faderift | OPEN: Kirkwail

OPEN: Kirkwail

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.

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“As in Thedas, there is a...division that you describe that has never been present in the world of my birth.” Home feels wrong; of my birth is still not quite accurate, not with all she's learned of their existence here, what her nature is. It sits ill but it serves, and she allows it to stand without correcting herself. “'Magicians' and 'commoners', things that people are. Witchcraft is just this: a craft. A tool. A thing that people use, not a thing that they are.”

Behind them, Marius fades—

but it will not be a comfort for long.

“The penalty for witchcraft was death, with, as he has said, no distinction. Thus it was a crime of the desperate—the downtrodden. The weak, who had no other means to reach for strength, and greater fears than death. The thin hope that they might be so successful as to avoid it. A woman's sin, not a man's, who might better his life another way.”

Upon the ghostly gallows, the stool beneath a mage is kicked free and he falls in the air—the rope dissipates, and the robes puff out. By the time he lands, he is no man at all, but Petrana herself barely older than Kitty, falling to her arms upon a lush bed and followed down by Marius, yet untouched by age and care and cruelty.

“Peace,” he says, soothing, fingers splayed out on her back and sliding down, sat beside her sprawl. “Peace, my love.”

Petrana-who-was does not lift her head, sullen, furious: “From your mouth it is no less than God's own wisdom!”

“I am divinely inspired,” he offers, arch, pressing a kiss to the back of her shoulder, just above the laces of her gown. “Shall I offer my goddess worship?”

Muffled into her arm: “You may offer me his head, for I am wrathful.”

Gentler, his hand settling at her waist, “I admit, it wasn't quite what I had in mind.” He lets her seethe, a little longer— “Don't be vexed, Petrana Solene. You're the best of me. They are small people in a small world and we're going to forget more than they've ever known when we're done. No one will ignore you when you're my wife.”

A sigh, and—it spins, dizzying, as she rolls over. His hair lengthens, his cheekbones sharpen; the tight, elaborate coiffure she had worn spreads out to loose curls upon a pillow, her round face drawn tight and weary. The bed they sit upon is rougher hewn, with plain bedding, and the blur of room around them...not a room at all, but a tent.

“I should never have come here.” Her voice is faint and rough; she gazes past him, does not notice the way his expression tightens, though even at a distance the way his grip on her shoulder does is difficult to miss. “I asked one thing of you, Marius, just one thing. One thing.”

“You are tired,” he tells her, touching her jaw. “You're tired.”

“No,” Petrana says, quietly, a terrible aching echo of herself; the quiet horror of it underscored by how empty it sounds, echoing out of the past. “No,” the younger Petrana repeats. “I sleep and I wake and nothing is changed.”

“You get stronger,” he says, so terribly soft.

She rolls over, away from him: “You don't.” His hand hovers over her shoulder, a moment longer, and then he rises—fades into nothing as he walks toward and then through Kitty and Petrana.

It's all awfully - well - intimate. It's not that Kitty is uncomfortable with intimacy or anything of the sort, but - privacy is privacy. Having the contents of Petrana's head dragged out and dumped out on the courtyard grounds like so much rubbish is bad enough; having those contents be from her memories of the bedroom is rather worse. Again, not that Kitty would be shocked to see it all; she's walked the streets of Whitechapel after dark, witnessed plenty; but there's something so dreadfully indecent about having these most private of moments laid bare.

She decides then and there that if the next memory is of the two of them screwing, she will just walk away, information or no.

Primly, she settles her folded hands in her lap, and keeps her eyes on Petrana through all of this. "Power, and the exercise of power, is a great deal of what people are. Humanity always seems to fall into these divisions. Here, it's mages and non-mages, but it's also nobles and commonfolk, freemen and slaves. I haven't yet run into a single society where people don't define themselves by the power they can inflict on others." A small shrug. "Likely, in time, if the witchcraft-users took over, it'd be the nonmagic folk who'd get ground down. Wouldn't they?"

The scene behind them shifts, then - answering Kitty's unconscious call; it's a judge in a high chair, a young woman with bobbed hair and too much lipstick, looking down at Kitty with utter distaste. No words, no verbal condemnations; this is a silent spirit. But the complete disgust the woman levels at the girl needs no narration.

“No,” Petrana says, a little bit more gently, sitting down beside Kitty and regarding the spirit that appears before them rather than the girl beside her. “That is precisely my point—that is why witchcraft was forbidden. Because it cannot be...there are no 'nonmagic' and 'magic' people, the way that there are no...'sword' and 'nonsword' people.”

This would be a more frustrating conversation if it weren't a familiar one, at this point; mages who are born, mages whose magic is something innate to them, that seems to be far more common than a situation like her own world, where magic is innate to the world.

“The only way to stop people from learning magic is to punish them for it—to make it forbidden, to make them fear the consequences. If magic represented power, explicitly, in that way—there would soon be very few people without magic, and another means would have to be found to divide the cruel from those they exploited. When I say that magic is a tool, I mean just that—it is a skill that any person might learn. Simply because someone does not know how to sing doesn't mean they have no voice. Because I do not wield a sword doesn't mean I am incapable of finding an edge. No one is without magic in a way that would mean they could not grasp it, if they reached.”

The spirit's expression is not unfamiliar. It is easier to look at, after so many visions of her own memories, than someone she's speaking to.

“Books of witchcraft were burned. Witches killed, their children smothered to end a sinful line. And yet: magic persisted. Women who reached for power found it. It cannot be ground out, so it cannot be controlled, so it was forbidden because it was power that no regime could limit to themselves.”

Edited 2019-01-20 23:29 (UTC)

But Kitty shakes her head. "It is like that," she says. "Where I come from. Anyone can learn, if they've got access to the right books and the right teachers. They give you a test when you're a kid, and if you're found to be clever enough and all that, then the government ask your parents to give you up. And then you get shipped off as an apprentice. And then you learn magic. I could have been one myself - a magician - if they'd thought I was clever enough."

Which stings, and it doesn't sting. Because the fact that she's a commoner - How can you not be bitter and ashamed, knowing that someone came through, picking out the best people of all of them and you weren't one of them? But at the same time, how different would she have been if she had been picked? She'd have ended up like the judge, with her utter lack of compassion - and it's so strange, now, looking on the woman and registering just how young she is. It's likely she's not even ten years older than Kitty. To be that twisted and bitter and cruel before you're even thirty...

The judge breaks apart - gives way to Mr Mandrake. And Mr Mandrake is just a kid. That much is clear, from the spots on his face and his gawky frame, his stupid too-tight suit with its frilly sleeves and his garish handkerchief and his long oily hair - he's barely even old enough to qualify as a teenager. But there's such awful coldness on his face, as he sits and watches - her, Kitty, some ghost of her being led out to be the next one for execution. Standing stiffly as two demons flank her.

"For high treason," Mr Mandrake, the child, is saying, "we should ensure that this sentence is one that lingers." And it's not something that happened, but it came so close, and so Kitty flinches and drops her eyes to the ground. Even though it's fake, it's - terrifying.

"We could learn it too." Her voice is thick. "If we could read. But most of us can't. They want to keep it out of our hands, you see. So there's more ways than just punishment to keep magic away from people."

“They are playing with fire, then,” she predicts, matter of fact. “It cannot be corralled that way forever, and such a structure will be destroyed. What follows may not be any better. No books and very few teachers ever taught the witches who came to my court, at the beginning. Illiteracy would never have...”

A small, strange smile.

“Most of my companions before exile could barely write their names. They were not fools; they were women, which is legally the same thing.”

"Well," says Kitty, her tone sharper than it should be, "your magic's not like mine, then." Which - the words aren't unkind, but her voice is. Which is pathetic, that she's so rattled by that stupid illusion of her execution. Spirits play tricks like this all the time; she ought to be better than that.

So she takes a moment to regain her comportment. Then, with a voice more level - "You need books to do magic in my world. There's no other way to go about it. It doesn't come to anyone naturally. The problem, I assure you, is not that we're not trying hard enough."

“I can speak only for my own world and the way that I have known it,” Petrana says, evenly; she has had such practise at not rising when provoked, and more than that, it is patently obvious that whatever provocation is here has absolutely nothing to do with her. “You have said several times now that you wish to understand it.”

She considers the scene before them as it shifts, just a glimpse of Marius and Petrana—not in a bed, nor a bedroom. A corridor. He stands at a distance as a little girl is pulled forcibly from her arms, expression impassive. The girl is handed to him; he doesn't flinch, walking away, as Petrana screams at his back.

“I would not have your only grasp of my world's situation come from my murderer.”

Edited 2019-01-21 00:11 (UTC)

Kitty's lips tighten as she feels a flare of anger. The anger isn't fair; that isn't Petrana dismissing her, or her own struggles, obviously. Kitty asked to learn, and she's learning. What was she expecting - some sort of solicitousness over her world? She'd have been annoyed if it came. But even so, there is anger - because of all of this, because of Kitty's memories of being either dismissed or abused by the magicians above her. Because Petrana is a magician, too. And that's what's not fair; she's not a magician like Mr Mandrake was a magician. But even so, the judge had brushed off Kitty's point of view so casually -

Doesn't matter. It's fine. Just stop.

"Your husband killed you, then?" Kitty's voice is flatter and more clipped than it ought to have been, asking that question. She ought to be presenting sympathy. But, well - she's not good at this, is she.

Petrana weighs what she says next for what feels like a very long time. It is long enough to stretch the silence awkwardly, and the way she continues staring fixedly ahead of herself is—

Neither of them are terribly well-suited to the conversation that they're having. There's a reason that she's avoided having it.

“I didn't know what my husband's crime was, when I followed him into exile.”

She isn't changing the subject.

“He had been convicted. By the grace of his uncle's great love for him, he was not executed, but instead permanently exiled from the empire. I had been engaged to marry him; we had had such dreams. We had thought to use the influence and power we might, in our small way, wield to push incremental change—that we might teach our daughters to read even had we a son, and make such a thing unremarkable. I was pregnant, and very young, and I followed him. He was very reasonable, when he explained to me. He was very persuasive. We would be alone. Unprotected. He could not be with me always. I would have to learn some means of protecting myself, our child. I was so small. It would be foolish to give me a blade. He would teach me witchcraft.”

Every step along the path had made sense when she took it.

“I would be safe at his side, then, and no where else. I would face execution, if I fled him. It was not something I considered, when he was working his enchantment into my ring, that he would always know where I was. He did this for my protection. I understood that this was necessary.”

(She doesn't wear it, any more. The enchantment on it had broken when she fell into Thedas, and it is in a box, in a drawer, to be thought about another day.)

“By the end, my husband was my emperor. He did not kill me with his hands. It is—improper for a wife to leave her lord. It is high treason, when he is sovereign.”

"Well, then." Sensitivity, Kitty. Get out of your own head. Kitty takes a breath, and smooths down the legs of her trousers, and speaks with a great deal more civility when she speaks next.

"I'm awfully sorry to hear that, then. It's a dreadful thing, when the people in your life turn out to be horrid." There's no surprise in Kitty's voice; she might play chipper and innocent on the network, but she's not naive enough to actually be surprised by a story like that. "And I'm so dreadfully sorry you couldn't get away from him, either. It's just good that you've built a life here, in spite of him and all his cruelty, isn't it?"

Comfort is like cold water, and Petrana straightens where she sits, slightly—now that it's said, she would prefer to...to anything else. She would have preferred none of it be said, that it be consigned to a history that stopped being hers when Thedas remade her. She does not bear the scars of the end of that life, only the memories. It was not her, who died at the foot of that tower—

at night she can still feel the ground rushing up to meet her.

Briskly, far more uncomfortable now than she was a moment ago (when she'd hardly been at ease)— “Yes. And I have work to do, as I'm sure do you. I would thank you not to entertain his shade any further, should he reappear.”

"As you wish," Kitty responds, though she's watching Petra all the while. When Petra rises, though, Kitty says -

"Why do you keep it all so secret? Are you afraid? Or ashamed?"

Which is, of course, a rather rich question, coming as it does from Kitty Jones, Professional Secret-Keeper. Even just the little flashes that Petrana's been witness to here are far more than she talks about with - well - just about anyone. Honestly, in spite of that bristle over the woman's indifference, it's absolutely for the best that Petrana is indifferent; Kitty doesn't want it getting around that she was charged with high treason against her government. So - she keeps secrets. But her reasons are hers; she doesn't know Petra's.

Indifference is a protective measure, when so much is tumbling out around them; an unkind one, a difficult one. Not one that comes naturally to her, when she is so much more at home with someone else's pain than her own—when she has so much more compassion for that. It is too near, and too entangled with a conversation that bares too much of her own self; she cannot have this conversation and allow herself to be other than remote at the same time.

“No,” she says, and does not volunteer an alternative.

(She is so toweringly angry that she can barely see through it. She would burn all of this down just to forget. And she loves him, still, and she can never forgive him for that alone.)

After a moment,

“The past is the past,” a little softer. “We are given an opportunity here, and I would not waste it looking back at something that does not see me. We cannot change what is in our history. We cannot change the worlds that we came from any longer, we are not there. We will not return. The woman who died was not me, in truth, any longer. Our lives there continue without us and whatever hopes we might harbor for those lives—we will never touch them again.”

The woman who was never free of Marius wasn't her. She grieves that, more than anything; that someone was left behind to give her this. That the separation is not so clear-cut as she would have it be, but that it is enough to know...that a life was lived never knowing anything else. It is terrible all the more for knowing something better.

“You would not have chosen for me to see what I have been shown, any more than I wished you to see my own past. That we are not shown courtesy by the Fade does not mean I should be any less courteous, myself, in allowing you to choose for yourself what you will say of that. It is courtesy I wish to be shown.”

"The past contains patterns of behavior that we can learn from," Kitty responds, the ferocity in her voice muted but still there. "And it contains the roots of our own ways of thinking. If we refuse to ever think about it, then the way we act will be mysterious to us, 'cause we'll just never consider why we do the things we do. And if we don't learn from our history - Then all we can ever do is react to what goes on around us, without ever considering a better way to live."

She shakes her head, then, crossing her arms. "There's no point in hiding from it," she says. "If you pretend like all of it never happened, then you're just living half a story."

It takes her a moment to reply steadily.

“I am not obliged to cut myself open for your inspection,” she says, very carefully, “in order to learn from what I have lived. Just as I do not call you half a person for not exposing yourself to me. They are your wounds, and not mine; I do not need you to strip naked before me to respect that they are there, and to offer you the benefit of the doubt you have the presence of mind to learn from them. You are no less a thoughtful person for not sharing with me each of those thoughts.”

Quieter: “There is not a single day I do not think of my daughters. Of that life. But it is my life.”

Edited 2019-01-21 01:56 (UTC)

"I'm not demanding you tell me. But you said it yourself - all that about the past is the past and you don't look back and all that." She shakes her head again.

"I'm saying it for your sake. If you don't look back, then you'll just keep on repeating all your mistakes. Again and again. That's just how people are. Tell me, don't tell me, but don't lie to yourself."

Petrana sits, again, this time more thoughtfully—less annoyed, considering how to put her thoughts into words. Finally,

“To me there is a difference,” she says, and this is easier, again. She is more comfortable explaining, debating, the further they get from matters still so close and so raw. “When I say, the past is the past, I don't mean what you say—to be ignorant of what happened, to ignore it, to never learn from it. I mean to say, I dislike a tendency I have seen, not merely in Thedas but simply in human nature, to dwell in past misfortune. Or to...refuse to see that things have changed. I wish to learn and to grow. Not to sit in something that is done, and never rise from it. What happened in my life will always define the steps that I take next, that is unavoidable. And you are correct: it must be learned from. But to sit around as if it is still the most important thing, as if unpicking it for an audience means...everyone who comes here and shouts, I am a king! Listen to me, for I am a king!”

Her little moue of distaste is almost comically ladylike.

“Why should we? What have you learned from being a king? If you cannot show me, then why should I care that someone else once looked? I would demonstrate what I have learned, not merely shout about the learning and expect to be heard.”

Kitty's brows draw together. Perhaps excessively unladylike, she exclaims, "I don't give a damn who's a king here." Then, holding her hand out and gesturing as she talks, she says, "Everyone ought to prove themselves with their actions. Their actions now. I won't ever disagree with that. And anyone who leans on their title or their fame or whatever to prove they're worth anything is an idiot."

Then, settling her hand back down into her lap - "But the more we know of the course of history, the more we can understand what the patterns are. And here, in this place, we've got a chance to learn of two dozen different histories. I mean - if that can't show you the patterns of human behavior, then what can? But if we all hide 'em and keep our secrets - Then there won't be anything to grow from."

It startles a genuine laugh from her, so unexpected; she is not, despite her best attempts, carved of stone. The laugh seems far more genuine than the small, closed-mouth things she allows to be called her smiles—seems more natural to her, suits her better.

Rarely seen, but truer.

“What of a bargain,” she says, after a moment, considering Kitty.

That makes her hesitate. The laugh - which is really absolutely lovely, the sort of laugh that makes one feel like one's taken a sip of warm tea, but altogether unexpected. And the offer, as well. Both leave Kitty feeling quite as though the ground has shifted, and she's not sure in which direction.

"A...bargain?" She tilts her face slightly away, watching Petra from the corner of her eye. "What sort of bargain?"

(Petrana would have liked very much to see Kitty say that to—well, it doesn't matter. Nevertheless, she is charmed.)

“For each secret of yours, I shall give you one of my own. At any time, whenever the mood might strike you to trade them. A sort of mutual education, to be used as we each see fit.”

As much as she does suspect that Kitty—who asks a great deal of questions, and it has seemed to Petrana volunteers roughly as much as she herself might—would find such forthcoming exchanges as challenging as she might, it is not an offer made in the assumption of having it declined.

(She would not be put out, if it were.)

It is an offer made because the results might well, as Kitty argues, have merit. And it seems a less difficult way of exploring that possibility than something less...structured, and particular. All the more for how much they've yet seen of one another, unasked.

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OPEN: Kirkwail

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