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

[ipseite]

“I can't be haunted by a man who lives,” she says, her fingertips at her collarbone. She follows him, and stiffens at the words from behind them—

“Is this the shape of your fears, my heart?”

He isn't real. It isn't real.

Persuasive, low— “You would choose a weak imitation who will never threaten you with the reach of his grasp.”

[overharrowed]

While this is clearly a bolt aimed at Petrana, Julius is struck despite himself, given away by a small shift in posture. Subtle, a reaction easily hidden from someone who knew him a bit less, but there all the same.

"Let's keep going. We can't stop it from following us, but perhaps it will get distracted." His tone is low, even.

[ipseite]

Petrana's hand comes up to Julius's elbow, and her grip is—tighter than it needs to be. Close, the scent of her hair and the heavy press of her skirts. Real, whole, present. “How—how widespread. Do you think it only the Gallows?”

The corridor is not the corridor—it is, and yet, oppressively overlaid, the interior of a tent, sparse and made for war, blurring into what looks like it must become a throne-room as they get further.

Marius, still:

“Perhaps you haunt me.”

[overharrowed]

"I haven't heard of anything beyond the Gallows yet," Julius says, setting a pace that lets her continue to hold his arm without difficult. "I've seen a few things clearly trying to get a rise out of me, others I couldn't make sense of. But I've not found anything like an epicenter."

Marius and the war tent are more vivid than most of what he's run across so far. He's unsure if observing as much will help or not, so he doesn't just yet.