✖ o death

[whip_poor_will]

The Sacraments ▸

The Emanations’ powers are not infinite. They require a certain level of insurance to maintain their vigor.

In this case, they need a sacrifice.

The Sacraments were a series of rituals carried out by a cursed bloodline. Ritualistically, they become victims of the Entities, in which they are carried into Limbo: A spiritual edge between life, death, time, and space. There, they are hung on a cross, where a Psychopomp would usually commence tearing out their eyes and disemboweling them. It is part of the ritual to keep the victim alive during all of this, until their blood is fed into the Tree of Limbo. It’s until their blood is spilled into the tree when the ritual is over, killing the victim, and feeding them to the Entity after experiencing great suffering.

However, Ravine is capable of carrying out the sacrifice without having to perform a ceremony. She can also absorb the curse, so that the sacrifice does not need to be taken as victim to the ritual. She did not realize this, however, until the death of Naomi Spijker.

A cursed victim will develop a mark at one point in their life, representing the Tree of Limbo. Most of the time, it develops as a faint spot on their left shoulder, and darkens the closer it is time for them to be sacrificed. Toward the end, the scar grants the victim great pain and a number of hallucinations.

The Sacrifices

The Wolfgang Family: Descendants of a German lineage way back in the Medieval Era. The earliest known sacrifice happened in the late Fourteenth Century, but sacrifices have been going on for much longer than that. While those in the past considered the sacrificial ceremony an honor, the Wolfgangs see it as a family curse.

The Moss Family: Descendants of an Irish lineage. After the Wolfgangs settled on the Colonies, their bloodied fate coalesced with the Mosses, solidifying a type of bond with the curse. After this, the two families resorted to incest in order to avoid the curse from spreading to other families by arranging marriages of cousins and second cousins.

Yseult Arnwolf (late 1300s): First known sacrifice in the Wolfgang family. Was also a serf serving a British duke during the Medieval times (any family before that didn’t really have a recorded name, assuming that they were mere servants of the estate’s feudal lord). She was killed at the age of twenty. Said to have been tending the fields at her master’s estate in southern Germany when one day she mysteriously vanished.

Helene Arnwolf-Wolfgang (early 1400s): Youngest daughter of Yseult, and married a wealthy duke of the Wolfgang family to escape the lower class lifestyle. From here on out, the Wolfgangs were known to have both power and money. Despite this, Helene was haunted by her mother’s disappearance and believed she had been murdered. She often had delusions and in her final days was known to be a bit crazy. At times she was mistaken to have been possessed by demons. Regardless, Helene gave birth to many children before her eventual disappearance.

Unlike Yseult, however, Helene’s body was found in the forest, cut with holes in her hands and feet and her eyes torn out. Her husband did not remarry, and died shortly after her undoubted murder, leaving their eldest son and daughter to care for the family assets.

Adele Wolfgang (middle 1500s): Had a very caring older brother who tried sparing her from the curse that fell upon their two great-grandmothers. Because her brother was a skilled hunter, the Dumah decided to cut a deal with him and claimed that if he killed a Psychopomp, they may be able to skip Adele.

Although she was temporarily spared by the Dumah, her dear older brother failed to carry out his task to kill the Psychopomp. Ultimately, Adele was sacrificed by the Dumah. The Psychopomp took no part in this ceremony.

At the same time she and her brother had been suffering in southern Germany’s peasant uprising, which had involved one-hundred-fifty years of religious conflict. After Adele died, her brother went missing and became a victim of the Sacraments.

Unknown Sacrifice (middle 1600s): Having their estate ruined in the central Europe’s Thirty Years War, the Wolfgang family moved from their homeland in Germany to hide out, and eventually ended up in a developing colony in New Hampshire, while some of their family split off into Connecticut. There, they unite with a Native American tribe, and later converged with an Irish family, the Mosses. It was after this that the blood between the Wolfgang family and the Moss were combined with the curse, but because they did not know whether or not if the curse would spread to this family, it wasn’t yet a concern.

The sacrifice during this time was a little girl who fell off the boat while the Wolfgangs were heading over to the Colonies, where she was abducted by the Dumah and later a victim of the Sacraments, and was found dead in the river by some townsmen. She was mutilated beyond recognition.

Alice Moss (early 1700s): Next generations of Wolfgangs and Mosses are considered people of the Colonies by this time. This would-be sacrifice was a woman who was suspected of being a witch, and was forced to flee her hometown of Windbridge, Connecticut. However, she was later met with a Psychopomp, who ferried Alice into Limbo, where she was sacrificed.

Because the suspected witchcraft was believed to have something to do with the curse, incest was involved between the two families in order to avoid the curse from expanding beyond their family bloodline.

During this time, Vincent woke up and was housed in an late 1600 village, during the Connecticut witch hunts.

Elizabeth Moss-Wolfgang (middle 1800s): Befriended the Psychopomp, Ravine. However, she eventually died of tuberculosis by the young age of eighteen. Ravine stayed by her side until her last breath, but refused to carry out the Sacraments when the girl died. The soul of Elizabeth was ripped away by a Psychopomp named Maia, who fed the human to the Dumah. Ravine, however, would never participate in another sacrifice again.

Elizabeth once lived on the newly established Wolfgang Family Estate, built by her father in Larkspur, Louisiana. Her mother, a Moss, had died during the birth of her daughter. Elizabeth’s father, a Wolfgang, remarried to his second cousin and continued the kinship on his side of the family, and was later killed in the Civil War.

Naomi Spijker (1995): A distant cousin of the Wolfgang and Moss family, whose bloodline got mixed somewhere among the years. Naomi was chosen to be the next sacrifice. Coincidentally, Vincent -- the closest and only relation to the Psychopomp by bond -- had shared a friendship with Naomi before discovering her ancestry. Distraught, Ravine tried to protect Naomi for her brother’s sake, but failed once again thanks to a being serving another Entity, Grayson Ambrosi. Grayson’s actions led to the downfall of the Dumah and the rise of the Asbeel.

Though at the expense of her brother’s friend, this incident allowed Ravine to realize that she could absorb the curses and make the sacrifices obsolete. This caused the Asbeel many problems, as they struggled against the reapers and required souls to thrive.

Naomi Spijker is considered to be the last of the known sacrifices.

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