faderift | OPEN: Kirkwail

OPEN: Kirkwail

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.

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"Trying to, yes."

That twisted sword-wielding spirit, newly arrived, warrants a glance and a glimpse of his teeth in what appears to be (and isn't) discomfort. Then the more wonderfully bizarre apparition unfurls itself further, and said artist (and stranger) huffs out one breath, like the idea of a laugh, and stops his hand for a moment just to watch it.

"Aren't you awful," he murmurs. That's right, let me look at you...

Charcoal hovers above the tooth of the paper, his arm moves in a little circle of preparation, and—ah. One of the living bodies thinks to approach him, and the coming imposition nudges him out of rhythm. In quick recovery, he dons an extremely polite expression, does his best to pull his peripheral attention back into focus, and again begins to scratch out a new shape on the page.

"Mind your step." There's art on the floor.

Edited 2019-01-13 00:07 (UTC)

"What step," comes a delicately accented voice full of both a distant sort of disgusted horror and bemusement. Alexandrie has emerged from the kitchens, the pop of a cork releasing from a bottle coming along with her.

It had been generalized horror, but of the normal human variety. Not until now, having staunchly decided to get into the cooking wine, has she seen anything that does not belong in nature at all. It's as fascinating as it is nauseating, which is considerably. But the feelings someone has of the wildly unnatural pulsing... things were strong enough to pull the spirit playing Rolant from his enlightening commentary on her baseness and naïveté to join the others, and watching him contort into a bent, shrouded, warp of a thing had been almost fiercely pleasant even as trying to follow the grotesquerie of it had made her head ache and her stomach turn.

"How may something with no feet to speak of mind such a thing?"

This is fine.

He's drawing them. Maker's breath and bones. Myr's expression grows briefly stricken as Benedict departs; he takes a careful breath in and releases it with a silent prayer for calm. (Well, so, and isn't it better if someone makes use of the things than letting them use him? The thought rings hollow in the face of gut-churning unease.) "Would you count them," he manages at length, "more as still life or nudes?"

This is directed, sort of, at Lexie as she's newly arrived, that and: "D'you have enough of that to share?"

Four seems to be a sufficient number for the things; once ex-Rolant has joined them, no more appear. The artist's subject on the table continues its slow flowering, waves of unwholesome intangible flesh puddling around it until Myr is a marooned island in an ocean of the stuff. Angles and perspective seem off around it.

"He was speaking to me," Bene says to Lexie, the snit audible in his voice, but lessened considerably by the circumstances. He bends to pick up one of the drawings and inspects it, wincing at the sight. It's better than what's surrounding them, but not by much.

"Cute," he remarks flatly, and sets it back down, only to make a similar face at the growing miasma around Myr.

"Where have you been, Enchanter?" Playing at sarcasm keeps the whimper out of his voice.

Being in the middle of a particularly immersive contour, Leander doesn't immediately respond to the question posed by the blindfolded elf—which is in itself intriguing, he'll have to ask about that in a minute—but he does smile about it.

And that smile withers just as quickly as it was born, back to relative neutrality. Cute, he says. Only the grimace that came before saves it from being taken as a wholly dismissive comment.

The new visitor, meanwhile, has caught his eye. It's not the young lady gleefully swinging wine (not yet), but the spirit she brings with her, which glides to join the rest. The contortions it performs to become its new fibroid shape are exquisitely terrible, and even as Leander sits up taller, lifts his chin, leans to see around all these damned people as they come and go from his line of sight, he's aware of the queasy heaviness gathering in his belly. Shapes moving how they ought not to move, vibrating in his peripheral vision, his eyes going soft—

Abruptly, his frustrated voice raises over the conversation: "Would you please stay out of the way. I can't do this much longer."

"They are neither still, nor life, and unless I am much confused about their nature spirits wear nothing but the stuff they are made of, so I should judge them nudes," Alexandrie replies lightly, as if she were speaking on a much more pleasant subject. After taking a ladylike swig of her prize, she produces a handkerchief to wipe the top of the bottle, and briefly takes Myr's hand to press the bottle into it safely on her way to join the little sordid gathering.

"My apologies, Lord Benedict," she says, watching her step as she maneuvers about to see this unknown fellow's work. Her mouth opens again afterwards, as if she means to deliver another remark, but she closes it again instead. She's done enough by Bene, and he'd done nothing to merit any further unkindnesses.

Drink isn't usually one of Myr's vices (more something studiously avoided; it's never gone well for him when he's been drunk), but today warrants the healthy hit he takes off the requisitioned cooking wine. It's supposed to help this sort of thing, isn't it? Make it distant and forgettable.

Though he's very sure he won't lightly forget this, surreal as the conversation makes the whole situation. He sets the bottle down on the table (Still Life With Elf) carefully and inches down along the bench and away (he assumes) from Leander's line of sight. The atrocity overgrowing him stretches like non-Euclidean putty to follow, flesh pulled to streamers as it struggles to maintain its intangible embrace.

"Oh," breezily, to Benedict, "working, the better to ignore the Gallows going to the Void. The Seneschal's an inspiration of mine. Though obviously I should've been down here modeling much sooner."

Edited 2019-01-13 06:18 (UTC)

"No, I mean--" Bene replies, "to have... these." Where have you been, what have you seen in your life to have witnessed such atrocities, is the true question, but he can't quite bring himself to ask it.

A glance to Alexandrie, and he gives a quiet nod, not quite forgiving, more simply allowing her presence without further fuss. He steps back to stand behind Leander, watching him draw with a curious eye, if only because it distracts him momentarily from the horrors before them.

His silence is interrupted by a gasp of both surprise and horror as a specter appears from nowhere and thrusts its sword into his midsection, causing him to recoil momentarily as though the blade were real. A whine-like sound leaves him then, a wordless exclamation of distress and frustration-- Maker, they get him every time.

Ah, bugger it. He can't throw down his tools now, not if there are people watching. Best try to finish this page, at least, before the quivering of his models does something unpleasant to him. It was a challenge he'd posed to himself, to focus so dearly on these visions despite the fluttering of his insides (perhaps because of them, that alone being a reward for this man who feels very little that's true); this will be the final sprint.

That elf may have the right idea, after all—what—the mewling sound just outside his periphery very nearly snatches his attention. Brief snag in his breath, grimacing, before it puffs free through his nose.

He barely takes his eyes off the creatures. His hand seems to know what to do of its own. What manifests on the page in a flurry of sweeping strokes is not of the same wrongness as the aberrations themselves, but it's a faithful (loving) study. (He might have put something into it to affect the same squirming of guts as he feels now. A hidden glyph, perhaps. Next time.)

"Be with you all in a moment. Just... a few more..." It's all a bit breathless. He swallows, too thickly to be comfortable. To the redhead hovering nearby, "I'll need a clear path on my right, please, darling."

"Lady." The correction is automatic. It's hardly an affronted one, but letting someone take liberties is really no way to start a relationship, imminent writhing existential horrors notwithstanding. Alexandrie will, however, move out of his line of periphery as requested, both out of decency's sake and because it gives her a greater advantage on seeing the paper his 'portraits' are coming to existence on. Her head tilts as her eye flickers over it, her lips pursing in thought.

"Oh, très bon. The sense of movement is well captured." She would think the shading amateurish if the wretched thing were not catching the light in those precise wrong ways, making it an expert rendition instead. "Finely enough that I pray you not display them publicly when you are finished," she ends wryly. This would be when she takes a drink, but she'd given the wine up to Myr. Merde.

Something she isn't looking at makes a horrible sucking sound in... reverse... and she barely suppresses a shudder, looking instead at Benedict just in time to see a woman coalesce behind him to raise a knife to his throat. She winces preemptively.

Damn. And here Myr’d hoped--without any real weight, for say what one would of Benedict, he was clever and persistent when driven to it--that the deliberate misunderstanding would be a way to let the question slide unremarked. But so it went.

“That’s for another time,” or never. Preferably never. It makes his pulse quicken uncomfortably to even contemplate explaining, let alone having to actually do it. At least--unwilling as he is to shed the blindfold--he's an excuse to sit out the conversation and take slow deep breaths to drive off the first starts of panic. The banter's at least a tolerable distraction from the too-near feeling of the four spirits--no, make that five--

"Benedict, are you all right?"

Audible distress draws the attention of the wraithish woman-thing with the sword. Its head spins all the way about to regard him before the body rotates to follow, locked on to Benedict. One moment it is there by the table; the next it is before the young mage, improbable sword upraised over its head.

If it weren't for the current circumstances, Benedict might pry, but he's (fortunately for Myr) a bit preoccupied now. The woman with the knife always comes next, so he doesn't react as violently to the ghost-slashing of his throat, but what he didn't expect was the attention of the spirit next to Myr.

"Wait," he says, unnerved by her approach despite his knowledge that no actual harm will come to him, "what's... what's she... don't do that." He backs up a few steps and is startled by hands reaching up from the ground, belonging to a rapidly materializing and raggedly-clothed throng of what appears to be peasants, their faces twisted in rage. Their fingers claw and tear at nothing, and he takes a few shuffling steps to try and free himself of them, turning only just in time to be met face-to-face with the new ghost.

"Stop it, stop it," he whines, hunching to hold his head in his hands, fully aware that there's no real danger yet not brave enough to look at any of it.

Lady it is, then—

Not quite finished, but done all the same, the artist abruptly drops his charcoal and stands, performing a very creative form of agility that involves looking like a calf learning to frolic, trying not to trip over the lap-board while it clatters to the ground—and there he goes, dashing a few strides away from the group and its spectral terrors, to stand with his back turned to one and all. With one hand on his hip and the other flat on his collarbones, he breathes deeply, and—

Nope. That didn't work. Nothing comes up, fortunately, but his coughing sounds thick and unpleasant. Still, he does his level best to be as polite as a trim young man can possibly be while trying not to turn inside-out. Ah, dignity. Nothing like dry-heaving in front of someone you're about to meet. He's on his feet, at least, even if there is quite a lot of uncomfortable pacing, head-bowing, putting of hands on hips, and so on. See how manfully he suffers!!

"Ah-hrm," he says, with his fist in front of his mouth, as if he can startle his ills away by coughing aggressively.

Should anyone think to approach him before he's ready to return, he'll wave them off without looking, perhaps show them his index finger: Give me a minute.

Graciously allowing both artist and mage their time to recover from their various maladies and frights, Alexandrie turns her attention instead to the rest of the drawings, looking up in brief (brief) stints to compare them to the grotesqueries that inspired them. After three such stints, she quickly decides that in order to avoid a need for a similar recovery period she really ought not to, despite her curiosity about how he'd chosen to depict them. What aspects he'd thought most important.

The exercise of applying an intellectual framework really does wonders for keeping ones mind off the rampant insanity. Save that these were sketches of things meant to drive one insane. She stops looking at the drawings as well, casting her eyes to the ceiling instead. "Adrianus De Vries would have given his left arm to have seen these," she muses; a Nevarran artist of much note who'd made his fame on his mind-warping paintings of buildings and structures that could not possibly exist. Could barely exist on canvas. His self portrait had been...

Well.

"Benedict--ahh, Maferath take it, stay there."

The younger mage's vocal distress, whining as it may be, serves as goad to an already-lacerated conscience. Myr peels himself off the bench, taking up the staff he'd left beneath it to feel his way--

No, on second thought, one of those spirits was after him and now it's moved on to tormenting someone weaker because he wouldn't look at it. Enough of that. He strips the blindfold off and shoves it in his pocket, grabs the wine bottle blindly from off the table (don't look at the thing spreading around it don't look don't) and marches over to Benedict.

"Here," and he offers the bottle once he's in reaching distance. "Look at me, take a drink of this, and tell me in detail how awful it is."

Torn between targets, the wraith-spirit hesitates only a moment before bringing her sword down on Myr. He flinches but keeps going: "And maybe the Lady De La Fontaine can tell us more about Messere De Vries and whatever mad spirit inspired him to draw those little rolly things with the beaks. You're all right over there, serah?" That last to Leander.

Having lost all its original audience to mere reproductions of its glory, the squirming obscenity on the table retreats coyly down some orthogonal dimension until it vanishes from sight. A scent of baking sand and putrefying corpse replaces it.

Edited 2019-01-28 09:14 (UTC)

The wine bottle is a welcome distraction, and Benedict takes it with a shaking hand, doing as Myr instructs while trying to tune out the morass of translucent horrors surrounding him.
"I know none of it is real," he deflects, to no one in particular-- he's just feeling defensive-- and takes a gulp of wine, holding onto it after. "There was a mob, in..."
He glances to Lexie, who was there, and wonders how much he should say. She didn't see what had chased him, bloodied, into the sewers they were using for the Inquisition's mass exeunt.

"...recently," he decides, "and I think it's them." If Kitty were here, she'd sneer at him. "And I-- I don't know what that other thing is. An awful woman with a sword." He takes another drink. "...she, um, just killed you."

"Yes, serah, I'm quite well. Thanks for your concern." If a momentary flush and sheen of sweat can be considered well.

He turns to see the culprit from a distance—oh, gone. Was it hanging around just to pose? That's flattering. These breezy, ego-laden thoughts are had while he straightens his clothes, brushes his hair back from his face a bit, and so on. Thusly recomposed, the artist strolls back toward his scattered tools and papers and sets about gathering them up, bending, stepping, bending again to swipe them from the floor.

The humanoid spectres, it would seem, are too commonplace to net his attention; if one takes a swing at him he'll probably lean away from it, but until then he hardly spares them a glance.

Lexie, though—he's looking at her between bows, still bright-eyed and breathless from stress, and smiling nonetheless. "And you, my dear Lady, are speaking nonsense. But bless you all the same." Here's a more intentional bow for her, along with a playful cant of his head, before he bends again to scrape his fingers beneath the edge of another page and snatch it up.

(It's conversational bait of the most transparent kind, of course, meant to encourage further praise. You can't just thank a person for a compliment; professional vanity requires a little dance.)

She catches Benedict's glance.

Minrathous.

Quickly, she seizes on the artist's attention, bow, words, rather than letting herself think of Minrathous. The Maker alone knows what she'll call into being if she thinks of Minrathous.

"My nonsense is only proper praise for having so faithfully captured this nonsense." Alexandrie smiles brightly, although she's quickly forced to cover both smile and nose with her handkerchief in light distress as the intensely powerful smell of of hot rotting remains washes past in the wake of the creature. She coughs primly into it rather than gagging as her throat is most desirous of.

"Where did you study?" she inquires, muffled by the cloth but perfectly genial despite both stench and remaining horrors.

"She's from the abbey," Myr says of the wraith, feigning calm through gritted teeth. (Gritted half to keep his gorge from rising at the scent and what it evokes. At least that one he had plenty of time to get used to back at home.) "Where I got my eyes back. I s'pose she's reason to be angry at me."

A mob recently. Myr's got no certain knowledge of what that might be, but has an inkling; he hadn't heard of Benedict coming to any grief inside Kirkwall itself. And the screaming peasants mobbing him aren't dressed like they bubbled up from Darktown--

Unaccountably his vision dims--he freezes a moment in heart-clutching alarm--as a pair of hands reach from the Fade to fold over his eyes. The rest of their owner materializes in short order: A woman with braided hair who's old and young at once, crone and maiden oddly overlaid. (Her smile is all the latter, mischievous and bright.) "We all do," Revered Mother Alvar says. "But I can't imagine being cruel to you even now."

One stomach is not so strong as the others, not between all the rest of this, the gulp of wine and the stench that follows it. Benedict realizes with horror that he may have just poisoned himself; Lexie was there that other time, too, and the look she shot him conveyed meaning that he is too anxious to properly interpret.

The bottle slips from his shaking hand, and Benedict turns to rush out of the room with a muttered apology. Retching is heard shortly after: he didn't make it to the privy, it would seem, but at least no one has to bear witness to the contents of his stomach.
Until they enter the hallway, anyway.

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OPEN: Kirkwail

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