Hiding in a moonlit archway from the white leopardess — the princess’s pet that “sucks the blood of any child she can lay hold of” — Vane shelters a trembling woman of Bulika and offers his own body to the beast so she can run. In return she opens to him the soul of her city: a people who think work “a disgrace,” who dig gems in their cellars and hoard what their ancestors saved, who “forget” the poor in order to stay rich, and who turn every stranger out before nightfall because “the presence of a stranger defiled the city.” Their princess has reigned “thousands of years,” answerable to nobody, keeping them “safe and free and rich.” Vane risks the leopardess to walk the woman home — and at the top of the stair she darts inside and shuts the door in his face, leaving him on a landing “length enough… for a man to lie down.” Bulika is the city built to keep love out, and its gratitude reaches exactly as far as its fear — no farther.
The Point of ReferenceBulika boasts that it is “more ancient and noble than any other nation,” that its princess has reigned for thousands of years and is “answerable to nobody.” It claims a self-grounded permanence — a city that never changes because it never gives. But a hoard is not the same as a ground. Only One is truly unchanging, and His changelessness is not a clenched fist but a faithful word: “I AM that I AM” (Exodus 3:14). This series fixes its reference there — on the Logos, the “I AM” who does not vary — and from that fixed point we can name Bulika’s false eternity for the counterfeit it is. A city that secures itself by excluding the stranger has not found the unchanging God; it has built an idol of its own fear and called the idol permanence.
Malachi 3:6 · LXX
Διότι ἐγὼ κύριος ὁ θεὸς ὑμῶν καὶ οὐκ ἠλλοίωμαι· καὶ ὑμεῖς υἱοὶ Ἰακὼβ οὐκ ἀπέχεσθε.
Malachi 3:6 · ESV
For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.
Bulika’s woman states the city’s gospel without flinching: “When one goes poor, we forget him. That is how we keep rich. We mean to be rich always.” Scripture has seen this city before — proud, full, idle, with a clenched hand toward the needy — and named it. Its name was Sodom, and the prophet Ezekiel reads its sin not as it is usually imagined but as Bulika lives it.
Ezekiel 16:49 · LXX
Πλὴν τοῦτο τὸ ἀνόμημα Σοδόμων τῆς ἀδελφῆς σου, ὑπερηφανία· ἐν πλησμονῇ ἄρτων καὶ ἐν εὐθηνίᾳ ἐσπατάλων αὐτὴ καὶ αἱ θυγατέρες αὐτῆς· καὶ χεῖρα πτωχοῦ καὶ πένητος οὐκ ἀντελαμβάνοντο.
Ezekiel 16:49 · ESV
Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.
Hebrews 13:2 · Greek
τῆς φιλοξενίας μὴ ἐπιλανθάνεσθε· διὰ ταύτης γὰρ ἔλαθόν τινες ξενίσαντες ἀγγέλους.
Hebrews 13:2 · ESV
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
The New Testament word for hospitality is built from philos (love) and xenos (stranger, foreigner). Its native opposite is xenophobia — fear of the stranger — which is the literal constitution of Bulika: “the presence of a stranger defiled the city.” Christ’s people are commanded to the very thing Bulika has criminalized. Where Bulika asks how purity can be kept “except by keeping low people at a proper distance,” the gospel answers that purity was kept by the One who drew near to the unclean and ate with sinners.
A closed system runs down
Bulika’s economics are a closed system: no work, no exchange, no inflow — only an inherited store of gems slowly drawn down and sold. The woman insists the day of emptiness “will never come.” But every closed system obeys the second law of thermodynamics: with no energy entering from outside, order decays and the usable supply only diminishes. A city that refuses to give, trade, or welcome is thermodynamically a sealed jar.
Life itself is the counter-example. Living things are open systems — they take in, give out, and keep exchanging with what is beyond them, which is exactly how they stave off decay. Bulika has chosen the metabolism of a stone. It calls the choice “dignity”; the laws of nature call it dying slowly with the lid on.
The other as defilement
Bulika has a complete ethic, and its first principle is that the stranger contaminates: “the presence of a stranger defiled the city.” This is the moral inversion of the golden rule. Where genuine ethics begins with obligation to the other, Bulika begins with the other as threat — so that hospitality becomes the one punishable crime and a shelter for strangers would be “pulled down, and its owner burned.”
Notice the self-flattery underneath: “we are more ancient and noble than any other nation.” The contempt is not incidental; it is the engine. A worldview that grounds its dignity in exclusion must keep producing outsiders to feel noble against. The woman’s own gratitude proves the logic — she will “make an exception” of the man who saved her, but she will not change the law that would have left him to die.
The leopardess and the vampire princess
Over the whole city stands a being who “could do what she pleased, and was answerable to nobody,” who has “power over the air and the water… the earth — and… the fire too,” whose pet leopardess prowls out to “suck the blood” of children. This is Lilith — in MacDonald’s myth Adam’s demonic first wife — and her metaphysic is parasitism. She does not create; she drains. Her eternity is borrowed life kept by taking the life of others.
That is the deepest lie of Bulika made flesh in its princess: the belief that one can have being on one’s own terms, sourced from nothing and accountable to no one. But a vampire is the most dependent of creatures — it cannot live without the blood it steals. Self-existence belongs to God alone (Exodus 3:14); every counterfeit of it is, at bottom, theft.
The stranger at the gate is the test
Throughout Scripture the treatment of the stranger is the litmus of a people’s heart. Israel is commanded to love the sojourner “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut 10:19); Sodom’s ruin was that it would not aid the needy (Ezek 16:49); and Christ Himself stands among us disguised as “the least of these” (Matt 25:35, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”). Bulika fails every test at once.
And note who is locked out on the landing: the one man who would lay down his life for another — “the beast shall not touch you till she has done with me.” In offering his body so the trembling woman could run, Vane plays, however dimly, a Christlike part — and the city repays him with a shut door. The gospel turns this on its head: the Stranger we shut out is the very One who came to take the beast’s teeth in our place.
Bulika calls hoarding “dignity,” idleness “nobility,” and cruelty to the poor “purity.” But renaming a thing does not change what it is. A clenched hand is a clenched hand whether you call it pride or prudence; a vampire is a vampire whether she is titled “princess” or not. Honest reason insists that the city be what it actually is — a place that “forgets” the suffering — before it can be loved enough to be healed.
The woman thanks Vane for his courage and then bolts the door against him. She cannot, in the same breath, both honor the man who would die for her and uphold the law that he be turned out to die. Bulika’s whole ethic is this contradiction institutionalized: it lives off life it refuses to give. A city cannot be at once “safe and free and rich” and guarded by a child-killing beast. The contradiction does not vanish; it waits at the door.
There is no third position on that landing. Either the stranger is taken in or he is left out; either the hand opens or it stays clenched. The woman attempts the impossible middle — a private “exception” that costs the city nothing — and at the last step even that collapses into a slammed door. Bulika, like every soul, must finally land on one side: welcome or refusal. There is no neutral landing wide enough to stand on forever.
Pleasant Springs Church — Discipleship School