The Coven of the Croaking Toad: A Gothic African Witch Folktale
When the red moon hides her face, the women with rootless souls answer a call that is not a voice, but a pulling in the blood.
In the villages, they speak of them in hushed tones around dying fires: the Rootless Ones. These are not women born of malice, but women who have severed the sacred bond with the Root-Mother, Lila. They traded the warmth of the hearth for the chill of borrowed power, their own spirits withering so a different, hungrier essence might take root within them.
Their gatherings are not mere meetings. They are a convocation of the untethered, held in the places Lila has turned her back upon—the blighted grove, the riverbed cracked by thirst, the earth salted by ancient tears.
The Call of the Red Moon
The world does not welcome them. It warns of their coming. This is the old lore, the Nsamanfo Akyede, whispered by grandmothers to frighten and instruct:
When the moon bleeds her light to a dull crimson and cloaks herself in tattered clouds, listen. The gray owl will hoot three times—not a hunt, but a summons. The old yellow-eyed cat, a creature that knows both hearth and shadow, will mewl a triplet of despair. Then, the toad, ancient and warty, will croak its dry-throated chant.
With the third croak, the wind awakens, not to cleanse, but to scour. It is then they take flight. Their shrieks are not human, nor animal, but the sound of torn reality, a swarm of furious spirits cutting across the sky.
The Inheritance of Emptiness
This power is a dark heirloom, passed not through blood, but through a willingness to be hollowed out. It is the legacy of broken covenants. A woman who has seen her crops fail and her children go hungry might, in her hour of despair, utter a prayer to something other than Lila. And something else answers.
She gains the power to blight a rival's field with a single, venomous word, or to still the heart of a predator with a glance. But the cost is her soul's tether to the living earth. The more the village fears the woman she was, the higher she climbs in the secret, sorrowful hierarchy of the Rootless. Their power is a paradox: it grows as their humanity recedes.
A Scholar's Fragile Defense
In a dusty study, far from the red earth, a European professor named Lodge once wrote: “It is no proof of wisdom to refuse to examine certain phenomena because we think it certain that they are impossible…”
He spoke of radio waves and unseen energies. He did not know of the Rootless Ones. To the village elder, his words are a child's prattle. You do not "examine" the storm that takes your roof. You do not "question" the plague that claims your livestock. You endure. You recognize the signs. You lock your door and pray to Lila that your own roots hold fast.
For the universe is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a living, breathing entity, and some of its children are hungry. The science of the city does not understand the truth of the countryside: that the greatest mysteries are not problems, but presences.
This tale is part of the chronicles of Gothic African Folklore, where the land itself remembers every broken promise.
Continue your descent through Africa’s haunted memories.
Explore more tales where the land remembers and the ancestors never forget at the
Gothic African Folklore Collection
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