Geist the Sin-Eaters

Death by Pestilence
Geist Preview for July 15
Posted: 2009-07-15

She comes back with a scream, convulses, hands fluttering at her sides, drool flying from her mouth, her eyes almost perfectly circular discs of sightless white. It ends, and when she blinks and looks around her, she moves with a grace she never had before she died; she stands and has the look of someone who has defeated a terrible enemy. And the geist that came back with her whispers: you have conquered; you have more to conquer still.

Stricken and destroyed by sickness or poison, but a conqueror of its effects. She has survived, and having survived, she will overcome the conditions of this world and triumph. The figure of White Horseman, Pestilence, bears a bow and crown. He conquers. He rules over all he sees. And the Stricken rule over him.

It's usual to talk about a battle against life-threatening disease, and while a Ravaged One knows that for most people, it's just an empty cliché — it either gets you or you don't and it's not really up to you what it does — for the Sin-Eater it has some meaning. Pestilence got him, but now has the capacity to win other battles, not least the battle against the inner foe, the monster that leans on his shoulder, hides in his veins. But the victory comes — so the Sin-Eater understands — through side-stepping death. The Sin-Eater comes out on top with finesse and grace, and maybe a little duplicity. If the Silent Sin-Eater beats Death by enduring it and coming out the other end of it, the Stricken One challenges the Horseman to a game of chess and win by swapping some of the pieces around when the Adversary is momentarily distracted.

The penchant for finding winning solutions, then, is the one thing that the Stricken can be said to have in common with each other. Certainly, “pestilence” is a vast catch-all term for any number of different ways to die.

Bacterial infections and viruses can claim us in any number of ways from the exotic to the mundane. The common cold rarely gets bad enough to take someone's life, but here's a man — a policeman, maybe, or a soldier — brought low by injuries sustained in the line of duty and run down by fatigue. He gets a little blast of the bug that's been going around, and he's dead and cold and back in the land of the living before anyone at the hospital even knows. For that matter, hospitals are the quintessential home of secondary infections. Respiratory infections claim old and young alike (a young woman recovers from an appendectomy just fine, only the pneumonia gets her the night before she comes home). Other, nastier infections have become more and more powerful, more immune to treatment — some might even say supernaturally so. A fighting-fit man in overnight for a routine removal of some stitches he got a few weeks before catches MRSA and ends up dying in intensive care, and the IV and the drugs and the oxygen mask do no good at all. And a brutal infection eats a woman's face from the inside out, opens out her stomach to the open air. She dies; she returns with her flesh knitted together with the most garish scars.

Sometimes it's the injustice of it all that brings the geist calling. Or the justice of it all. Or both at the same time.

Psychological illnesses can kill you indirectly, but sometimes the relationship a Sin-Eater and a Sin-Eater's geist has with the depression or delusionary illness that made her stop eating or take an overdose or jump in front of a train makes all the difference. Psychological illness is a common companion, and if a geist replaces the tragic, delusional voices the Sin-Eater had before, who's to notice?

Poisoning is a brother to pestilence. A worker in a nuclear power station gets a freak blast from a damaged reactor that the authorities covered up rather than spend the money to fix — he's all right for a day, and his body ceases to work, and then he gets up and he's fighting fit, and the management breathe a sigh of relief and say, look, there's nothing wrong with our reactor. He's fine.

A whole village gets dangerous levels of aluminum in its water supply. People's hair turns green, sickness and cancers follow. Only one person dies of it in the short term, and she comes right back, still stuck with the sickly greenish tint in hair that once was golden.

Coming out through the other side of death, the Stricken Sin-Eater understands that survival is an active thing. The Ravaged One does not endure: her survival is an active thing, and that survival brings with it a supernatural grace. She looks upon the existence of the unquiet dead as a challenge, a puzzle to solve, an adversary to pit herself against. The geist drives her to see the dead as a challenge, and in return, the Sin-Eater engages in a battle of will and wits for ultimate control of her soul.

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