The First Psalm

Jötna notices the energy wakening her mind also exists in her flesh; a body she loathed. She begins to wriggle to give her arms the room to scrape the rest of her free. She begins thinking of revenge…

An arm emerges from the topsoil, flesh seared from intense burns. A gasping head next, red hair black with mud and soot. Zora takes her first breath in her new life... no, that's not quite right. Whatever this is, it is not life. Her breath enters scarred lungs, burning. Slowly, inch by inch, she drags herself from this grave. A chain is wrapped around her, itself showing signs of heat damage; she undoes the chain, coiling it over a shoulder.

Wait. She should not have shoulders. There is a difference between remembering and knowing. She remembers the sound of the voice that led her to this state. She knows she was betrayed. She remembers the feel of the knife slashing her face. She knows it was to silence her on the pyre. She remembers not how she died. She knows her flesh should be long gone, burnt away by the flames that had engulfed her. But here she stood, spirit made manifest. What now? Was she here for a purpose?

Not far from her, another corpse. This one had not made it to a grave. Perhaps it had not made it far from one. Very little remained, other than a tattered backpack with some goods inside, and a single, sturdy femur-bone that would have to do to defend herself. She doesn't remember the world, but she knows it is a harsh place. She will need sisters.

Confound those servants. Why is it still dark and why am I ...filthy? What the ....

Magdalene was confused. She was ever so slowly realizing that she wasn't at home. She wasn't sure exactly what was home, but this wasn't it...of that she was sure. At least she thought so.

Spitting out something from her mouth she realizes it's dirt but why can't she smell? Is this mud? One arm manages to wriggle free. It immediately goes to her neck and feels the mud-caked skin there, but why she knows not. Then she proceeds to wiggle her arms and legs until she can move more freely. Eventually, she painstakingly claws her way through the mud until she can sit upright above the mud and dirt. She's terribly disoriented and her body feels wrong.

"Is this ... a graveyard?" She slowly looks around. "I don't live here! Surely I can't be ... No. No." She looks around again, shakes her head and stares, refusing to believe what she thinks she knows.

"Mother!"

Panic stricken, she snaps open her eyes. The vision of the knife still fresh in her mind she jerks to avoid it, but something is wrong.

All is dark. All is pain.

With a cry that fills her mouth with sand she grapples with her bonds, a prison of earth and blood. Slowly, her thrashing gives way to sky, a sky as black as the grave.

Her grave.

The bundle of sackcloth and rope, like a long dormant maggot of human size, shudders violently as the dark energy saturates its hidden resting place. Bindings snap from a force within its mass and two long pale appendages emerge from the grotesque cocoon of fiber, dirt, and damp sod. Struggling and shimmying upward, the thing urged on by the wrongness of the necrotic surge, seeks to emerge.

Two long slender hands, ghostly pale, with long nails thrust upward defiantly from the soured earth. They are followed by the unnatural mass likened to a head and shoulders encased in ruined rough cloth and held together with a well-made rope. A frantic ripping ensues and quickly a head of long black hair appears.

The pale head enshrouded by the nimbus raven mane faces the shattered sky and finds a voice in a single hoarse scream.

It seemed to the young dead bride, as if she had awoken within the darkness that she had seen, in her last living moment, lurking behind her uxoricidal husband's eyes.

Now, with sight restored, she regards the dead women around her, and those beyond before the cry and the scream shake her out of her reverie. In a moment of clarity, Lilly Fey speaks, "We are a sisterhood of the dead. A sorority of the debased and disillusioned. Whatever has caused us to wake, perhaps intends that we return the evil done to us to our tormentors in kind? Which is the path that leades to justice?"

Magdalene hears the scream and then the woman who looks dead like herself speaks out and Magdalene answers. "Speak for yourself! I was never debased. Never!"

Magdalene was furious that she was being lumped into a sorority of any kind by someone she had never laid eyes on before. But then she noticed the other groups. Hideous beings, some without heads yet they walked. Rather than be alarmed she was angry. Angry that she was here and angry that she was surrounded by these ugly creatures. It felt so very wrong. She deserved better than this.

But where was this?

As the scream echoes throughout the unhallowed grounds, its source tears free of the covetous black soil. With much fury, it rips at the cloying burlap until most of it has been torn asunder. Beneath, the slender pale young woman now dons but the loosened coils of the sod-caked rope draped about her and the thread-bare remains of a fine chemise ruined by the interment and the cruel passage of time.

Silver blue eyes glint in the chance peeking of the moon through the darkness above, framed by the long serpents of her black hair. cascading down her milk white face. At the the sound of a voice, the recently returned young woman turns sharply to its owner and then to the second.

"Why..?" Is the only word that finds purchase to her lips.

Zora looks on the women gathered. Miserable wretches, much like herself. Small details flash glimpses of their former lives, shadows of who they used to be when they were filled with beauty, warmth, and vibrance. But only shadows, fleeting. Without a mirror, she had no idea what stories she told... but her current state, burnt as it was, told plenty.

She moves stiffly, her flesh not flexing the way it had prior to her death, as she shuffles to the others. "We wake because the shadow that covers our shattered land respects nothing, not even death. There is no purpose but our own. And may the gods have mercy should my purpose come to pass, for they have shown me none." Her voice comes out harsh, and after speaking she folds over in a body-wracking fit of coughing. The material expelled from her lungs could be nothing other than ash and dirt.

Althea turns towards the woman in the bride's gown and begins to cry.

"Dead? Are we dead? I don't remember what happened, I don't... I don't remember dying."

"Oh hush woman. I have an inkling, but I don't remember the way of my death either. There's no point in mewling about it. What's done is done. The question we should all be asking ourselves is what do we plan to do next?"

Magdalene tries to brush off the caked-on dirt from what is left of her fine clothes which are now full of rips and holes.

Althea scowls at Magdalene,

"Maybe you're better off this way! Who crawls out of the ground and thinks, ho-hum, just another day?"

The young lady stands from her grave and walks towards the others, testing her Shakey legs with each step. She notices a crow perched near her who seems to be staring with rapt attention.

"I remember that bird..."

She puts out an arm and the crow flies over to land upon it.

"For me, I must get back home. My sister has no one. Where in hell are we? Does anyone know the way to Galgenbeck?"
Jötna’s attempt to stop her drool makes a slurping sound. She stares at anyone looking for judgment. She’s had a rough night and may pick a fight if she doesn’t get some food.

Magdalene just scowls back at Althea whose name is surprisingly similar to her sister's she thinks but doesn't quite remember what her sister's name actually is.

"How did you do that with the bird? she wonders wide-eyed as Althea calls the crow over. Then to the slurper, she says, "Gods be damned if I know. I don't even know what Galgenbeck is? That a place or a tavern?"

"Galgenbeck... I know the name, but I don't know where it is. Or where we are. But that gives us a goal, a direction. Let us take what we can, and find this Galgenbeck." Zora looks around at some of the legible gravestones for markings that the corpse below is a witch, or for shambling corpses with remnants of gear that may be useful. She avoids getting involved in the bickering between the two.