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

[rathercommon]

"Doesn't that seem a bit wrong, though? Pretending to believe something just for the sake of survival?" Kitty, who bowed and scraped and smiled and simpered with the best of them back home, doesn't actually really believe that. If you survive, you survive; who cares if you tell lies to do it. The only thing that matters is betraying your principles, not whether or not you're loud about them.

But - it's interesting. Kitty has, to this point, taken Wysteria to be a fool. But this is actually an interesting conversation. She's not about to let it die.

[heirring]

"Oh, no one believes everything the Church says. Not even the people who art part of it and think they do. Otherwise there wouldn't be all the back and forth discussion about who is and isn't a demon or what any of it means. And they pick their Divines, so it's not like they can even say it was prophetic or anything. Not properly, anyway."

She scratches the side of her nose with the back edge of the pen then scratches down a last note before folding the paper over. The pen gets shoved back behind her ear, disappearing into her pale hair.

"Anyway, I didn't mean join the Chantry or become Andrastian. Although I don't really see the harm either. It isn't as if they're entirely wrong, now are they? The Fade apparently really does exist, so who's to say the rest isn't at least a little bit true? But no, I meant... that whatever we do to make sure we don't get shoved into a hole or whatever you like after this is all over, none of it will really matter to anyone at all in the Chantry doesn't agree. That's where all the trouble with the mages and Circles started, wasn't it? A difference in theological opinion."