❝But I guess you were like flowers in the snow, beautiful but cold.
Name: Seo Chwa Age: looks 25 but is 450 Species: vampire Lives in: Motel Occupation: none she takes money from her victims Affiliation: none
Family:
A daughter that died 4 centuries years ago, two sons with the same faith
Has 7-8xgreat-grandchildren, living descendants of her daughter, but has no desire to be in contact with them
Powers: aside from the normal vampire speed, strength and very heightened senses Seo does not have powers. However since coming to Greywood she has began to see sounds when she is well-fed and she can also smell different emotions, however cannot distinguish between them yet Hobbies: the only current way Seo fills her time is learning history and trying to understand the modern world. When she was human she enjoyed gardening and singing.
BEFORE:
Seo was born in 1573 to a family of farmers in the province of Gyeongsang-do, Korea. The first nineteen years of her life were what one would call normal for that time, working the fields to help her parents and siblings in the summers, staying at home in winters and being married off to a neighboring farmer family close to her sixteenth birthday. She had two baby boys and she would have been happy to have more had 1592 had not come. She had gone to her mother while her appa and her husband traveled to Busan to trade goods as the winter had been rough on their land. It was the sounds that woke her up, people screaming and clamor of fighting all around. With little thinking, she ran with her boys to her mother and they tried to run away. She had often wondered if they did escape north, herself being hit by a falling wooden plank from the burning roof of a building. Often she also wonders if it would have been better to die at that time, but wandering has not yet brought her peace.
Enslaved, dragged and beaten, used by soldiers while others had died in front of her eyes as she had awoken, Seo was moved with few others left alive to the coast south where the Japanese ships were docked. Where they went all that could be seen were burned cities and farms, the smell strong enough to make you vomit from hundreds of meters away.
Weeks later Seo found herself on a ship to Japan, trapped in the bottom of the ship, visited by men before and during the what seemed years long voyage. From there she was taken into an establishment where she spent the next 11 months used for anything, from simple chores given to her by matrons who owned the place to servicing different men in evenings. She had a small time of solace when she gave birth to a boy, taken away from her before she could give him a name. She thought of ending her life then, fearing that for the rest of it she would need to have this excuse of an existence and it would be better to join her husband and family now in the otherworld. She had no chance to do so. Her body having recovered from her pregnancy and having been put to more work, she found herself once again being dragged by men towards the place she had come from by the sea. And then it was another ship, no explanations, not understanding the language of either the Japanese or the white men that pushed her to the wall where she found herself chained in darkness with no way of moving or laying down. In the months the ship stopped on multiple ports, from some places only food was brought from others other slaves until at last she was almost thankful to be taken off the ship and onto solid ground.
She thought her life in Portugal would be the same as it had been, only twenty-one years of age she felt like she had lived twice as long. But at the docks she was motioned to follow a man in strange clothes, what she would later recognize as a suit. She was barely alive at that point but was happy to be taken away from the other women, hoping that maybe she wouldn’t be sent to any establishment. Finding herself in a mansion, far richer than anything she’d seen in her life, she was taken to be fixed up. After days of being kept in a room and being brought food, she was taken to a man with dark skin, as the ones she had seen being taken out of the ship, her hand was given to him and after that, she was his wife. Two years later she had a baby girl. She had begun understanding the Portuguese language, even learned some from her husband.
It seemed an idyllic life, compared to the year in which she had felt as if she were burning in hell. And one night she walked outside her room for water and crossed paths with her master, who owned her husband, and her and every other slave on this property. A pale man with stern features who took her to the inside the mansion where she was rarely allowed to venture, offering her a drink of what she thought was liquid love, but simply peach juice. Seo bowed to thank him and retreated to her bed next to her husband and daughter. And then the next night she woke, craving to taste that drink again, venturing out for fresh air, her master sitting on the porch. And a ritual formed, each night she would walk up to him and he would give her a drink, and months later she would often spend hours and he would teach her Portuguese while he learned her own language. She looked through maps of the world, amazed at the vast world and where her own home had been once - it seemed as far away to her as the moon was.
On what she thought might be her twenty-fourth year he kissed her for the first time. And in her mind, she thought that he was a master and she was his slave and he would only do what he wanted and then let her go. But he didn’t, he demanded that her husband and daughter move with her to the first floor of the mansion. When her babe wasn’t in her arms and her husband was out she was in his bed. Months later he bit her, drinking her blood with the same delight with which she had drank that first glass of peach nectar, kissing her and allowing her to taste the blood on his lips. In 1596, she had learned all he could offer her as information of the supernatural. Of the witches that lived throughout the land, the coven which helped him and made the charm for him which allowed him to live in sunlight. Of the wolves that he had chased away from the area of Lisbon. Of the sirens that lurked in some of the parts of the world that he had visited in the 400 years in which he had been alive. He spoke of the sweetness of the fae folk that were so hard to catch. Of the way life changed and how all was clearer.
And so, she begged her master to become her creator, to be just Maurin. And so… he did.
AFTER:
Her first night as a vampire turned too bloody. Seo remembers little of it, her vision red and discriminatory, her conscious coming back in the darkness of the basement with her crying daughter in her arms, both of their bodies covered in blood, the taste of it on her, the smell almost blinding her again. Six slaves had to be buried on the next night her own husband one of them. Maurin had prepared a ring that contained magic to allow her to walk into the sun and gifted it to her on her second night of immortality. She was feasting each night, her human emotions replaced. Fear had turned into anger, her sadness had turned into gleefulness with each drop that touched her tongue. A month into her transformation it was evident that Lisbon was too small for her and her appetite. Maurin ordered that trunks be packed and they travelled with carriage for weeks. Seo’s daughter, Betariz, named by her master when she was born, travelled with them, sleeping at most times, quiet with her doll, crying when awake. Where they passed bodies were left in buildings that were set aflame.
They passed through the Spanish kingdoms, and then settled for a while in the Kingdom of France. They kept away from politics and the court, as Maurin had done since he had been turned in 1066 after the war in England where he had been found dying on a field. They killed the lord of a chateau in a province that seemed far enough for anyone to miss, enjoying his lands and servants, fetching people from the nearby villages to devour. Almost a year passed before they had to leave in the middle of the night while the chateau burned, set alight by the people, afraid of the masters that had taken too many daughters and sons. By boat they reached the Papal State where the church was too quick to detect them. And so, their life was a constant move, until in 1610, thirteen years after her turn, the three of them boarded a ship to the new world.
The long voyage and the need for restraint finally allowed Seo to begin squashing the bloodlust in her soul and she spent most days gazing at the sea and sitting with Beatriz, who was now a young woman of sixteen. The next ten years of their lives were calm, with the help of their vampiric influence they took land in the English colonies and began building a mansion, the land around it one day becoming Dover, New Hampshire. Seo learned the language which Maurin had known since the time he had been a human, despite the differences in it. And all seemed well until Beatriz left their home for Albany, where she wanted to marry a man she had met while they had gone to a social event. The woman’s emotions went wild again and she left Maurin without notice, travelling by foot deeper into the lands. And that is when things went to hell.
Wrong place, wrong time, one might say, Seo had always thought it was wrong emotion, wrong victim. Stumbling over a village, hungry as she had not drank blood in a week, Seo thought back then that it would be a feast and then she would move on. But the occupants of the land turned to be a coven. And as they found her with her teeth in a young man’s throat, his life drained, they restrained her with magic and charms. Forever ends now, she remembers thinking for that night. But the wife of the man who had died decided otherwise. And while the vampire screamed and shouted, fighting invisible hands that dragged her further into the woods, chanting started. Thrown into a hole in the earth, a cave half filled with water and bats as companions, Seo was let go but could not leave. She spent days in darkness, screaming. And on the full moon, at the mouth of the cave, the witches set a spell, which made the air shine, a bowl of blood placed into the territory that Seo could walk out in.
If she were to have even a drop left into the bowl once three full moons pass she would be free. If not, she would be kept there until someone willingly goes inside to her and helps her get out. And so she was alone with her thoughts and her never ending hunger. The first two weeks was bearable, while the bats were still not too afraid and she left the bowl full. The second half she had a sip once a day before realizing that it would not be enough. And in the middle of the third month… well the last drop fell on her tongue. And so, she could not leave. Months on end were spent pacing the cave, hoping that Maurin would find her. Months were spent thinking of her daughter, the only child she had known truly, regrets of the way she had made her live. And then her body started giving in the hunger, shutting down. It took time, but when six full moons had come and gone she could not move an inch, her eyes closed as it took too much to be able to open them. A pose of seeming peace and comfort on the uncomfortable stones until she seemed one of them.
She isn’t sure when she was taken out of the cave or how. From documents she had found it seemed like a man had been exploring the woods and stumbled onto the vines that covered the entrance of a cave and inside it he had found a statue of a naked woman, sleeping. This statue had sold at an auction and then her owner had displayed her in his mansion in Hollywood for a long time before someone from the cleaning staff had come to work with a bandage on their hand. And that bandage had gotten too wet while cleaning and while cleaning her the wound had reopened and blood had smeared on her face and lips. What she knows is that no one in that mansion survived to see the next sunrise. Awake since the 2013, Seo has travelled through what had once been dirt-road cities and villages in attempts to find her maker. The history of the supernatural kind isn’t as closely kept as that of humans and so if he were dead or alive, there was no way for her to know. Finding the coven who had taken away so much time from her was also impossible, especially with how untrusting of information the witches seemed to be. The only thing that has brought her joy has been the fact that her daughter’s great-grandchildren were out there and she had seen them while in their mundane lives, unaware of their history and how they had come to be where they were. She hoped that was the case.
She hasn’t been able to settle since waking up, travelling and wandering. Without her sun charmed ring the night had become her day. She found out about Greywood while listening on a witch that she had been trying to find a way to entice of making her a new charm. That was her purpose of coming and in the first weeks she found herself enchanted by the place.
Seo has been in Greywood for a while now and she is living in the motel.
