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

For a few days after her first visit, when she came out of the dark silent as a phantom, Samson made a little time before bed to look out over the Gallows from his room. He was just starting to doubt she'd really existed at all—some new trick of the lyrium, most like—when there came another peck on the glass.

Over time, he's taken to sitting near the window, the better to hear a rustle or tap, or to catch a shadow moving in his periphery. He finds her presence as comforting as he would one of his men after exposure to the red; familiar but uneasy, always mindful, with a low-key fondness all the same.

Which is why he doesn't immediately react when music begins to bleed into his awareness like a spreading ink. Only when he notes Anna's subtle stiffening does he, too, straighten his spine.

"You can hear it, then," he murmurs. "Thought it was just me." It's not so unlike the other song.

(The bread was good.)

Splish, splash, splish, splash... A childish little rhythm, matched in round with, Plip, plop, plip, plop...

Anna stands from her seated position slowly, her head turning as careful as a turret searching the grounds. She doesn't see what she is looking for, but their voices are unmistakable.

Listen close... and you, too, will hear... The sound... of water...

What she hears beneath the voices is the rattling. The rattling of leather and chain restraints, the rattle and clatter of a metal IV stand, metal tools on metal carts.

"Where is that... coming from?" she inquires hesitantly. She doesn't really want to know the answer. She'd prefer it if he changed his mind, and told her he heard nothing at all. Then it would all be in her head, her own madness seeping forth from a damaged cistern.

"Haven't the foggiest." In a tone too uncertain to be considered optimism, he adds, "Maybe someone's just had a bath?"

Someone had a bath, and then decided to sloppily wander the hallways of an unoccupied floor in the Mage Tower while singing to themselves. Yes, that must be it.

Then he hears the buckles and chains, too, closer to his ear than any such sound should be, and the little hairs on the back of his neck go all bristly. He's prepared to tolerate exactly zero seconds of this, and so in sudden decision he stands up out of his chair, and announces aloud to the room, "Right. That's enough of that."

To the door, then, with intent to fling it open and curse at whomever's screwing around out there.

She doesn't want to follow after him, she tries to ignore his prison tower as much as possible, really. To only flit past from the outside and ignore the reality of it all. But she knows, knows how much deeper than a little bathtub this goes.

Have you heard how curiously the sea churns?
Like a storm, but like the rain, only gentle, like dripping water.
It bellows from deep inside of me.Here it comes, up through my insides... but gently, like little droplets.

Adeline materials in the chair that he has abandoned, just as Anna remembers her. Her head swollen and distended, her body strapped down to the wood, needled and tubing sticking out of her body. Her skin as grey and slick as some kind of sea creature's. Anna trips backwards from it, into the corner.

"Is that you, Lady Maria?" She is eyeless, her eyes swallowed up to exist somewehre inside of her, now gazing not at the world without but instead the world within. "No, you're someone else. Please, could you do something for me? I need Brain Fluid. Murky, mushy Brain Fluid…"

Anna covers her mouth, dark eyes round with disgust and horror. The smell of the ocean, of fresh rain, intermingles with the unmistakable stink of death, chemicals, viscera.

Samson's hand is nearly at the latch when the lullaby's next bizarre verse is spoken—by whom, by what—and there his hand goes still, along with the rest of him. A minute turn of his head, straining of his eyes all the way to the right, their blood-rimmed whites flashing at the door. The sudden clatter turns him full about almost against his will (hand twitching for a sword that isn't there, even after all this time) and the sight of this new aberration staggers him, too, very literally, so that he seems to mimic Anna's recoil. The door thumps beneath his sudden weight.

No guard reaction from outside; Samson doesn't notice. Not yet. He's a bit preoccupied.

"Maker's fuck—"

Demon. He doesn't think it, but feels it, with bone-deep certainty, an alarm in every vein, every limb. And it stops there, becomes no more productive than the sudden clarity of tunnel vision. Everything gone murky but that... thing.

Its brain moves and flexes, as though there is some kind of... animate... liquid housed inside. Disembodied voices continue to sing and ruminate upon the water.

Adeline again begs, "Hello, is someone there? Please, won't you help me? My blood is quite fine, it will ease your hardships. I will trade you a vial, if you will find me more Brain fluid.

Murky, mushy Brain Fluid..."

Her delirious hunger and the way she chews the sounds of 'murky' and 'mushy' only add to her disturbing request, her disturbing offer.

OPEN: Kirkwail

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