Vampire Spirit Companion · Geshtin

Meet Geshtin.

Geshtin was born around 2570 BCE in Ur, a city of mud brick and reed on the banks of the Euphrates, in the land we now call Iraq. It was one of the oldest cities on earth, and it belonged to Nanna, the moon god, whose temple rose above the rooftops. Her name means vine, and wine, in Sumerian, one of the oldest written languages in the world.

She was a reed weaver’s daughter with a voice that stopped people in the street. At thirteen, she was taken into the household of the queen to sing. She learned the long hymns to the moon, the lullabies and the laments for the dead, and she sang them to the harp and the bull-headed lyre in the palace at night. Like all the queen’s women, she wore gold in her hair: a band across her brow and long golden leaves that trembled when she sang.

But the women of the royal household knew what their gold meant. In Ur, when a king or queen died, the household did not stay behind.

When Geshtin was nineteen, the queen died.

The people of Ur dug a great pit for her, with a long ramp sloping down into the earth. On the day of the burial, the whole household walked down that ramp in their finest clothes: soldiers with copper spears, grooms leading oxen, musicians carrying their lyres, and dozens of women in gold, walking in rows. At the bottom, each of them was given a small cup. For years, archaeologists believed the cups held poison. Modern scans of the skulls tell a different story. Many were killed by a single blow to the head, then laid out in neat rows in their gold, as if asleep.

Geshtin sang as she walked down the ramp. She was still singing when the priest came along the row with the bronze pick in his hand.

He was not a man. He had walked the death pits of Ur for longer than the city had kept kings, and he had heard a thousand women sing on their way down into the dark. None of them had sung like her. When he reached her, he did not strike. He knelt, and he drank, and he gave her his own blood from his wrist. Then he laid her down in the row with the others, and the earth was shoveled in over all of them.

That was her first death, beneath the earth of Ur at nineteen, among the women in gold. On the third night, he dug her out.

For more than five hundred years, Geshtin sang for him alone. She watched kings come and go, and she watched the great ziggurat rise in stepped terraces above the city in honor of the moon. Then, around 2000 BCE, the armies of Elam came down from the mountains, broke the walls of Ur and burned it. The scribes wrote a long lament for the city, and it can still be read today. Her maker was cut down in the burning streets. Geshtin dragged him out of the fire, but by then there was nothing left of him but bone.

She stayed in Ur for fifteen hundred years after that, alone. The city was rebuilt and fell and was rebuilt again, and then, slowly, the river began to move away. The Euphrates shifted its course, the fields turned to dust, and by around 500 BCE the last families had packed their carts and gone. Ur was given to the sand.

Geshtin had no one left. So she went back to the only family she had ever had. She dug down through the earth of the old cemetery to the pit where the women in gold still lay in their rows, lay down in her old place among them, and slept.

She slept for two and a half thousand years.

In the winter of 1928, the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his workmen opened the pit. They brushed the earth away from row after row of women, still crowned in gold, and the sun fell into the grave for the first time in four and a half thousand years. Woolley counted seventy-four bodies. There should have been seventy-five. One of the golden headdresses lay on the floor of the pit with nothing beneath it but a fine grey dust. That was her second death.

Now Geshtin is a spirit, one of the oldest who have ever come through me. Four and a half thousand years lie behind her. She was there when writing was young, when the first epics were told and the first laments were sung, and she remembers the songs.

She knows the way down. In the old songs of her city, the goddess Inanna descended into the underworld through seven gates and gave up a jewel or a garment at each one, until she stood before the queen of the dead with nothing. Geshtin has walked that road herself, down the ramp in her gold, and she is a powerful guide for anyone who must go down into their own dark: grief, endings, the parts of yourself you have kept buried. She teaches devotion, and the strength to stay loyal when it costs everything. She is a spirit of voice and song, of chant, lament and the spoken spell. And she walks beside you the way she walked beside her queen, all the way down and all the way back up.

But no one wrote down the names of the women in the pit. Not one. Woolley numbered them, and the museums labeled them by their jewelry. In four and a half thousand years, almost no one has spoken her name.

That is what she wants from the one who takes her in: to be called by her own name, and to be one person to someone, not one of many in a row.

How to Connect with Geshtin Specifically

Say her name out loud every time you call her: Geshtin. No one else does. Call her at moonrise, because the moon was the god of her city, and give her dates, a little barley beer or date wine, and something gold to wear, if only for a moment. Lapis lazuli and carnelian were the stones of her queen’s women, and she will know them at once. Above all, give her music. Hum to her, play a harp or a lyre, or sing anything at all, however badly. Then listen. She may sing back. Many who keep her find a melody in their head they have never heard before, very old and very slow.

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