Sunniva
Sobriquet: The Wolf-dancer, Sunniva - means gift if the sun in ancient German, ironic since she turns with the full moon.
Appearance: Sunniva is a Nordic beauty, although born to a Saxon family, there can be little doubt that one of her grandfathers was a Norseman who came to her village in the act of viking. Regardless, her flawless and milk pale skin tells the tale and none can have any doubt after looking into her arctic blue eyes. At first glance one would call Sunniva little more than a waif, for she stands just short of five feet tall and probably weighs one-hundred pounds soaking wet. Her face is faintly vulpine in shape and her small breasts accentuate a sinuous athletic body born to dance and to hunt. Although not originally trained to dance, Sunniva has found a novel and superior grace since her first turning and she now serves as the understudy of Salome, the Wife of the Serpent. As a dervish, Sunniva is quite popular and regularly receives gifts and offers of affection from admirers, allowing her to maintain the lifestyle of medieval merchants wife or one of the less nobility. Her clothing and jewelry reflect her opulent lifestyle as she possesses numerous dresses, fine cloaks, rings, necklaces, baldrics and jeweled daggers. Her prize piece of jewelry is masterfully worked wolf's head medallion that she prominently displays upon her bosom.
Behavior: Despite her air of frigid indifference, Sunniva has always been a woman of intense passion, even before her turning. Since her transformation her hungers have all grown in intensity, whether it be for food, sex or dance. The beast inside her ever seek for release and even in her dreams she transforms to hunt through surreal landscapes.
History: Born in Wifilisburg, of peasant stock in 1080 A.D., Sunniva grew up the youngest of seven children. She never knew her father for he died of a rotten gut the same year she was born. Sunniva's mother had her hands full raising seven children while trying to work a farm and not long after she remarried. Sunniva's stepfather was a much younger man than her mother, hard working, but inexperienced with children. Quick with discipline and light on love, Sunniva's stepfather wasn't what the family really needed, but her mother exhausted from carrying the load of two medieval parents did not really care.
As a young girl growing up without the love of a good father-figure, Sunniva never really knew what she was looking for as she searched for in the form of male affection. Like all the children of the village, she was required to spend some of her time learning the basics of her faith and found a sympathetic soul in the old village priest, father Sigiward. The kindly old priest spent an hour or two everyday with the village children teaching them about Christ and the Church of Rome. But as often as not, the old man was a glorified babysitter who saw the children of the village as his grandchildren and took good care of them all. But when Sunniva was nine, the old man died suddenly in the night and for a time the village was without spiritual leadership.
Then Frater Eadweard arrived from a distant village and took over Sunday sermons, catechism and confession. At first everything seemed fine, the monk was fatter than the old priest, but everyone liked him and he had a way with the people of the village. In the year of Sunniva's birth, several daughters had been born to the village and these girls quickly took to playing together when not performing chores. In the year following Frater Eadweard's arrival, a number of these young girls passed through their first menstrual cycle together -- becoming young women, at least in the medieval mind.
Almost immediately, the goodly Brother began to pay extra attention to these young women and the villagers so used to the excesses of attention provided all the children by the old village priest thought nothing of it. Within months all the girls were becoming ill, not eating, having nightmares and irregular courses. Frater Eadweard quickly diagnosed this as the influence of the devil, perhaps even witchcraft. It had never occurred to anyone in the village that one of their neighbors might be a witch, but the charge kept the villagers watching one another and not the Brother. Eadweard took each of the girls in hand and personally exercised the demons within them, but upon returning them to their families he demanded that they all come to him once a week for blessing to ensure the evil spirits did not return. The good Brother tracked the evil back to an old crone who lived at the edge of the village and she was exiled from her home never to be seen again.
For Sunniva, as for each of the other girls, this was a hellish time. Frater Eadweard often broke sweat ensuring the evil spirits did not return to possess the girls and when he smiled at them it was different than when he smiled for everyone else. It was during this time that Eadwulf, the huntsman's son began to take notice of her. They exchanged glaces in church, and on the village common or where ever they might chance to meet one another. Over the next year, Eadwulf brought her small gifts, leaving them where she would find them and sometimes they would meet in the woods while he hunted or swim in the nearby lake. Unlike the other villagers, Eadwulf did not seem to think there was something wrong with her and dismissed her possession as a fever of the church.
When Eadwulf came to her stepfather and asked for her hand it was good news from every front. It was well known that Eadwulf was a skilled hunter from a well respected family, her marriage would lighten the load at home, she would marry a man she adored and Frater Eadweard would no long touch her. A small dowry was arranged and the wedding set for Winter-Night, but Eadwulf created hard feelings in the village when he spurned Frater Eadweard as the holy man at their union, something that secretly pleased Sunniva. Instead, Eadwulf invited an elderly priest from the next village to perform the ceremony and while everyone attended, many were angry including the good Brother. Yet Eadwulf was a man of commanding presence and not afraid to break with local tradition if it suited him and his beautiful new wife.
On her wedding night, Sunniva finally understood what Frater Eadweard had actually been doing and although she was not disappointed with her new husbands efforts, she could not be satisfied for all the rage that boiled up inside her at the lecherous Brother. Sunniva's honeymoon was longer for Eadwulf's desire to please his young wife and as he made-love to her, she plotted her revenge against Eadweard. Sunniva and Eadwulf's first year of marriage passed quickly as pleasant things do and then the strange pageant arrived. Never before had a traveling pageant stopped in the little thorpe of Wifilisburg, barely three hundred souls and country peasants at that. Many wondered why such a group of skilled entertainers and their odd collection of beasts and freaks would want to entertain simple country folk, but nothing so exciting had ever happened before in the little village so no much cared to ask.
Eadwulf took Sunniva to the pageant and they saw its many wonders and they were impressed, but something else, quite different happened to Sunniva. As she and Eadwulf watched each of the shows late into the night, she began once more to nurse her revenge against Eadweard. It was as if the strange fortune teller knew what the filthy Brother had done to her and the other girls and in the guise of offering her advice on receiving justice, she set Sunniva on the road to revenge. The next morning Eadwulf was gone hunting and she woke to a cold bed and with angry thoughts like spiders skittering in her head. That very afternoon she sought out the other girls as they washed clothes in the river and spoke to them of exposing the foul and false holy-man. But now that Sunniva had found a good husband, the other girls wanted the same and if the Brother was exposed then the shame of what he had done to them would ensure they never had husbands and none of them wanted that to happen. So they pressed Sunniva to keep silent on their behalf, and they could know happiness too. It wasn't an unreasonable request, and Sunniva struggled to stick to the agreement when she had all winter to watch the dirty Brother looking at the younger girls.
That winter was a cold one with heavy snow and the pageant was trapped in the valley below the village until the spring thaw. It was a long, bitter winter the end of which everyone looked forward to with the return of warmth and greenery. One night, a few weeks before the Spring equinox, a brilliant light lit up the top of Beacon Hill and then was gone. It had happened in the darkest hours of night before dawn and the shepherds who attended their flocks on the hill came back to the village in the company of strangers and everyone was sick.
The village elders fearing plague wisely placed the strangers in an old unused house at the edge of the village and sent for a healer. But nothing the healer could do seemed to held the strangers or the shepherds who had gone blind. It was then that Brother Eadweard began to talk of witchcraft once more which stirred some of the villagers up, while others remained uncertain. It was the pageanteers who settled the matter when their leader, a massive black-man spoke on behalf of the the strangers saying that the pageant had healers who could cure this illness and there need not be bloodshed. The village elders were pacified and the shepherds where given into Mauritanus' care. The others seemed to be healing on their own and the fear spread by Eadweard dissipated like fog in the sun, but not before his treachery incensed Sunniva once again and she confronted the other village girls a second time. Things did not go so well however as each of them told her they would call her a liar before the village if she attacked the reputation of the monk.
Sunniva was blind with rage when Æthelred found her, quietly in the shadow of the church, he told her
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