant good cheer. Was, contrarily, glum and gloomy as he reported to his father, the Master of Weir, just how disturbing they found it, Golgotha Nauroz, the scientocrats and him, looking out Broom’s cockpit window and seeing Cynthia’s horrifying ghost – as they’d come to prefer to terrifying tulpa – flying at the same pace alongside them.

What were they in league with? Where did Cynthia’s familiar, her shadow creature, get those really big, really black and ever-so-awful, as in awesome, wings that sprouted out of her shoulder blades. Where did she hide them ordinarily? Where did she hide, period, when she wasn't visibly beside Cynthia?

Inside her? Was she a demon? Wasn't all that exercise bad for her unborn baby? Or was it a demon, too?

To which Saladin replied: “We are in league with anyone, and anything, that is not in league with devils.”

"Decimation Damnation" -- Auctorial Preamble

Did promise, in the preamble to “Hidden Headgames”, the 2017 collection of three novellas bridging the prose versions of PHANTACEA Phase One and Phase Two,  that “Wilderwitch’s Babies” will be back, full-throttle, in “Daemonic Desperation”.

Well, here it is. No need to guess who the desperate daemon is, either.

Have a quote from the perspective of a onetime perpetual presence (adult, female) trying, and at least momentarily failing, to make a comeback in 5980 Year of the Dome. That’d be fully thirty years after she was ill-starred for killing the Male Entity (him for the eleventh time according the Entities’ own reckoning).

Although some of the events alluded to occurred in “Helios on the Moon”, it’s taken from ‘Pyrame’s Progress’, the second novella contained in the aforementioned Games collection.

Humanized Memory [the Female Entity], her tremendous visage simultaneously blanking as it reddened both alarmingly and indicatively, hesitated; didn't answer. Something was happening to her, Moon’s Angel, on the Moon. Must mean someone, perhaps a devil [Strife], was trying to take her over; to displace the Demon Queen – if it was her – as she did so.

Was that her, walking over her grave, she and Shah’s, two in one, their final resting place, moments later? Had to be.

Without going into too many details, in PHANTACEA the word ‘devil’ means, and always has meant, what it did originally: namely, ‘little god’. Pyrame’s a devil over-coated by Tsishah’s demon, whose full name is, or was, Shahiyeda. They, melded, have just been swallowed – more like sucked in – by the accumulated, yet stunningly smooth, Stopstone/Solidium Godcrud of Absudyl, the Subterranean Land of the Mandroids.

Absudyl, sometimes (as in “The Thousand Days of Disbelief”) also referred to as Minius, after its only occasionally conscious, primary denizen Magnus Minus, is the westernmost terminus of the Hell-Well of the World. The demon or, more correctly, daemon (as in genius) Pyrame senses walking over her grave subsequently keeps on walking until she reaches the other end of the Hell-Well; until she reaches Satanwyck, Hell on Earth. Whereupon she seizes, howsoever briefly, what she considers her rightful throne, the Highchair of Hell.

Yes, it’s Primeval Lilith, the Daemon Queen of the Night; of the Day as well. Her name’s generic but, under it, or variations thereof, she’s had an exceedingly long history — her-story, if you prefer. And not just in terms of the Phantacea Mythos. (Which began in September 1977 with the oversized comic book PHANTACEA One, the first publication in any medium besides a short story written as a teenager in first year university to bear that designation.)

Here’s another quote, one taken from an article found on Wikipedia entitled ‘Lilith in Popular Culture’ …

No spirit exerts more fascination over media and popular culture than Lilith. Her appearances are genuinely too numerous to count.

So, clearly not a character unique to the Phantacea Mythos. She’s so old she might be preliterate, even prehistoric. This quote was also taken from Wikipedia, albeit in an article specifically about Lilith:

Lilith is often envisioned as a dangerous demon of the night, who is sexually wanton, and who … may be linked in part to a historically earlier class of female demons (lilitu) in ancient Mesopotamian religion, found in cuneiform texts of Sumer, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, and Babylonia.

All of which works for our purposes. So does the notion that she was the Biblical Adam’s first wife, the mother of Cain, Slayer of Abel, whose story made up part of the 1990 graphic novel “Forever & 40 Days – The Genesis of PHANTACEA”. There, Anti-Patriarch Cain is described as being an incarnation of ‘Heliosophos (Helios called Sophos the Wise), the most ancient enemy of devazurkind’.

Which shouldn't surprise anyone since Cain’s father, the Male Entity, Alorus Ptah, the second Biblical Adam and the first patriarch of Golden Age Humankind, was Helios in an unspecified lifetime. (Google up Adam Kadmon sometime. As I've said many times, I didn't make up the Phantacea Mythos so much as channel it.)

Indeed, Cain’s dwelling place, Enoch City, is shown in pH-4ever&40 as being very similar, if perhaps not identical, to Trans-Time Trigon, what follows the Dual Entities across time and space. Has in fact been shown to do so since Helios and Mnemosyne were introduced in 1978’s Phantacea Three.

What hasn't been shown since those days is that the Female Entity holding onto pHant’s Lithesome – or Loathsome, if you prefer – Lily throughout most of that time is how she gets to appear to be a solid being, as opposed to just a holographic projection or a digital face in her computer self’s wall.

Come Daem-Desp, Luscious Lily isn't hers anymore; isn't Pyrame’s either. Have an abbreviated, yet nonetheless pertinent passage from 2016’s “Decimation Damnation”. It’s told from the perspective of a certain Wayfarer in the Wild Weird; takes place on the same day the Witch more that just met Primeval Lilith.

Saladin Devason finished making love to Wilderwitch …. But there was more, he realized, stretching his mental tendrils such that he could read him, Braille-like, without an interpreter. The Master was not altogether himself. He thought he was making love to some sort of darkness-shrouded succubus, a Black Widow woman, one with only two eyes, but one who was not entirely herself either.

The Witch was not possessed, she was coated; rather, her soul-self was. And Saladin was not making love to her, it, the nevertheless effectively possessed spirit. Another horror was. It also had two eyes. Only one of them was in its forehead.

That remains the case at the end of Dec-Dam. Except, the Demon Queen, who has a brain and concomitant ambitions of her own, no more has hold of Wilderwitch – the last member of the Damnation Brigade in the Weirdom of Cabalarkon, if perhaps not D-Brig’s last living member anywhere – than the Witch has hold of her. Hardly the best of situations, I’m sure you’d agree.

Nevertheless, perhaps ironically, Lethal Lily is most of the reason the Witch is healing so quickly. She’s also … what? A quarter of the reason the Witch is pregnant; hence, maybe, eventually, our opus’s overall title ‘Wilderwitch’s Babies’. That quartering of responsibility applies equally to Lascivious Lily, whereas the male half of the equation is the Master of Weir possessed by the Moloch Sedon, the All-Father of Devazurkind, who looks and, as also per pH-4ever&40, may actually be the Devil.

Seems said Devil is after another Sed-son. (In 5980 there are only two left, one on either side of Cathonia.) Needs one, for starters, to keep up (aka) the Cathonic Zone or Dome in order to shield his Hidden Headworld from the Outer Earth. Seems as well that only the Demon Queen can have Sed-sons.

Rather, only the Demon Queen can conceive a Sed-son. That still leaves her shells to bear them. Or it did when the Demon Queen was solidifying Pyrame Silverstar, and that she-devil was possessing the demon’s mortal surrogates. Then again, in the absence of Pyrame she might have to bear him herself on account of the Witch being simultaneously pregnant … with (at least) one girl.

This being the Phantacea Mythos, there are plenty of other dynamics at play in Daem-Desp. There are also quite a few more pages than Dec-Dam. That’s why there’s no room for a Character Companion is this edition. It’s also why there is no teaser at the end of the story proper. Instead, as you’ll see when you get there, there are not one or two, but four (increasingly brief) epilogues.

Enjoy.

Jim McPherson
Creator/writer
The Phantacea Mythos

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NOTE: There's an images-loaded essay from late 2018 re Lithesome-Loathsome over on pHantaBlog

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