OPEN: Kirkwail

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone
WHAT: Ghosts
WHEN: Wintermarch 20
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: OOC post. More content warnings than you can shake a stick at, probably, including allusions to slavery and violence in the body of the log post. Please use appropriate warnings in the subject lines for your own threads.

The storm sweeps in like an assassin: unexpected, in the dark, and throwing sharp pricks of sleet at exposed eyes and noses with expert aim and enough force to almost draw blood if the angle is right. Half an hour after the clouds crest the cliffs is all it takes for the city to retract indoors and huddle around fireplaces, settling in for a long night that will, unforeseen, turn into a long two days.

The Gallows, too, is pelted with ice; the walls of the cliffs and the fortress protect much of it from the worst of the wind, but when it can find a path over or through the walls, it slams through windows or doors to scatter papers and snuff out fires.

In the dark, in the rain, hurrying between towers or already accustomed to jumping firelight casting strange shadows and the wind howling like a wounded animal, people might be forgiven if they don't notice at first. But there's a hanging in the courtyard, a dozen translucent wisps of bodies dangling from the idea of nooses, and there's a girl's voice in the basement of the templar tower screaming for her mother, and there's a ghostly man in the library holding the blade of a knife to his palm and whispering this is it, this is it—or maybe there isn't, actually, when you lift your head to pay closer attention.

But as the night wears on they multiply, and they brighten, and even if you haven't noticed them, they begin to notice you.

Comments

Nari, OTA

[nadasharillen]

I. Herb Garden

There's a makeshift shelter rigged over one of the benches. Unused trellising, its occupant vine dry and shriveled for the season, provides the tented shape of it, and a still-dirty tarp is lashed over the frame; it flaps in the driving wind that sweeps in over the walls of the courtyard sometimes. Inside sits Nahariel, wrapped in an oilcloth cloak, every line of her form and all her formidible focus turned towards the glow that shares the space with her.

"--I know, da'halla. You wouldn't be happy. Betrayal of the People and all that. But he needs me, and I need him, and it's hard sometimes, but what isn't. And we're happy. I think. As happy as you get." Nari smiles sheepishly. "He brings me tarts. I'd never had tarts. That's kind of like a buck, right?"

The faint and shimmering figure of Siuona Dahlasanor continues to look down at the sachets of tea she's compiling with a small smile, reaching up every so often to tuck one of the locks of hair that have fallen forward behind her ear. It will slide back down again soon, like it always had.

II. Courtyard, night (CW: gore, racism, allusions to rape)

Some of it is sweet. Birdsong, laughter, children playing hide-and-seek amongst the crates. Most of it is horror, and it keeps growing. But until she smelled it, that overpowering stench of burnt meat in the shifting spirit-light of the courtyard that changes like fire, none of them had been hers. A high pitched scream of denial stops Nari dead in her tracks, the chill of animal horror racing down her spine as the Fade-dwellers shift and blossom into the pandemonium of a Dalish camp in full blaze, cruel laughter and whooping issuing from men--and a few women--in patchwork armor casually chopping through the linked hands of those elves trying to pull their clanmates from beneath collapsing aravels. It's larger than life, all of it, as if viewed by a child.

She shuts her eyes, covers her face with both hands and shakes her head to clear it, but Ilriane is still screaming, muffled now.

(For Ghost!Cade)

It's the armor that draws her. It's recent; very recent. This battle that flickers through the streets isn't like the others. Not the Tevenes, nor the slaves, not the older renditions of the Chantry's flaming sword, the different slant of their pauldrons. This one could be taking place now. She's only started to begin to wonder when something else catches her eye. They're all helmeted, all covered, all the same except for shape, form, movement, but--

But she would know him in any crowd.

i [quiet sobbing]

[faithlikeaseed]

"Nari?"

She's surely still familiar with the sound of Myr finding his way around with careful steps and staff. With the way he reaches cautiously to find the trellis and its flapping tarp with a hand, to make himself certain of the structure he can't see. He knows--this is probably a one-sided conversation he shouldn't be privy to, and so waits once he's said her name, blindfolded face turned aside to demonstrate deliberate inattention in the Circle mode.

"Are you talking to--" It's strange; Sina shouldn't be hard to say a year out. The grief has aged, no longer the heart-tearing sort of thing that still haunted after him for Evrion's sake. It never had been quite the same to begin with: They'd known beforehand with Sina. And his last glimpse of her had let his heart believe she'd only gone away for a while, was simply off gardening in a far fairer land than Kirkwall, to return to them when she'd time.

"Is Sina with you?"

[nadasharillen]

She would have startled for someone else, but for Myr, who has the distinction of being one of two people--the other being Simon--with whom she sometimes converses about Cade, her reply has its characteristic warm wryness.

"I'm with her." An important distinction. Sina's not here, not really. She ought to be upset by it. Angry, or despairing, or any of the other things that had ripped at her flesh for so long, but after the journey to Falon'Din's temple and the choices she'd made there, the edges of the great hole in Nari had dulled. There was still a hole, of course, there would always be a hole, but Sina in her quiet tea-making normalcy is more balm to it than anything else. The small swell of tears in Nari's eyes as the vision flickers and repeats is more for love than loss.

Amidst the rest of the horrors, this is a quiet place.

The sound of cloth shifting, and her tone changes to one of concern. "Myr, are your eyes all right?"

[faithlikeaseed]

"I'm with her," and oh, he can understand that. Perhaps it's better than the alternative--better than a spirit with more native intelligence borrowing their memories of Sina and playing mimic with them. It's a particular trick that's never sat well with Myr, reminds him exactly why he's not keen on spirits, especially when they wear the forms of the dead. But simply an image...

That's better. That's acceptable.

"They're fine," he reassures her, "it's what I'm seeing with them that's--not." There's a strange note of guilt in there; everyone else in the Gallows was dealing barefaced and open-eyed with whatever came at them (or not, as the case might be) and here he is giving up the sight a woman died for not to. At least this is only a temporary measure, one easily undone--as he slips a thumb under the blindfold to uncover an eye and show her, with a wink.

He sneaks a look at Sina's image after, heart catching in his throat at the sight of her. "Maker," soft as a prayer, "I didn't remember her being so thin."

[nadasharillen]

"Well... there's nothing else here," Nari says hesitantly after a pause long enough to be a look around, "At least, not that I can see."

Maybe it was Sina. Or whatever spirit was wearing her shape. There were other things across the Veil besides horrors, weren't there? The spirits like Faith, and Hope, and Justice, the ones that helped Anders, Christine. Sam. And what isn't hopeful, about even the smallest things like making little bags of tea. We don't make things that we don't think will be used. Seen. Read. By someone else, if not ourselves. Everything we make, little floating lights sent forward.

"A little thin, maybe," Nari grants, "but she always had more eyes than face. More spirit than body. I used to carry her around like she weighed nothing—less than."

[faithlikeaseed]

There's nothing else here, she says, and Myr goes still on the instant as if expecting the words themselves to act a summons.

But there's no prickling of a spirit stepping through the weakened Veil, and nothing awful erupts into his vision to torment him. He lets his breath out slowly. "Well. That's a piece of relief. D'you--"

D'you mind another? he'd been about to ask, but that's not exactly a way of asking it that permits a no. And Nari deserves this kindness in Sina's shape, her own piece of hope and healing to carry forward--deserves it unruined and undisturbed. "Might I stay a little while with the two of you? At least until something does appear."

He'd been watching Sina the whole time he sorted through that in his head but looks over to Nari then with a smile soft and sad for that description. "She made me want to, you know, and I never thought she'd be a burden. Wherever she wanted to go or whatever she asked." And he'd had only a few months to know her. (He thinks of a year back, of snow and a shivering body and how much of his own heart has now been taken up by someone shaped by her love of Sina. Look after her, and how that had been repaid.

Thank you for sending me, cousin, he thinks to Sina's image. I hope you're sleeping well.)

i

[motherfucking_ghost]

There's something fucking weird going on. Which is both normal for the Inquisition and, as he's gathered in their time here, normal for Kirkwall, but this kind of fucking weird is not normal, so unless everyone's finally gone completely and utterly insane--

He wouldn't fully put that past anyone, really, but he's going to calmly go about his day and not see or hear or witness anything weird, because, that would just be crazy, right, and if it's ghosts, if it's really ghost-ghosts, then, well, how many people does he know here who are dead now, would Rifter spirits be stuck here, too, is that how that works? He worries at the scarred flesh around his neck and wanders into the garden, because if there's somewhere he can find a little peace without leaving the Gallows, then surely--

Then...surely...

He almost walks past. Just a conversation, no need to get involved. But one of the two is less than fully physical, and more than that, one of the two is familiar in a way that makes the bottom drop out of his gut. He stares. It's rude, but who the fuck is gonna notice except for Nari?

"You know she can't--" he starts, then stops. Then, lamely, finishes: "...hear you. Right?" Because what the fuck does he know, maybe she does. Maybe she can. Maybe it's not fully unlike the images, the people, seen in that strange mountain village, only these ones don't beckon anyone to stay.

[nadasharillen]

Nari's head jerks up, a quick startle. Sina continues to measure. Finishes a bag, sets it aside, flickers. Starts again, the pile next to her suddenly five or so bags lighter, the loose leaves of her mixture of tea and herbs piled higher. The more solid elf colors slightly, a little embarrassed and unsure as to whether or not she'd been overheard.

"I know," she replies, her smile wry and lopsided. "Or I think I know. I... uh... talk to her all the time anyway. But..." Nari looks back at the ghostly shade of her clansister, her look softening. "It's nice. It's nice to see her again, while I do it." Sina pushes hair lightly behind her ear. It shifts slowly forward and falls.

[motherfucking_ghost]

"...Yeah. I get that." Talking to people who aren't there all the time or it being nice to see someone who's dead? por que no los dos "Do you mind, uh, if I stay a little bit? I mean-" He shuffles his feet. "Like I didn't know her super well or anything, but I knew her and, y'know, tried to help and all, so it's...like you said, it's nice, but I mean, I don't wanna intrude or anything."

[nadasharillen]

Nari nods, scoots over on the bench and relinquishes her position next to Sina so there's room for Church to sit by her.

"Please," she invites, her smile growing a bit. "It's... I'm glad other people miss her too." It's a reminder that she was real, and here, and important. That she had inspired friendship and loyalty in more than just her doting Clan. She tilts her head slightly, wrinkling the vallaslin on her brow as it furrows in thought.

"You were there, for that experiment. You volunteered. It's—" Nari pauses briefly. She wants to put his name here, but that was still during the time in which she'd not made the best of efforts to remember the names of humans. Even rifter humans. Even rifter humans who willingly went through hideously painful magic experiments that could save her clansister. The smile turns to a look of deep chagrin and she scrubs her hand through her hair, mussing it a bit.

"Creators. I'm sorry. I don't remember your name."

[motherfucking_ghost]

He hesitates, because...then he's sitting beside a ghost. One who's here but...not. Disconnected from the mortal world around her. Would it be weird? Maybe it's weird. But the seat is offered, and he nods his thanks before sitting.

"Church. It's Church, yeah, that was me." He waves her concern aside. There are so many fucking people here, he doesn't actually expect most to know his name. "I've got a vested interest in rifter stuff. Obviously. But also just...it's more than us. People like her, people from here get 'em, too. We're in it together, and she was already so..." Would fragile sound offensive? Frail? "She was already going downhill. No reason to put her through any of that. A little danger on my end to help us all understand what's going on in our own bodies is no big deal."

It didn't save Sina, though. It was never really going to, far along as she was. Still. He rubs at the palm of his hand. Christine knows the pain is getting worse, a small increment, but noticeable. And it'll keep getting worse.

"Signing up for experiments doesn't make my girlfriend very happy," he adds with a lopsided smile, "but I just tell her it's a good thing she's a healer then to patch me right up."

The other option

[justice_is_blond]

It's pushing toward mid-morning when the ghost of Sina wanders into the library. Anders doesn't completely register her at first, far too focused on the ghostly figure of a bushy-bearded male mage sitting right across from him, but Nari following behind brings his gaze over.

"Nari," he says quietly, voice barely above a whisper as if talking too loud will send both away. It likely won't, there's currently child-like voices reciting the Chant over and over somewhere nearby, but he doesn't want to risk it. The two are too precious for that.

"Does she talk to you?" Some of them seem to talk, or interact a little. They're not really what they appear, he knows that, and yet there's a little bit of a longing in the question. He can live with the pain and guilt that's rising up to see some of these people again.

[nadasharillen]

It's easy to fall back into it. The trailing slightly back and to the left of her First. Sina complained sometimes of having to turn her head to talk to her, and Nari would quicken her step to come alongside her obediently, but the next time, there they went again. Like an Emerald Knight with their wolf trotting companionably at their heels.

It's her second time to the library, but the first they've been noticed. Nari turns at the familiar whisper, turns back to watch Sina move into the herbals and pull one from the shelf. It's a different book than is there, they must have been rearranged in the last year and a half, but even so, the spirit will be there for a while. Satisfied by the thought, Nari moves over to join Anders, peering curiously at his companion on her way.

She shakes her head. "No. But I uh..." Here, the oft-seen run of her hand through her hair to pull it back from her face and then let it fall forward again next to a small sheepish smile. "I don't mind. Does... he talk to you?" She tips her head to indicate the man across from him.

[justice_is_blond]

"He doesn't." He's not sure if he's glad of that fact or not. It's all lies, but this is a lie that's as sweet as it is bitter. Karl opens a new book and begins paging through, oblivious to anyone there. Sina seems equally oblivious. He wonders if either of them had any idea how much they'd be missed.

"He's Karl." A short beat. "Was. He was Karl Thekla, a mage." The mage part is probably obvious, seeing as he's in robes, but Anders is having a little trouble thinking entirely clearly. "I wish I could hear his voice again, but I've no idea what he or I'd say."

He chuckles, a little more awkwardly than anything else.

[nadasharillen]

"Karl."

She repeats it as she looks at him. This is not a face she would have ever seen. A voice she never will. Nari wonders what he might have sounded like. At the very least, there's one more person walking the Gallows who would be able to put face to name and remember Karl Thekla.

"'Hello', maybe," The corner of her mouth tugs up a bit in a small half-smile. "...What happened?" She asks carefully, and then almost immediately it feels wrong. That's the wrong question. So she shakes her head quickly and replaces it with the question that she would want someone to ask, were it Sina sitting there paging through a book and someone else coming to join her. "No. What was he like?"

[justice_is_blond]

He swallows hard at the first question, but the second restores the little bit of color he'd lost.

"Kind." Anders has to swallow a second time, this time around a lump in his throat making his voice a little hoarse. "Kind, sweet, funny, gentle. He... He was one of my teachers, for a time, and I was known for being, um."

The look on his face is part-reflection, part-wistful, and just slightly wry. "Trouble. I was known for being trouble. I'd escaped twice at that point, been hauled back and punished and was contemplating how I'd go about running a third time when I wound up in his class. One of the punishments had, had punished other mages too, so some in the Circle were not... kind. But he was unbothered. I would act up and he'd work through it, I'd pretend I didn't know the answer to something and he saw through it, and I wound up with a crush."

More than a crush, eventually, and his gaze goes back to Karl from Nari. "We weren't allowed relationships, mages in the Circle, and he refused to have anything with a student, but I proved more stubborn than him." His expression softens, saddens. "It would have been better for him if I hadn't been, in the end. But I can't... Without him and what we had, I'd not have made it through Kinloch Hold."

Much like he has a feeling Nari wouldn't have done well with the Inquisition if she hadn't been there with Sina.

Iish with a side of wildcard

[dashing]

She feels as though she is being hunted. From time to time she can hear the baying cries of the Dalish, but they are ghosts, and she will not give them that power over. They had hurt her enough, and there was much work to be done, people who needed to be supported through their own ghosts. Even so, she is only a person, has the limits inherent to the living, and needs some reprieve.

When her toe catches one an uneven stone and her knee drives down into the cobbling and her hand grasps one of the beds to steady herself, she realises that coming to the herb garden was a mistake. The scent of wet earth on her palm, the pain in her knee and the shock jarred up her still recovering shoulder—

Herian is afraid to look up, but she refuses to let her fear cow her. Swallows, and drags her gaze upward, to the Circle of Dalish ghosts standing around her. Taller, so much taller than they would have been, because these ghosts lived in childhood recollections. There's another figure kneeling not so far in front of her, an elven man with blond hair and a bloodied mouth, something in him that speaks to kindness and compassion where the others are all rage.

[nadasharillen]

All at once, Sina moves as she hadn't before, interrupting her peaceful cycle. She shifts in a swirl that lingers only briefly before the tracks of her reappear, kneeling and blood-lipped, bare-faced and male. Startled, Nari follows the path of the spirit to see Herian, taken to ground by mis-step or emotion, caged in by elves whose stature is larger than they ought to have. She can only see a few of their faces, but even if those weren't adorned by the curving lines of their vallaslin, she would know her people by the cut and style of their armor.

"...Ambassador?" she calls after a moment, but her pause was long enough that already the spirits had started to move.

cw mutilation / murder

[dashing]

Her body is cold. She doesn't realise it immediately, until she sees a wispish thing wrapping about her, before it moves forward, and child start to materialise before her. Kneeling on the ground, small and slight. She does not need to see its face to know it for herself, and Herian almost dry heaves.

Not this. Not this. The demon taking her father's face in the Fade had been one thing, but to be here again, to smell wet earth and rotting vegetation was so much more.

"Don't worry, little mischief." Spoken in the language of the Starkhaven alienage, their own dialect, and the dagger against his throat pricks in harder. A switch to trade, then. "Everything will be f—"

The knife pulls up, and the ghost of her father screams at his ear is cut away, the next in quick succession. Herian's eyes close. Not again, not this, not again. It came to her often enough in her dreams, and every time she is frozen and can't move to stop when the Dalish jerk the blade across his throat.

[nadasharillen]

It's disgusting to her that the first thing she feels is defensiveness. The rise at the same time, the feeling of We weren't all like this, Keeper Dhavihal would never have allowed this simultaneous with the knowledge sitting in the pit of her stomach like a stone that Dahlasanor had, before its fall, been more than strange. That mostly, they were. They were like this. That fathering a child on a human was treason against the People, that being caught near a Clan with your get meant... this. Your life taken from you in exchange for the life you'd 'taken' from the People and 'given' to the shem'len.

It's Why did you go. Why didn't you stay in your city. Why did you bring her. What were you thinking. And at the same time How can we do this to our own. What made us forget they were our own.

cw torture stuff

[dashing]

She has played this scene over and over in her mind. Her father's blood spraying and bubbling from his throat. The voice that was stolen from him, that more care was likely taken over animals they felled in the hunt than this living man. Her eyes stayed shut tight, and she hears the screams from her younger self, the way she fights against the Dalish holding her, the struggle as they start to pull leather leggings onto her as she tries to kick and bite and struggle.

Pushing herself up, Herian opens her eyes, and takes in the scene again. Staring at it, at this corruption of a new home with echoes and—

her gaze falls on Dahlasanor, and her jaws clenches. She walks through the spirits, they dissipate and reform like fog as she steps through them, as though she might block out the sight of nails being driven into her legs, of what was done to her.

"You've no need to see this."

GHOST CADE

[onlyhymns]

The Templar is young and fit, of confident stride and displaying only the faintest hint of fidgety indecisiveness seen in the occasional pause or quick clumsy step.
A spell of some kind is thrown from his shield side, and just as quickly his sword is angled to stab right through the gut of a nearby mage, her cast interrupted. Wrenching the sword back out, he swings it around to lop off the arm of another, his motions cold and precise, as automatic as if he were a golem.

This spirit glows a bit brighter among the others, perhaps aware of the attention it attracts.

[nadasharillen]

The casual brutality of it makes Nari suck a breath through her teeth. As does the skill with which it is achieved. She'd not seen him with sword and shield before, only admired the tranquil form of his archery. She'd known, of course, that he was a Templar, and that Templar were soldiers, but it's hard to reconcile the furtive skittish Cade she knows with soldier. With that kind of soldier.

Maybe it isn't him. He's far enough away that his edges blend. (No, it is.)

Almost without thinking, her feet are following him, the lines of her body cautious.

[onlyhymns]

More of the same follows, the spirit carving its way through combatants, but always with a very specific forward trajectory: he's trying to find Meredith, get to Meredith, perhaps protect Meredith?

The battle shifts, the mob of ghosts effortlessly flickering from here to the entrance hall of the mage tower. Nari will have to find him again, but there he is, just at the moment a spell knocks him back.

[nadasharillen]

Losing sight of him in the roiling melee here makes her as tense as the thought of losing sight of him in battle now does, even knowing with absolute certainty that he lives. That if he's injured he heals, that if he goes down he gets back up. All the same, she's scrambled up a stack of crates for a better vantage point from which to squint and scan the crowd with a soft focus.

There.

There's no need to dodge through the press of bodies, nor to try to evade the blades or blasts, but habit and instinct die hard. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Nari knows she looks absurd, slipping her way through the fight like a flickering fish through thick weeds, but she saves her embarrassment for later. She's only just found him again when he's knocked backwards through her, and she whirls to look to where he's landed.