Sister Irina (Sister Ee*REE*nah)
"And if I should have prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I should have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing."
1 Corinthians 13:2
“The spirit of God flows through me, and so I must carry it out into the world.”
Though Irina says nothing of her past life, her old name, or the village she came from, she has not forgotten that life entirely, or some few secrets of the old ways that still remain strong in such a place. Close that the village was to the deep forest, there were many pacts laid down across the generations that maintained a tenuous balance between the people of the village and the people of the wood. Irina’s mother had bound herself to one of those powers within the woods to keep that balance, a binding made in blood and sacrifice, one that her daughter had no intention of inheriting. What little she knew for sure was that dark and hungry things lurked in the forest, even if not all of the forest folk were so malign.
And so she fled from her village with what little coin and food she could pilfer from her family, dangerous that it may have been for a girl barely in adulthood to travel alone. The village priest had told her of a monastery far to the east and that was where she went over the course of long weeks, a trial of faith that she did not fully comprehend at the time, and it took all of her strength to make it to the monastery. Her body never truly recovered from the ordeal, but such an act of devotion earned her place as a novice, and she took the name Irina as she began her new life.
In the monastery she found a peace she had never truly felt in her home, in both the solitude of prayer and the communion of her fellow devotees. For many years she learned as much of history and medicine as she did of the True Confession, and in the monastery she happily immersed herself in the transcendent spirit of the Divine Presence, never offering the slightest complaints of her duties. She dutifully spent countless hours transcribing holy texts of the saints and martyrs of the church, tended to pilgrims, and taught orphans, especially one ‘Little’ Ivan, in who she saw the subtle signs of an inhuman bloodline, and tried to shelter him from the dangers of the wider world. And though she did enjoy the company of others, from pilgrims to her fellow ascetics, the most peace she felt was always in the quiet hours of prayer in the early morning, when such contemplation brought her closest to the divine mystery of the Trinity.
In recent weeks, it began with dreams.
Visions of darkness crawling from the deep places of the wood. Visions of villages burning, pillaged by twisted men and monstrous creatures. The whispers of the saints were unclear, a chaotic cacophony of warnings, but she could discern a hint of the purpose. When she knelt before the altar and prayed through a long, cold night, pleading that there must be another for them to choose, one voice was clear.
It must be. It must be.
Irina had read and transcribed many tales of the holy saints of the True Confession, so many there were who had been burned, beheaded, and otherwise martyred for their faith, all after they had received such a holy calling. The thought of following such a legacy filled her with dread, but she could not deny the brief moment of clarity that she had received, or the first signs of a divine power coursing through her frail body.
Though some of the elders in the monastery were skeptical of Irina’s claims, a tearful confession that the last thing she truly wanted was to depart convinced the abbess to give her leave to just that, obliged that Irina was to seek out the calling she had been given.
And so with little more than what she had first arrived at the monastery with so many years ago, Irina set back out into the wider world, searching for a sign that would guide her closer to the path that had been set before her. Though she still had her doubts and fears, Irina was willing to carry her faith into the dark places, come what may of the calling she had been given.
Current Location
Species
Ethnicity
Age
38
Children
Current Residence
Aleksandrovka
Gender
female
Eyes
Brown
Hair
Dark
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
Pale
Height
Tall
Weight
Frail
Belief/Deity
Aligned Organization
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