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

[ipseite]

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.

[rathercommon]

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?"

[ipseite]

(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.