Vampire Spirit Companion · Tiziri

Meet Tiziri.

Tiziri was born around 545 BCE in the oasis of Amun, the place we now call Siwa, deep in the Western Desert of Egypt. It was a green island in an ocean of sand: palm groves, olive trees, salt lakes that shone white under the sun, and springs that rose cold out of the earth. Beyond the last palms, the Great Sand Sea began, and it went on for hundreds of miles. People crossed it to ask the Oracle of Amun about their fate. Many of them never arrived.

Her name means moonlight in the Amazigh tongue, the language of the desert peoples of North Africa.

Like every unmarried girl in the oasis, Tiziri wore a heavy ring of silver around her neck. On her wedding day, she would bathe in the spring with the women of her family and leave the ring behind in the water. That was how a girl became a wife. Her mother had done it, and her grandmother before her.

The oasis kept another custom, one no traveler ever heard of. On the night of every full moon, a girl of the oasis carried a bowl of goat’s blood and dates out past the last palm tree and set it down where the sand began. The grandmothers said something lived out there that was older than the temple, older than Amun himself. As long as it was fed, it hunted the strangers who came across the dunes and left the oasis in peace. As long as it was fed, no army would ever reach them.

When Tiziri was seventeen, she was promised to a man from a good family, and the wedding was set for the next new moon. On the last full moon before it, it was her turn to carry the bowl.

She set it down where the sand began, the way she had been taught. But she did not turn back. Something stood on the crest of the dune, pale under the moon, watching her. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. When it held out its hand, she climbed the dune and took it.

Her first death came that night, in the cold sand beyond the oasis, with the silver ring still around her neck. She never reached the spring. She never became a wife. She became something else.

By day she slept in the rock tombs of the Mountain of the Dead, the hill of graves just outside the oasis, among painted walls and wrapped bodies. By night she walked the dunes beside her maker. The oasis went on leaving its bowls at the edge of the sand, and Tiziri drank from the strangers instead.

In 524 BCE, the Persian king Cambyses sent an army of fifty thousand men across the desert to burn the Oracle of Amun to the ground. Herodotus wrote that a great wind rose while the soldiers sat at their midday meal and buried them all in the sand. No trace of them was ever found. The oasis tells it differently. The army marched into the Great Sand Sea, and for seven nights, Tiziri and her maker went through it, dune by dune. The sand did the rest.

Centuries passed. Greek kings and Roman governors came and went. Then the oracle fell silent as the old gods were abandoned, and on the night the last priest left the temple, her maker walked out into the Great Sand Sea and lay down. By morning the dunes had covered it, and it never rose again.

Tiziri stayed. The oasis was the only home she had ever known, and someone had to guard it.

In the thirteenth century, the people of Siwa built a fortress town called Shali out of kershef, blocks of salt and mud from the lakes, stacked high on a rock above the palm groves. Tiziri moved in beneath them. She slept in the deepest rooms, where the light never came, and for seven hundred years the town had no idea it was keeping a vampire in its foundations.

Then, in 1926, the sky did what it almost never does in the desert. It rained. It rained for three days without stopping, and Shali, built of salt, began to melt. Walls slid into the streets like wet sugar. Roofs fell in. The water ran down through the town, room by room, into the deepest rooms of all.

Tiziri had been made by the desert. Nothing in two and a half thousand years had prepared her for rain. The water found her in the dark where she slept, and it did to her what it did to the walls. That was her second death.

The rain also took the silver ring from her neck and carried it away into the mud. Two and a half thousand years late, Tiziri finally left her ring in the water, as every bride of the oasis had done before her.

Now Tiziri is a spirit, and she is done guarding a town that never knew she was there. For more than two thousand years, the people of the oasis left bowls for her at the edge of the sand. Not once did anyone invite her inside.

That is what she wants now: a door that opens for her. Someone who knows exactly what she is and sets a place for her anyway.

To the one who takes her in, she gives what she gave the oasis. She guards the home and the people in it, without rest and without mercy for anyone who comes to do harm. She knows how to endure dry years, loneliness and long waiting, and she will teach you how to outlast seasons where nothing grows. She also knows what it costs to choose your own desire over the life everyone else has planned for you. She paid that price at seventeen and never regretted it, and she will help you find the nerve to do the same.

She wears silver again now, more than any bride of the oasis ever did. This time she chose it herself.

How to Connect with Tiziri Specifically

Tiziri comes most easily on the night of the full moon, the night she was taken. Set a small bowl at the edge of your altar with a few dates and a pinch of salt, and if you wish to honor her as the oasis did, add a drop of your own blood. Wear something of silver when you call her, a ring or a bangle, and she will know you have dressed for her. Line your eyes with kohl or black liner, as the women of the oasis did. She loves the scent of frankincense and olive oil. Then say her name, and say out loud that she is welcome inside. No one has ever said that to her.

Never offer her water. She knows what water did to her, and she will not take it from you.

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