As I was working on a Large Expansion for Aralheim, as well as poking at future plots, I realized that I had left off the idea of witches or witchcraft in my first pass of the Heartlands.. Wanting to include some witch concepts, I decided to work out what it would mean for Aralheim

WITCH (n.)

1) Any female magic-user. In the Lands of the Midnight Sun this is considered derogatory, but it's a normal term in the Heartlands, even though it doesn't totally supplant Sorcerer/Sorceress or simply Wizard.
2) Any practitioner, male or female, of a number of classes of Heartlands folk magic.
3) Any magic-user whose power is drawn from, in whole or in part, consorting with demons. Can be applied to males or females, though more often to females, with males also referred to as "Warlock" or either gender sometimes as "Cultist"
4) A member of the Greywitch order, a small and highly secretive group of magic-users, currently but not by necessity exclusively female, who have found a way to retain their humanity against wild power that may have otherwise turned them into Ulfr by channeling and redirecting the energy into magic. (NOTE: No one who has become an Ulfr by transforming can 'go back' by learning to be a Greywitch. Rather, a vulnerable person could be, in essence, immunized against transformation. Success rate may vary by individual and transformation stimulus -- a Greywitch whose vigilance about the state of her own soul lapses could still become an Ulfr. The total number of Greywitches in the world doesn't break 100 and might not break 50.)