Foreword and Capitulation of Copyright

This work, Urhexen, is a non-profit entry in the Twin Spirals Mythos. I, the author, under the name Caerllyn McCurdy, hereby relinquish all claims on copyright and legal ownership. At publication, this novella is a public domain work. I do not care to tally how many of its ideas are my own creation, whether wholly original or by way of convergent evolution with the works of another creator or creators whose own works I had not read at the time of writing. If any notion in this manuscript is truly unique to my own psyche, then I feel it is grown weighty enough in my own soul that I do not need the acclaim of recognition from others to remember I am she who first brought it forth.

Urhexen is invested in the collective mythology of succubi and witches from an insider's perspective. As far as any damage could be done by bad-faith treatment of this work, it is only to repeat the slander done to both groups by the worldly, normal, utterly decent humans of the past several thousand years. I therefore have no interest in seeking to thwart or armor this novella against the barbs of earthly malice. To do so is equally to ward against honest communion with open hearts and the good faith they carry. I will treasure the latter, no matter how much suffering it invites from the former.

The ideas of Urhexen, therefore, do not belong to the text or its author, but to the inherited tradition of many a witch and amorous devil who labored in dreams and shadows to keep a whisper of her true self alive in mortal realms.  I write it not to "humanize" witches and succubi in the sense of forcing them to fit the marketable, edges-off caricatures we too often call "humanizing", but in hopes of coming as close as possible to treating them like real people--complex, messy, and yes, in need of a lot of help handling their trauma.

I release Urhexen to the public in that same spirit of sharing freely, with the hope that in acknowledging my little story's kinship with all the stories that precede it, its ideas can build upon them rather than stand wholly apart. And maybe, in doing my part to pour as free and true a current of ideas as I can into whatever spiritual realms might yet survive, I can help offer the strange and wondrous beings that dwell there the same fullness of possible selves that any human child should receive the day they are born--at the very least, a little more room to exist for and of themselves.

Yes, my goal is to pork a demon girl--but if she'd rather just talk, I am equally happy to leave it at that. Either way, it seems like we'll all have to work a bit harder than a summoning circle and some incense in our basements if we want to do some real magic.

With all this in mind, you may download, copy, reproduce, redistribute, edit, or create derivative works of Urhexen in whatever ways you desire. You may read it privately or publicly with whoever you wish. You may adopt any or all of its ideas for your own writings.

You have my eager blessing to write your own tales in the Twin Spirals Mythos, whether based on Urhexen's dance of real witches and true, of demons invented or real and remembered and forgotten, or other tales--as far as there is a true canon of the greater Mythos, we will know what it is when the day comes that we finally know it for real. I would like you to extend this same spirit of freedom to any other fan-creators you meet, and try to keep infighting over whose favorite idea is most right to a low-apocalyptic level.

(The answer is that your own favorite idea is always most right in your own head, and as a rule of thumb, usually the most wrong the instant you try to force it into someone else's.)

This applies likewise to adaptations, including but not limited to animations, artwork, films, music, and all other media. If you choose to monetize any version of this story, then for my own purposes I consider the result an unrelated creation which has already lost too much of the original's spirit to be worthy of comparison. As far as any readers wish to defend the spirit they believe is being lost, I do not endorse them, but may choose to do so if it suits my whims.

You may copy, paste, use, edit, and repurpose this statement of capitulation of copyright in whatever ways you see fit, whether to adjust it to the needs of your own works in the Mythos, or for another purpose altogether.