Erzebeth is a Hungarian witch with prehensile hair, member of the anarchist group in the 1888 gesta (campaign-cycle) of Antiterra. Shot down and returned as a double, she is the archive’s first bearer of the double motif.
| Type | Character |
| Familiar | Scorpion |
| Spanish entry | Erzebeth |
Description
She is twenty-three, in a long black period dress. Her hair, worn in a high bun, strangles, snatches wands and hooks drowning companions from the water. An awakened scorpion familiar accompanies her. She cannot bear virgin children and falls ill near Melissa and Sebastián, rescued from the temple of Sol Invictus. Her stated aim was “to be rid of the ogre”.
History
In the hell-in-the-tavern scene she cut a pursuing guard’s throat; she reached the crossing by bicycle with Ludovico. The patriarch of Glastonville said lodging her and her scorpion was like hosting “the embassy of Ahriman”.
At the border of Piedras Negras, a village priest pleading for peace called her “cursed witch”. Driven by ancestral hatred for the witches burned in squares, she shot him in the face with a sawed-off shotgun (“the priest-killer”) and did not repent: “I wanted to kill him.” This set off the border fight, a clash with the paladin Ariel and pursuit by Mexican justice. Before San Salvador, a Gnostic priest who asked her forgiveness on behalf of witch-hunters, she half-conceded error but would not confess, and laughed at a nun’s coif offered as disguise.
Taken to the slaughterhouse of Paso del Norte to be hanged, she broke free and flew, and nine rifles shot her down dead. Later Gorgona, himself returned, told her she was already dead: she was a double who had replaced her fallen body, and a double would seek to destroy her, “but that will not happen twice”.
Later role
After the founding phase she becomes one of the two guardians of the Platform of Taurus; the cross-gesta line continues with Maleika. In Les Libertateurs (1891) she appears as “hanged/shot and brought back: certificate of double”.
The same soul
Erzebeth shares the same soul with Maleika, Magda of Les Libertateurs and Sisi of the Invisible Cities: one line of the potent that recurs from chronicle to chronicle, which the Old Witch watches over.
Gallery
