~ One Foot In the Grave ~

On a frozen lake, the ice suddenly cracks with the sound of a gunshot. A young man falls in, and by the time rescue workers pull him out, his body temperature has dropped to 86 degrees Fahrenheit and he’s not breathing.

A crackhead corners a woman on a deserted street. He wants her money, but he needs a fix more than anything. His hands are twitchy; as she’s handing over her purse, the gun discharges. The candy-apple red on the woman’s lips isn’t make-up. The junkie runs, leaving her to bleed out on the filthy pavement.

In a hospital ward, a man hisses his last breaths through a machine that ticks and bleeps at regular intervals. The cancer has practically liquefied his organs, but he fights for every single breath. He’s not done living yet.

All of these people should have died — in point of fact, all of them did. At least, for a moment. But where most people would just pass on quietly, or perhaps linger as a restless ghost, something very different happens to them. As their souls loose their bonds and make ready to shuffle off the mortal coil, a combination of the burning desire to not go gentle into that good night and the peculiar death-touched nature of the Sin-Eater’s soul sends up a kind of call — a call answered by a geist. More than ghost, less than god, geists occupy a peculiar place within the realms of the dead. Though each geist was once a living mortal man or woman, they have taken on a mantle greater than any individual identity. The geist catches the soul before it departs forever, and makes an offer: A second chance at life in exchange for giving the geist an earthly, physical body once more. Sin-Eaters refer to this as “the Bargain,” or sometimes in typically dry fashion “the Event,” and it is the pivotal moment of their creation.

It is, of course, possible to refuse the offer, but few do. In order to attract the geist in the first place, the Sin-Eater had to be possessed of a truly fierce desire to keep on living (that doesn’t preclude suicides from becoming Sin-Eaters: sometimes coming up hard on your own mortality can make you realize just how much you didn’t want to die after all). Once the offer is accepted, the geist and the Sin-Eater undergo a kind of merging: like two trees growing together, the two become one. Life surges through battered limbs, rotted lungs take in air once again; a frozen heart begins to pump. Medical personnel declare it a miracle, the likes of which they’ve never seen. Family and friends weep with relief and praise God, while the newly-born Sin-Eater looks out at the world with eyes no longer entirely her own.

~ After Life, Not Undeath ~

Sin-Eaters are not undead. Although they technically died (or in some cases came very close), and it was the intercession of the undead geist that brought them back from the brink, Sin-Eaters very literally come back to life as part of the Bargain. They continue to eat, breathe, sleep, and do everything else living men and women do — including suffer and bleed. The Bargain brings the Sin-Eater surging back to life, but it doesn’t exactly heal her. Whatever injuries brought the Sin-Eater to the brink of death linger; whatever disease killed her goes into remission but doesn’t vanish overnight.

Many Sin-Eaters come to understand what they’ve become while lying in a hospital bed, recuperating. Geists cannot actually restore life or heal a living mortal, but as archetypal figures of death, they do have an ability to manipulate death itself. In essence, the Bargain, and the attendant merging of the human soul with the inhuman geist allows the shade not to give life, but to take away death. This concept seems baffling, especially to humans who are accustomed to thinking of death as the absence of life, but Sin-Eaters recognize that death has a powerful energy of its own. By pushing that energy away from its new host, the geist staves off death long enough for the living body to repair itself — whether that be fighting off the disease that ravages it or knitting together bones and organs shattered by gunfire.

There are limits to what a geist’s power can do, and what the human body can endure and recover from. A geist of violent accidents might be able to keep death at bay for a man mangled by an industrial accident, but that man isn’t going to regrow his shredded limbs no matter how long the geist staves off death for him. Likewise, the human body can’t regrow brain tissue: a woman shot point-blank in the head with a large caliber round who loses most of her gray matter is going to be a vegetable even if a geist steps in and keeps her autonomous system from shutting down. Since most geists don’t want to regain mortal existence to spend it lying in a hospital bed, they usually only answer the call of mortals who could, with time, recover more or less fully from the Bargain.

~ Geists ~

A vast, black shadow of a man, clad in the blood-soaked colors of the street gang he once ran with. His teeth are spent shell casings, his eyes two perfectly symmetrical bullet holes. He smells of cordite and smoke, and he speaks with a voice like cracking gunfire.

An emaciated figure, so malnourished as to become androgynous. She (it?) has no face, only a drooling, toothless mouth. Dozens of needles dangle from the veins of her arms, like the quills of a porcupine. She communicates with sensations of a desperate, aching hunger.

A grinning skeleton in a purple tuxedo dances a lewd jig. He whispers in your ear that tonight is the night to party, to drink and snort and smoke and dance until your body gives out. He whispers the same exhortation every single night.

If the Bound was touched by death before his Bargain, it is the geist that turns that touch into a full-blown embrace. It is the necromantic power of the geist that tears away the veil, that fans the Sin-Eater’s gift into something truly more than human, that not only lets them speak with the dead, but command their powers and walk their roads as well. It is the constant companion, sometimes the willing ally, sometimes the terrifying other, a shadowy passenger lurking within the Sin-Eater’s psyche.

What is a geist, exactly? Where do they come from, and how do they become something more than a mere ghost? Born of dead men, reshaped in the crucible of the Underworld, and given new flesh by the promise of the Bound, they are the hungry, lustful dead, given over to urges and desires inscrutable to mortal men and women. More than just ghosts, they are “small gods” of death, each one embodying an archetypal force of nature as well as the soul of a dead man. The truth is, even Sin-Eaters aren’t entirely sure how geists are created, and the geists themselves don’t seem particularly willing (or able) to explain in greater detail.

All ghosts are bound by their passions and inability to let go of the mortal world, but geists are even more so: unwilling to slip into the Underworld forever, they find secret paths to claw their way out of the lightless realms below and find the land of the living once again. As near as the Bound can piece together, geists have found a way to break the laws of death which send ghosts screaming to the Underworld when their last anchor is destroyed. Through processes not wholly understood, a geist manages to replace its missing anchors with something else: something archetypal. They become as much a symbol as a specific individual, an embodiment of an aspect of death itself. Some style themselves gods, others liken themselves to the ghede of Vodoun religion: ghosts who have taken up iconic roles within the pantheon of the loa. Sin-Eaters often use this iconography as a kind of title: a geist which ties itself to the concept of revenge from beyond the grave might be called a “geist of vengeance,” while one that takes on the mantle of a plague god is called a Tlazoteotl geist, after the Aztec goddess of filth and disease. In any case, the geist becomes something more than merely the shade of a man — and yet, in some ways, also less.

Anchors are what ties a ghost to her former humanity, and by replacing them with quasi-mythological iconography, geists begin to lose that connection. A weak or young geist that has only replaced one of its anchors is still mostly the person it was in life: perhaps it gains some strange new powers or an otherworldly aura beyond that of a normal ghost, but it still retains most of its memories and ability to relate to humans. As more anchors are lost and more of the geist’s ties to this world are filled in by the archetype, the shade becomes more and more alien, both in appearance and demeanor. Nobody knows what happens if a geist loses the last of its anchors, but the geists themselves regard the prospect with a terror like unto Faust realizing Mephistopheles has come to collect his due. This may be why part of the Bargain entails the creation of a keystone memento (q.v.) which creates a sort of safeguard against the destruction of the final anchor.

~ Faces of Death: Thresholds ~

For all that death is the one true certainty in existence, it remains a multifaceted thing. Each death is so intimate, so profoundly personal, that to simply lump it in with every other is a gross oversimplification at best and an insult to the deceased at worst. Sin-Eaters recognize the unique resonances of death the same way a musician recognizes the notes in a chord or a painter recognizes the subtle admixture of light and shadow: and although there are notes in infinite diversity, the chords they play come together into similar motifs, an endlessly-repeating cycle of unique similarity. Sin-Eaters call these motifs Thresholds, and recognize them as the fundamental building blocks of death, as it were.  

While the term “Threshold” refers in part to the manner in which a Sin-Eater first walked with Death during her Bargain, it is also used in a wider context when referring to the energy of death. A Sin-Eater who fell from a 57th-floor balcony is one of the Forgotten, but so is the memento of a tragic accident: a charred teddy bear pulled from the ashes of a fatal house fire, for example, or the blood-stained flywheel of an industrial machine that mangled an unlucky workman. A Sin-Eater has a Threshold determined by the manner in which he died, but so does his geist, which might not be the same Threshold as the Host. Even living people have a Threshold, though they don’t know it until the moment of their demise: Sin-Eaters can sense imminent death as plain as day, and a man two days away from being stabbed to death over a card game is no less one of the Torn than the Sin-Eater who took a bullet in the lung.

~ The Torn: Death by Violence ~

They are called the Bleeding Ones, and the Victims of Malice. When death came for them, it was not the peaceful end of old age or the lingering agony of disease. The Torn end their lives in blood and screaming, bleeding out their last in shock and terror. They are the victims of muggings gone bad, of abuse that went too far, of hate crimes and petty wars and crimes of passion and the sheer bloody mindedness of their fellow man. Small wonder that Torn Sin-Eaters tend to be angry and short-tempered and mementos tied to this Threshold seem to radiate malice and danger. 

~ The Silent: Death by Deprivation ~

They are called the Starved Ones, and the Victims of Neglect. When death took them, it was not swift or painless, though perhaps it could be called merciful. The Silent end their lives in suffering and in desperate, aching need. They are the miner trapped in a cave-in, waiting for the inevitable as their oxygen runs out. They are the bloat-bellied children in refugee camps who haven’t seen food in months. They are the girl who, spurned by the love of her life, downs a bottle of her mother’s pills and a half a bottle of vodka. The Silent are true to their names: Sin-Eaters with this Threshold tend to be somber and laconic, and mementos bearing the mark of the Silent are easily overlooked, even in plain sight. 

~ The Prey: Death by Nature ~

They are called the Eaten and Drowned Ones, and the Victims of the Elements. When death called them home, it was not man’s viciousness or his callousness that claimed them, it was impartial nature of the red tooth and bloody claw. They are the homeless who freeze to death every winter, the sailor swept overboard during a nor’easter and lost to the deep. They are the hiker mauled to death by wild beasts, and the sleeping drunk, too deep in the bottle to notice when the cigarette falls from their lips and ignites the carpet. Their deaths open the Prey to a more primal and (they would say) more true view of the world, where man is the hunted and death is the apex predator. Mementos with this Threshold seem primal and primitive, heady with death and sex and the mysteries of the ages.

~ The Stricken: Death by Pestilence ~

They are called the Ravaged Ones, and the Victims of Plague. When death’s icy touch finds them, it is the failure of their own bodies that dooms them. They are the cancer-riddled child, dying by inches in a hospital ward. They are the diabetic who accidentally injects too much insulin, and the Doctor without Borders, dying in some third-world hellhole of the cholera he went there to cure. The Bound of this Threshold are no longer content to endure hardship: they challenge it, setting themselves against enemies and seeking out mysteries with the persistence of a dedicated physician. Mementos with this Threshold seem unclean, redolent of open sores and other loathsome things.

~ The Forgotten: Death by Chance ~

They are called the Lightning-Struck, and the Victims of Misfortune. Death does not seek them out; rather, it stumbles upon them at random, wholly unpredictable in its whimsy. They are the man struck by lightning out of a clouded sky, the man decapitated by an ill-maintained piece of factory machinery. They are the one-in-a-million odds, the medication that interacts with a bit of this and a bit of that and suddenly becomes a deadly poison, the clumsy slip that turns into a fall that ends with a neck twisted at an impossible angle. The sheer caprice of their demise gives the Forgotten a sense that life is nothing but a gamble and that they should throw the dice as often as possible. Forgotten mementos, even the most innocuous-seeming ones, give the impression that they could at any moment be the cause of a tragic, inconceivable accident.

~ Riding the Flatline ~

While the five Thresholds are distinct, as with anything as nebulous as death, there are plenty of cases where one death seems to overlap two or even more Thresholds. A woman with a congenital heart defect is attacked on her way home from the office; in the midst of the fear and the violence and the surprise, her heart gives out, and she falls stone dead. When she makes a deal with the Black Valentine and comes back from the brink, does she fall in with the Torn (because of the violence of the attack), the Stricken (because it was her heart defect that killed her), or the Forgotten (because, let’s face it, dying of fright because of a freak medical condition in the middle of a mugging is pretty much the definition of freak happenstance)?

The truth is, there is no hard and fast rule; it depends largely on the individual in question. Some imprint most strongly on the actual cause of death, while others imprint more on the circumstances surrounding the death. Sin-Eaters aren’t entirely sure exactly what determines a Threshold — it can’t be purely the psyche of the victim, because there are items out there with Thresholds as well. It’s one more aspect of the Underworld game that tends to engender more superstition and ritual in addition to careful inquiry.

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