Rising at Dusk
General Summary
Emma startles awake, starving and dessicated, feeling so dry that her bones ache and her body lacks any strength or vitality. A comforting presence sits beside her and ten heartbeats drum in her ears, none of them her own. A bloody wrist is proffered and Emma's eyes focus in on the ripped open, pulsing veins. She drinks. She retches and vomits blood to the floor as she rolls onto it. She comes back to the bloody wrist for more. The process repeats again, and again. She retches and vomits less, and less, and then not at all. Soon the blood of the wrist is something strange and somehow soothing, roaring through her veins and ringing in her ears. Her body regenerates from dessicated and mummified Hel-black corpse to the beauty she was in life. Her eyes rise, following the wrist to the arm to the face. Thorra, her sister-in-law, feeds her.
But it is not the sister she knew. Thorra is different. Older. But not by much. When Emma has drank her fill, the two sit and talk. It has been five years since her death in 1546. Tonight she rises as a Revenant, a type of Vampire. On that Thorra knows little. Emma's husband, Julian, is dead. Her children, Bjorn and Ben, are being raised by her sister Saga. And should anything befall Saga, Thorra will care for them. The boys will not be without kin, though Emma, as she is, can never truly be a part of her family again. Emma knows it, she feels the gnawing hunger in her that could never be sated, the beast that cannot be tamed. Bereft of her family and denied proper death, for those injustices alone she hates the one that made her like this. Ieldra Aethelgifu and that cursed draught of "strength." Damn that blood-soaked woods-witch!
In all, for Emma, her rising was simple. Awakened from torpor by the blood of her sister-in-law Thorra after she removed the silver stake from Emma's heart, Emma drank greedily until Thorra ripped her wrist away. They talked for a time while surrounded by nine ferocious shirtless men covered in silvery tattoos, and Thorra revealed much of the world mortals must never know. Like that Iceland was governed by Werewolves, and they did not want a Vampire of any sort here. So Thorra made arrangements to have Emma leave after seeing her children from a distance. Apparently the female ship captain, a Captain Omarosa, that brought Emma to Iceland in 1545 was actually a Vampire and was willing to take Emma wherever she wanted to go out of solidarity...
Emma and Thorra watched the boys from a hillside, and then walked down to the harbor where Omarosa was waiting. Emma left Iceland two nights after she slipped Death's claim, heartbroken over the loss of her boys. She carried with her the silver stake that was supposed to prevent her rising as the Undead, a memento of the past. Aboard Omarosa's ship she agreed to be staked and put into torpor so that she didn't awaken ravenous and eat the crew. And so Emma, staked to her bunk, slipped once more into Torpor.
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