Erotic Liturgy

In The Witch of Pontevedra, Cymbeline Villamin offers a lyrical and sensually-charged novella that defies genre expectations, while forging new ground in feminist speculative fiction. 

Experimental and poetic, this 125-page work traverses time, body, and belief —challenging the borders between myth and science, flesh and spirit, trauma and transcendence.

At the heart of the story is Vina, a woman marked by memory and myth. Her rival Lyra, in a near-mystical teleportation sequence, vanishes from a place of violence and is reconstituted particle-by-particle, in a futuristic quantum gym. There are actually two witches. 

This motif of corporeal reassembly becomes the organizing metaphor of the text. Memory is inscribed on the body, and healing requires not forgetting but radical re-membering.

Villamin’s language glows with sensuality, yet avoids voyeurism; it is erotic without being exploitative. 

Lyra’s tattooed breast, her encounters with Noah, and the textured descriptions all function as conduits for a larger inquiry into desire, divinity, and feminine power. 

Erotic passages are treated with reverence, as if each moan, touch, or climax is a sacred act of reclamation.

The novella fulfills its thematic ambition. Witchcraft, often a metaphor for female otherness, here becomes a symbolic cipher for colonized womanhood. 

Vina is not merely a victim of persecution; she is a bearer of ancient knowledge and a rebel against linear history. 

The teleportation technology that resurrects Lyra, the subtle witch, is both literal and figurative, a futuristic agent of justice that restores what the fire sought to erase.

This is no didactic tale. Villamin has crafted a protagonist who is fully human: sensuous, intelligent, conflicted, and powerful. 

Noah, the male protagonist and savior figure, is a gentle presence, a foil who listens more than he leads, allowing the two women’s journeys to take center stage.

Structurally, the novella is fragmentary and nonlinear, an intentional design that mirrors the women’s psychic disorientation and metaphysical rebirth. 

At times, the lyricism and rapid time shifts may disorient the reader, but this only enhances the incantatory quality of the narrative. 

The novella’s timelines are layered, but the ambiguity is part of its power.

What makes The Witch of Pontevedra unique is its alchemical blend of genres: part feminist fable, part erotic liturgy, part speculative elegy. 

One might hear echoes of Isabel Allende, yet Villamin’s voice remains wholly her own— earthy, mystical, and unapologetically sensual.

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The paperback version is for release by 8Letters Bookstore & Publishing in 2026.

To reserve your copy--

Email: Cymbeline Villamin