Night draped Rechitsy in a black shroud; the boggy mist clung to his boots, settling as cold dew. The moon, thin as a sickle, barely broke through the clouds, casting shadows across the ruts. In the dark Jaromir rarely hunted — beasts lie low at night, and bogs are dangerous: one wrong step and the quagmire will swallow you. But tonight he strode toward the fields with his bow at the ready. His fingers brushed the string, and a vague feeling churned in his chest — not fear of a beast, but anxiety before the unknown. Tonight he hunted not a beast. Licho, miasma, spirit — something bodiless that sucked life. Arrows and knife seemed useless against it.
The fields began beyond the log causeway, where bog yielded to firm ground. The air smelled of damp soil and mouldering grass. The silence pressed — no frogs, no cicadas, only the rustle of ears under the wind. Jaromir stepped softly, as his father had taught: heel to toe, so no twig would crack. An arrow lay on the string, ready to fly, though he did not know at whom to aim.
He passed a boundary post, leaning with age. Once it had marked Rechitsy's border, but after Stanislav bought land from the neighbors, the line moved and the fields spread, taking in new plots. The ears swayed, but their movement was jerky, as if someone invisible were slipping nearby. Jaromir froze, squinted, catching shadows with his eye. A hummock, a shadow at the field's edge… A shadow? He snapped up the bow, his heart hammering. The shadow vanished, but the rustling grew louder — either wind, or claws on the ground. He moved on, listening.
The night was too quiet, and every sound felt like a threat. Each step echoed, as if someone were sneaking behind him. He held his breath — a rustle on the right. Bow up, string drawn. A hare burst from the thicket, its eyes glinting like coals, and the animal was gone. Jaromir exhaled, but the fear did not recede — even a hare in this night seemed a harbinger of trouble.
The earth underfoot was alive, fertile — rich black soil that gave generous ears. Jaromir ran his fingers along a stalk, feeling the roughness of a head full of grain. The ears grew higher than usual, closing over his head, as if unwilling to let the hunter pass. He flinched when one stalk suddenly lashed his arm, as if come alive — too quick for mere wind. Nearby an indistinct whisper sounded, barely audible.
Jaromir gripped the bow; sweat ran down his temple.
"Melitele, give strength," he muttered, though he believed more in his own hands than in prayers. But against this evil it might not be enough.
Suddenly the air thickened, and he felt the hairs on his nape rise — as if someone's breath, cold and damp, had touched his neck. He turned — slowly, so as not to betray fear. A few paces away the darkness heaved — not a shadow, but a clot, a shimmer. He raised the bow, but his fingers froze. Where to shoot? The ground turned softer, as if ready to gape open. The whisper became a drone, the ears swayed in time with the breathing of something very angry, unnatural. His foot caught on a thick root — it moved and drew back into the soil. Jaromir stepped back; his spine pressed against a wall of wheat.
The whisper swelled; the field came alive. The ears before him parted of themselves, as if at someone's unspoken will, and from their mass something rose.
The miasma towered before Jaromir, half-transparent, woven of mist and shadows, yet tangible. Its body, like the warped trunk of an ancient oak, shimmered now as dense bark, now as haze dissolving into the night; branch-arms studded with wheat ears stirred as if alive, reached for the hunter but did not touch. Instead of skin — a mosaic of rotted leaves, moss, and flowering grasses pulsing like veins, and the face — a void, where, instead of eyes, tiny fungus spores glimmered, casting a faint greenish light. A gaping mouth, like a crack in the soil, breathed the scent of bloom and rot, releasing thin shoots that writhed like snakes.
Jaromir felt in his pocket for Tadeusz's prayer book; not believing in its power, he held it out and shouted:
— I mean you no harm!
The miasma halted a pace away, its roots freezing short of his boots. The creature did not move. It waited, as if giving him a chance to explain why he was here.
Jaromir could not find the strength to move; the prayer book trembled in his outstretched hand, and the miasma hovered a meter away, motionless like a clot of night torn from the sky. The hum from the hollow of the creature's mouth grew, turning into a vibration that reverberated in the hunter's bones. As if the very earth under his feet were singing in a low, cracked tone. Jaromir's skin began to grow cold — from within, as though the blood in his veins were thickening, turning to bog slurry. He felt his strength draining away, slowly but inexorably: his legs grew heavy, his fingers numb, and a strange taste appeared in his mouth — earthy, with a hint of bitterness, like fresh shoots. He glanced down and saw thin green threads pushing from the corners of his lips, like wheat sprouts greedily reaching for the moonlight. The skin on his hands wrinkled and darkened, becoming like the bark of an old tree — the same as on Kazik, on Nastasya, on Tadeusz.
"Why… are you here?" a voice sounded. It echoed in Jaromir's head, not in words but in images that flared before his inner sight. Not visions in the full sense — rather sensations laid over reality: the taste of poison in water, the smell of rotting earth, the pain of roots turning to dust. The evil spoke through the ground beneath his feet, through the roots crawling over his boots. It soaked up Jaromir's thoughts as soil drinks rain, and answered in kind — with a torrent of feelings that made the hunter writhe from within.
"I came… to stop you," Jaromir thought, fighting the nausea that rose from those alien images. His strength was melting away, the sprouts in his mouth pricked his gums like needles, but he forced himself to focus.
"You kill… why?"
The miasma quivered, and Jaromir's mind was flooded by a murky stream: a river black as pitch with dead fish floating to the surface; the fields of Zalesie, Vishnevka, and other villages smothered by whitish mold; the shadows of men, bribed with gold, pouring bitter poison into the water under cover of night so the land would wither and the harvest rot. Behind them — a portly shadow with a red face, a well-groomed beard, and rings gleaming on his fingers. He rakes in others' plots, expanding his holdings at the price of others' misfortune. The evil, the spirit of the earth born of the fields' pain and the land's suffering, poured these visions into his mind, and Jaromir felt its rage — an indomitable desire to punish the people of Rechitsy, to cleanse the land of them as a field of weeds.
Jaromir coughed and spat green sap from the sprouts that now tickled his chin. The skin on his face drew tight and cracked like dry earth in a drought.
"Stanislav… he poisoned the neighbors? To buy up their land?" he thought, and the miasma answered with a flash of confirmation: the image of the elder standing over a map where Rechitsy's borders crept farther, devouring others' fields.
"Yes," the evil responded, and this time the images were sharper, like knives: the pain of dying trees, the scream of roots torn from poisoned soil. It wanted to kill Jaromir — for being part of this village, one of the people — but it hesitated, as if curious, as if giving a chance to understand.
Gasping under the weight in his chest, Jaromir thought:
"Why does he need dead land? What is he seeking in this ruin?"
The evil answered with a new stream of visions, soft as the breath of spring: fields coming to life at its touch, where from black, poisoned soil green shoots broke through, flowers opened among the rot, and roots drank clean water from healed rivers. The spirit had been here for centuries, long before people, before Stanislav — a guardian of the earth who healed its wounds, returned life where it had faded. But now its patience was exhausted: the poison had flowed too long, too often, and the spirit had decided to rip out the source of the corruption — the people who were killing the land for greed.
"How to stop it?" Jaromir thought, feeling his vision blur and his body weaken, as if the evil's roots had already twined about his heart. "How to end the killings?"
The miasma drew a half step closer; its hum softened to a baleful whisper that coiled through Jaromir's mind. The visions surged again: blood — guilty, scarlet, thick — pouring onto the poisoned earth like an offering. The blood of the one whose greed was killing the land.
"Justice," echoed in his head, and the miasma stepped back; its branch-hands stilled, giving the hunter a respite. But Jaromir's strength still ebbed away, leaving only cold in his bones and heaviness in his chest.
The hunter collapsed to his knees; the prayer book slipped from his numb fingers and fell into the soft earth among the ears. The sprouts in his mouth scraped his throat, pricked like needles, leaving the taste of earth and blood. The skin on his hands cracked, and a brownish fluid seeped from the fissures, smelling of rot and damp soil. He struggled, clinging to images of Katara, her warm smile, the children running in the yard, but the world spun and darkened as if the field were dragging him down into its depths. His eyelids grew heavy, his breath broke, and Jaromir fell face-first into the wheat, sinking into oblivion.
He came to toward morning, lying prone in a furrow. The sun barely pierced the mist, painting the field a gray light. His body ached as after a severe fever: his skin was still wrinkled where the evil's roots had touched it; scars like burns showed on his hands, and the taste of earth lingered in his mouth. The sprouts had vanished, but his lips were cracked and bleeding. Jaromir rose slowly, staggering, picked up the prayer book and his bow. Exhausted, with a face upon which the miasma's shadow was imprinted forever, the hunter set off back to the village with a clear understanding of what had to be done.