Revenants - aka The Lazarus

(So after a few years of hectic school life, I've finally geared up mentally to get in to the whole amateur fiction writing stuff. Again. Yay for me.)

Anyway, my idea for the Urban Fantasy I'm trying to write deals with what I call Revenants. They're formerly non-supernatural humans who've died and visited the Umbral Plane - or at least, the part that's both accessible and memorable - and have come back.

Now here's the stuff that bugs me:

1. What kind of supernatural force or entity could justify this form of resurrection? I've been reading too much of the WoD fluff these days, so all I've got in my mind right now is 'super ancient and powerful ghost that wants to taste the living world again', a la Geist: The Sin-Eaters. I've also thought about 'divine mission' or other forms of divine intervention... but while that suits the Revenants who view their Second Breath as a religious miracle, some folks are atheistic or hedonistic folks who just want to enjoy life again. Preferably by avoiding danger as much as possible, which would automatically mean that they want to stay the hell out of the hidden supernatural world that they've just entered. Worshipping gods/spirits and looking for mysterious religious secrets is not exactly the best way to do that, since a disturbingly large number of them are ''real''.

2. More important point: How the hell does all the resurrected people return to ordinary life?! I imagine that some sort of cosmic-level Retcon would be at work, but I'm appalled at the sheer amount of retconning that would be needed. Especially with not-clean deaths, such as car accidents. I could just give up and say some magical force did the retconning, but that feels a bit too much like giving up.

...Anyone to help? Pretty please?

edited 14th Oct '13 9:20:08 AM by Ninth

Does their return heal wounds, or are they more clearly undead, their bodies just as they died? (And if the latter, do they rot?) The latter case seems the simplest: return the spirit, arrest decay and find a way to get the spirit back in control of the body. The latter means either rapid healing or some means of undoing the damage done, I imagine.

The mechanism for the return of the spirit might depend on the metaphysics of your afterlife: how does one get to the Umbral Plane in the first place? Knowing that might suggest a way of reversing the process.

For me, I wrote that the reintroduction of magic into Earth was a result of one damned soul that was truly created in the image of the divine creator.

This soul wanting to escape the city of Dis, shattered the gate between the world of the living and the dead. The gate was rapidly repaired by the entities policing this hellish urban afterlife, but damage was done and the cataclysmic force required to momentarily alter the flow of souls from the living to the dead was enough to cause magic to come surging back to Earth.

So in short, have something big happen prior to the beginning of the story.

Their true form stays at the shape it was in at the time of death. So if the revenant died from a bear attack or something... *shivers* Thankfully, they have a souped-up form of Glamour that not only hides that form, it also flawlessly patches up any visible wounds.
All Souls of mortal beings (note capital letters) of the dead 'gravitate' to the Umbral Plane, where the various afterlifes are. Psychopomps are entities who watch over that process by clearing a path through the Ethereal and the Astral Planes that metaphysically lie between the Material and the Umbral. And that's all I've got at this point. I guess I'll have to cook up something about the Psychopomps, or the 'Umbral Journey' through the two vast Planes of existence.

Have some big event? That's a great idea, actually. Thing is, I was partly making the idea of the Revenants based on mummies of Egypt and jiangshi of China as well, so a 'recent' event probably won't cut it...
But with your idea of magic flowing into the world, I now have an idea. Most forms of magic in my 'verse was based on channeling forces of the non-Material Planes in the first place. Said Planes are more abstract and incorporeal as it moves away from the Material - in other words, more dead. (I classify 'life' as a domain of material forces) So maybe I'll just say that everytime someone uses magic, it messes up the borders between the Planes, enough to create distortions that distract or disorient the Soul on its way to the afterlife...

And as I'm writing this, I've come up with the idea that 'life' as a Revenant is actually Purgatory. The Souls have some purpose left to resolve, or perhaps some abstract 'sin' they need to wash off before moving on to the afterlife. In this case, the entire living world doubles as an Afterlife Antechamber for them.