OC SPOTLIGHT: Leah // mostly sfw...?

leah was born in ashwick, a certain english town previously mentioned in samuel's story. ashwick was always strange, isolated, and somehow ... different. a woman accused of witchcraft had once cursed the town, and it had a long history of mysterious events and eerie occurences. by the 1880s, when the story of ashwick cultimates, england's official religion was protestantism, but ashwick remained intensely catholic. the town stuck to its own ways and had only minimal contacts with the outside world, almost as if the paths and roads avoided it on purpose.

but none of that troubled leah. she was just a carefree young woman with other things on her mind. her father was the deacon of ashwick and her mother was also devoutly religious, but their stifling approach to parenting didn't succeed in turning leah into the demure, obedient daughter they had hoped for. 

somehow, in this gloomy town, with parents who cared more about their own virtues than her, leah was a ray of sunshine, a free spirit with heaps of joie de vivre. when others were afraid to say anything, leah spoke her mind; when nobody would ask questions unless necessary, leah was curious verging on snoopy. while everyone else studied the bible, leah read fairytales and romance stories. others would 'save themselves for marriage,' but leah was an expert at flirting with any cute boy she saw, and loved dragging them off into the woods or a hidden corner for some fun. nobody ever left ashwick, but leah dreamed of seeing the rest of the world.

she was best friends with isaac, the young priest who had taken on the role of living saint after performing a miracle in the church garden. they were polar opposites, with isaac being shy and soft-spoken while leah was bold and uncensored. she would tell him of her plans to travel and explore and be free, but isaac worried she was setting herself up for disappointment.

one day, a stranger came to town, and that alone was rare--people usually never moved neither to nor from ashwick. it almost seemed like people born there were doomed to die there, and outsiders were usually met with unwelcoming suspicion, if they managed to find their way there at all.

but this man, whose name was samuel, installs himself as the new town doctor, and soon everyone felt like he had always been part of the town. leah can't help but notice the attraction between him and isaac--she had always had a keen eye for that kind of thing. her priestly friend had always been lonely and repressed, taught that love and lust were reasons for shame and guilt, but leah tries to encourage him to allow both into his life. she has no idea what would come out of their love, though. as the relationship between isaac and samuel deepens, the clock ticks towards ashwick's inevitable ruin.

more strangers start passing by, people who seem like they're running from something. a string of horrible deaths befall the town. hunters start stumbling on half-eaten bodies in the woods, torn apart by a large monster. others die from mysterious causes, no wounds or injures but with pale fear etched into their lifeless faces. the crops are eaten by insects, and the wine goes sour in its caskets. the livestock falls ill, and it hails in july. one fateful night, father atwood is bludgeoned to death in the middle of the church.

people start whispering about the ten plagues of egypt, but once a monster hunter named madame duval arrives to town, the suspicions turn to witchcraft. much mystery surrounded ashwick's history, but some knew the story of the witch who was burned to death hundreds of years earlier. perhaps her influence still plagued the land? madame duval is actually tracking a werewolf, but after proclaiming that something is very wrong here she agrees to stay and root out the evil in ashwick.

once the first person has been blamed, tried, and burned at the stake, it opens up a floodgate of paranoia. it's the late 19th century and witch trials should be a thing of the past, and yet the town of ashwick fills with the stench of burning human flesh. nobody's safe, and the collective mind of the population fills with a suspicious zeal to smoke out the demons in their midst. it doesn't help that nothing gets better--with every person that's executed, things just get worse.

soon enough it's leah's turn to be accused of witchcraft. she can't believe it--she's never done a bad thing in her life. she cries and begs and pleads, knowing she's innocent, but none of the townfolks listen. her own parents say how she's always been too independent, too headstrong, too sinful. a demon must have tempted her into the darkness. if they had only known earlier, they would have snuffed out her life in its cradle.

hours before she's about to be tied to the stake, her pyre already built in the middle of the town square, one of the nuns serving in the church enters her cell. her name is sister hannah and when she tells leah to be quiet and follow, she takes the risk and obeys.

it's a wise gamble. the 'nun' soon sheds her habit, and as they escape from ashwick leah learns that hannah is actually a witch--though she's not the cause of ashwick's suffering. she had been there at the devil's behest, yes, but now that "he's there in person" it's time for her to leave.

"what about isaac?"

"oh, he will be just fine."

leah will never quite understand why hannah choose to save her. with her detached, icy demeanour she hardly comes off as a person who would rescue someone simply out of the goodness of their heart. but now that leah knows that magic is real, she begs hannah to teach her. the witch says she won't, but that she can take leah to someone who will.

that's how leah ends up in charlie's woods. they follow an impossible path through an impossible forest until they come upon a homely cottage in the middle of a large clearing, surrounded by a thriving garden, sun beaming on grass and leaves more intensely green than anything leah has ever seen before. they're greeted by a certain wrath demon who wouldn't hesitate to rip unwelcome intruders apart, but charlie has met hannah before and knows that they can trust her.

not too long ago, leah spent her days being bored with the conservative and gloomy ways of ashwick, always on the hunt for what little delight the town had to offer. then she almost perished at the hands of the madness consuming her home town--and now she's having tea and biscuits with the guardian witch of an interdimensional forest and their demonic boyfriend, asking them to teach her the arts. charlie can tell that leah has no innate otherwordly talents. there's not an ounce of magic in her blood, no hidden abilities waiting to be unlocked. but she's so earnest, so eager, and vows to work hard.

she keeps that promise. she has to. leah becomes the woodwitch's apprentice, but it's hard to learn magic from scratch and leah never had a good head for studying. she's easily distracted, struggles to remember the right words and actions, and the sheer amount of information often overwhelms her. she finds herself unable to focus on reading for hours on end, having difficulties learning spells by heart, or mixing roots and herbs and powers without constantly consulting books and recipes--and even then she often mess it up. more than once she has a breakdown, crying with frustration from how nothing seems to stick and how her progress is so slow.

but she comes out of every such meltdown even more determined than before, stubborn as sin and working harder than ever. that's her strength. she's not powerful, talented, or scholarly. she's not a natural at magic. but she's tenacious and strong-willed, with an unbending and fearless spirit.

it helps that charlie is a great and patient mentor, who‘s good at coming up with methods of learning that work for leah. and they know lots of other people who are also happy to help the fledgeling witch figure her own specific brand of magic out. one of them is vasilisa, the eternal mother figure; another is salvio, a gentle violin maker and music witch. even kazimir and volkov, the monster hunters who shares an odd friendship with the inhabitants of the woods, has some useful lessons for her. little by little, leah starts realising that she doesn't need to do magic exactly like it says in the ancient tomes, or exactly like one of her mentors. she can do it her own way. that's the beauty of witchcraft.

her progess gradually picks up the pace a bit, and once she feels like she's starting to get the hang of it, she's eager and impatient to go further. charlie tries to encourage her to keep it slow and steady, but leah ... was never very good at listening to the authority figures in her life. she decides to take some initiative of her own, eager to see what she can do if she really puts her mind to something. she 'borrows' some of charlie's books, locks herself in the cellar, and gets out the chalk. 

everyone who's mentored her had always warned her to be careful with supernatural creatures and especially with demons. but she knows that a witch can learn a great deal from the denizens of the underworld. and charlie themselves is literally dating a demonic prince.  why shouldn't leah, too, try communing a bit with someone from hell? imagine the things a demon could teach her! with the rare old books as reference, she starts drawing symbols and sigils on the floor, mumbling incantations, lighting wax candles of various meaningful colours, waiting for the right hour to strike, and then--

it shouldn't have worked. she still has so much to learn, and witches far more powerful and skilled than her have often failed in summoning demons. but in a spell of fool's luck, the cellar fills with fog and smoke and in its midst appears a man made of marble.

in a matter of seconds leah goes from squealing with excitement to tearing her hair because oh my god what is charlie going to say, from wanting to pester the demon to tell her all the magical secrets to wondering if she'll even make it out of the cellar alive because what if he just eats her--

the demon in question is named raum, and he belongs to the realm of pride. he's rather highly ranked, too, so he's assuming it must have been a powerful mortal that managed to summon him. imagine his surprise when he sees this ordinary young woman pacing about the floor, biting her fingernails and flailing her scrawny elbows around in a mixture of fluttery triumph and flustered indecisiveness. to make matters worse, not only has she successfully summoned him--she has somehow managed to bind him to her with a magical tether.

hilarity ensues as charlie and march descend the stairs to check on the commotion in the cellar. marchosias and raum has met before and the prince of wrath soon ends up laughing his ass off at how a lofty pride demon got himself bound by an amateur witch. charlie is, of course, concerned about leah's reckless experimentation with something so dangerous... but also proud of the fact that she did it.

the woodwitch could cut the bond and send raum home, but leah refuses, insisting that now that raum is here he must share all his insight into magic with her. besides, he's absolute eye candy--leah never could keep her eyes (or hands) of a handsome man.

they make an odd pair. raum is refined and gentlemanly, a master of intrigue, deceit, thievery, and complex plots, whether deviced to topple kingdoms or personal enemies. meanwhile leah is down-to-earth, laid back, and delightfully simple. she doesn't make things more complicated than they have to be, and there's not a proud bone in her body. in other words she never makes herself guilty of the sin that raum is used to punishing in humans, and it has him oddly intrigued.

leah flirts with him from day one. sure, she's always heard terrible things about demons--they're dangerous, they hate humans, they'll do anything they can to hurt you. but he's so good-looking, and so posh with his elegant ways and eloquent speech. 

at first, raum scoffs at it, determined not to fall for the wiles of a simple human. but there's something about her that's so unlike anything he's ever seen in either a demon or a mortal. she's not pure or innocent in the traditional sense, but she's pure in how she's earnest, honest, and unpretentious. where others might try to design intricate methods to approach a problem, or complex ways to deal with an issue, she often comes up with solutions that are so simple and obvious that everyone else overlooked them. she has a good heart and absolutely no ego. if anyone is rude or mean to her she doesn't seem to care, she just laughs it off or plays along--but if someone mistreat a friend of hers, or threatens the helpless, she immediately steps up to defend and protect them. her emotions can get intense and she's not afraid of expressing it, but she never holds a grudge, and mere hours after a yelling match she has probably forgotten what they were arguing about in the first place. where someone else might refrain from doing what's right out of fear for their own safety, leah knows no such precaution. regardless of whether you'd describe her as brave or stupid, she sure is fearless.

and she's not worried about what other people thinks. she just does what makes her happy, never a thought about being judged or laughed at or ridiculed. for example she asks charlie if witches really do fly on broomsticks, and even after learning that it's more a human misconception than an actual thing she really wants to learn. imagine flying around in the sky, free like a bird... charlie is glad to help her figure it out and before long she's happily zooming around on a broom.

that's not to say that she's completely free of inner demons. leah survived the awful events that consumed ashwick, but not without her fair share of trauma. she almost got burned at the stake, condemned by people she thought were her friends, denounced by parents who never loved her. she had to flee the place she had always called home, uprooted from everything she once knew.

but she finds herself a new family in the odd congregation of people in the woods. there's charlie, the calm eye in the middle of the storm, who always knows what to do to soothe an ache, whether it's physical or emotional. there's march with his rebellious spirit, who no-one can tame and who always trust his guts. there's vasilisa and kazimir and sitri and volkov and his wife, qiulan, who all care about her in their own ways, as one would care about a daughter or younger sister.

and then there's raum.

raum decides that if he's going to be stuck with this wannabe witch, at least he can save some face by making her powerful. in other words, leah gets her wish--he joins her gallery of mentors, and starts teaching her witchcraft as viewed through the lens of a pride demon.

naturally, as residents of the woods, they end up involved in whatever happens in there. when sister clementia descends on the forest, leah wants to stay and help fight her off, but raum insists on taking her out of harm's way. on the other hand he sometimes has demonic business to deal with and since he can't stray too far from her due to the tether, he has to convince her to come along. every time they go off on such an adventure together, a bond starts to form between them that has nothing to do with magic.

when raum finds out that her parents never let her dance, he offers to teach her ballroom waltzes. leah, in her turn, introduces raum to the concept of fun for fun's own sake. you needn't take everything so seriously, and some of the most joyful things in the world are deceptively simple. raum also teaches her to steal and pickpocket, just for fun, and becomes oddly proud of her when she manages to pinch the wallet of a stuck-up aristocrat or sneak out a crystal figurine from a fancy gala they infiltrated. he once steals some of the bloody queen's jewellery for her, which has leah throwing herself around his neck with a mixture of disbelief and joy.

she's come so far from where she started, and where life in ashwick had always seemed so dull and grey, the magic that's blossoming from her fingertips turns her world vibrant and vivid. but truth be told, leah never becomes a very powerful witch. she never learns how to perform massive magical feats like charlie or vasilisa, she can never master elemental forces like march with his fire, or the elegance of raum's demonic craft.

but she never wanted power in the first place. she didn't turn to magic because she was craving strength or knowledge or impressive skill. her pursuit was always humble, pure, driven by curiosity, an eagerness to discover and explore the magical beauty nestled into the nooks and crannies of the world, the things that most people have forgotten about or are unable to see. she wanted to escape the rules people had always tried to impose on her, to live unfettered by either religion or science or social expectations. she never had any ambitions or lofty goals--she just wants to be free. 

perhaps that's why a pride demon does fall for her, and not through wiles, or magic, or cunning, or impressive deeds. it's simple because of her, being herself.

when raum starts responding in kind to her flirtatious banter, leah is absolutely delighted. she's straightforward, shameless, and quite frankly hasn't gotten laid in a while, so she happily turns up the heat. she's very weak to romance and even though he had initially seemed so aloof, raum proves himself surprisingly smooth. finally they end up in her bed, and the fledgeling witch discovers that raum absolutely has good reason to be proud of certain skills of his. leah couldn't be more excited about having a demonic boyfriend. it's just like in the fairytales... except instead of a mortal prince it's an infernal noble. same difference, right? 

there weren't many mortal survivors of the events in ashwick, and it actually gives her some street cred among demons. she's confused as to why, until she learns that the surgeon that isaac was crushing on was the goddamn devil. lucifer himself had come to claim her cursed home town as his, and as much as it shakes leah to the core she's much more excited about how it means that isaac is dating the fucking devil. when she eventually reunites with her best friend he has properly become samael's consort, with plenty of power of his own and as unfettered as can be.

what happened in ashwick had been centuries in the making. but it's also the beginning of the end of the world as anyone knows it. with isaac at his side, samael starts planning a second war on heaven.

but none of that troubles leah. she's not special or unique. she has no grand destiny to fulfill, no huge role to play in the way the fate of the world unfolds. she's just leah, and life is good.

-----

i have so many feels about leah and most of them are about how she's rather relatable. she gets excited over silly things, is crushing on a handsome person who makes her feel all giddy, and she loves just having fun. she's not exceptionally talented or gifted, she's not a genius or an expert at anything, and she wants to learn but struggles to focus. she's fun and light-hearted and brings a welcome slice-of-lifey touch to any narrative she's involved it. she's just a normal person in an unusual situation, who sometimes ‘channels the audience’ in how she interacts with the exceptional people around her and how she reacts to things that happen. at the same time her stubborn determination and refusal to give up is an inspiring reminder that you don't have to be exceptional to be great. idk, it makes me feel philosophical.

if you have any questions about leah, just comment below <3

// art + leah + march © me; isaac + hannah + charlie + raum © kubi.