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

[onlyhymns]

Hearing a voice more grounded than those around him, Cade lifts his head to meet Silas' eyes with a look of abject misery. "It's... it's real," he rasps, "it's... it was here, it..."

Between them, a mage lurches into sight, bleeding mortally from a stomach wound. She grits her teeth, and as her hand forms into a claw, blood draws in a stream to form in a glowing miasma over her hand.

[spellshatter]

It's not real—not the way the two of them are—and Silas straightens up and walks through the ghostly blood mage, not so much to prove it as to make sure she isn't in the way, because his limited knowledge of Ser Harimann, he's remembering now, includes limited knowledge of the fact that the fellow isn't entirely all right at the best of times.

"It might've been here before," he says, "but it isn't anymore."

[onlyhymns]

"But it's still real," Cade says, feeling nonsensical, eyes feverishly scanning over the mage through whom Silas passed. "It's-- the Fade is real. It remembers." He meets Silas' eyes, realizes why the other man is so much taller, and slowly, carefully gets to his feet. "These-- people. Are all real."