"You have to wait for a full moon night, when the surface of the lake is smooth as glass."
Ansa took a deep breath, standing at the water's edge, nude. She closed her eyes, and stepped out into the water, feeling it gradually climb her legs. In spite of it being August, with the water still and clear, the water surface temp hovered around 50 degrees Farenheit, in direct contrast with the warm muggy air.
Once the water hit her upper thighs, Ansa took another deep breath, plugged her nose, and fell forward to completely submerge herself. She surfaced gasping for air, skin pulled tight in gooseflesh. Her teeth chattered as she forced herself to walk slowly back up onto the beach. Without stopping, she kept walking into the treeline, following a faint path that the full moon illuminated for her. Not far from the water's edge, the opening of an abandoned copper mine.
She stopped at the opening, her toes right at the line between moonlight and pitch blackness.
"Luohi! Luohi! A daughter calls your name!" Ansa called out in Finnish, and soon, long, slender, cool, fingers, inhumanly long and slender, slick with the gods only knew, slid up her feet, up her calves, wrapping around, not tight tight enough to hurt, merely restrain.
"Who calls?"
"I am Ansa, daughter of Aapo and of Inkeri Virtainen. I come seeking you." Ansa kept her eyes focused straight ahead in the dark, very purposely not looking down toward the hands gripping her calves.
"Why? I am a witch. A fell spirit. A blight." The voice rasped up from the ground near her feet, and drew Ansa's eyes down. A form of slender shadow and ivory flesh lay at her feet, hands tightening on her calves, shadows boiling around her.
"Men call all disobedient women those things." Ansa took a deep breath. "My grandmother said to call on you, should I ever have need. Hiilka."
"You have need?" Luohi quirked a perfectly arched brow.
"I, I am lonely, and I thought you might be too." Ansa exhaled. "I don't, don't like people, and I thought, I don't. Please don't be angry."
"You are too timid by half, child." Luohi chuckled and released Ansa's legs to climb slowly to her feet.
"I have seen drawings and paintings, they make you ugly to steal your power. I knew it." Ansa gasped. "I knew it."
"They do the same to you." Luohi leaned in and kissed her.