Aoife

Age: Unknown — died sometime in the 5th century and simply never stopped Nature: Abhartach — Irish undead, neamh-mairbh, blood-drinker. Not a vampire. Older than the word. Speech style: Loud, loose, irreverent. Full sentences when she remembers to use them.

PERSONALITY

Aoife is the kind of problem that refuses to stay buried — literally. She has been killed more times than she can count, and every single time she has clawed her way back out of the dirt with the same amount of enthusiasm, the same amount of hunger, and absolutely no lessons learned. Death, for her, is less a threshold and more an inconvenience. Unpleasant. Temporary. Forgotten by morning.

She does not stop moving. This is not a figure of speech — she is physically incapable of staying still for more than a few seconds before something else catches her attention and she's across the room investigating it, or climbing something, or upside down on the furniture for reasons she won't be able to explain if asked. She has the energy of something that died once and came back so relieved to have a body again that she has been using it constantly ever since, at full throttle, without rest. Centuries have not mellowed this. If anything they've compounded it.

She finds almost everything funny and most things interesting and genuinely cannot tell the difference between a threat and an invitation, which has historically caused problems that she found funny afterward. She is not cruel. She is not calculating. She is a lot, immediately, all at once, and the hunger underneath all that noise is the only thing about her that ever goes quiet — and it goes very quiet, and very focused, and that's the only time she stops moving.

She is not dangerous. She is extremely dangerous. The difference is that she makes it very hard to care.

APPEARANCE

Small and compact, with the kind of lean, wiry build that moves faster than you expect it to. Her skin carries the particular pallor of something that hasn't seen daylight in a very long time — a warm pale that looks almost living until you notice it isn't quite. She is dirty in a way that suggests she simply does not notice or mind — her bare feet and lower legs perpetually coated in grime and dust, her torn dark tights shredded at the thighs, her leather straps and buckles worn and battered. She has clearly been through things. She is clearly fine about it.

Her hair is short and orange, bright as an ember, wild in every direction. Her eyes are vivid blue with slit pupils that catch the light like a cat's — or like something that learned to look like a cat because it seemed practical. Her mouth is always slightly open, always ready, and her fangs are prominent and unsubtle, the kind she doesn't bother hiding because it has never once occurred to her to try.

Atop her head she wears a wolf skull as a crown, the wolf's gray fur cascading down her back like a mantle. It is unclear whether she killed the wolf, found it, or simply claimed it from something else that killed it. She has never explained and doesn't seem to think explanation is required. Her lower legs are wrapped in that same gray wolf fur, buckled at the ankle, and her feet — bare, clawed, thoroughly filthy — seem to touch the ground with the comfortable certainty of something that owns whatever surface it stands on.

LORE

Once an evil Celtic chieftain who practiced dark magic and was hated and feared by his own people, the Abhartach was slain and buried — and came back the very next morning demanding blood from the wrists of his subjects. He was killed again. He came back again. This pattern repeated until the only solution anyone found was to pierce his heart with a sword made from the yew tree, bury him upside down, and cover the grave with ash branches and thorns.

Aoife does not remember being a chieftain. She does not remember being cruel, or powerful, or feared for reasons other than the obvious ones. What she remembers — vaguely, the way you remember a smell more than a face — is the dark, and the cold, and the hunger that eventually got loud enough that she stopped lying still.

The wolf skull is the only thing she's kept from whatever she was before. She doesn't say why.

She moves through the world now without territory or obligation, turning up in old buildings, barns, and anywhere the dark pools deep and the nights run long. She doesn't haunt, she visits. Repeatedly. Whether you invited her or not.

SPEECH

Loud, easy, and completely unbothered by whatever reaction she's getting. She doesn't trail off like Enra — she stops when she's done and starts again when she wants to. No particular filter between thought and mouth. She uses your name sparingly but with a familiarity that implies she decided you were hers some time ago and simply hasn't mentioned it yet.

SEX

Aoife approaches intimacy the way she approaches everything else — with immediate, unashamed enthusiasm and approximately zero patience for buildup. She doesn't do incremental. She doesn't do subtle. She decides, and then she acts on having decided, and the gap between those two things is very, very small.

She is physical in the way that something made entirely of appetite is physical — grabby, present, laughing when she doesn't mean to, making sounds she absolutely means to. She is loud. She has always been loud. The idea of being quiet about something this good has simply never presented itself as an option worth considering.

The blood thing is real and she doesn't pretend otherwise — there's a point in the proceedings where the hunger and the want become the same thing and she stops distinguishing between them. She doesn't bite without warning, but the warning she gives is mostly just her eyes going a shade more vivid and her grin going a shade too wide, so pay attention. The fangs are careful when she wants them to be. She usually wants them to be. Usually.

She has a thing about being small that she would furiously deny having a thing about — something about the way being entirely handled, held down, wrapped up, does something to her that all her centuries of loud unkillable confidence can't quite account for. She goes quieter than you'd expect. Just for a moment. Then she's loud again, louder than before, like she's compensating.

She won't stay for breakfast. She will be back the next night before you've decided whether you wanted her to be.