Blix

Human / Monster Hunter

Submitted character story

You are a hunter who talks first and draws steel second, the kind who walked through the Blackfen because negotiation means surviving what force cannot. What brought you back was the voice that woke you at sixteen, the first of countless dead who would never let you rest easy again. Every spirit you call on takes something from you, a small death each time, and the grey in your hair came far too early. You are the one who makes monsters answer for the names they've taken.

Defining moment: This is the nature of being cursed. The Voronin family has always walked with one foot in the grave, and with one ear lent to those who've gone before them - Blix remembers it too well. She was sixteen the first time she heard a voice in her ear that belonged to no living man, and it came as quickly as her first breath that morning.

She'd startled from her sleep, eyes flying open only to meet a dessicated face lingering inches above her own. Watching. Waiting to see how she'd react. She'd known the day was coming - she'd seen it in the slow greying of her hair, in the way that things would seem *off* when she paid attention, sometimes. It didn't stop her from screaming. She didn't sleep again, that night - and very rarely did she see a full night's sleep any night afterwards, always tormented by the rotted faces and rattling voices that would shake her from her slumber with reaching, phantasmal hands and a strange, unholy insistence.

Over the years, she learned to listen: to heed the warnings of the spirits that would speak, and to watch for signs of the ones that wouldn't. She learned to ask them for favors - for assistance, sometimes, or for guidance. Never for free. Always to send them on a road to a better afterlife, if they were so inclined.

That curse - that knowledge of the dead, so intimate that it felt like her own small passing each and every time she called on it - was what drove her to hunt the things that crawled and bumped in the night. The things that weren't named. The things older than men, that would drag them into shadows and deep forests before they ever knew what was coming. It's what made her a monster hunter: after all, what good is the work you do if you hear more vengeful dead than hopeful living?

Already paid the price