History

The future could be found in the past.

Or at least that was the feeling in the society Gintare Vilkaite was born into. A time of change and restlessness in Europe, 1848 remembered everywhere, nationalism growing and growing. For Ginta’s family, minor szlachta in the countryside around Vilnius, it gave them a glorious past to think about, one where they were not just owners of a small estate and its serfs, but part of the grand Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

(Someone should have told them how unrealistic it was. But nobody knows what they don’t know.)

For Ginta’s childhood, it was just an idea. It was in the names that she and her sister were given: not the names of saints, but associations of ancient Lithuania. It was in the kind of books they learned to read, not the most dangerous political material but still Romantic ideals that went against the empire above them. It wasn’t a life of immense luxury, but it was comfortable, the family’s lives supported by the serfs under them, something that seemed entirely normal to Ginta when it was all she had known.

It was her older brother who would take it further, in the environment where he came of age. In his late teens, he joined in with the growing movement toward rebellion. It was 1863 when it exploded into violence and then crushed, and the Vilkas family’s life would be changed forever. For the crimes of one of their members, soldiers marched into the family estate and seized their land. Nobody knew where Jonas was, if he was dead or alive, if he was captured or escaped. There was only the fear that they had lost their son, their brother, and in the case of a certain witch--a fiance.

Ksienija had gotten engaged to Jonas just months before the rebellion broke out. After he didn't come home, it was Ksienija that introduced Ginta to the world of magic that she could see, not just distant statues of angels in church. When Ginta expressed her worries to Ksienija, the two of them together went in search of someone who could grant the miracle they wished for: Jonas’s life. They begged for angels to show themselves, and when no miracle was given to them, they decided to turn to the other side for the answers and help they sought.

It was in between ancient trees, in the dark depths of the forest, that Ginta learned her brother was still alive, and struck the deal with a demon to keep him that way.

An agonizing couple of years passed before they got a letter from Jonas, telling of his daring escape, his journey across the ocean, and how he wanted them to join him in Chicago, where they could get a house and jobs, where they could start again, free from the political history that haunted them in the Russian Empire. The war in America was over, things were looking up, as he told them.

So they went. Ginta, her sister and parents gathered the money to pay for passage to America, and crowded all together in a rented house. The women found work in the garment industry, sewing shirts day in and day out, while Jonas worked in a foundry and Ginta’s father in a meatpacking plant. It was so far from the comfortable life they had once enjoyed. They had jobs, but they were miserable, low-paying, made them all have to count pennies to get what they needed to survive. It was a new start, but not an especially fresh one.

And then the fire came. It came in the middle of the night, waking up to knocks on the door and yells in all the languages of the city to run. Ginta remembers grabbing her nephew from his crib and running with him through the streets, the glow of the flames shining ominously behind her, looking around to make sure none of her family were left behind as they ran across the river. They came out alive from the Great Fire, but their house had not. Yet their rental contract remained, landlord determined to squeeze them for money. And what precious items of theirs remained, after all the amber in their jewelry had melted, had been picked over by the opportunists willing to sort through the ash.

How far they had fallen. Once minor nobility, now in a strange land with barely a penny to their name.

And still with a demon contract that Ginta had kept secret from them all.

It was not long after the fire when Ginta received the first warning note from the demon, upset that the fire had nearly taken the human from her with nothing in return.

It was over the next few years that Ginta realized how badly she needed to escape the contract. There was too much to worry about: from an eternity in hell to the empty stomachs of her family. Escape, renegotiate, whatever needed to be done, she had to do it.

In 1881, she left Chicago. By 1882, she had made it to a place where she hoped to find answers: Never, New Mexico.