| “ | It's truly an amazing garment. It affords protection more adamant than a suit of quarter-inch plate. Another quality? It magically holds so many interesting things. Wooden boys and deadlier toys. | „ |
| ~ Boy Blue, fighting goblins, Fables #36 — "Death & Taxes: Chapter One of Homelands" |
The Witching Cloak is an immensely powerful magic cloak that debuts in flashbacks in Fables: The Last Castle. It was originally crafted from Mister Dark's Bag of Endless Nightmares and Infinite Screams, a tool personally created by him using his own essence which due to him being one of the Great Powers, gave the cloak its immense magical powers and abilities.
History
Creation
At some unknown point, Mister Dark created the Bag of Endless Nightmares and Infinite Screams to hold naughty children. After being imprisoned by the Boxers, the Empire took his sack and made the Witching Cloak from it. Unknown to the Empire, the cloak was a part of the Dark One, and he used this connection to subtly suggest the wearer towards a series of events to free himself.[2]
Fabletown
Boy Blue was assigned the task of testing its capabilities when he first donated it to the Fabletown vault. He previously was given it by Colonel Bearskin as a means to escape the battle at the Last Castle once the enemy overpowered them. When the final resistance fell, Boy Blue used it to teleport himself onto the final ship out to the mundane world.[1]
It was later used by Boy Blue during his infiltration of the Homelands. He managed to sneak his way through the Adversary's forces by taking on different forms.[3]
The cloak was a catalyst in Boy Blue's death as well. While wearing the cloak, Blue tried to block a magic arrow from hitting Bigby Wolf. As the arrow was enchanted to always hit its mark, it negated the cloaks protective barrier, travelling straight through Boy Blue's arm, to hit its target.[6] A piece of the cloak became lodged inside Boy Blue's body,[4] and it made him gradually weaker until he passed on.[7]
Shortly after Mister Dark's reawakening, the Witching Cloak disintegrated and vanished,[4] its magic having been drained into his person.[2]
Effects
While wearing the Witching Cloak, the user can make themselves invisible, as well as change their form to almost whatever they desire. The wearer is also able to teleport across distances and dimensions, as long as they know where they want to appear. The cape is nearly indestructible, though other magic, if strong enough, may cause some harm. This effect extends to the protection of the wearer.
The interior of the cloak contains an effectively unlimited storage capacity, with the weight and dimensions of the objects inside having no effect on the wearer or the cloak itself. During his campaign in the Homelands, Boy Blue was able to carry all of his travelling supplies, including Pinocchio's deactivated body and the Vorpal Sword, as well as a vast number of books and texts about the Empire, looted from various libraries. This storage space is unable to be accessed by those who do not know how.
While captured by the Adversary, Boy Blue spoke a phrase that he claimed activated an enchantment that would destroy the cloak and everything inside, unless he spoke a different password every day. It is unknown if this is true, or if he was bluffing for leverage over his captor.
Original source
While the Witching Cloak itself appears to be an original creation by Bill Willingham, the bag which the cloak was made from,[2] is based on two distinct items from folklore, namely the sack of the Bubak from Czech mythology, and the Torbalan's bag from Bulgarian folklore:
The Bubak's sack
The Bubak is the boogeyman from Czech mythology, and the Czech version of the Sack Man. The Bubak, also known as the Sack Man, roams the land at night in search of his next victim, and weaves the souls of his victims into decaying attire that he dons. Rather than subjecting the children he captures to immediate and horrific death, the creature places them within his sack, where they exist in an alternate realm, conscious yet paralyzed, and spared from mortal demise. These unfortunate souls are consumed by sorrow as they must endure the daily existence alongside the Sack Man. Only when the full moon graces the sky does the child emerge for a meticulously orchestrated ritual of murder, during which the Bubak takes painstaking care in weaving the innocent child's soul into a state of agonizingly slow torment.[8]
"Buback" is one of Mister Dark's many aliases, and he was known to have his own sack for holding children, the Bag of Endless Nightmares and Infinite Screams, which later became the Witching Cloak.[2]
The Torbalan's bag
The Torbalan is a creature from Bulgarian folklore. No one knows what it looks like, only that it has a bag (torba means "bag" in Bulgarian). The creature targets misbehaving children who disrespect their parents and elders, snatching them away in its bag and abandoning them in a desolate location. Sometimes, a Torbalan will also grab unattended or wandering children.[9]
Torbalan is one of Mister Dark's aliases, and he had own sack for holding naughty children, which he used to battle the Empire's Boxing League of sorcerers, effortlessly scooping them up by the dozens and tossing them into his mystic sack that seemed to have no bottom.[2]
References
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