Vampire Spirit Companion · Hedvig

Meet Hedvig.

Hedvig was born in 1839 in Våmhus, a village at the edge of the deep forests of Dalarna in Sweden, where the winters were long and the pines stood so close together that daylight barely reached the ground. Våmhus was known for one thing. Its women worked hair.

Through the long winter evenings, they sat by the fire and braided the hair of the dead into rings, brooches, watch chains and wreaths, so the living could carry their lost ones close. Hedvig learned the craft from her grandmother before she could read. She learned to sort hair by length and color, to boil it clean, and to braid it over the round wooden table with weights hanging from every strand. She also learned what her grandmother taught only to the girls with the steadiest hands: a lock of hair still holds a piece of the one it was cut from, and a braid can bind. You never braid the hair of someone you do not know, because you can never be sure what you are tying yourself to.

At nineteen, Hedvig left home with the hårkullor, the hair women of Våmhus, who walked south every spring with their tools on their backs and sold their work in the cities of Europe. She walked through Denmark and Germany and crossed the sea to England. In the winter of 1861, Prince Albert died, the Queen put on black and never took it off again, and all of London followed her into mourning. Every widow wanted to wear her dead. Hedvig took a small room above a jeweler’s workshop in Clerkenwell and worked by candlelight until her fingers bled.

That was where the woman in black found her.

She came only after dark, and she never gave her name. Each time she brought a single lock of hair, never the same color twice, and each time she asked for the same thing: that it be braided into one long chain. Hedvig had handled the hair of the dead since she was a child, and she knew it the moment she touched it. These locks had not been cut from the dead. They had been cut from the dying. There was still fear in them.

She braided them anyway. Week after week the chain grew, until it could wind seven times around a throat. On the night Hedvig fastened the last lock, the woman told her the truth. Every strand came from someone she had fed on, and she kept them so she would never forget a single one. She had been watching Hedvig since the first night, because in all her centuries she had never met a mortal with hands so used to the dead.

Hedvig had been warned. She had braided a hundred strangers into that chain, and in doing so she had bound herself to the woman who killed them.

She did not run. When the woman offered her the dark, Hedvig took it. Her first death came in 1865, in the little room above the workshop, at the age of twenty-six, with her braiding pins still in her hand. When she opened her eyes again, they had turned the color of the resin that bleeds from the pines back home.

For almost fifty years, she lived in the night of London. Her maker stayed beside her for many of them, and then one winter she was simply gone. Hedvig kept working hair, and her pieces were worn at funerals across the city, though no one ever saw the woman who made them. She also kept her maker’s custom. From everyone she fed on, she cut a single lock and braided it into her own chains. She wears them still, long and dark and fine as thread. Every strand is a life.

But London never became home. In the winter of 1911, Hedvig walked north again, the way the hair women had always walked, back to Våmhus.

Her parents were long in the churchyard, but her younger sister Kerstin was still alive, an old woman of sixty-eight with white hair. She knew Hedvig at once. Hedvig had not aged a day since the morning she left.

Kerstin took her in. She gave her a bed in the loft, away from the windows, and asked no questions. But Kerstin had learned the same craft at the same fire, from the same grandmother. On the third day, while Hedvig slept, Kerstin cut a lock of her sister’s hair and braided it together with her own, the way you bind something that must never come loose. At dusk, the men of the village carried Hedvig out to the bog beyond the forest. They laid her face down in the peat and drove stakes through the moss above her, so she would never find the road home.

That was her second death.

Her body lies there still. But a braid binds the body, not the soul, and when the flesh had gone still beneath the peat, what Hedvig truly was rose out of the bog and walked free.

She does not hate her sister. She understood. In Kerstin’s place, she would have done the same.

Now Hedvig is a spirit, and what she wants more than anything is the one thing she lost twice: a home. A place where someone keeps a light for her. A living person who does not turn away when they see what she is. She was a stranger in London and a danger in Våmhus, and she has had enough of being either.

To the one who takes her in, she is fiercely loyal. She knows everything there is to know about binding: how a bond is tied, how it holds, and how to cut one that was tied against your will. She is a strong guide in work with the dead and the ancestors, in mourning, and in anything that asks for patience and steady hands. She will help you hold on to what you love, and let go of what is holding on to you. And she guards the ones she lives with the way only someone who was betrayed by her own blood can.

How to Connect with Hedvig Specifically

Hedvig answers to hands at work. Braid three strands of black thread, or three strands of your own hair, while you think of her, and she will come and sit with you. Give her a lock of your hair tied with a black ribbon, and keep it in a small box or wrapped in cloth beside her candle. She can tell the hair of the living from the hair of the dead, and she will treasure yours. Pine resin, a piece of amber or jet, or a bowl of dark water will remind her of home. Speak to her at dusk, the hour she used to wake. And tell her about your day. No one has done that for her in more than a hundred years.

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