A revenant, she’d said to me with such a palpable shame upon her voice, as if it were the most damnable thing she might’ve told me! Revenant, the word echoed around in my skull, and yet I found absolutely no significance in it, though I was sure enough that it must be something terrible for the way she apologized for it!

  An errant spike of pain wracked my chest, but it was so much lesser than its earlier siblings that it did not at all detract me from my mission for meaning! But I could not just ignore it, so I placed a hand on my chest to steady my breaths, and I shakily pushed myself onto my feet, although my ribs protested my rise, and they saw my spine hunched in their spiteful remembrance of the pain I’d so recently been assailed with!

  The bed was not far from immediately beside me, and so I forbade that these insignificant torments should prevent my reaching it! I forced my back straight, even as a searing agony enveloped my ribs for their disobedience, and I unsteadily marched myself over to our bed with my head held high! My bones just creaked inside me, but I gave them no ear as I gingerly lowered myself down upon our covers, and my body naturally resolved itself to sleep as I made complete contact with the bed.

  I was weary, for my day had been long and trying, and this entire unlife I’d been ‘blessed’ with was at the heart of why. My eyes shut themselves as I lay upon my pillow, and every breath I took brought in my Arianna’s scent again. Although she was not truly gone: I still so terribly missed her physical presence, and my arms naturally sought her out to no avail.

  In life we had been together just so often as we could be, but I never knew just how much I’d relied on those small moments of privacy I’d had from her… and I never knew just how necessary it was for our love that I could feel her hair in my fingers. My outstretched hand grabbed into the partner pillow to mine, and I aspired to envision that it was her who I held in my hand instead… but try as I might: I could not trick myself into actually believing that I lay there beside her!

  Regardless of my want for her and for sleep: I could not forget the word she’d said, for my mind whirred away despite its wretched tiredness. Revenant, I’d heard that word before, I was sure of it, but from where? It was a type of undeath, of this I was certain… but it wasn’t particularly common if memory served.

  My beleaguered mind jumped at the shadows of all the undead monsters I’d ever known, of ghouls and liches, of vampires and rusalka, of the shtriga I’d heard tell of this very morning, and none of them had the qualities of a revenant. 

  Even the lich that my Arianna had become had registered a few notable entries in history, such as Koschei the Immortal — who once ruled a distant land to the east with a golden fist — and I was sure that her name would rank high among them in the future! Notable examples of villainous creatures were usually not so troublesome to remember as revenants were becoming for me; ghouls might be easily enough identified through Caesar and his Legion, and notable vampires simply had to start with Miguel Torres, for he still lorded over the Deadlands when last I’d heard! 

  If any notable revenants had ever existed, then it was a wonder how they managed to so completely elude me! I was near enough to asking my dearly departed to clarify the word when at last my mind arrived upon the phantom memory of a near-Ancient text which depicted the foul presences they’d had to contend with in the early days of their end, and it was such a dreadful scrap that I was forced to speak in disgust!

  “Who was it, Rianna?” I growled to her with as bitter an edge as had ever been in my voice, for I very well knew why my symptoms so differed from that which had been documented of ghouls! I was not sustaining my state’s degeneration through the human remains I’d gorged myself on: I’d been devouring the vestiges of their very souls to repair the damages that had been dealt to me!

  A chill ran down my spine as the journals of those first survivors of that Ancient devastation came further into my mind, and I had to shudder as I remembered still more of their desperate documentations; enough of them had ended in mid-observation that the gravity of the catastrophe they must have suffered was clear to any who were so fortunate as to see even a copy of them… but my Arianna still hadn’t answered my unspecified question, so I more purposefully charged her,

  “Whose life did you mean to exchange with mine? Who was meant to be consigned to oblivion in my place?!”

  She withstood my ferocious inquest, but I could feel her wincing with my every word. I tried to wait for her to delicately formulate an answer for me, but my patience was not nearly so vast as it once was, and so shouting soon erupted from me,

  “Of all the vile undead on Earth and in Hell, Rianna… and you chose to make me a revenant? Are you insane!? Does my solemn oath mean nothing to you?! I swore to do no harm, and you may as well just see me dead now, for I will not break it!”

  Tears fell from my eyes like rain in a storm, and my voice broke with despair as I struggled again for air. I put my hand back over my chest, and I forced myself to take great blubbering breaths, as I could not trust my involuntary breathing to do the job while I was so upset! A fit of terror had assailed me but minutes before, and I was not at all ready to risk another one!

  For a great while we remained in that unspoken emotional armistice where I wept, and she affected an unending shame from inside me. It was all that I could do to secure my breathing amidst my sobs, but I pondered what a creature she’d wanted to turn me into, and the more I thought of it: the less I understood why she had done it! I had to know, and just as soon as the hiccups let me go: I would find out!

  “Why a revenant, Rianna? Just... how were you expecting me to react?” I’d recovered just enough to earnestly ask her, but all the while after I’d delivered my question: she was silent. This was a strange quiet that came from her, for it felt as if she’d already determined that she would accept whatever judgement I came to without her explanation! But what explanation could be worse than not knowing at all?!

  This utter readiness she’d affected — for the feeling that came from her was one of nonchalance in the face of my endless and overwhelming fury, and it seemed from her bracing that she’d felt entirely prepared to endure whatever punishment I might’ve meted out to her! — brought me steadily again to anger. Did she really think that I would let her defer this through omission alone?!

  So hot and terrible was the scope of the emotion that pressed upon me that it was like a mountain of molten wrath bearing down on my shoulders! Even strengthened as they now were, they could not withstand the sheer weight of the contempt I had for her uninspired attempt to leave me witless and oblivious to the truth only she could provide me with!

  I shook so, for I could not well contain the rejection that arose in defiance of her clearly intentional maliciousness, and though I fought to constrain the explosion of resentment that gathered inside me: I failed to withhold it for so long as even a handful of agonizingly drawn out seconds, as had become a common occurrence in my undeath!

  The deeprooted pain which had consumed me with a deluge of liquid fire shortly bubbled out from within me, and when it made to impose itself upon her as well: I was not even remotely inclined to stopper its sulfuric outpouring! This bile was a substance born of righteousness, and its formation was so completely justifiable that I very consciously rather exacerbated the concentration of vitriol it had meant to direct at her silence,

  “Was it not enough that I must bleed the living and sup upon the bones of the dead, but you would have had me commit murder as well?! Is there no desecration that you will not sink to, Princess Arianna Stella?!”

  No matter how a person might’ve prepared to be kissed by fire: it must always burn their skin on contact. As the flames of my bitterness licked her: I could feel her recoil and blanch within me, and she affected such an aching disgust and sorrow as she there reeled! To have been at once called by the whole of her given name, status, and Clan origin was such an unnatural detachment from my speech of decades, and she could not have possibly imagined my inflicting it upon her in castigation!

  She’d rent such a wound in my trust in intentionally preparing to resurrect me as a revenant! Of all the terrible undead in this world — of all those unnatural creatures that had come into my earlier considerations — the revenant undead are such a contemptuous existence that the formation of a lich or a wraith are lesser evils by the objective truth of how they must be brought into being!

  Blood sacrifice is necessary for a revenant to enter this world, for they must slay a target of their vengeance, or they will be forever banished from even their afterlife! Their souls are destroyed in total upon failure! I had not even considered that I should be one of their kind, for I’d thought my Arianna to be above engaging in such an impure practice!

  Clearly, I did not know my beloved so well as I’d once thought, as for her to do this to me was entirely outside of my reckoning of what a person of her character might have done, but she’d finally strained to rise from the blow I’d dealt her, and I was shortly presented with her voice which now carried an edge of steel,

  “I’d meant for you to live, Mira… I am not my uncle: I cannot just bring someone back because I want to! Yeah, it was absolutely selfish of me, and I am sorry that it came to this, but a revenant was the closest I could do to having you back and whole, I mean… assuming you’d perished.”

  My teeth ground against each other, and hateful tears just rolled down my cheeks in a cascade! What a rotten rationale my beloved had presented to me in place of a real justification for the madness she had forced into me for the sake of my Godforsaken skin! Had my own lover exchanged her veritable reason for such a selfish insanity as to make my flesh bear the barest pretense of life?!

  As if the undead and the alive were ever so interchangeable as that! We were not meant to walk on this same Earth that we once knew! We are an abomination of the Lord’s works! Any unholy aspect she might’ve formed up from my skin, bones, and corrupted soul would have been an affront to His kingdom… but a revenant was far worse than any of these foul mockeries of life’s function!

  “But what of the cost, Rianna?! Did you think that I would simply accept this?”

  Arianna affected such a cluelessness at my first rhetorical question that I’d quite faltered from the elongated rant that flowed in my mind. It couldn’t be that she didn’t know, surely? She was by far the more studiously educated in spiritual matters than I, and there was no possibility that she hadn’t accounted for the negative elements that were necessarily associated with revenants! 

  She certainly wouldn’t have let me experience such a thing, and she’d had so long to deliberate over what it was that she’d wanted to chain me to unlife as that there was simply no angle she might have left uncovered, as I was too precious for her to risk in the slightest! Thankfully, she shortly showed me where the fault in her understanding lay,

  “What cost? We already killed the man who killed you: you ate his corpse for God’s sake! So there’s obviously no target of vengeance then! You’re alive, Mira! Just with some… new quirks.”

  How very wrong she was, and over such a fundamental issue that I had to groan as my heavy head left its pillow for the sheer ludicrousness of this situation! It was so like her: she’d had every advanced and intricate detail covered by a dozen failsafes and redundancies, and yet still she would miss such a basic step! 

  Oh, if only she hadn’t done this so very underhandedly: I might have caught this stupid inconsistency that she’d left in her reasoning, and it might have otherwise prevented her from committing such an absurdity as raising me as a revenant! I truly hadn’t expected her to have been so unobservant of such an obvious detail, and I soberly indicated it to her,

  “Rianna, a revenant seeks vengeance upon the person they blame for their unjust death. The soldier only killed me, and while I cannot say that I enjoyed the experience: I am not one to ascribe condemnation upon a tool for its master’s works!”

  The clarity of the situation expanded for my Arianna in three stages. At first, she was befuddled, and I could feel tiny feet racing all around my heart as she tried to get a pulse on just what I was implicitly suggesting. Then the ants stopped all at once, as she’d finally come upon a conclusion that suited her, and it was followed by such an excitement that it bordered on dangerous as she spoke her deduction to me,

  “Mira, are you actually saying that you thought the decrepit old creep was responsible?”

  How fortuitous it would have been for my beloved if that were only the case, for our vengeances would have then been in alignment, and I very well may have broken my vow — if only to protect my son and the remaining children from her father’s further impious behavior! Really, the matter of culpability is one far better judged by a person who can wholly blame any one individual for any one thing they might have done… and thus a person very much unlike myself.

  But if there had to be one culprit for our death, and they were to be decided by me, then it was not at all unlikely that the Cardinal simply did not merit such a position of responsibility! No, that crowning achievement went to a far higher power, but as I was firmly unwilling to lay the faults of man at the Lord’s feet: the onus therefore fell upon the person who could have most affected our destiny.

  “It’s worse than that, Rianna.” I said to my lover, and I made a considering pause there as I checked that my breathing was stable, before I elucidated my inner workings to her, 

  “His Holiness should have stopped the Cardinal long before it came to this.”