Deep inside the cave, the supplicant watched, fascinated, as snakes twined through the sorceress’ fingers. Illuminated by torches set into rough crevices in the surrounding rock walls, the witch’s gleaming skin, shining with sweat, became golden in the flickering glow. Eyes closed and head upturned, she seemed to be listening for a voice only she could hear. Her hips undulated; she muttered and moaned. Snakes glittered and slithered at her feet, curving around the tripod legs of a smoking cauldron.
Her eyes fluttered open, startled. She seemed to emerge from a dark dream. Slowly, she bent her head of raven curls over the small iron cauldron, breathing deeply from its bubbling concoction. Then she intoned the incantation the supplicant had paid her to utter.
“Hekate, Goddess of the Stygian blackness of Hades, keeper of the flame, seer of the undead, hear my plea.”
The sorceress stirred the contents of the cauldron. A thin wisp of noxious green wafted towards her nostrils, and she breathed once more, her eyes wild through the curtain of hair falling over her face.
“The power of death is yours. Only you control the keepers of the gate, the hell-hounds Cerberus, doomed to honor thy bidding. The supplicant beseeches the Great Goddess to bring death upon the enemy whose name is inscribed—” she dropped a small piece of dull green wax into the cauldron’s flames—“on this tablet.” The carved wax melted away.
“May this evil-doer meet his just due, may he enter Hades’ gates through your intervention, oh cunning Hekate who sees the dark hearts of all who appeal to her, yet maintains silence.”
The supplicant, satisfied that the goddess had heard his prayer, withdrew from the hot, smoky chamber. In a mood to be generous, he dropped an extra coin into the woven basket on the ground near the mouth of the cave.
Emerging from the darkness, he looked up into the cloudless blue sky in awe, and the breath left his body. The Moon-goddess Hekate had sent him a sign of her approval. All around him was still. There was no bird song; no animals skittered through the brush near the cave’s opening. What had been bright now grew dim. As the Moon’s orb slid across the face of the Sun, all that could be seen was a ring of red-orange fire, shimmering with the gleam of Hekate’s snakes.
Many minutes passed before the world woke to life again, before he could move. Yet something had changed, for as he walked along the track leading back to Athens, the dirt had transformed into powdered bone, its grit choking him and encrusting his skin with the burned remains of the dead.
Demise of a Demagogue 