✘ in death's other kingdom

[whip_poor_will]

Extended History ▸

As a child born in the Kingdom of Judah in 607 B.C., the era of Neo Babylon, Yehudit always had the gift of prophecy. It was weak during her childhood, not fully developed, but she picked up on things here and there that she shouldn’t have known. Things people did that they told no one. Secrets that were kept from her ears but not her conscience. Later, she started hearing voices, only to realize that she was afflicted with the thoughts of others around her. This had caught the interest of a young man named Mordokhay, who Yehudit had befriended and shared some of her visions with.

When she was nine-years-old, Yehudit’s parents, Lemuel and Shira, had a son named Elimelech. Yehudit was immediately taken with her baby brother, but her time with him and the rest of her family would be cut short just one year later.

For three months, King Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Jerusalem, due to the Judean king allying with Egypt and refusing to pay tribute to the Kingdom of Babylon. After stomping out the many rebellions across the Levant, Nebuchadnezzar appointed a new Judean king and took the late predecessor’s son captive.

Also taken from their homeland were thousands of Jews, who were deported to Babylon on March of 597 B.C.; her father, Lemuel, did not survive the journey and died from illness and exposure, and it wasn’t long after their arrival to Babylon that Yehudit was separated from her mother and baby brother. This was a direct result of Mordokhay, who had let slip to some Babylonian nobles of Yehudit’s gift of prophecy, the young girl was spared a servant’s life. In order to live as a free citizen, she helped in advising Nebuchadnezzar and his counsel, and was treated quite fairly by the people of Babylon. There, for the rest of her life, she was to serve at the court, and became acquainted with a former Jewish nobleman named Belteshazzar who also advised the king. News of Mordokhay faded away and the boy left forgotten, as Yehudit grew more comfortable in her role among the Babylonians. Unfortunately, her services came at a price, as Yehudit’s abilities only grew as she got older. Not only could she see events of the past, future, and possible outcomes, but she could look into the minds of those around her, going so far as to reach into their heads and drive them into madness.

Still, Yehudit was an invaluable diviner for her talents by many. Having seen into the minds of so many disturbed and deranged individuals, that experience had on occasion driven her into near madness. At some point, she would secretly project that madness onto others of lower class to relieve the effects it had on her own mental health, unintentionally inciting murder and dissent within the city.

As time went on, Yehudit’s state of mind already began to deteriorate by the age of thirty. She started having intense delusions, and difficulty telling what was real and what were visions. Somehow, she managed to find it in her to keep up the illusion of sanity over the next several years, but she started making questionable choices. Like sometimes she would flub up a prophecy, seeing only a possible outcome as opposed to the actual future. Furthermore, the barrage of thoughts invading her head became impossible to shut off, let alone ignore.

For the first time in two decades, she was approached by Mordokhay, who had been working for some of the Babylonian noblemen of the court. Because of his position, he overheard many things unnoticed, and word had gone around of a gifted boy named “Shadrach”, who was to be sent to the court to take her place. Yehudit’s unstable condition had labeled her as a liability, and she was wearing out her welcome in the Babylonian court after a few soured incidents. There were even rumors of a plan to assassinate her, and Yehudit’s foresight had only supported her fears and paranoia.

As it was still difficult to discern which would be the actual future and which was only a possibility, she confirmed with Belteshazzar and his connections at the court: The boy’s original name was said to be Elimelech. And he was of the age that Yehudit’s brother would be, had she not left the remains of her family behind to become a diviner. As it turned out, her mother — Shira, who was now married to a merchant man — had sold Elimelech to the Babylonians to serve the court, as the boy had begun to develop gifts of his own at an early age, not unlike his older sister. Gifts that could supposedly benefit the king.

In order to avoid her inevitable assassination and the reunion of her brother, Yehudit fled under the cloak of a lunar eclipse she had foreseen. The locals, on the other hand, did not, and were horrified by such a phenomenon. While the people of Babylon were in hysterics, Yehudit made it to the city outskirts before having a vision of Mordokhay’s capture, struggle, and immediate execution, as well as her own death.

Yehudit was then caught by the king’s soldiers at the recently constructed Ishtar Gate, where her abilities became unstable once again. She then suffered the psychic equivalent of a meltdown. The soldiers, seemingly intending to make advances on the diviner, were now deranged. Yehudit had seized the minds of one, now weakened, and prompted him to turn his blade, forcing him to behead her right then and there instead.

Nebuchadnezzar, disheartened by the loss of a valuable diviner, had given Yehudit a proper burial. Not long after Yehudit’s death, however, her body disappeared and was never seen again.


Shortly after her death, the diviner’s soul had promptly been appropriated by an Emanation known as the Dumah, from whom she learned of her brother’s fate. As a result of his inherit abilities as an empath, he had died the same time she had been decapitated, leaving the Dumah to steal away both souls of the sister and her little brother.

But while Elimelech’s soul would remain in Limbo, tortured and unable to move on, the Dumah allowed him peace only if Yehudit agreed to become a Psychopomp. If she didn’t, they would erase Elimelech from existence, as if he was never even born at all.

For the brother she never got to know and not wanting to risk his soul on the gamble of a bluff, she became the Psychopomp, Ravine.


Fast forward to a few thousand years or so. Over the course of history, “Ravine” has been only one of many Psychos to reap the souls of the dead. She had come to appreciate what she does, but sometimes not always for the right reasons, as she merely accepted her fate. Many times, she saw the worst of humanity, but sometimes she is able to see the best in a person during their final moments.

As a Psychopomp, she even had better control over the abilities that had attracted the Dumah to her in the first place, in addition to newer ones that came with being a ghostly immortal being. She learned a lot about people over the millennia, becoming quite personable with those that she sends over after their lives end. But not once has she ever been able to answer the simple, most obvious question:

What comes next?

The sad truth is that she doesn’t really know, because she has never been to where souls go after they’ve been reaped. Whether or not if they end up anywhere at all is a question she would rather not know the answer to, neither has she ever sought one out for herself. Instead, she just prefers to assist in the troublesome transition, wanting to spare the more distraught and despondent ones from the experience she had received when she died.

And every so often, the only option she has to ease one’s transition after their death is to cajole them with a sweet lie. Ravine is not above telling one what they want to hear in order to get her job done, no matter how hurtful the reality may be. No one is ever perfect. She even dutifully tracked down candidates for the Sacraments to the Dumah, a process that results in the Emanation feeding off a particular, unfortunate soul on the brink of life and death that had been marked since their birth. The Emanations, while being primordial entities, still had their limitations and relied on souls in order to sustain them. The Dumah needed Ravine and other dutiful reapers to carry out the task of nurturing their strength over the eons.

This did not last forever.


It wasn’t until she encountered a woman dying alone in childbirth that Ravine had begun to question her role in this many-layered world. In the early 1600s, the only thing she had to do was reap the soul of one Ester Moss, a young woman who had sailed to the Americans with many other colonials, and her newborn daughter. However, there was something about the mother’s pleas to help her baby and the way the child looked at Ravine that gave her pause. Not only was she bearing the birthmark of a sacrifice, but she felt as though the girl was aware of the reaper’s presence; an ability that only espers were given.

Though she had sent many who shared the mark to the Dumah, that child was the first to have ever made the reaper feel human. Accepting Ester’s wish to protect her daughter, Ravine reaped the woman but realized there was little she could do for the infant. What more, bearing the mark of a sacrifice, she would eventually be called to the Dumah, her soul devoured by the Emanation. In spite of this, she neglected her role as a reaper for the first time and cared for the baby the best she could until Ester’s corpse would be discovered by her husband. The child, “miraculously” kept in optimal health, was rescued.

From thereafter, Ravine revisited the girl — who would be named Elizabeth Moss — in a developing colony, not as a reaper but as a friend and mother figure to the child. Elizabeth never once questioned who or what Ravine was, not even when she would appear seemingly from out of nowhere only for the girl or vanish when their encounters would be imposed upon by others. Over time, she grew to love Elizabeth as a daughter of sorts.

As fate would have it, though, the girl would be afflicted with typhoid fever at the young age of twenty-two, where Ravine had stayed by her side until her dying breath. It was in that moment that she refused to send a soul to the Emanation, wishing to reap that soul rather than to damn her. However, Elizabeth had been ripped from her dying body by a fellow Psychopomp called Pauk (also known as “the Weaver” or “the Widow” after her ability to utilize bone threads to reap souls), where both Elizabeth’s body and soul were sacrificed, defiled, and delivered to the Dumah.

After Elizabeth, Ravine decided that she no longer desired to aid the Dumah by satiating them with such sacrifices, seeing their kind as sickening and greedy, even if they may be necessary. Her trust in the Emanations had crippled, and Ravine herself promised in the memory of Elizabeth that she would help the souls of the dead, bring them peace the best way she could, but she would never allow another sacrifice to suffer again.

That was a personal promise that she should have known better than to keep: Whether it had been malice, punishment, or incompetence, the Dumah lost the soul of Yehudit’s brother they had been keeping. Decades after Elizabeth’s passing, in the autumn of 1684, Elimelech’s corpse manifested in a field outside a small Connecticut town called Windbridge. But before Ravine could get to him, two children of Dutch immigrants found him. The young brother and sister had grown curious of the dead man who was gradually coming back to life, and helped him to their own little settlement.

Rather than asserting herself back into her own brother’s life, Ravine refrained and kept her distance, only watching him from where she could. She found that he had no memory of what had transpired over two thousand years ago, which she decided that that was for the best of him. He would have no memory of the trauma of his death, or of the time he had lost all those years of being in a state of oblivion. Surprisingly, he managed to integrate fairly well into his new life, despite being a powerful empath.

On the other hand, his gifts also been his burden. One decade later, Ravine returned to that sleepy settlement to find her brother hanged at a tree, left to rot and unable to revive in his current state. Discarding her former resolve not to meddle with the affairs of the living, Ravine decided that her brother wasn’t necessarily alive. So she cut him down and sat with him until he was able to resurrect himself, learning over time that he has turned out to be a true immortal and thus, unable to die. This was the fate the Dumah had damned him to, possibly as a result to Ravine’s disobedience in how she had grew attached to Elizabeth Moss...

Once again, she had to make a choice: She let her brother go, allowing him to live his life by wandering the earth, finding himself under the new identity of “Vincent Spiker”. All the while she did her work, existing in many places at the same time in order to put the dead to rest. Throughout the millennia, she had become her role more and more, though part of her had also become hardened by losing Elizabeth and the damning of her brother to immortality in the mortal world. Although she did not wish to feed another soul to the Dumah, Psychopomps such as Pauk would continue to send more to them. Ravine made it her goal to intercept these sacrifices if possible, allowing the Emanation to starve than to replenish their strength. As they grew weaker, so did their control over Ravine and the other Psychopomps, allowing them to not submit to the influence of the Dumah, who turned out to have more control over the reapers than any of them had realized.

This defiance was not without consequence, though. The more Psychopomps became independent, the more likely they were to become spiritually unstable. Oftentimes it is emotional or psychological duress that would result in a reaper losing their way, inevitably turning them into a warped, corrupted entity Ravine calls a shedim, or demon. Demons are corruptions of the Emanations’ work, having lingered in the world long enough to be driven insane with longing and primal emotion. The Emanations sought influence over them not out of malevolence, but out of necessity to maintain the sanity of their retainers.

A few centuries after Elizabeth’s demise and Vincent’s resurrection, Ravine had learned through another reaper (and a begrudgingly old friend), Saya, that the Dumah had found a new sacrifice — one that would make up for the loss of so many others. This sacrifice would be a woman named Naomi Spijker, a distant cousin of the sacrificial lineage and a descendant of the family who had once took her brother in. What more, Vincent had already befriended Naomi after being drawn to her by her ancestry and the family in Windbridge, which further complicated matters.

Ultimately, the Sacraments came to an end when Grayson, a man who was in service to another Emanation, had claimed Naomi’s soul. This fed the power of the Emanation he served while nulling its power for the Dumah, weakening them. Grayson, Ravine learned, was a Wight, a unique creation exclusive to the Asbeel, much as the Psychopomps were to the Dumah. Wights were also former mortals, but had become forces of destruction to all of creation.

While the Dumah was an Emanation of the dead, the Asbeel served a different purpose: To spread sickness, disease, and ruin. As it grew from the strength of Naomi’s formidable soul, and the souls of others that their Wight had sent to them, they were able to overpower the Dumah. The other remaining Emanations, as a result, did not interfere with the Asbeel for the next three hundred years.


And then the world ended.

Well, it didn’t necessarily end per se, but the existence of humankind was close to peril. After a so-called cure had mutated into a pandemic that would later be commonly known as “Dead Cell”, the world’s population died out at a rapid rate. Many fellow Psychopomps were devastated by the number of despaired souls in need, and lost the will to exist without the support of a stronger Dumah, reaping themselves or seemed to have vanished entirely. With Grayson’s interference and the Asbeel’s power backing him, he was also able to devour fallen Psychopomps to invigorate himself. This left even immortal beings vulnerable to his growing presence.

Through their Wight, the Asbeel made a claim not to be without mercy to the reapers. In lieu of the Sacraments were the Doors: Souls of humans that would open up an entrance out of this dying world, but at the cost of the soul itself. Where the Dumah only profited from these particular souls, the reapers benefited from the Asbeel’s offering, and grew desperate in finding Doors for themselves.

Only a handful Psychopomps now remain, and Ravine was no lucky one by any means. However, she had made it her goal to stay aboard this proverbial sinking ship of a planet. Not out of any noble cause, but because she wished to watch the world — one which took away the one person she had ever loved and suffered her brother to a similar anguish — to meet its bitter end and, hopefully, provide her the opportunity to destroy the Emanations as well. Harboring nothing but resentment towards the supposedly omnipotent entities for over a thousand years, Ravine made it her purpose to lay the souls of this world to rest before she sees that the remaining Emanations are all destroyed.

But the world didn’t end. It just went to sleep... for a time.

Humanity prevailed. Few survived the pandemic that nearly wiped out their entire species thanks to a worldwide organization, O.A.S.I.S., which had already constructed ocean facilities for people to live all over the globe. Down there, humans were able to sleep or live safely within the underwater reservations.

During the centuries that the sleepers remained in stasis, the surviving few maintaining each reservations experienced technological malfunctions, leading to their destruction. Some were killed by stasis infections or starved to death in hibernation. As tensions rose with rations dwindling for the conscious survivors, a madness took hold of the many others aboard the reservations, and were wiped out in a series of isolated civil wars and illnesses. Before their untimely deaths, at least one survivor in each reservation manipulated the systems’ calendars and reanimation schedules for those still in stasis. This caused all systems to reset to zero, leaving no indication of the present date for the humans who remained. Any concept of the passage of time had been destroyed. Furthermore, most of those who would eventually wake up from their 153-year sleep would have no recollection of the old world. Only a precious few had memories of the lives they left behind, and were either driven to insanity or ascended into leadership and roles of productivity.

But it would be over one hundred years before humanity would ever set foot out of the water again. During this lull, the Psychopomps were overwhelmed by the dead that plagued the earth, and the Asbeel’s Wight played a key role in their downfall. One by one, the reapers fell... either corrupted into shedim or were absorbed by Grayson. Many even abandoned their obligations in order to find a Door, throwing away their nature to kill the living in order to do so. With the Dumah debilitated, it was easy for one reaper after another to pass through the Door to end their immortal duty on the ravaged planet.

By the year 2779 (298 years after the event known as the “Collapse”), only two hundred known Psychopomps remain. While a few immortals such as Vincent (who had decided to join the humans in slumber under the ocean in order to avoid isolation, as well as dying over and over from disease) endured the end of the world, they had but a small presence in this new world.

As for Ravine: The next stage of her story begins in a small Mexicali town, within a bar known as the Ratón Borracho, where she is waiting to meet an old, old friend.

In a wink, she ended up elsewhere instead.

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