OPEN LOG: Establishing a Base in Kirkwall

[faderifting]

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

Comments

[indocile]

Have to -

oh. It's possible Margaux did not consult herself, either, in grabbing his hand; her fingers flex under his and then, with the very smallest reluctance as someone steeling themselves before a fire, she lets go first. Everybody is being very brave, in this probably full of ghosts nightmare place. Look at all of this bravery. (She's never been anywhere so - this. She'll have to go lots of places, though, so, maybe it's good practise. For later. If she gets used to it here, where there's lots of people whose hands she can hold, or shoulders she can hide behind.)

"I have some chalk," she says, shrugging the light leather bag she's been carrying down from her shoulder and fishing about in it until her hand closes on what she's looking for and definitely not a skull slipped in there by some terrible shade.

No, when she takes it out, it's just chalk. She wasn't worried.

[alankazam]

Some fiddling with his hands, and he finally shakes a spark of something into faint light: blue-green and flickering with the lazy pull of the Fade. Alan shifts the veilfire to one palm, held aloft and apart from them both, offers the other back again.

This is fine. This is fine. They've light; they'll have their bearings, if they need them. They're prepared now —

"Good," He remembers belatedly to reply. "I think we're close."

(He can't shake the ugly idea they're being led into something.)

[indocile]

Margaux thinks about being too proud to take it when it's offered; something whispers behind her and she laces her fingers so tightly he might well feel every individual bone in her hand, emphasised by the coolness in the air that seems to draw her skin tighter like she's clutching in for warmth. (There is ghosts, my guy, fuck pride.)

"I think we are close also but I think maybe I do not want to be close to what it is we are close to."

Because it's ghosts. They're close to ghosts, and Margaux doesn't think of herself as being particularly credulous, but they live in a world where demons pour out of holes in the sky and mages wield power she can't comprehend like it's nothing and is it ghosts that do possessions or just spirits and demons and actually, what is the academic difference, please, she would like to have it explained to her specifically so she can be correctly afraid of the right things.

Like, all of them, but accurately and in detail.

"Unless it's the door." The one that leads - out.

Distantly, something slams.

[alankazam]

There are spirits in the wild, there are demons at night — but never like this, never pushing down on everything in the points of cave rock. That there's someone else here living, it's,

Well. He's not about to begrudge a few bruised fingers.

"Whatever it is," Definitely not the door. "I don't think we get to go until it does."

He cranes his head over his neck to squint at Margaux, tries very hard to look reassuring.

"Nothing's tried to hurt us. Maybe it just needs to be heard," (It looks much like he always does: Like nothing very much at all.) "Everyone does, sometimes."

[indocile]

Is he trying to do something with his face. Margaux can't tell; she tries to make hers look brave, says, "I am a very good listener," in case anything in the dark is -

listening.

What tales might it hold, the Gallows? Not pretty ones. The same tales any place holds, with deep enough shadows and cruel enough masters; it is a jolt to see, when she's always thought of the Circles from the outside as...better. A safer place, surely, than the awful world outside.

Maybe there is just no where good, for anyone.