faderift | OPEN LOG: Establishing a Base in Kirkwall

WHO: Many People
WHAT: Cleaning up Kirkwall
WHEN: Cloudreach 1-21
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: This log post is for characters who go early to Kirkwall to assist in preparing it for the rest of those assigned there. We strongly encourage IC discussion of things left to character discretion—someone should definitely do a crystal post to discuss what to do with the personal belongings left behind in the Gallows or what new form the statues should take!

Kirkwall once lived on the edge of the Tevinter Imperium and was home to nearly a million slaves. Stolen from elven lands or shipped from across the sea, all slaves fed the Imperium's unquenchable thirst for expansion. They worked in massive quarries and sweltering foundries that produced stone and steel for the Empire.

The city's complicated past is not easy to forget, history having earmarked many corners of the stone city. A ship approaching the harbor spots the city's namesake: an imposing black wall. It is visible for miles, and carved into the cliff side are a pantheon of vile guardians representing the Old Gods. Over the years, the Chantry has effaced many of these profane sentinels, but it will take many more years to erase them all.

Also carved into the cliff is a channel that permits ships into the city's interior. Flanking the channel are two massive bronze statues—the Twins of Kirkwall. The statues have a practical use. Kirkwall sits next to the narrowest point of the Waking Sea, and a massive chain net can be erected between the statues and the lighthouse, closing off the only narrow navigable lane. This stranglehold on sea traffic is jealously guarded by the ever-changing rulers of the city as the net trolls taxes, tolls, and extortions in from the sea.

—From In Pursuit of Knowledge: The Travels of a Chantry Scholar, by Brother Genitivi

Establishing a presence in Kirkwall is a delicate matter. First, there's Provisional Viscount Bran Cavin—a man so used to batting back friendly offers of entirely harmless occupation of the battered city-state that his first three responses to the Inquisition's leadership appeared to be slightly personalized form letters. Proving that the Inquisition is here to work and not to conquer will be a process. The first step in that process is the second reason the move is delicate: the only building the Provisional Viscount is willing to part with is the Gallows, left quarantined and unoccupied since Knight-Commander Meredith Stannard's famous crystallization into red lyrium in the courtyard. The Gallows have since overgrown with red lyrium. If anyone is going to live and work there, there's a lot of work to do.

↠ Cloudreach 1-3: The Journey There
↠ Cloudreach 3-4: Arrival
↠ Cloudreach 4-14: Haunted
↠ Cloudreach 14-21: Spring Cleaning

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

As far as Merrill is concerned, the worst time for a minor spirit to decide to inhabit a dead body is while it's being handled. That is, of course, therefore what happens: Merrill is carefully lifting a skeleton when it twists in her grip and grabs onto her hair. Staff on her back -- since, well, she was lifting a skeleton -- Merrill does the first thing she can think of.

She shrieks and shoves a fistful of magic ice into the skeleton's eye sockets.

"Get it off, get it off!"

Not again.

Wren unceremoniously drops the corpse she's been inspecting, sprints towards Merrill... slips on a fallen metatarsal and goes skidding.

Her arms flail, torn between the instinct for balance and the more pressing desire to not see anyone's face chewed off today, careen forward —

— She more or less tackles the thing. This would be a better plan (it's not really a plan at all) if the skeleton didn't still have its fingers tangled in a fistful of elf hair. Merrill's frost drives into its skull and it shrieks, a sound without a throat behind it, ripped straight from the Fade.

Wren snarls, and punches it in the face.

There's another shriek as the Templar tackles the skeleton, as this sends Merrill sprawling to the ground as well. Luckily, it loosens the grip on her hair -- probably because several non-existent without the aid of magic joints have been heavily jostled out of place. Unfortunately, Merrill is now one slice of bread in a skeleton sandwich, and she's the one on the bottom.

"Off," she repeats, kicking her legs a bit; she's trying not to kick Wren, but she is mostly just flailing. More ice gathers in her palms and she shoves at bone, frost crawling from her fingers to wrap around it, to bite deeply and try to weaken or just outright freeze any movement.

The bright side of having all the air knocked out of you is that it's hard to audibly curse. Wren scrambles back off Merrill, hands stinging with the overflow of ice. She rips at the corpse (its movements gradually slowing, the snapping of its jaws sluggish) as she does, leaves herself holding —

Just arms. Fuck.

Wren tosses them aside.

"Hang on!" Shouts the person who has arguably made this entire scenario worse. It's another few second's work to pull off the remaining torso, slam it hard at the wall.

One of the arm twitches, as if in protest, before the hold the spirit has on it vanishes. Merrill scrambles backward, staff freeing itself from where it's secured against her back to roll on the ground next to her. One hand comes up to feel at her head, to see if bony fingers tore her scalp (not this time), even as she watches Wren finish off the skeleton.

"Creators," she says after a moment, rubbing her head. "That was- well. I'd prefer it if they didn't all do that."

OPEN LOG: Establishing a Base in Kirkwall

skeleton war

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