faderift | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

All at once, Sina moves as she hadn't before, interrupting her peaceful cycle. She shifts in a swirl that lingers only briefly before the tracks of her reappear, kneeling and blood-lipped, bare-faced and male. Startled, Nari follows the path of the spirit to see Herian, taken to ground by mis-step or emotion, caged in by elves whose stature is larger than they ought to have. She can only see a few of their faces, but even if those weren't adorned by the curving lines of their vallaslin, she would know her people by the cut and style of their armor.

"...Ambassador?" she calls after a moment, but her pause was long enough that already the spirits had started to move.

Her body is cold. She doesn't realise it immediately, until she sees a wispish thing wrapping about her, before it moves forward, and child start to materialise before her. Kneeling on the ground, small and slight. She does not need to see its face to know it for herself, and Herian almost dry heaves.

Not this. Not this. The demon taking her father's face in the Fade had been one thing, but to be here again, to smell wet earth and rotting vegetation was so much more.

"Don't worry, little mischief." Spoken in the language of the Starkhaven alienage, their own dialect, and the dagger against his throat pricks in harder. A switch to trade, then. "Everything will be f—"

The knife pulls up, and the ghost of her father screams at his ear is cut away, the next in quick succession. Herian's eyes close. Not again, not this, not again. It came to her often enough in her dreams, and every time she is frozen and can't move to stop when the Dalish jerk the blade across his throat.

It's disgusting to her that the first thing she feels is defensiveness. The rise at the same time, the feeling of We weren't all like this, Keeper Dhavihal would never have allowed this simultaneous with the knowledge sitting in the pit of her stomach like a stone that Dahlasanor had, before its fall, been more than strange. That mostly, they were. They were like this. That fathering a child on a human was treason against the People, that being caught near a Clan with your get meant... this. Your life taken from you in exchange for the life you'd 'taken' from the People and 'given' to the shem'len.

It's Why did you go. Why didn't you stay in your city. Why did you bring her. What were you thinking. And at the same time How can we do this to our own. What made us forget they were our own.

She has played this scene over and over in her mind. Her father's blood spraying and bubbling from his throat. The voice that was stolen from him, that more care was likely taken over animals they felled in the hunt than this living man. Her eyes stayed shut tight, and she hears the screams from her younger self, the way she fights against the Dalish holding her, the struggle as they start to pull leather leggings onto her as she tries to kick and bite and struggle.

Pushing herself up, Herian opens her eyes, and takes in the scene again. Staring at it, at this corruption of a new home with echoes and—

her gaze falls on Dahlasanor, and her jaws clenches. She walks through the spirits, they dissipate and reform like fog as she steps through them, as though she might block out the sight of nails being driven into her legs, of what was done to her.

"You've no need to see this."

She'd heard of this. What they were doing to the young Herian who had just watched her father maimed and killed in front of her. She'd never seen it done, of course, Dhavihal would have never allowed even the thought of it, not even to a laim'lan. Not even to a shem'len, although she'd no doubt that Mirsedis and Nymii had anyway.

Nari looks away before the first nail goes in, but she still winces at the high sound of a child in agony that follows it.

"You're right. I'll... leave," she says to one of the barren garden walls. It's colder here now, in her makeshift shelter that suddenly seems flimsy.

OPEN: Kirkwail

no subject

cw mutilation / murder

no subject

cw torture stuff

(i'm so slow aaa)