open: lol never mind.

[cozen]

WHO: Open!
WHAT: A memorial that doesn’t go as planned.
WHEN: Justinian 1
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Nah.

The ceremony takes place in one of the side courtyards that’s been converted into a garden, where the oppressive architecture is offset with flowers and trees. There’s a small pyre, for those whose traditions call for pyres, but no bodies to burn. Instead there are tokens, flowers, favorite foods, treasured possessions—not yet lit.

(For the others, the Dalish and Nevarrans and anyone else with a different wish, their friends and family will have made different arrangements alongside the pyre, probably, if they aren’t universally reviled.)

Anyone who wants to speak, whether it’s a prepared speech or a single spontaneous sentence, can do so. The tone is respectful but only so solemn. It’s been more than a week. For many, the worst of the shock has passed, and the sun has continued to rise and set, and there’s room between bouts of misery for fond memories and occasionally laughter. The memorial is a door that’s closing—slowly, kindly—and tomorrow, on the other side of it, the war will continue.

Today, on this side, the only people judging anyone else for crying are the assholes.

***

Across the harbor, more than a dozen filthy and tired people come to a stop on the docks, and the loitering ferryman pauses to take stock of them, then starts laughing. There isn’t even any local mythology about ferrymen and the dead. It’s just that funny to him on its own, that he’s been rowing miserable people around all week, and here’s the source of all that misery, dirty and tired but significantly less dead than believed.

When he stops laughing, he offers to dunk everyone in the harbor before rowing them over. For the smell, you know. No one is going to be happy to see them if their eyes are watering too much to actually see them. Then he laughs some more at his hilarious joke.

But he does eventually load up his boat—and maybe there isn’t room for everyone all at once, maybe some dramatic reunions will be delayed, maybe some people will be even more fashionably late to their funeral than the others—and carries everyone across the bay, still chuckling intermittently.

***

In the courtyard, the speeches and anecdotes (and singing, perhaps) wind down to long silences peppered with murmurs or sniffling. Someone is preparing to light the pyre. And then the gate creaks open.

Comments

[exequy]

Not a fucking bit, [ Kostos says with all the tattered remnants of his dignity he can gather, pushing at Iorveth's forearms to free his face, just as soon as he's over the surprise of having his face squished—and that's before he fully realizes there's grime involved.

Emotions are for tools, and Kostos, fortunate enough not to have any of the very small handful of people he'd become a reckless revenge-murdering monster for among the missing, had had quite enough of dealing with them well before the dead returned and all of the springs he'd hoped were drying up had welled up again.

But he has work to do. He'd only gone up to his room to change, first, and now this: ]

You asshole.

[ Now he's realized that there's grime involved. He touches his own face to confirm the transference, then gives Iorveth one of those darting half-slap shoulder shoves, meant more as a jolting fuck you than to knock anyone down.

He did miss him a little. ]

[aenseidhe]

[ iorveth leans with the shove, pacing back a couple steps as he laughs, cracked and dry lips grinning wide at kostos's unfortunate dirt to face issue. ]

Are you sure? [ he starts, voice teasing as he bends down to snatch up a handful of dirt and gravel, sifting it out for some pebbles that he starts to throw at the mage's chest, because he is a grown ass man and he can. ] Not even a single tear?

[ plink, there's a pebble. plonk, there's another one. ]

Should I have died more violently? Maybe left behind an arm gruesomely? [ because what do we do when we barely dodge an untimely demise? crack some jokes about it. laugh like everyone who believed it is a sucker. ] Please, I value your critique.

[exequy]

[ Kostos is in the middle of trying to rub his cheek clean, without success, when the first pebble hits, and for the second he’s raised a hand to try to block it, also without success. But before there can be a third, he’s made a clean two-handed gesture and been enveloped by a barrier of force that wouldn’t let a sword touch him, and definitely not a pebble.

He doesn’t trot out magic lightly. Not in bar fights, even when he has cracked ribs and a bloody nose. Definitely not during practice. That would be cheating. But this is important. He’s had his face squished and his cheeks grimed and his decision—recommendation, at least—to stop searching suddenly shown to be stupid, and in a way he can’t rightly be angry about, since being angry that everyone’s proven him wrong by surviving would obviously be ridiculous—he’s glad, really, it’s just—

The pebbles aren’t touching him anymore, is the point. ]

There’s still time.

[ To die violently. To lose an arm. He doesn’t mean it. ]

[aenseidhe]

[ the magic barrier that erects around kostos gets a lame pbbbft sound from the recently rumored dead man(elf). boo, you whore.

but, he does take the appearance of actual magic as a 'you can stop now' and iorveth drops the rest of his pebbles back onto the dirty street from whence they came, pacing lazily up to the edge of kostos's barrier instead and linger there. ]

Lend us some assistance then, would you? [ iorveth holds an arm out, giving it a shake towards Kostos, like he's expecting the man to pull out a machete and hack it off for him. ] Here, the left one. I'd hate for my corpse to look unbalanced.

[ because missing the right eye and right arm would just be tacky, too aesthetically heavy on the one side, and violate some kind of corpse feng shui. we can't have that.

the point of this nonsense being: he just survived the desert and the mountains and the deep roads hell in practically just his pajamas, let him preen a little. morbidly. ]