The Sturmer family were close growing up, or so Irma was told. To her, the only family she knows is her elder brother, Ytel, who stepped into the role of parent when the plague stole their family from them when Irma was only three. She only knows of them from the stories that Ytel tells her about the family that loved them, that would have done anything to protect them. If asked in adulthood, Irma would say that perhaps their deaths were the bargain made to keep Irma and Ytel alive, but such words can only be said by someone who sees them only as shadowy figures more akin to folklore than to people. She tried not asking about her family growing up, not when it inflicted a look of such sadness upon her brother’s face. To her, Ytel was infinitely more important than knowing the stories behind people that are little more than names. She does her best to make up for their loss and tries to incorporate the pieces of them she knows into who she is, if only to lessen the weight on her brother’s shoulders, but at times, Irma feels like she’s competing with ghosts. The smile on his face when he speaks of them is something that Irma has never seen, and she doesn’t quite have the guts to ask if he would trade their lives for hers.
Despite growing up as little more than a street urchin, Ytel had shielded her from whatever might endanger her. While Irma didn’t begrudge her brother the protectiveness, not when he witnessed the destruction of their family firsthand and not when she was a sickly child that some believed the plague would claim next, but it did leave her with something of a weakness when she struck out on her own as a young adult. She learned quickly how to think on her feet, how to smile just threatening enough to make someone walk the other way, and ultimately how to keep herself safe from anything the world deigned to throw at her, preferring to rely on physical combat rather than her own gifts. To Irma, a nymph was weak. It hadn’t protected her family and it certainly hadn’t protected Ytel and her on the streets in their youth. It was only fear of death that kept her from exchanging her nymph powers for vampirism as she was offered several decades later by a lover. She had no wish to die, if she anything she wanted to be strong enough to never fear death again. Maybe it was this thinking that led to her close brushes with death the years later, first with her own life during the birth of her first child, and then again with the death of her second to war, and again with her third to famine. Each struck a blow more powerful than the next so that by the time she met Mosiah Sayed in 1900, there was little part of her that could be broken anymore. Or so she thought till the day David Sturmer-Sayed was born and placed in her arms, alive and safe. Her and Mosiah were never meant to be a couple, but David became Irma’s entire world and one that she would do anything to protect. They stayed for a time in Egypt together as a small family, Irma studying astronomy and reading tarot cards to get by, trying to support a family on her own. Irma left Mosiah behind when David was old enough, taking her son with her back to her hometown in Germany, and all was well.
The important people in her life know that she can be soft, that the prickly exterior was only to judge others before allowing them too close to people important. But her son was gentle in all the ways she wasn’t, and Irma didn’t notice this till he followed love across the sea, something that Irma knew would end in heartbreak. It was only the knowledge of her own overprotectiveness that kept Irma in Germany the first few months, but she followed him to the Americas not long after. She kept her distance from that town of Lethe, unwilling to drag her life story out for them to read, unwilling to share her pain with people who would not take care of it. Her absence from David was difficult to fathom and Lethe was too strict on visiting laws for her own taste, enough that she finally conceded to enter the town in 2017. Her son might consider it motherly instincts, for only a year later the first Riverborn arrived, but Irma could only regard the situation with a certain amount of amusement. She had seen her hometown rise and fall so many times that she has no fear of Lethe’s current predicaments.
