The Jūl-qadar

Excerpt from the personal journal of Voah Sahnsuur

This latest task has been such a ghastly affair, so much that I hardly wish to recount it.

What I witnessed in Nūlbūzar has since been taxing on me. It is an itch on my mind and I feel that it is time to scratch it out. While sleep eludes me this night I have decided to write it down.

Day 1
What had begun as an easy rain, by daybreak had become a pounding downpour and Cambena’s fury would threaten the area with lightning for the next two days.

Even so, I feared not my Goddess, for I know she protects me. I went ahead and conducted a further inquiry with the locals of which several claimed to have heard terrible wailing and shrieks of agony in the night, presumably from the hills. From my location at the manse, I barely heard anything but rain but there were too many separate accounts to dismiss the allegation.

Understandably the locals had grown more fearful and restless, leaving no willing participant to join and assist me as a guide. After gathering more information on the whereabouts of the witch’s cave, I have no doubt it was her presence that spooked the horses upon my arrival and was likely the source of the strange sounds.

Drenched I was from moving about town all day, wet to great discomfort and cold almost to the point of chill. I attempted a scouting trek, but the constant torrent kept me from safely traveling into the muddy hills and cliff-sides. This I took as a sign from the Goddess to wait, so I postponed my search.

———

Day 2
I met with the mother of the missing boy, Andil. In a strange turn of events, she claimed to have woke in the night and thought she had seen her son’s ghost, but he was there in the flesh and she took him in to bed and cared for him.

If that wasn’t peculiar enough, one other thing she said stood out to me. She mentioned he seemed senseless, near dead, stumbling outside her home in the rain like a newborn fawn trying to find its bearings.

I talked to Andil which almost immediately gave me pause. Although he lay in bed weakly and spoke softly, the boy seemed to have something behind his eyes. He spoke with a maturity beyond his years. He said that the ‘woman had gone’ and he ‘didn’t think she was a witch at all’, instead ‘she was just a lonely woman gone mad, wanting a child of her own.’

But it wasn’t until I invoked the name of Cambena and praised for his freedom that I caught the telling twitch in the boy’s eye. I knew then, but I didn’t have the heart to tell the mother that her son was no boy at all but a vile and dangerous blood witch called a jūl-qadar (face snatcher).

I calmly took my leave asking that the mother give him some time to rest for a few hours. I alerted the Auctor to send some men to watch the house to make sure nothing happened while I was away, checking on the cave in the event that I was wrong and the boy was himself. After some resistance, we came to an agreement that a local huntsman would keep an eye on the house from a distance and follow anyone who left.

Finally, I was able to make my way to the cave of the wretched witch. It was a tidy trek but the storm had subsided, leaving behind a layer of fog in its wake. It was not hard to access now that weather was permitting, so with a lantern I found the gradual curving incline that led gently up into the hills. Soon I came upon a crescent shaped exterior cave, its floor lined of powdery earth and vaulted by a shelf of overhanging rock. There poured a fountain from high above that pooled outside the cave like a font which sent the rest of the water into an overflowing creek that ran down the hills into the Onsai.

The arched entrance to the cave was just beyond. Had it not been the den of maleficium, the scape might have been a more beautiful one.

The cavern inside made my hair stand on end but otherwise there was little evidence left to find. It would seem to anyone else that the woman had indeed left, but I didn’t give up so easily and eventually found the evidence to prove my suspicions correct.

Buried under a shallow grave of fresh earth not far from the trail, lay a bundle of bloody clothes, tools, healer’s pack, a bed roll, a leather pouch filled with ashes, bones, and a lock of hair matching that of the boy, and if that wasn’t enough to go on, there was the revolting sloughed husk of the witch’s previous female form. It nauseates me to think on it.

I immediately made haste back to the mother’s home to bring the Justice of Vastad down on the witch who had taken the life of an innocent boy and stolen his visage and form, and fooled his mother.

When I arrived, there was an uproar inside as the witch boy was pleading to be let out of his room. His mother was in a state of panic and confusion stating that she could not physically remove him from the room and he was showing signs of pain whenever she tried. His behavior was becoming erratic and extremely agitated. They were both thankfully unaware that I had lined the floor around the bed and the door with Sacred Salts.

“Step away!” I shouted. “That is not your son!”

The boy continued to whine and plead and the mother, in her delusion, stepped in front of me as I pulled my sword. The huntsman, though unsure of what was happening, grabbed the woman with his strong arms and held her back as set the blade down on a table and took out my censer. The mother was going to need proof. I owed her that much if I was to kill her son in front of her.

“I have you, witch.” said I, as I lit the censer.

To me, she tried to play it until the last. “I am no witch, good lady! Please, I beg you.”

“Soon you will beg for death.” I replied.

As the censer filled the bedroom with holy incense, I chanted the names of the Pillars, saving Panolis for last, for the witch had blasphemously claimed to be a follower of the God. The false Andil boy-witch physically recoiled and writhed in discomfort with each recitation.

I immediately took up the blade again and with holy oil I coated it. Whist the boy-witch was distracted and disoriented, I entered the room, trying to ignore the horrified screams of both the mother and the huntsman.

It pains me deeply to think how that poor child must have suffered at the hands of that murdering thief of a witch; his unfortunate mother perhaps doubly so.

———

Shalia Nix could tell the last lines of the entry bore the smears and smudges of wet, likely tears, but the journal spared the grisly details of how the judgement actually went down.

The good people of Nūlbūzar still remember the wounded boy being brought screaming into the square by the Arbiter, tied to a wooden beam to be burned, during which the child spat curses in a voice that sounded like many; a boy, a woman, and at least one other; his eyes glowing with evil fury. A witch in shepherd’s clothing. For the mercy of the mother, the head was promptly removed. The cave and its surrounding area sanctified by Arbiter Voah Sahnsuur. Regardless, the mother later hung herself.

*Jūl-qadar (zhooll chadar)
A jūl-qadar is a blood witch who kills its victim (human or animal), consumes part of them, and later assumes their form in a painful and disgusting transformation rebirth process.
- Magister / Abjurer Nyllyn
Noctua Inquisition Codex of Defense