Note – Dr. Junius Harcroft:
• In the summer of 524AA, a wild woman arrived in the West-Auralic town of Fairebough, to what newsletters describe as, “A fanfare of terrified laughter.” Three years into her research, Madam Liché is in West-Aurals gathering folklore about the sprawling woods that at the time were the region’s pride. We can only imagine the look on the old witch’s face when she hears the news from Fairebough: Sheer excitement and elation; the colourful writing we are used to ensues.

In the woods outside of Fairebough, there lives a youth of uncivilised allure. A nameless girl who hunts the wild as a wolf, observed before only by trappers; never climbing fences to disturb livestock. Until now, when she wanders on two legs, arms spread and bosom bare–like a mother–into the town square. She says she has wisdom to share, demands that ears be lent, but is instead only offered frantic screaming and heckling. In this moment she is, despite spending all her days enveloped by the dangerous wilds, the most vulnerable she has ever been. Constables arrive on scene to subdue her, and she goes with them to a cell where she is dressed in rags and fed bread, which I have no doubt upsets her carnivorously-inclined constitution. Before I arrive the wisdom she sought to share has not been heard by anyone, and by the time I am in Fairebough she has severely bruised her knuckles and knees in her attempts to thrash the iron bars.

My correspondence within the constabulary assures that an interrogation room is kept available for my arrival, but refuses to heed my wish that the meeting be kept private; a guard will be present to ensure my safety in case something goes awry. I am committed to only take notes, and allow the girl to speak.

I am already seated when the girl is brought in, bearing signs of unhealth that render me speechless. It dawns on me immediately that it is not the civilised world that has rejected her, but she who has rejected the civilised world. Whatever initial reason she had for doing so has now been thoroughly cemented in place; her injuries, and the fearful look about her, seem to say. She cowers when I offer her my hand in introduction, so I submit to unlearn all but the most base gestures. When I point to myself and state my name, she offers in exchange only the slightest nod.

Note – Dr. Junius Harcroft:
• At this point, it appears Madam Liché forgot her sole objective of writing as the conversation progresses. She continues days later, after the wild woman has been released back into the woods.

She speaks beautifully, if you commit to understanding. Rudimentary Auralic, with words intuitively compounded and injected where she lacks the right ones. Glass became ‘clearstone’. The cell in which she resided was ‘hole of iron’. What she sought to communicate to her urbane siblings, she did to me with ease, and became increasingly eager as we spoke. I, too, felt this eagerness: Spending time in her proximity felt exhilarating in a way I cannot quite articulate, but there was at once the sensation of great joy and privilege, burdened by terror each time our eyes met, which only seemed to entertain her.

Eo. Not a name in itself, but a word she referred to herself by; but only ever as a shrill shout of sorts, accompanied by a fist thrust into the air. I asked her to explain what Eo means to her, and she equates it to the manner of living that is exclusive to her: Wild, primal, instinctual.

Eo: a Keyword. The call the heart makes when daggers are thrust; life electric; adrenaline and nerves; vitality.

She ran into the woods where she belongs, and I am certain she will know better than to stumble into society a second time. But something churns in my gut that I’m sure wasn’t there before I met this uncommon maid: a candlelight the night before, but now a raging pyre: the longing to be free.

Tomorrow morning I will seek her out. I have a theory that she behaves much different in her element than when anxiously confined to our urban ways.

Note – Dr. Junius Harcroft:
• Madam Liché, a frail widow in her fifties, thus wanders alone and unarmed into the wide and sprawling woodlands of West-Aurals. A brief look at the paper trail suggests: her following as well as correspondence were not aware until she had been missing for at least three days. Soon after, however, she miraculously returns to town and demands to be left alone to write.

Into the woods outside of Fairebough I walked, until its smokestacks were just within view. Only its trappers dare wander that far, for once the town is out of sight, it takes only a singular wrong turn to vanish completely. But that is a thought which I had left under my pillow, and I committed to the next step. I discarded my dress and raised my bare embrace towards the canopies, felt my toes dig through loamy soil, filled my lungs with the musky air, and peered my eyes into the deeper woods. Then, that raging pyre in my belly called to me again, and I lifted my voice to answer it: EO!

Every conscious thought that sought to hold me back was drowned underneath the rumbling of my gut. As I began to sprint I felt them leave me, one after the other, and the last to go was the reminder that human folk–indeed–stand on two legs instead of four. What flawed creatures we are.

Where in my body the endurance resides, I cannot say for sure, but I ran like that until the sun was high. Then, in a small clearing, I saw her. From her jaws hung the fresh carcass of a hare, which she with her bare hands and explosive swiftness had caught. She approached me and pinched a bloody morsel off her hunt’s thigh, and after setting it between my lips smeared its fluids down my chin and neck. This time, those deadly eyes of hers did not stir in me fright. They were, on the contrary, like those of a mother, welcoming me into the world. I hope that mine expressed appreciation, for my voice at the time knew only grunts and laughter.

Though I must have seemed to her like a newborn foal, she led me by the hand through her home. Whereas we refer to the walls in which we confine our aching and fattening bodies as home, to her home is everything–absolutely everything–there outside. Having fed me from her lunch and brought me to a creek from which she knew was safe to drink, the wild woman spoke to me in solemnity, and my mind had to rouse from its slumber to hear:

“You can not stay for long, we both know. Still it makes my heart happy that you came.”

She embraced me. I wept, for never has my skin felt touch as sacred, as charged with raw emotion, as then. All touch is vital, both for animals and people. I was reminded of when I first held my daughter in my arms, when I brushed my thumb down her round cheek, and saw a smile pop in her newborn eyes. As we grow into society, we become more and more accustomed to false sensations of touch–both when giving and receiving–to the point where it loses all meaning. But the wild woman knows none of that padding and so she touches purely. Then, when she pulled away again, she held my hand, and said:

“Tomorrow we give thanks to our mother. I want you to come too.”

This ignited in my head a curiosity. Were there more like her in these woods? A family of them? But as we once again began to run, once again did my thoughts blur away.

I began to take after her: How she yips and bays when she traverses the landscape; her unique pattern of walking, ball of the foot first, as we walked before we cobbled boots with thicker soles. We ate constantly on our track, foraged the fruit and berries she knew were safe for us to consume, but she sometimes would separate from me to catch small animals; little morsels I quickly unlearned my discrimination against: Mice, small birds, rabbits, lizards. I assumed our path somehow led to her kinspeople. It didn’t.

When night fell she explained that without fire, which she rarely builds for it is boring and arduous, we must find shelter in the thicker parts of the forest. Shelters are not a necessity when one moves constantly forward, and caves are home to stronger hunters that, when they return to their home, have you cornered. Time after time I am reminded of her intuition regarding this lifestyle of hers, aware that humans before recorded history still sought to live in groups, harness large areas to their fullest potential by way of hunting and gathering. The wild woman does not live as the first humans did: She is alone and always vulnerable, and young as she may be, the fact that she even lives is remarkable. She lives as an animal, for animals we still are in our hearts and our stomachs, even if the mind has for most of us taken precedence.

And thus we sat at the base of an ancient oak tree. I became aware of the stress I had for hours put my body under. Everything ached, and it was bliss.

We awoke together from a slumber that was as refreshing as it was light and brief. The woods around us had the signs of early morning; the freshness of new life, laced in the night’s mournful tears where she kissed the world goodbye. My legs, though still complaining from the day before, sprang me to my feet and once more we started to run. We ran like this for another full day: Running, eating, drinking, hollering and growling. We rarely interrupted our coarse breaths with speech, nor did we need to.

Then in the night, we came upon another large oak, and the wild woman sat me down and told me she would leave me for a while. My worries that she would abandon me out in the middle of the dense woods arrived, stronger with every minute that passed with me by myself. It dawned on me that the uninterrupted sprint was our only real defense against the wilderness. A great advantage of the human shape, the ability to out-trek most of nature’s fiends. When resigned to stillness, we all but offer ourselves to the Bitterness’ cold embrace.

Some might say that without instruments to measure it, time is simultaneously fleeting and endless. After my time in the woods, especially time spent silently waiting for my wild companion, I want to offer a different perspective: By creating the instruments to track time down to the minutes and the seconds, we essentially have made ourselves slaves to time. Ask yourself this: Is your watch chained to you, or you to it?
While without the means to measure time and the sun long set, time passes precisely as fast as you like it to. Learn to meditate and this comes naturally.

And so she left, I worried, I meditated, and she returned. She carried in her hands a bundle of plutes, the fresh body of a fawn, and a brittle old bone, mossed over. I understood immediately that these were reagents for a ritual of some sorts and offered my assistance, but she insisted that I remain seated. I watched her grind the bone into powder between two rocks, butcher the fawn for its liver, and stew the mind-numbing mushrooms between the two. She mixed this with her bloody hands until it had the consistency of custard, took a long slurp, then offered the rest to me. The taste was exclusively that of the raw liver, and went down as smooth as gelatin with no need to chew. After we had sampled her ritual, which included not a single word or gesture, she said that it was time to sleep, and that she would meet me there.

I succumbed to sleep, and my stomach in its depravity birthed a dream most fierce and red: The dream that starving animals have when their bodies know that the next day, if they find no food, will be their very last.

In the dream I awoke standing with my eyes in height of my chest, as though they were the eyes of my heart. My voice was both a whisper and a pounding drum, quiet and loud, all at once. The space around me was still the forest, but the canopies had taken a glassy and ruby hue, as had the grass, which stood as grotesque spines, straight like razors, prickly and blood-coated. I felt my feet in them and them in my feet, but they did not sting me even when sticking through my skin. Underneath the grass I felt the soil, pounding and heaving deep breaths, as if I was stood on the chest of a giant.

By my side appeared my companion, smiling reassuringly as she took my hand. Her eyes were closed, as I’m sure mine were, but in her naked chest was a glow I felt a connection when looked into. She led me on, but this time we did not sprint. In her presence I now finally felt the kind of reverence I expect when meeting those invested in the occult, that my more usual correspondence carries, or those of churches, cults and covens. There was, of course, a purpose in her pace; a kind of mirth, or excitement.
A strange red mist began to cover the forest floor, but beneath it I began to see what looked like roots winding in and out through the soil, branching sporadically, and pulsating away from that which we walked. I realised soon that these roots were not roots, although of course they were, but veins, wrapped in sinew and pumping blood.
In the near distance I heard whimpering, bleating, erratic breathing, and a heart mercilessly pounding. The fog was thicker, further off the ground as we moved, and the arterial roots thickened in width. Soon the fog was above our eyes, and I tasted on every breath what I had suspected: Blood, aerosolised.

I began to make out the shape of a tree in the thick of the mist: A vile and wicked looking tree, like something out of a children’s playbook; the kind an evil witch makes her hut by, barren and haunting and enormous. This tree was not that. It was much, much worse.

The roots wound into its base like cords to a lamp, sprawling into every direction and jerking weirdly each time the drum beneath its bark was beaten. But its bark was no bark at all, though pale and cracked it was. My companion was eager to embrace it, but I resigned to simply lay my hand on its surface. It was soft and pliant, and held a sickening warmth: A warmth I recognise from studying with Dr. Spargo; just below body temperature, a still fresh corpse.

Wherever the mist settled, and settle it did in every place, it seemed to gather and drip. It made seeing difficult; difficult to make out between different blood red shapes, but when I looked up into its branches they appeared like arms, segmented with elbows and shoulders, dripping with blood, and ending in long hands, fingers, and even nails. With one of these appendages, it reached down to my companion and seemed to stroke her shoulder. With another, it held a finger to my chest and drew a symbol: Its sigil, invoking its name, EO.

In this ancient wight’s broken skin, the cracks often separated. In the sputtering pulp beneath, I saw its glowing soul: The pulsating heart, wrapped in entrails. From these separations I heard, amidst the pulsations, the vocalisations of several creatures. It growled like wolves, bleated like sheep, chatted like squirrels, wheezed like humans.

All of a sudden, the source of these vocalisations was revealed, as from the separations, with enough force and speed to send me startled to the ground, the heads of fauna of all sorts sprouted. The antlered head of a stag burst through, eyes closed, bleating in distress. Then a wolf, followed by a fox, a boar, a rabbit… All these heads vocalised with great stress, thrashed around as if trying to escape. Then, all of them simultaneously, birthed themselves from that tree, whole of body, and ran swiftly into the thicket.

I jumped to my feet, and I was alone in the morning sun, surrounded by green growth, yet covered in blood. Next to me was a fresh kill; my first kill as a hunter: An elk. My wild companion was nowhere to be seen, and I knew I would never see her again, for two wild folks ought to never meet.

I was full of new vitality. My legs no longer ached, and they knew the direction back to Fairebough.

To be Eo is not to live as prehistoric humans did.

Eo is much, much older than that.

Older than invention.

Older than morality.

Eo is the flesh that envelops the bones of our world.

Eo is the breath, the heart, the gut.

Eo is Life Itself.

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• Following is a list of Keywords contributions regarding ‘Eo’, all of which can be found in the Merilica City Library’s occult section:

‘Stay of Execution’ by Jacqueline Spargo

‘Eo & Koa’ by Sebastian Sphingid

‘The Trees of Life’ by Riitta Latvala

‘Dross!’ by Gregory Buford