I woke already in the ground. I knew that I ought to have been terrified, to be frightened that I might die in my coffin, and yet I was calm. In my very depths, some part of me felt assured that I would emerge from the ground, and return to my home, and see my husband, and all would be well.
As I clawed my way through the wood of the coffin, and burrowed by body up out of the ground—my lungs burning, my fingers bleeding, and my eyes blinded by dirt—something else stirred within me. It was… I can only call it a conviction that there was something I had to do. Something I absolutely had to do. But I could not remember what it was, or why I had to do it. It was like a name forgotten, one you are certain will return to your memories at any moment. I put it out of my mind, and, finding myself in the churchyard outside my village, I hurried home with only the light of the moon to guide me.
When I got there, I found my husband with another woman… another wife. “Where have you been?” he cried, and then, “Is it really you…” He hesitated, and I saw it then: he was older. He had aged, even in the time I’d been unconscious. There was grey in his hair, and lines on his face. How long had I slept? Why had I not woken sooner?
Then he answered my question for me, his voice shaking as he whispered, “But you’ve been dead for ten years…”
The Revenant is an alternate PC race for our campaign—a replacement for the demi-humans we won’t be using.
Though it is undead, it’s not a “revenant” of the sort that’s traditional in D&D—another flavor of undead antaognist, that is. The PC revenant is undead, and it is driven by some unfulfilled impetus that drove it in life: to protect a loved one, to finish a project, to save a village, to destroy a specific enemy, but that vengeful impulse doesn’t define the revenant one-dimensionally.
