Editing Xia: Revenant Stripling (section)

=Description=

When someone dies particularly brutally or painfully, it is possible that they will become a ghost. When that someone is a child, the ghost's sense of self is often so entangled with his or her physical form, that the spirit stays within the corpse, animating it and filling it with a gruesome half-life.

The revenant appears as an ordinary child, albeit one in the moments just after death. Its movements are stilted, unnatural and disturbing.

A revenant has the mind of a child, but the perceptions of one taken by hell. It views its surroundings as a terrifying nightmare of strange and hostile figures - it will lash out instinctively with its claws, more out of fear than malice, and will not respond to speech or attempts to communicate with it.

The only exception to this is when dealing with close members of its own family. Somehow the revenant will be reminded of the link shared in life, and will be almost protective of its relatives, and can even be comforted and directed by them.

Of course, being faced with the reanimated corpse of a beloved child is a horrifying experience, and many relatives will have their sanity broken by this unnatural and disharmonious relationship. The relatives will believe that the child is not dead at all, and try to act normally. This madness is what sustains the Revenant over time - if someone can successfully cure the relatives of their madness, and convince him to accept the child's death, then the very act of the relatives saying goodbye can lay the ghost to rest, and return the revenant to being nothing more than the body of a dead child.
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