Iazmăciune

Speak, sweetling. Read the word and say it aloud. Say the word that not even the bravest children of Harbaburesti speak on a high summer day.

“Iazmăciune.”

We shiver. Say it again.

“Iazmăciune.”

Sometimes we lament the lack of flesh to thrill to goose pimples. Oh, the myriad pleasures of meat. Speak the name again and we will be there.

“Iazmăciune.”

We fly to Bacas County – west of the church and graveyard – in a small forest valley, we perch in the ruins of an old village. Everything is a shambles, uninhabited for years sharp enough to carve a stone. Despite the fade into oblivion, we can still see the phantom of past glory. In the night, shadows and moonlight playfully chase one another. Strange lights. Ominous sounds. The ignis fatuus bewitches the jelly eyes of you fleshlings, and the village appears in its former beauty, built up and inhabited. Believe not the illusion.

The folk of Harbaburesti avoid this place. They call it Iazmăciune – “evil place” – when they dare to call it at all. Names have power, sweetling. Names are the most focused application of wind. To call something is to invite an answer. Parents warn children to stay away from those ruins. The children obey, but not for fear of a lashing.

Even forbidden names spread stories. Stories of wicked spirits and restless shades trailing the streets seeking revenge or redemption. Tales of a vicious duality, a battle between good and evil that replays every night after sunset, in endless loop. All say whosoever steps into the doomed village will unwillingly take part in that battle.

Grown men pale and swear that they visited the swamps near the village and saw, reflected in the water, dead men hanging from the trees. Yet when they look up, the branches are empty, and the caws of crows and ravens tell no tales.

But carrion birds whisper their secrets to us, sweetling. It is part of a pact we made in the long ago, when we traded them dominion to eat the dead. But that is another story entirely.

Some claim the village is the neutral grounds of monsters, a place where vampires, werewolves, and worse meet to divide territories and soft, warm prey.

Still others, those who dislike the Romany, point their fingers and blame the “damn gypsies and their curses” for the evil of the old village. The traveling folk have little to say about the ruins, though their faces contort in anger and fear at the mention of the ghost village’s history.

So everyone, Romanian and Romany alike, stay away. No one in Harbaburesti remembers much of the ruined village, not even its original name. Yet secrets surface, and the enigmatic Cucuvea reluctantly shares what ravens and crows will not.

Initiate the secret histories.

The Templar knights once had an interest in this area, when they passed through on their way to the crusades. But it was not until the rule of Vlad III that the village reached its prime. The Son of the Dragon ruled the village benevolently, save for some object lessons to lawbreakers that, in time, would build the legend of “Vlad the Impaler.” The Ottomans came, as did darker forces, and all were repelled, and the village people lived well under Vlad’s rule – if only for a short time.

When Vlad Dracula fled in 1462, the villagers and the Romany were the first victims of the new vampire queen. The streets ran red, but they did not stay red. We watched the undead lick every inch clean.

Vlad eventually returned with Octavian, Cucuvea, and the Romany, marshalling their allies for a final push against the vampires. At the cost of Vlad’s life, they destroyed the fiends, and the vampire queen herself fled the valley, with the Romany in determined pursuit.

In the aftermath, Cucuvea laid a curse on the village, binding its evils to the soil so that it might never leave. And there it remains – all of that concentrated, wicked intent soaked into the earth. If you call the name Iazmăciune, sweetling, it might answer