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

[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.)