Baba Yaga — The Wildwood Witch

She lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs deep in the forest, surrounded by a fence of human skulls that glow at night. Her iron mortar and pestle are her vehicle. She flies by sweeping away her tracks with a broom. She might help you. She might eat you. The key is to be polite, to do her work, and to ask the right questions. Baba Yaga is the great ambivalent figure of Slavic mythology — neither villain nor helper but something older and more honest than either. She represents the forest itself: terrifying, generous, indifferent, and more ancient than anything that lives in it.

These signs carry the hut on chicken legs, the skull fence, the iron mortar, and the forest that was old before the first village was built.