Karl Draugr
Karl’s fourteen-hundred years old. He’s from so far back he didn’t even have a second name – he is what he is, Karl the Draug. He’s from Scandinavia. A trader, not a raider. Karl has a nice thatched hut somewhere, smoked kippers on the stove and the warm arms of a loving wife to come home to at night. Frigga, her name is. He won’t ever talk about her much, but when he does, you listen. Hair like honey-mead, he says, and eyes like sapphires.
Then, one day, whilst Karl sits by his fire, eating his kippers and dandling his newborn daughter on his knee, the door opens. A black hooded figure from a neighboring village. He throws a harpoon-spear through Karl’s chest and pins him to that wall. As he bleeds out, slowly, the hooded man cracks his baby girl’s skull against the edge of the firepit, and rapes Karl’s wife to death as he thrashes against the spear. He’s still watching as the light goes out of his eyes. Per istam Sanctam Unctionem indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid deliqusti. Amen, though the Christian faith had never reached him.
Its three days before his village mates find him in the snowstorm, and a full week before he’s back out of the ground. Praise be to God they don’t burn him in his ship, because he’s back angry. The hooded man is nowhere to be found. He crosses half the northern countries on foot, looking for him, hunting for many a year. Following that sense, the tickle in the back of the brain that screams “I’m over here.” That one you’re feeling now.
Karl gets close. He’s so close now the smell of the hooded man is filling up his nose and mouth. He can hear his heartbeat. His fingers twitch as he strides closer, and closer and closer.
Then he sees a little village girl drowning in a lake. She thrashes and struggles, and Karl thinks of his own kid, lost to him forever. He breaks off from the path, just for a moment. Dives in and pulls her out. Puts her back on the bank, shakes the water out of her lungs with his blue hands, and he turns to flee. But by then it’s too late. The hooded man is dead, killed and left to rot for nothing more than what he was carrying. If that is not divine intervention, then I don’t know what is.
Karl, of course, ascribes the issue to an entirely different source, but I remind him that God has a plan. He works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.
Karl’s trapped here now. Has he told you what happens next? Warned you? About the sleepless nights where the Devil fills you up and demands that you kill? The sweet temptation, worse than any bodily lust you’ve ever felt?
He has? Well, good. It’s so much more than you can imagine.
Karl resists it.
We’ve each got our reasons for resisting, those who you've met today, but Karl has nothing but his sense of right and wrong. He’s not even filled with the light of the Lord – he’s one of Dante’s virtuous pagans, and its only that belief in what is truly just that gets him through those nights.
Karl can’t take it. He knows that he has to do something, or the lust will overtake him. God willing, you’ll never see a revenant that’s become like that. But he can’t trust himself. He won’t kill a man, even one who deserves it, because he knows if he starts he’ll never stop. That’s why we have the Rules, you see. It’s not because Karl hates killing. It’s because he loves it too much.
I have my own rules, of course.
Karl spends the next fourteen-hundred years wandering. He finds the guilty, he proves their guilt, and he brings them to earthly justice. Unearthly justice awaits them elsewhere. Can you imagine what its like? Working to catch the blackest of the lost sheep, and bringing them in unshorn? And for a man whose culture permits and sanctions murder as a man’s proper work?
And now here he is. Criminologist and detective before there were words for such things. Learnt martial arts and forensic sciences. Hunter. Chaser. Avenger. For fourteen hundred years. He did this for so long on his own, until we found him, and he found us.
