A Year and A Day: Rusalki

Changeling: the Dreaming

Homebrew Rules

Character Creation Guide Download: Rusalki.pdf

Quoth the Rusalki:

(Winter) “Hey there, pretty boy! Come give us a kiss! I promise you won’t regret it as long as you live!”
(Summer) “Hail mortal, I thank you for the bread and milk, and pray your fields are as full as a Goddesses’ bosom.”

Kith Excerpt:

To some mortals, the Rusalki were beautiful and benevolent goddesses of the primeval waters who irrigated the summer crops with their magic. Ancient daughters of rivers and lakes, they would bless good farmers and sometimes even take them as husbands. To other mortals, the Rusalki were jealous virgin ghosts hellbent on coaxing young men into their icy rivers and dragging them down, down, down to the dark depths. These Rusalki were considered old ghosts of young women. They were bitter at having died a virgin, or having died unbaptized, or being slaughtered by a weak-willed lover after discovery of her carrying child. Each scenario is as bitter and dark as the last, but the angry revenant spirit to come back is lusty and vengeful and murderous in a way they never were in life.

In many ways, both were right. The Rusalki are an all-female Plemya (Kith) of beautiful water-maidens. Not quite ghosts, and not quite Goddesses, the misinterpretation is due to their fickle season-based Natures. During the Summer Months, the Rusalki are Leto (Seelie) – warm and benevolent, with a disposition as sunny as the warm skies above. These were the interpretations of crop goddesses that mortals celebrated. Yet during the winter months, the Rusalki are Zima (Unseelie) in the worst sense, cold and callous and hungry with lusty murderous intent. Their smiles and hearts are icy hard, and they do absolutely drag mortals down into the cold depths of their waters.

Flavor

“Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.”
― Anatole Broyard, “Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir”