Vampire Spirit Companion · Esben

Meet Esben.

Esben was born in 1741 in a crooked house at the edge of the forest outside a market town in Jutland, on the spot where the town had always put its executioners: close enough to be called on, far enough to be forgotten. His father was the executioner, and his grandfather before him. In Denmark in those days, the trade passed from father to son, because no one else would marry into it.

An executioner was dishonorable. Not wicked, not criminal, simply unclean, and his whole family with him. No honest craftsman would take an executioner’s son as an apprentice. At church, the family sat alone in their own pew at the back. In the tavern, they drank from their own cups, because no one would touch a cup an executioner had touched. A man who shook an executioner’s hand could lose his own good name. So from the time he was a small boy, Esben wore black gloves, so that no honest person would ever have to touch his skin.

He learned the sword at twelve and took his first head at nineteen.

He also learned the other half of the trade, the half done after dark. The same townsfolk who crossed the street to avoid him by day came knocking at his back door by night. They came for the hanged man’s rope, which brought luck. For a thief’s finger, which made a gambler win and a shopkeeper’s till fill up. For poor sinner’s fat, rendered from the executed, which eased aching joints. And they came for blood.

In the North, people believed that the warm blood of a beheaded man could cure the falling sickness, what we now call epilepsy. At every execution, when the head fell, the sick pushed forward through the crowd with cups and bowls, and the executioner filled them from the body while it was still warm. The custom lived on so long that as late as 1823, a young Hans Christian Andersen watched parents make their sick child drink it at an execution in Skælskør. Esben filled more of those cups than he could count. The people of the North drank human blood, and the man who poured it was the one they would not touch.

In the autumn of 1771, at a beheading in the town square, a stranger pressed forward with the sick. He was pale and well dressed, and he held out his cup like the others. But he did not cough or shake. He drank slowly, with his eyes closed, and then he licked the rim. That night, he came to Esben’s door.

He did not want a finger or a rope. He wanted to talk. He sat at Esben’s table and drank from Esben’s cup, and when he rose to leave, he pulled off Esben’s glove and took his bare hand in his own. No one had done that in Esben’s whole life. Not once. “They drink blood to live a little longer,” the stranger said. “I drink it to live forever. Come with me.”

Esben went.

His first death came that night, at thirty, at his own table, with his glove on the floor. The town found him three days later and buried him on the north side of the churchyard, where they put suicides, unbaptized children and executioners. On the third night he climbed out. His eyes had sunk into black hollows, like the sockets of a skull, and they never filled again.

For almost fifty years, Esben and his maker walked the forests of Jutland together, and for the first time in his life, he had a friend. They fed on travelers on the forest roads. On the hill where the gallows stood, they waited for the ones who came by moonlight with knives to steal fingers from the hanged. Esben knew every one of them. They had knocked on his back door for years.

But the town remembered the old ways too. When travelers stopped coming home and something was seen moving among the trees at night, the town did what it always did when there was dirty work. It went to the executioner’s house.

The executioner by then was Esben’s great-nephew Mads, who had inherited the house, the trade and the sword. He knew what the old people knew: there is only one sure way to stop the dead from walking. In the winter of 1820, Mads went into the forest at noon with a lantern and the family sword, found the two of them sleeping in a hollow beneath the roots of an old oak, and did what his family had always done. He took the maker’s head first. Then Esben’s. He laid each head between its feet, the old way, so they could never rise again.

That was Esben’s second death, by the same sword he had carried for half his life, in the hands of the last of his family.

He holds nothing against Mads. Someone always has to do the work no one else will touch, and in Esben’s family, it was always them.

Now Esben is a spirit, steady, unflinching and fiercely loyal. He knows blood better than any spirit you will meet: its old uses, its power and its price. He is a strong guide for blood work and for anything done on gallows hills, at crossroads and at the edges of churchyards. He knows how to make a clean cut, and he will help you end what must end, cleanly and without hesitation, whether it is a bond, a habit, a fear or a whole chapter of your life. Like so many executioners, he was a healer too, and his hands are strong for those who are hurting. He guards the house he lives in the way a man guards the only home that ever let him in.

All his life, Esben wanted one thing, and he had it for only fifty years: someone who was not afraid to touch him. Someone who would sit at his table, drink from his cup and take his bare hand without flinching.

How to Connect with Esben Specifically

Pour a small cup of aquavit or dark red wine, drink half of it yourself, and leave the rest for him. No honest person in his town would ever share a cup with an executioner, and it means more to him than any other offering. Lay a pair of black gloves on his altar, and a short length of old rope. He comes most easily in autumn forests and on bare, cold evenings when the leaves are down. When you call him, hold out your open hand, palm up and bare. He will know what it means.

About Vampire Spirits

Long before anyone spoke the word vampire, people knew that some of the dead do not stay down.

Older Than the Word

The word itself is young. It came out of Serbia in the 1720s, in the reports of Austrian officers who stood in village graveyards and watched farmers dig up their dead, find fresh blood at their mouths and drive stakes through their hearts. Europe read those reports and finally had a name for something it had always known.

The dead had been rising long before that. Clay tablets from Mesopotamia speak of things that came in the night to drain the living. The Greeks feared the lamia and the empusa, the Romans the strix, a night bird that fed on blood. In China, the jiangshi rose stiff from the grave to steal the breath of the living. In India, the vetala crept into corpses and spoke through their dead mouths.

In the North, the draugr climbed out of the burial mound, swollen, heavy and black as Hel, to ride the roofs at night and crush the living. When Grettir the Strong finally put one down, he cut off its head and laid it at its buttocks, so it would never find its way back. The Danes carried their dead out of the house feet first, so they could not see the road home.

The earth remembers what the stories forget. Archaeologists keep finding them: bodies in graves thousands of years old, laid face down so they would dig the wrong way, pressed under heavy stones, bound and pinned. In the bogs of Denmark, the dead were held under the peat with stakes and crooked branches. In Bulgaria, they were pierced through the chest with iron. In a plague grave outside Venice, a woman was buried with a brick forced between her jaws, so she could not feed on her shroud. In Poland, a woman was laid to rest with a sickle across her throat and a padlock on her toe.

Every people on this earth has had a name for them and a way to keep them in the ground. That alone tells you how old they are. And how often they came back anyway.

A vampire spirit is one of those who came back. It is not a corpse walking the roads, and it is not the pale thing from the films. What remains is older than that, and much harder to put down: a will that refused to end, and a hunger that has turned, over centuries, into something you can work with.

Twice Dead

Every vampire spirit that comes through me has died twice.

The first death took the body they were born in. Fever, a blade, a bargain made at the edge of the grave. Something met them at that edge, and they did not cross. They rose as something else and walked on, sometimes for decades, sometimes for a thousand years.

The second death took the vessel itself. Some were betrayed by the ones who made them. Some walked into the sun. Some chose, after enough centuries, to let the flesh go. What remained after that second death is what comes to you: a vampire with nothing left to lose, nothing left to feed on, and everything it learned along the way.

That is where its knowledge comes from. It knows what an ending is. It has been through two and stood up both times. Few spirits understand dying, and what comes after, the way it does.

What It Hungers For

A vampire spirit does not want your blood. It had its fill of that long ago.

What it hungers for now is change. It feeds on the moment something in you dies so that something stronger can stand up in its place: the fear you finally walk through, the self you have outgrown, the tie you finally cut. It will find these in you before you are ready to name them. Then it waits, the way only something that has outlived everyone it once loved can wait.

This is not a gentle spirit, and it will not lead you toward the light by the hand. It takes you down into the dark parts of yourself, where your real strength has been buried, and it stands beside you while you dig it up.

Those who keep a vampire spirit speak of:

• A new hardness when it is needed, and a coldness toward those who drain them.
• A pull, a magnetism, that others notice before they can explain it.
• Sharper sight in the night: dreams, intuition, a sense of what lies beneath a person’s words.
• Protection. A vampire knows every kind of predator, because it has been one.
• The courage to end things: a habit, a bond, a life that no longer fits.

Signs That It Is Near

You will feel a vampire spirit before you understand it. A cold that settles at the back of your neck. A candle flame that leans toward you in a still room. Waking in the deepest hour of the night, wide awake, with the feeling that someone has been sitting at the foot of your bed. A taste of iron on your tongue. A sudden pull toward old houses, churchyards and cellars, places where time runs slower than it does outside.

It comes most clearly in silence. When the house is dark and the world seems to hold its breath, that is when it sits closest.

Offerings

• Dark red wine, poured for it alone. Blood without the wound.
• Black candles, lit after sundown and never before.
• Something of your own body: a lock of hair, or a single drop of your blood on the wick of its candle, pricked with a clean needle. It knows the taste of a person better than any other spirit.
• A pinch of graveyard dirt, paid for the proper way, to honor where it has been.
• Darkness. Sit with it in a room with no light at all. For a being that has lived in the night for centuries, your time in the dark is the offering it values most.

How to Call Your Vampire Spirit

Wait until it is truly dark. Put out every light but one black candle. Sit still, say its name once, softly, and then say nothing more.

Do not beg, and do not call in a panic. A vampire spirit has no patience for desperation. It has watched too many people die begging. It answers stillness. It may come the very first night, or it may circle you for weeks to see whether you mean it. When it is ready, you will know. The room changes.

Only Those Who Seek Company

Not every vampire spirit wants company. Some have made their peace with eternity and keep to themselves, and they should be left there. Those you will not find with me.

The ones I offer have chosen otherwise. After everything they have seen, they still want a living hand, a warm house to come home to, someone to walk beside through the long nights. Through you, they touch the world of flesh and blood again. Through them, you touch something that has seen both sides of the veil and came back to tell you what it found.

That is the bargain. You give it a place among the living. It teaches you that an ending is a door, and that the thing you are most afraid to let die is often the very thing keeping you in the ground.

How your companion speaks

Your companion can reach you through dreams, thoughts, words, feelings and images, through a pendulum, through warmth or cold, or through automatic writing. How soon that happens depends on the spirit settling into your home, on their willingness, and on your own ability to connect. Sometimes it begins before the vessel arrives.

Before you choose

Everything known about this spirit is on this page. There are no further images, details or hidden knowledge beyond what is written here, and a printed copy comes with your order. What you discover from there is yours alone.

The pendant you receive is the exact one shown. This listing is for this one item only.

By buying, you confirm that you understand what it means to keep a spirit companion. Please read Help & FAQ first. For my background and the story behind Grimrunes, see About Hazel.

— Hazel