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

iii

[faithlikeaseed]

"--oh."

If Myr had wandered out of the Gallows and into the Golden City, he could not be more surprised nor wider-eyed than he is now. (It's a surprise driven in no small part by contrast; this is worlds away from the horrors he's been feeling, the obscenities that throng the Gallows with the Veil thinned nearly to nothing.)

He sets his foot down, caught as he was mid-step by the sudden vision, and stares unashamedly at the peacock-bright elves, the brilliant walls, the tree set in the center like a vhenadahl kissed by the Maker's grace itself. It suggests things, conjures things, that Sorrel's description of what elves had been never could; Myr's only the hints in Thranduil's stories to lead the idea the elvhen could be so noble as--

As this. "O Creating Glory," he breathes. "Where is this?"

[utulien_aure]

"Serah Myr?"

Caught up in his own head as he is, the sound of someone else entering the courtyard comes as more of a shock that it would normally be. A moment's confusion, nothing more- but Myr's presence does break the spell that his heart had so wanted to believe.

Fingon is not yet sure whether or not he is grateful.

"This is the city of Tirion," he says in answer to Myr's question, "eldest of the cities of the Eldar west of the sea. And the fairest, to my mind-but perhaps I am biased. I grew up here, after all."

A faint smile crosses his face.

"I hadn't realized quite how much I missed it."

[faithlikeaseed]

"How could you not?"

Myr looks over at Fingon in time to catch the smile and return it with one of his own. The awe in his eyes is plain to see; nothing, outside his dreams, has prepared him for this. If he'd seen Nevarra City, perhaps, or Minrathous-- They'd probably still pale before this. Before Tirion.

"Will you tell me more of it?" And then, as a spirit wearing an Eldar guise passes by them: "And these pe--these spirits, the people they're pretending at--do they really all go about like this on an ordinary day?"

[utulien_aure]

"How indeed?" Fingon murmurs to himself, a little wry and a little sad. "I suppose I taught myself not to think on it very much. An easier thing to do, perhaps, when it did not linger in the air before me."

His eyes follow Myr's to the spirits about them, mimicking the lives of people he once saw every day. "Of course; ask as much as you like. As for the clothing- well," he laughs, "my people are known for being terrible show-offs."

Which might explain a few things about Fingon's favorite hairstyles.

"But no, this is the Great Square- few among the Noldor would choose to be seen at less than their best before the King's House, and fewer still would forego the chance to model their own work. Every metalworker here- and there are a fair few, I expect- is wearing an armband or cloak-pin of his own design. And the nissi of the Embroiderer's Guild are, if anything, even prouder of their work."