Geist the Sin-Eaters

Cross the Threshold
Geist Preview for July 10
Posted: 2009-07-10

Thresholds are states of being, of deathly resonance. They’re the marks put on someone or something by Death. Death by violence carries a supernatural tie to — and affinity for — violence.

The Sin-Eaters are generally aware of Thresholds, and treat the concept fairly seriously. While they don’t tend to elevate a Threshold to the status of a social group or belief system, it is true that most people who die by deprivation seem to have some things in common. As such, the Bound tend to take the marks of death and expand them into heraldry. The Torn self-identify as such because it gets the point across: they understand violence, and they accept that part of their nature. The Forgotten talk more about chance and accidents, because they have something of an investment in the concept. In the end, a Threshold means something to every Sin-Eater — but just how much it means is up to the person in question.

Here is an example of one of the five thresholds:

The Silent: Death by Deprivation
The Starved Ones, Victims of Neglect, Marked by Starvation and Need, Chosen of the Black Horseman

He comes back. His mouth wide open, he takes a deep, juddering breath, a cry somewhere between horror, relief and triumph. He begins to hyperventilate. His stomach cramps up and he curls up. It takes a long time for him to come to himself, and it is only when he does that he realizes just how hungry he is, just how thirsty. And the creature curled up inside that empty stomach cries out from inside, demanding to be fed.

He is one of the Silent, the Starving Ones, and he died from deprivation and came back in need. Silent because he joined the multitude of the starved, who die in their thousands every second of every day.

A man suffering from the worst rhinovirus anyone knows about gets tied up and gagged with a sock by a burglar. As he suffocates because his nose is so badly blocked, he thinks: what a stupid way to go. And something hears him, makes him awaken among the splintered remains of a chair and pieces of torn rope, breathing more freely than he ever has for years.

Another Starving One was killed by another sort of hunger: the bottle took him right from the day he decided that he couldn't cope with college anymore and killed him before he was even thirty.

Why a hungry geist picks a dying man or woman is hard to say. In the end, these creatures have inexplicable, consuming appetites and it seems that something about the person and the way he or she dies draws the geist, nourishes it in some way. Maybe the final release of life-energy at the climax of a slow, drawn-out death is exquisitely tasty. Maybe the creature is drawn unwillingly by urges it cannot understand to a hungry soul that it must join with.

Whatever the geist's reasons, coming back from this sort of death alters the Silent One in one important way: he is now able to able to endure things he could never have dealt with before.

The starving so often go quietly, robbed of the means of living, robbed of the energy to protest, robbed of a voice. They say the suffocated man or the starving man experiences a weird kind of peace in the moment before he dies. The Sin-Eater retains that peace brings that back from the Underworld with him. He has died, and he has come back. He can take anything.

Even though a Starving One cannot express it in words, the geist that joined with her at the final extremity of deprivation makes the Starving One need, more keenly than she ever has before. But it's a different need. It's like this: the Sin-Eater needs to find, to see, to experience the restless dead. She needs to see the underworld. Death has become an addiction for her.

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