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

[limier]

"No."

Curt. The young woman in the doorway isn’t real. She isn’t anything for very long — long enough to think Vipond? To dismiss the thought on the slope of a shifting brow. Something more amorphous: A scattering of imagined apprentices, else faces from some crowd.

Not that. The clothes are all wrong, and no mage since the Archon has worn a crown in Kirkwall.

The young woman in the doorway isn’t real. But she’s still in the bloody doorway, and that means shoving hand through stomach to reach the knob.

"If you wish intellectual curiousity," It might be fascinating, under other circumstances, another life. The luxuries of abstraction, of distance, of not owning responsibility for fifty-odd potential abominations. "The Provost will be fucking about somewhere."

It smells like a pyre in here. That isn’t real, either.

[ipseite]

From down the hallway, a more familiar (and fixed) voice— “Coupe?” And then, a little bit louder, as if she intended to have said: “Commander Coupe? Are you there?” very briskly, having never at the best of times paid a great deal of attention to the suggestion that she consider the commander's schedule.

The spirit who is not Thaïs widens her eyes in a way that mirrors Petrana's to an almost uncomfortable degree, eerie in the momentary similarity over the shifting planes of her face, and she clasps a hand against the door as if she might hold it closed.

She couldn't, of course. She isn't anything so firm.

Not-Thaïs straightens her dress, and it holds its shape for the time it takes her to brush it smooth. Then straightens her shoulders, rises a little until she's so tall as Wren herself. Sets her mouth, like she's screwing up her courage, and—so sweetly, sudden, a half-turn: “How do I look?”

[limier]

She opens her mouth to reply, sucks in a breath of smoke instead. She's not cruel — tries not to be. Maker knows if spirits can be wounded, that hardly matters: They steal nothing if not sympathetic shape. Called back,

"Madame Ambassador," A slip she wouldn't make under other circumstance, on any other day. Perhaps. "Do not,"

It's too late, of course, even as her office creaks open. It's been too late from the moment the spirit chose this shape (what little it's chosen, seems still to be choosing).

She tries not to be cruel. But clipped under her breath,

"Stop fussing."

They aren't people. Another slip, another day.