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

vasilisa is based on THE vasilisa prekrasnaya of russian folklore, but with a heavy emphasis on based on. her tale begins in medieval russia, with the shitty stepmom sending her to baba yaga’s hut, and involves many elements from the fairytale in question. but as with many of the stories set in our ’gods among us’ universe it’s ultimately a drastically different tale, an homage full of references but with zero claim to staying true to canon. 

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vasilisa’s mother died while she was little, but her last act of love towards her daughter was to give her a small doll that would aid her in her times of need. it comforted her when she grieved, and after her father had remarried, the doll helped her perform the many chores and tasks that her hateful step-mother kept giving her. it got even worse after her father left for a business trip and never came back. the step-mother spoiled her own two daughters rotten, but treated vasilisa like a slave. even with the doll’s help it would have worn her down, were it not for the quiet resolve that had taken root in her heart. somehow, she would one day take control of her life.

once the girls had all grown up, the two step-daughters couldn’t stand the fact that the local boys were much more interested in vasilisa than in either of them. people had started calling her ‘vasilisa the beautiful,’ and vasilisa admittedly loved the attention—it was a nice change of pace. 

but the step-mother wouldn’t let vasilisa marry any of her suitors, and then all of a sudden the wife’s spending habits caught up with them. she was forced to give up her fancy lifestyle and the dysfunctional little family found themselves moving from a bright town house to a old and murky cottage. it was next to the dark woods where people said that the witch baba yaga lived in a hut on chicken legs, and though it scared her, vasilisa would sometimes find herself staring into the forest, oddly drawn to its gloomy paths.

after all the candles and lights in the cottage had mysteriously gone out, the step-mother told vasilisa to get baba yaga to give her fire, thinking she might get rid of her once and for all. vasilisa thought about running away, but the woods kept whispering at her, and the doll told her to answer the call. 

walking through the forest felt less like entering a different world and more like opening a door that had always been there, but locked. the very air seemed to tickle her fingertips and make her hair bristle, and the deeper she went, the stranger things she glimpsed between the tree trunks. at dawn, she saw a white horse carrying a white-clad man on its back; at noon, a red horse with a red rider; and as the darkness of night enveloped the woods, a black horse with a black rider. at that moment, many pairs of yellow flame lit up ahead of her, and she realised it came from the eye sockets of human skulls, scattered throughout the bone fence encircling the witch’s hut. 

she froze, from a mixture of fear and fascination, and then baba yaga’s skeletal hands were on her shoulders, a creaking voice in her ear. why have you come, girl? 

heart racing, vasilisa turned around to face the old witch, and said that her step-mother had sent her to fetch light—but that what she really wanted was to learn. 

the bold request tickled baba yaga, but naturally, such knowledge doesn’t come free. if vasilisa could finish a set of tasks before the next passing of the black rider, the crone would teach her witchcraft. if not, she would die. 

vasilisa works hard, because she wants to earn it; sleeves rolled up she deals with the cooking, the dishes, the washing, and the cleaning. but she has to ask the loyal doll to help her with some of the more impossible tasks baba yaga gave her, like finding every poppy seeds in a pile of dirt.

as the black rider disappears into the woods, baba yaga inspects her handiwork; once the red rider has passed by the next morning, her training begins.

the old crone has much to teach her. baba yaga is fickle and cranky, but secretly grows fond of the stubborn and crafty young woman who never lets any type of challenge or hardship stop her from trying. vasilisa doesn’t shy away from the dark and gritty sides of the craft and baba yaga teaches her the power of blood and bones and pain, showing her how to learn from the voices between the trees.

time was strange in those woods and vasilisa never quite knew how long she was the witch’s apprentice. but one day, the crone decides that it’s time for her to leave—she still has plenty to learn, but there’s many others out there who can teach her.

baba yaga sends her on her way, but not without a few gifts, including the light her step-mother had once asked for. a flock of birds follow her through the forest, the first of many. vasilisa returns to the dark cottage and the step-mother and step-sisters act like she’s only been gone a few days. they greet her with spiteful words and cruel jests, only to suddenly realise that she’s somehow very different. as she pulls the cloth from the burning skull baba yaga had given her, its light make their flesh catch flame until nothing more than three charred corpses remain.

vasilisa wanders into the world, seeking more knowledge. she learns from witches, wise women, herbalists, healers, and alchemists—not to mention the occasional spirit, demon, or fae. 

but her life isn’t just hard work and witchcraft. like any other hormonal and horny young person, sometimes she just wants to drink, party, and have sex. one fateful morning she wakes up in a stranger’s bed, with a terrible hangover and a faint, delightful soreness along her inner thighs. turns out her drunk self had made a good choice, because the man next to her is quite handsome—not to mention ready for a couple of morning rounds. and that’s how she and kazimir met.

the spark between them immediately roars into a blazing fire. they’re both young, stupid, passionate, in love, and unable to tear themselves away from one another, thinking little of how brightly burning fires tend to go out quicker. sure, they fight and argue as intensely as they do everything else, but they always kiss and make up and the sex is so good, y’know?

she soon learns he’s a hunter, but his prey is not the birds and beasts of the woods—it’s monsters, witches, and demons. in other words he’s the last person a fledgling witch like herself should have anything to do with. but she can’t resist. she’s in love with being in love, and she adores the way he adores her, even when it makes him possessive—it feeds into her vanity. she’s vasilisa the beautiful, isn’t she? why shouldn’t she love the attention? 

even after vasilisa and kazimir get married and move in together, she keeps her craft a secret. he’s regularly away on hunts and that’s when she can perform rituals, whisper spells into the dark, charge talismans, gather strange ingredients and tuck them away in hidden corners. birds still follow her wherever she goes, but she feeds them every day to make it seem natural. when kazimir comes home injured she treats his wounds, just as she sometimes helps other people in the village when they’re sick or hurt. for all they know she’s just good with herbs and roots. kazimir warns her that if she’s too good at healing, people might start to think she’s a witch, but when a jealous villager says it out loud kazimir straight up just headbutts him. nobody says shit like that about his wife.

thing is, monster hunters don’t have a high life expectancy. even as kazimir survives one fight after another, many of his friends don’t. kazimir was always an acquired taste, with his rough unpolished ways and crude manners. vasilisa used to find it oddly thrilling, but as he keeps losing his rare few friends to various monsters, things take a turn for the worse. he starts drinking, his raw charm turns into something much less romantic, and his occupational dislike for witches and beasts turns into a more personal hatred. their fights and arguments get worse, because even as vasilisa tries to help him deal with the trauma of losing his friends she won’t put up with his shit as he takes it out on others, drunk more often than sober, and with the blood of her sisters on his hands. 

one night he stumbles across their threshold, wasted and bloody and with a witch’s decapitated head dangling from his fist. that’s the last drop.

when he wakes up next morning, vasilisa is gone. he has no memory of what happened and no idea where she might be, but there’s a pile of ashes in the yard. nothing much remained in it except some charred fragments of things like jars, boxes, jewellery, bones... some of which seem to be human. 

the ashen pile is where she burnt everything she couldn’t bring with her as she left—things she didn’t want him to find, lest he’d finally understand she’s a witch. vasilisa is back on the road with nothing except the clothes on her back and the satchel across her shoulder. she knows kazimir will be looking for her, but vasilisa has no intention of letting him find her. 

once again she wanders where the wind takes her, seeking out people to learn from along the way, ranging from the local healers of tiny villages to legendary witches in lands unknown. she hones her skills, putting herself to the test and being tested by others, and throughout her trials and tribulations her kind of intense personality starts to simmer down. vanity turns into maturity, fire into embers. she runs into baba yaga again and even the old crone notes how the young woman seems to have settled into herself. 

there’s other men, here and there, but nothing that lasts, nothing that lingers with her as she leaves for another new adventure. at the north of the world, where the winter is dark and the summer full of light, she finds a foal hatched from an egg, with a black body, a white death’s head, and red chicken legs. with the foal in tow she wanders south, where she first meets a half-troll witchling known as charlie. shortly thereafter she has her first encounter with sister clementia, a zealous nun who tries to kill her. vasilisa is not interested in fighting to the death, so she creates a diversion and slips away, but it wouldn’t be the last time they meet.

as always, she trusts her gut feeling, even when it tells her to go back east. in another deep forest a hunter has accidentally run into a mother bear and her cub, refusing to leave his injured dog behind but unwilling to shoot the bear, unless it would be absolutely necessary to protect himself and his companion. thankfully, no violence proves necessary—a strange woman steps between the compassionate hunter and the protective bear, mumbling something at the latter, and to his astonishment the animal mother peacefully turns around and leaves with her cub.

vasilisa helps him treat the dog’s injured leg, too, and when he finds out she’s looking for the wise woman in his home village he offers to show her the way, introducing himself as alyosha. 

the old crone is delighted that someone wants to learn how to heal and help the ailing, since she’s at death’s door and there’s no-one to take her place. but she soon has reason to chuckle that vasilisa probably has more to teach her than the other way around. even then, something tells vasilisa to stick around. wherever she went it had always seemed like the wind had been pulling her in one direction or other, but in this little town the air is calm and still.

the villagers say she can have the small cottage by the meadows, although it’s very old and dilapidated and half fallen in on itself. alyosha immediately offers to help fix it up and proves himself quite handy, whatever the task at hand. the little cottage ends up like new, with a grass-covered roof and a garden for vegetables and plants. speaking of, alyosha starts bringing her bunches of herbs and spices, hoping she’ll have use of them in her healing teas and salves and concoctions. she’s happy to help any villager that gets sick or injured, and the old crone is relieved that someone young and spry is around to take over from her.

alyosha often brings her rabbits and birds from his hunts, too, helps her take in the little harvest from her garden, builds her a small chicken coop and carves name tags for her goats in case they’d get lost, since she lets them wander freely. vasilisa loves cooking—she’s the type who shows her care for people by feeding them—and the two of them often share a meal together, ranging from hearty dinners in the cottage to picnics under the sun. sometimes, alyosha collects an armful of flowers for her, saying that they probably are of no medical use but that he wants her to have them anyway.

vasilisa hasn’t forgotten what happened last time she fell in love, so this time she’s trying to take it slow, but she’s internally squealing.

it’s only a matter of time, anyway. alyosha is basically the opposite of kazimir—kind, unselfish, and calm. he’s attentive, compassionate, and reliable, a friend to everyone in the village, and wholesome enough to blush when people tease him about what’s obviously budding between him and vasilisa.

their first kiss happens soon enough anyway, once vasilisa has decided she’s deliberated long enough and that she’s just going to go for it.

the wind remains calm and she can feel in her gut that alyosha might be the one, but she’s even more of a witch now than when she met kazimir. if she’s going to spend the rest of her life with him, he has to know. vasilisa packs her satchel, in case he doesn’t take it well, and asks him to come with her to a clearing in the forest, the new moon as their witness. 

she tells alyosha that last time she loved someone she kept a big secret, and it didn’t end well. i want you to know who and what i am. one of the many birds that alyosha had so often helped her feed flies from the trees to her hand, and the hunter watches her bury a knife in its little chest. but once she cups the bird’s lifeless body in her hands, mumbling at it in a language he can’t understand, its wings and claws start to twitch. in front of his eyes it hops back to its feet and onto her shoulder, preening at her long tresses of hair like nothing had happened.

once alyosha remembers how to talk, all he can think to say is you won’t turn me into a frog, will you?

vasilisa laughs, relieved and in love, and practically tackles him to the grass. as far as she’s concerned they got married right then and there, naked in the moonlight. but there’s a more conventional ceremony not too long after, with all the villagers happy to see the two of them finally together.

alyosha officially moves into the cottage with her (as if he wasn’t already spending most of his time there) and they enlarge it a bit, making space for alyosha to skin and butcher his prey—plus a room for vasilisa’s ingredients and tools and rituals, where she can finally practice her craft without having to hide it from her lover.

on that note, the villagers starts whispering that perhaps she knows more things than simply the medical properties of herbs and how to dress a wound. she’s a bit too good at it, you know? and then there was the time where the harvest looked like it was going bad, and she went to into the furrows to do god knows what, and a few weeks later the fields were keeling over with ripe and golden grain. before that, the tailor had insisted he was haunted by an evil spirit, but vasilisa had made a talisman for him to wear and it had never bothered him since. more recently a couple who had been trying for children for years went to her for help, and she had them both drink a strange-smelling brew—a year later, they had triplets. was this merely the skill of a healer? and how come she hadn’t aged a day since she had first arrived? in any case, the villagers seemed to agree that whatever she is, she’s one of them. if she’s a witch, she’s our witch.

one morning, a barmaid came to the cottage, sobbing and distraught and with her clothes torn, asking if vasilisa had anything to keep an unwanted child from taking root inside her. vasilisa held and comforted the young woman, who confides in her that a stablehand had assaulted her. the witch gives her a dense but sweet cake to eat, and promises to take care of all her problems.

that same night, the stablehand disappeared, never to be seen again. 

the incidence leaves vasilisa embittered but resolute. she has alyosha now, arguably the sweetest man on earth, but there’s so many other women suffering at the hands of cruel men and she’s sick of it. she’s heard the gossip in town, the rumours and whispers of things happening in every village in the ares, not to mention the nearby town. as always, vasilisa keeps no secrets from her husband, telling him that she’s going to hunt some prey of her own. her murderous intents initially has him worried, but once she tells him the crimes of the people she’s going after, he understands. 

it’s the beginning of the local legend that people would come to refer to as the claw woman. it started when every now and then, a man of ill repute would go missing or turn up dead—sometimes there would be no trace, other times they’d find a lifeless body, flesh slashed open as by long daggers and strange symbols carved into the skin. in rare cases the man would be found alive but irrevocably scared out of his wits, and other times there would be nothing more than a trail of blood leading into the forest. it happened across a wide area, but the men were always bad —abusive husbands, drunk fathers, lying boyfriends, rapists. sometimes people would glimpse an eerie figure with a feathered back and knife-like talons. those sightings soon became something that instilled abusive men with fear—and gave suffering women hope.

if anyone suspected vasilisa, nobody said it out loud. but the local ladies all seemed to know where to go if they were ever having trouble with a man. and if ever a hunter passed by, trying to hunt down the claw woman, nobody told them anything. 

as it turns out, when a witch hunter finally found her, he didn’t need anyone’s help. he had been tracking the ‘monster’ as he would any other, zoning in on the mysterious creature until his gut feeling took over. and so it came to be that one day, vasilisa opened her front door and saw kazimir at the gate.

her former husband’s shock soon turns to rage. he had been looking for her for years, not knowing whether she was alive or dead, trying to drink it all away—and here she was, a witch all along, a monster like those he’d spent his life hunting?

the birds in the trees stir and caw and vasilisa steps onto the porch, ice in her stomach even though she realises that if push comes to shove, both of them won’t survive it. she tells him to leave and never return to her corner of the world, but kazimir only steps further into her yard, cursing between gritted teeth.

alyosha steps between them, barely knowing what’s happening but trying to deescalate the situation all the same—in a fit of anger kazimir pulls out a dagger and stabs him in the gut, ripping his stomach open.

as alyosha’s body sags to the ground, the sky darkens with storm clouds, and the air turns a deathly quiet. the witch stares at him, hair slithering out of her braid, each tress weightless and electric. without a moment’s warning the hunter finds himself slammed into a tree, and at the blink of an eye vasilisa goes from standing on the porch to hovering an inch in front of his face, with his own knife in her hand. she had been prepared to fight him to the death, but now she’s going to do worse.

she buries the dagger in his chest, and as she slowly twists it around she lays a curse on him, to never find peace unless he learns what love means. his vision goes black and he wakes up in the middle of a forest, no idea where he is, how much time has passed, or how to find his way back, but with a gaping wound in his chest that knits itself together in front of his eyes. 

a few days layer, vasilisa finishes a long and complicated ritual by placing a simple kiss on alyosha’s forehead. he blinks his eyes open, weak and tired, laying in the middle of a chalk circle, surrounded by wax candles and bones and withered flowers. vasilisa smiles at him, blood running down her naked body, leaning in to kiss his lips. his skin is pale and there’s no heartbeat in his chest, no pulse in his veins, no breath in his lungs.

i didn’t want to let you go, she murmurs, nestling herself into his lap, and putting a cup of blood to his lips. it’s like nectar on his tongue, making him feel somewhat alive again, and he starts to understand what’s happened.

vasilisa couldn’t save his life, but she could bring him back from the dead, as a strigoi—a vampire. 

their life together had never been normal, and now it’s even more strange. but kazimir doesn’t come back to disturb the peace, and as alyosha adjusts to being undead, their life together settles into a new but pleasant rhythm. the claw woman starts bleeding her victims dry, to put their blood to better use elsewhere... but she also regularly insists that alyosha feeds off of her, because honestly—she’s into it.

he used to joke about him growing old while his witch wife stayed young and fresh for centuries, but now he’s also been frozen in time. the villagers whisper and gossip but as one generation replaces another, hesitant caution is replaced by grateful acceptance. yes, maybe she’s a witch, and maybe he’s a vampire, but she’s never done anything bad to anyone that didn’t deserve it, and dead or alive alyosha remains the kindest man on the planet. they’ve both always helped people in need, asking for little in return, and bringing nothing but good to the village. when the occasional monster hunter comes by, looking for work, nobody says a word.

some time later, they have a daughter named vika. she’s the first of several, all of them half vampire and half witch, but the laughter that fills the cottage is the same as any child’s.

vasilisa may not look a minute over thirty but by now she’s become one of the elder witches, a master of her craft, known for the flock of birds that always follow her around. with time, other girls come to learn from her, like she had once learnt from baba yaga. as long as they’re worthy, vasilisa is happy to teach them, and whenever one of her pupils is ready to set out on their own she gifts them a small, helpful doll, like the one she still always carries around in her pocket. 

vasilisa loves caring for people, naturally taking on the role of mentor, friend, sister, daughter, or mother, depending on who she’s interacting with. she loves her family to no end, and seeing her darling husband play with their kids once again has her internally squealing. she’s like an older sister to charlie, who has become the guardian of a liminal forest, and more a mom than a mentor to most of her apprentices. she despises kazimir, but after meeting a certain demon he starts to learn his lesson, and once the curse is lifted she forgives him. 

as for sister clementia, she should have died long ago, but her own kind of ‘heavenly’ magic keeps her alive. the nun ends up obsessed with tracking vasilisa down, to the point of going after her loved ones to draw her out. the final confrontation between the two makes the very fabric of reality tremble, and almost claims both of their lives. in the end clementia falls alone into the abyss, but when vasilisa’s finally allows her legs to give out, countless hands reach out to catch her.

it’s alyosha’s turn to anxiously nurse her back to health, but she doesn’t mind the pain. everyone’s safe, and she’s never felt more at home.

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aaa, feels. my favourite part of vasilisa’s story is how fucking cute and wholesome she and alyosha is. if you have any questions about vasilisa, just comment below and i’ll answer to the best of my abilities <3 (and if you want to find out more about what happened to kazimir, read the sitri spotlight.)

art + vasilisa © me; kazimir + charlie + alyosha + clementia © kubi.