Thoughts about the Draugr...

[IamLEAM1983]

I've been on a bit of a Norse binge with The Northman and Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and I've come to realize a few important things about Magnus Haraldson's past...

What's clear is that Lilith and Aldergard did definitely meet, or else the Draugr wouldn't have organized in the way they have. As it stands, the Draugr are a vampire bloodline of guardians and wardens, their Blood-mandated quirk is the need to stand guard for something - either a concept, a person or something else that strikes them as noteworthy and noble. They've ritualized their deaths and currently are willing to keep prospects hooked up on billions of dollars' worth of Paradise tech if it means they'll survive an otherwise-implausible trip back to Orkney and Dragon's Peak, which is the only place where they're allowed to die as mortals and be reborn as Draugr. If you're Marked, they see you as fated to join them. They won't let you die on purpose and they'll save you if they can, but if their seeresses give them obvious signs that the Norns intend for you to die in one specific upcoming fight, then they'll let you know in advance, so that you know you've temporarily lost their support.

If you survive that fated fight, they'll honor you and ask you to choose. You can be freed from your Mark and forever be known as friend and brother to the Draugr - which in their minds means you're fated for Valhalla. If you die, as mentioned above, they'll deploy state-of-the-art tech and knowledge to ressuccitate you in order to prepare you for Orkney.

Aldergard was a huge influence on them, maybe moreso than Lilith, in that he established his Keepers by slauthering Norwegian Vikings who'd sailed for Orkney with intent to pillage the Isles - only to keep their slaves alive and take them under his wing. His initial plan was for a living bloodline of Keepers, but meeting Lilith and being shown snippets of the years to come changed his mind. The circumstances being what they were, Lilith would say she didn't curse the first of these men and women to undeath, but instead blessed them with honor for their greatest sacrifice; seeing as joining her means they all forsook Valhalla, all hopes of common mortal vengeance.

So, Magnus Haraldson never did go a-viking like you'd expect; he'd been a Norwegian woodworker and shipwright who'd been taken hostage and sold as a slave to a rival chieftain. He'd been branded, had seen his wife and children slain, and he'd been saved by what probably seemed like a ghost-ship packed with apparitions sent by Hela herself.

The Draugr keep a longhall, they line its tables with food and decorations every single night, but it's for their guests and Dragon's Peak's employees. The eldest among them were former slaves, so if you spot a number of Scandinavian or Slavic names in old Abolitionist records, chances are some of these dessicated vampires helped people like Harriet Tubman or Abe Lincoln. Every night, they stand vigil while the castle's living employees and guests share a common feast. They have a little ritual where showing a mark of bondage or fealty can "convince" one of them to break away from its post and join you at the table, where they'll drink blood from closed tankards to avoid upsetting others.

They might seem staid and, well, more than a little dry to most, but they have stories about wronged Draugr whose thirst for blood turns impossible to sate, and who'll hunt down whoever wronged them and poison the life of their descendants in any way they can. That gives them their own seidr or magic, but they see it as being inherited from Lilith and being extremely dark in nature. If they have any hope to safeguard the soul of the mortals they once were, Draugr who seek vengeance have to claim it within their target's lifetime. If you're a Draugr and turn to seidr, your soul is seen as having been lost - as you're now a spirit of vengeance ensconced in undying flesh. Draugr that still have a soul all have the same glacial-blue eyes, and those who've lost theirs are eyeless, only able to see in the Shadowlands. The Sighted keep a close eye on the Sightless, deep in their underground necropolis, and kill off any one of them that starts to accrue too much power. They've heard stories of Blood Warlocks passed on through generations all the way through to the earliest days of Civilization, of people like the Hyperborean sorcerors - and know that seidrmadr without a target can't be counted on to remain sane.

Nowadays, the Draugr are much more cosmopolitan than they were a few generations ago. You'll spot blue-eyed and dried-up West Africans in their numbers, along with Asian and other European descents - with a fair few British and Americans, now. In any case, joining them officially means you won't be trusted with a weapon again until you speak at least one Scandinavian idiom and can answer in one of its older forms, if called to flyt or to join a warband in a ritual. You'll have been made aware that the training is absolutely grueling, that it would break lesser men - but that it's designed as such to break death's hold over you. Weapons training, martial arts, rhetoric, cyberwarfare - there isn't much that Aldergard's Keepers haven't touched or dabbled in over the centuries, the end-goal being that even the oldest of all Husks knows its way around a smartphone and remains proficient in any occasion - no matter if it's a sword duel or a hackathon treated with all the seriousness of an Iron Age holmgang.

As for actual holmgangs, these still can occur on occasion. A Draugr can still be lured in by false promises, become convinced that there's honor and duty to be found in pursuits that endanger the rest of Dragon's Peak and the villages beyond, and the soldiers've had to deal with traitors before. If the offender was stopped after costing the clan, a duel to the death can be arranged. The only way they know to reliably kill another one of their own is to destroy their heads, but they just won't allow anyone to take up a sniping perch and take them out incognito. They could, and a lot of younger Husks regularly make suggestions in that sense, but almost everyone from Magnus' generation tends to refuse pistol or rifle duels. There's only honor, as far as they're concerned, if swords, hammers and shields are involved.

In very rare occasions, a Marked ally who's set to die of something less than honorable, like cancer, can extraordinarily call for a holmgang against themselves, in order to go out fighting. When that happens, the Norns are always consulted, to see if felling that candidate in ritual battle is grounds enough for induction in the bloodline.

If they've managed to sustain someone long enough for the Blood to be passed on safely, they put on a full Scandinavian funeral wake for that person. Turning someone into a Draugr has less immediate effects than with other bloodlines, so the person appears to plainly die. They'll then entomb them, expose the bier in the upper levels of their necropolis, and keep a Death-Maiden on watch. Eventually, the new Draugr rouses and is bound to make enough noise to be heard from right next to the tomb. The Death-Maiden frees them, offers them their first meal of blood, and then entrusts the stripling to a Breaker.

Draugr are reborn stiff as corpses, and some of the earlier ones sometimes have trouble unclenching their fists or letting go of whatever it is they're holding. This is where Breakers come in, as they're very literally charged with surgically pounding on their kind's fresh striplings with a sledgehammer. The head's always avoided, for obvious reasons, and any more delicate joints are typically handled by hand, like a chiropractor would. Thankfully, Draugr have an extremely lowered pain response, where wounds that would probably make someone else squeal in pain or pass out just feel - weird. Feed a Draugr enough blood, however, and they're said to turn frighteningly agile - some of them being almost supernaturally good at freehand climbing. It's part of why they tend to feed so sparsely, in order to turn some of their strengths into known factors that are difficult to precisely measure.