Who and What is Elka Wyverg?

Elka is an eleven-year-old ghostbait child living in Corvin, a village or small town in Dal-Riatah, with her younger brother (Toby) and her parents.

Dal-Riatah is a continent in the North-West of the Dal-Riatan Empire and its environs, and this country has a curse on it: every child is born either ghostbait (they “Bring” Ghosts or Witches in response to stress) or witchward (Ghosts and Witches find them repellent). Nobody is sure where the curse came from or why it affects their children, much less how to get rid of it.

Whenever a ghostbait child starts to Bring, they exhibit similar behaviour to that of demonic possession (see The Possession Diaries, a series of posts concerning real-life examples of possession). However, the Ghost or Witch does not inhabit the child’s body but passes through it into the material plane, where it feasts on people in the child’s immediate vicinity, leaving the ghostbait child physically unharmed.

On her eleventh birthday, Elka had to undergo the Test, an ordeal that every child in Dal-Riatah has to experience at that age to discover whether they are ghostbait or witchward, as the effects of the curse begin during the onset of puberty. According to the Test, Elka is a ghostbait.

This means that she is unable to live with her family. Her parents sell her off to the village ghostmerchant, a man designated to dispose of ghostbait children in the empty, misty plains beyond Corvin. However, before he can take her away she Brings a Ghost that kills her parents.

Logan Bartholom, a Nighthunter, manages to quell the Ghost and remove Elka and Toby to the safety of an old friend’s house, but unfortunately that friend is less trustworthy than Logan believed…

We will meet Elka and her brother Toby in the second Nighthunter book, The Curse of the Grim, which is currently in the works.

To read more about Logan and his escapades, you can find the first book, A Dark Heritage, here: