Ethereal Chronicles

By the time she reached the chamber, heart thumping and her face streaked with tears, it was already too late. The door hung slightly ajar, and from within the room seeped the sickly, metallic scent of blood. Lamia stifled a sob as she pushed the door wider, and it swung open slowly, the creak echoing eerily in a silence far too unnatural.

Before her, the severed bodies of her children had been slung across the room, their faces scarred with permanent expressions of terror. Blood had pooled thickly on the floor, glistening in the dim light, and it dribbled down the walls in a hot, sticky mess, still fresh from the horror.

She could not speak a word, but instead collapsed to her knees, and the crimson soaked into the white of her nightgown. She knew that Hera was not yet done with her. So, with her throat tight and harsh, grieving shudders racking her body, she waited.

Minutes passed – perhaps even hours – but she remained rooted in place until Hera appeared once more, her eyes hard and cold, yielding a thin veil of satisfaction that was unable to conceal the seething hatred beneath.

Hera’s gaze pierced Lamia, who felt a growing numbness in her blood soaked legs, quickly giving way to a searing pain that consumed her entirely. She fell back to writhe on the slippery ground as agony tore through her body, red hot at the edge of her torso, movements of pain smearing her skin against the blood of her little ones.

And when she looked down to assess the damage, she saw that her legs had been replaced by the coiling, heavy tail of a snake.

Lamia let out a howl of horror, only to recoil as a forked tongue flickered from her mouth, its hiss filling her ears and deepening her disgust.

At this, the goddess laughed. “You reap what you sow, you sly snake!” With a final mocking glance she vanished.

APPEARANCE AND ATTRIBUTES

Lamia’s disfigurement manifests as the lower body of a snake, draping her human form in the skin of the creature. Her eyes vary across sources, but they may be bloodied, empty sockets, or appear enchanted, removable and re-inserted at will.

Though Lamia was originally a mortal woman, her choices left her cursed to live eternally as a serpent. She has several admirable supernatural abilities, including shapeshifting and the gift of prophecy. Lamia is often compared to other formidable female figures in Greek Mythology, such as the Gorgon Medusa and her relatives the Stygian Witches; three crones who share between them a single eye and a single tooth.

In tales passed down from parents to children, Lamia appears as a sort of bogeyman; a hideous, child devouring monster fueled by jealousy and rage. She may kill her victims first or consume them alive, and some say that her prey can still be saved should you dare to slit her belly open and pull the child out from within.

In addition to her reputation as a child killer, Lamia evolved to become a seductress of men, giving rise to the Lamiae race. Unlike Lamia, these women are not ugly creatures; they can be quite beautiful, their snake tails merging seamlessly with their perfect torsos. Lamaie target weak – willed men, seducing them to satisfy their carnal appetites before consuming their flesh. One distinguishing feature of these monsters is their foul odor; Aristophanes made a reference to the terrible smell of a Lamiae’s “testicles”.

LAMIA’S BACKGROUND

Lamia’s mortal life was drenched in sorrow. Before her curse was cast upon her, she was a royal of Libya, and one of Zeus’ many mortal lovers. She bore many children with Zeus before Hera discovered the affair.

Hera did not take Lamia’s involvement with Zeus lightly and responded quickly with revenge. The goddess either killed or tricked Lamia into murdering the offspring she had created with Zeus. Some sources even suggest that Lamia was deceived into eating her children, a horrific act that led to the hunger for mortal children that possessed her thereafter.

Hera then cursed Lamia with insomnia so that she could never find reprieve from her actions. Driven to madness by grief and tormented by the relentless thoughts that assaulted her day and night, Lamia gouged out her own eyes.

Zeus was overcome by pity for Lamia, and in an act of compassion, offered her relief from the insomnia she had been cursed with by granting her eyes that she could remove whenever she wished. He also gifted her the ability to shapeshift, so that she could regain some semblance of her former self.

Over time, Lamia’s grief soured to jealousy towards mothers who still had their children, and she resorted to murder, unable to bear the sight of others cherishing what she could not have. The more children she took, the more haggard her appearance grew, until her face was so hideously disfigured she could not bring herself to look upon it.

Whether Lamia feels remorse now we will never know, but perhaps, in her warped perception, she sees the murders as an act of kindness, releasing mothers from the burden that bound her to this terrible fate.