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

[coquettish_trees]

It gives her a start, to see Petrana whole and in the flesh so soon after the broken doll the spirits had played. Keep playing. It's a certain kind of uncanny horror she had only felt before after bolting awake from nightmare of death before it fled back into the unconscious: to look at someone's face and be able to see exactly where it would splinter. Which of the lovely dark sapphire eyes would burst from its socket. Where the jaw breaks. Had it been a fear of hers, acted large to terrify her? Or something darker?

There is only room for reassurance if she begins with the latter.

"The you..." Alexandrie starts, having to pause and press her tongue to the roof of her mouth for a moment to alleviate the dryness before continuing, "The you who remains in the world of your origin. She... was murdered so?"

[ipseite]

A part of her thinks to lie.

To deny it. To forget that she cannot forget it, and say, a nightmare, only. A terrible thing that could never be. To rewrite, to unwrite what had been done, how dreadfully they had fallen apart. That she had never fled, that he had never confined her, that she had walked down from that tower and not been thrown. That her husband had been, still, who he had been before—

he walks out of memory and into a bedroom, overlaid upon the tower's entrance hall. The woman sat upon the bed, her hands tightly clasped—she is older than she is, standing whole and hale before Alexandrie, but there is something about the eyes. About the way that living, Petrana anticipates the moment, flinches a breath before Marius in memory brings his fist down upon the table and the movement is mirrored by her twin shade.

“Petrana the martyr,” he mocks her, furious, through his teeth. “I have placed a crown upon your head and an empire at your feet and still, still it is not enough for you. Sitting in judgment as if you forget you sit at my side.”

With cut-glass precision, “I don't forget.”

“I am doing what is needful. Will you remember that?”

“I remember when I believed that you would,” she flings back at him, a flare of temper that Thedas has seen rarely, if ever. “I remember when you listened to me, Marius, when was the last time that you listened to me? And now, you target—”

A sharp, barked laugh. “Woman, you target my patience. I do nothing but listen to you.”

Stung, “You bade me speak.”

“And my god, have you!” He grasps her by the forearm, dragging her to her feet—and they are younger, now, and she laughs as he spins her out into the ballroom, his midnight ensemble the perfect counterpoint to the golden sun she's made of herself for what must have been a costume ball. She glows, even in memory, has eyes for nothing but the man drawing her back into his arms, moving swift and lightfooted and perfectly matched, a partnership, to music that plays muffled as if it comes from terribly far away.

The warmth in his voice when he says, “Ma princesse soleil,” is a blade sliding against velvet, and all the more unsettling for the ways in which he does not play her false. He is no perfect charmer; there's a wry, self-aware edge to the way he moves in the space, the little twitch of his eyebrows toward company only they can see inviting her into the joke, the roll of his eyes. The way he murmurs into her ear, too low to be heard, and the intimacy of the smile she arranges her features to hide.

Once, she thinks, he had loved her. Perhaps not as she'd loved him; perhaps not as she'd wished he would. But surely—

once, he had loved her.

She is still laughing when Madame de Cedoux says, starkly, “The penalty for treason is death.”

[coquettish_trees]

This is different, vastly, from the scenes she had seen playing out today. There had been hints of scenery, suggestions, enough to establish the feeling of a place, but this...

Alexandrie can see the carving on the bedposts. The print on the silk of the covers that wrinkle lightly around this other Petrana's slight weight. Even the small tremble of the table beneath the slam of the man's fist. She is only adjusted to this when it changes, when everything changes. The time, the place, the music, the entire feeling of it. The space between the two of them, like a cold hearth suddenly taking flame. He says something, an endearment, perhaps, that she thinks she could almost understand, and he means it. Loves her.

She tears her eyes away when Petrana speaks, looks down at her. Asks, softly, "What happened?" and means it all.

[ipseite]

Petrana's gaze holds on that moment as the music ends and the laughter dissipates along with the dancers; she doesn't meet Alexandrie's gaze. Her expression is cold, tight with unhappiness, and it doesn't seem in this moment to enter her head to acknowledge another person's gaze.

“His nature took its course,” is what she says, shortly. “Many died for it.”

[coquettish_trees]

"I—" Alexandrie begins, pauses briefly, and then continues, "—apologize for my inquiry. It is an exceptional temptation today, to peek into rooms that are not ones own for the simple fact of their doors being flung open." Especially into other worlds entire. "Even so, an opened door is hardly an invitation to rifle through the space, and I shall not ask you to explain anything further."

The unspoken end being, of course, 'unless you wish to.'