#kikimore

Okay, these are two things I love and I see a lot of things from SM in TOH and I think this is a very interesting topic and some of you might want to read about this! Also, TOH is about demons and Slavic Mythology is ALL ABOUT DEMONS.

1. Kikimora - Kikimore

Some of you maybe know this name from the Witcher games and books. In there this demon kinda looked like this:

But remember: never trust The Witcher about Slavic Mythology! (Also Witcher is very sexist)

The real Kikimore is slightly different. First of all, it doesn’t live on swamps or any place like this. It’s a House Demon and sometimes people believed that she was a wife of Domovoy.

Domovoy was this kind of demon you want in your house but you are also scared of him. He was depicted as an old, small man but everyone knew that he was hella powerful and he was the one to rule other house demons. If you wanted your house to be protected you had to leave him a food around your furnace (because that’s where he lived). If you made him angry (for example by not giving him food) he would break your plates or beat your children. But usually he would bring you good luck.

Kikimore is a little bit more complicated demon. Like almost all Slavic demons she was created from a soul of a dead person, and in many cases, Kikimore is one of them, they were born from a soul of unborn child, newborn or a woman who suddenly died. If she was born from a soul of a woman she would appear as Domania, wife of Domovoy, and she would protect your household with him.

But if she was born from soul of unborn or newborn she would became Kikimore, a very mean demon. Her main activities were: spinning at night, waking up a children at night and being mean to your chickens. She was small and her face didn’t remind a human one. Also she often had legs like chicken. She also was able to became invisible.

And what is interesting about this? First of all, maybe Kikimora from TOH doesn’t totally look like the one from Slavic Mythology but she’s closer than the one from The Witcher. She’s small, her face doesn’t really looks like the human one and her legs! She also is like this little mean demon of Emperors Coven who no one likes (both Lilith and Hunter hates her) but it’s like she is just in one package with this coven and you can’t get rid of her. She also doesn’t like children, I am sure she was waking up Hunter at night all the time just to make his life miserable. Also there is this one thing that comes with the second thing from Slavic Mythology I want to tell you about, but it will be in next post! But here’s a little spoiler for you:

you have never played with The Witcher 1, and never had to face the Kikimore Queen. 

I remember seeing this shit for the first time, when I was 14. I yelled, ran and died..fast. :D

Every monster in The Witcher Netflix in order │ 1/?

S1 E1: Kikimora

WITCHER BEASTIARY:: KIKIMORE

The beasts' physical appearance underlines their different places in the hierarchy. Workers are smaller, modelled after spiders, though the similarity is not obvious. The characteristic shape of their limbs and cephalothoraxes suffices to evoke repulsion.

Kikimore soldiers resemble beetles. They are more massive and protected by thick, chitinous armour. Their horned heads and torsos, as well as the sharp thorns on their legs, clearly demonstrate them to be dangerous creatures.

He didn't react to the muffled cry of the woman selling vegetables who was staring at the bony, taloned paw sticking out beneath the horse-blanket, bobbing up and down in time with the donkey's trot. Caldemeyne shifted from foot to foot, looking at the spidery shape with its dry black skin, that glassy eye with its vertical pupil, the needle-like fangs in the bloody jaws. -------- Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

                                   𝕂𝕀𝕂𝕀𝕄𝕆ℝ𝔼: 𝔹𝔼𝕊𝕋𝕀𝔸ℝ𝕐 𝔼ℕ𝕋ℝ𝕐

Kikimores form colonies, making them similar to communal insects such as ants. A kikimore colony is ruled by a queen and organized into something of a social hierarchy. Kikimore workers take care of hunting food and bringing it back to the nest, while kikimore warriors defend the nest against attackers.

A worker on its own can be easily killed by even a weak person or a child. It is rare indeed, however, to come across an isolated individual, for kikimore workers usual move in groups of a few to a dozen or so members. The only defense against a swarm of kikimores available to a normal person is to flee. And not even that is guaranteed to work.

Kikimore workers listen to orders given by kikimore warriors. On command, a swarm of workers might begin burrowing tunnels near potential prey to allow for a surprise mass attack. Eliminate the warrior guiding a swarm, however, and the workers will disperse and cease digging.

Kikimore workers are nimbler and quicker than warrriors.

They show complete immunity to the Axii Sign, and when they dig tunnels, they are invulnerable to all the other Signs as well. Poison also does them no harm.

The Kikimore giant insects in the swamps have become more active lately. They’re aggressively expanding their territory into where the Drowners live, and even burrow into the city on occasion.  It may be worth investigating what could be causing that later. For right now I’m primarily concerned with hunting down the Salamandra bands that have been abducting workers from the swamp village, forcing them to harvest herbs for their drug labs. According to the druids, they’ve managed to set up a camp in the northern edges of the swamp. How they managed that is beyond me; simply crossing the beaten paths in this place can be incredibly risky. I’m a witcher and it was only thanks to a magic amplification ritual I performed at the mage’s tower partway through my exploration that I had the mystic might necessary to evade a pack of monstrously-sized wolves roaming the trails. A hex on one of the younger ones and a passing Kikimore befuddled the group into fighting each other. Or so I assume; I didn’t look back after I cast the spells, all I know is I’m still alive.

The bandits must travel in groups and have significant forces at their base to be able to move around freely here. I’ll have to scout out their operation, find some subtle means of intrusion, and prepare myself for the fight of my life once I’m inside. The druids may know something, and the city guard should have some leads about the bottom-most rungs of the gang, at least. I doubt the swamp-folk will have anything useful to say but I suppose I  may as well question them. I expect  they’ll simply extol more virtues  of their “water lords,” they appear more and more  fervent in their adulation of those strange deities every time I drop by the village for a rest.

I can’t say that I blame them for finding such fascination in beings that hold dominion over darkness and water. I’ve been caught in enough storms while trekking through this swamp to have found a certain respect and admiration for the idea myself. There’s a special exhilaration in it. The sheer cold of the wind and rain makes your body feel like it’s been stung all over, and you have to fight to keep your senses from going numb. The darkness is so thick you can hardly see three steps ahead of your own feet with a light, and in this swamp that means you don’t know whether you’re about to be stepping on solid ground, plunging into water, or something in between. And then there’s the threat of undead and other creatures leaping out from the  shadows at any turn, forcing  you to remain vigilant in what territory you’re nearing, whether you’re straying too far from the road, whether that latest sound was an encroaching threat or just the wind. I’ve gone from one end of the swamp to the other without battling a single creature and felt more tension than I have in some swordfights I’ve been in.