[OPEN] FRIGHTENING FESTIVITIES

[heirring]

WHO: Everyone
WHAT: Celebrating a totally 100% legit wedding.
WHEN: Summerday
WHERE: Edlingham Hall, the Vinmark Foothills
NOTES: cw: Spectral Violence and Ghostly Gore; if you don't want to deal with the spooky ghost adventure half of the evening, feel free to say your character went back to Kirkwall early rather than staying the night.

PARTY;

A few hours' journey from Kirkwall, the great old shape of the house known as Edlingham Hall rises up from out of the Vinmark foothills. In the decades (ages?) since it's abandonment, what must have once been a very imposing stone structure built in the mountain's shadow has given way to age and the elements. What remains is unequivocally a ruin, albeit a stunningly elaborate one. It's a place of columns and alcoves, gutted passages and weather worn stairs leading to the skeletal remains of old towers and chambers, with everything turned to varying shades of brown and green and as it's been grown over or into by the surrounding landscape. There's hardly a roof remaining to be found in the whole of the place.

Luckily, this particular party doesn't require one. In what might have once been the titular hall, a series of tables and benches (borrowed from the Gallows, thank you very much) have been set up around a stretch of cracked tiles which has been more or less cleared for dancing and everything has been lit amply by a collection of merrily burning braziers.

Party-goers will be treated to a host of entertainment, included but not limited to: at least one speech (thank you, Provost Stark), a half dozen toasts, a rather impressive spread of Orlesian-styled cuisine (no doubt prepared by someone devastated to be expected to do so under such rugged conditions), quite a bit of rather good wine, music, dancing, and a few more avant garde Rifter-influenced party games including a vaguely wyvern-shaped pinata and some heinous game called Snap-Dragon.

And if none of that sounds like a good time, then there are ruins to explore, discreet alcoves to investigate, and a campground pitched in the ruin's shadow where one might retire early from the party with only a stock level of scorn.

AT THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT;

An eerie mist begins to stream from the cracked tiles of the dance floor. Riftwatch does not count a fog mage among their midst. Was one perhaps hired? Is this a trick of some science? A peculiar feature of the weather in this region? Such murmurs begin to circulate as the mist continues to thicken, and rise, and sour to a sickly pale yellow. It clashes with the decorations. Its touch seems to wither the impossibly sumptuous meal, curdling cream fillings and souring fine meats.

And then the screaming starts.

In the stone frame of an upper window, see her: a woman, in a long pale gown, with a horrible wound around her neck. Her slippers peep over the sill. Blood begins to drip down her front as her mouth opens, and opens, and opens, until her jaw rests upon her bloody chest.

Guests seated at the table will feel some creature bumping against their legs--something big, and solid, and hot, and hairy. When they pull away in horror, they will find nothing at all beneath the table. But the growling will not stop, nor will the crunching of teeth on bone.

The twisted figure of a man rises from a pile of tumble-down stone. His limbs hang at loose and unnerving angles. One arm has been crushed and droops down too low, brushing at his warped knee. His face is a mask of pain, and his left eye bulges as if ready to burst. Pressure has thrust his circlet of gold low on his brow, cinching his balding head. He shuffles toward the party, reaching with his ruined hands for human flesh. Or perhaps a cup of wine.

A headless body comes running out from the rotting main keep. It is wearing armor but is otherwise without identity. From its stump of a neck sprays a great geyser of blood, spatting party-goers and the ground and the food and whatever else is in its way. Its graying hands are reaching, but without a head, its path is random and monstrous, trampling over anything and anyone without regard. Or it would, if it weren’t spectral.

The ghosts must be stopped. Find the source of the haunting or this marriage will be ruined.

Those not interested in tracking down the source of the haunting will soon discover that the fog which has wreathed Edlingham Hall has become quite impenetrable. Attempting to escape the grounds will result in being impossibly turned around and eventually spit any would-be escapee back into the ruin. Solving the mystery may be optional, but experiencing the haunting by the aforementioned ghosts (and any other thematically appropriately specters your heart might desire for the convenience of creeping out your characters) apparently isn't.

Comments

[heirring]

Her nod is emphatic in the way that someone mentally noting and committing information to memory might do.

"This does of course beg the question of what becomes of any Rifter once they have left Thedas," she muses aloud, though hardly for the first time. "Miss Niehaus' experience would suggest a sort of...re-integration, as it were. Although clearly she bears only the memories of her original time in Thedas. Do you know, I asked her about her anchor and she seems to have lost the additional abilities it once had. I'm quite eager to see if it is a temporary set back, or if she will successfully retrain the thing."

[ipseite]

“Do we accept the premise that they leave?”

Petrana's expression suggests that she does not, although she is thoughtful rather than corrective. Working through, out loud, something that she has perhaps not had the occasion to discuss in such explicit terms before.

“It is my understanding, for example, that if a spirit of Thedas is destroyed — then that destruction is not necessarily...what made it up, of the Fade, may one day form something new. We have, as rifters, much in common with the spirits of Thedas; I don't recall if you had arrived or not, during the sickness. If we are, then, ourselves created of the Fade in some manner...what it gives, it may take back, and it is malleable. It has proven malleable. If she had been, effectively, remade rather than returned, then that would account for the behaviour of her anchor, might it not?”

[heirring]

There is a distinct glint of pleasure which lights there in Wysteria's eye at the suggestion and her free hand--the one not employed with managing a cup of wine--jerks after the impulse to grasp the smaller woman's forearm in her eagerness. She manages to rein herself in only at the very last moment, her hand instead rising to fiddle at the pearls about her neck.

"So you suspect that when rifters disappear, it is because they have become something different according to--what then? Their whims? The Fade's? Some vagary on the part of their anchor, perhaps?"

These are probing questions more than they are interrogation, as if the theory itself is a dark room and she must go about with a lamp and light up all these unfamiliar corners.

[ipseite]

“Setting aside for a moment the origins of our memories, if in practicality we come from the Fade — an ever-changing thing, the veil thinning and strengthening...who is to say, then, what we might become? Or simply return to, as dreams are woken from and the things in them dissipate into the Fade itself.”

She takes a small drink of wine.

“Is it a coincidence that rifters with the strongest ties outside of themselves remain the longest? Is that simply a function of remaining, that we will build those things? Or is it significant. Madame de Fonce, I do not know the answer, but the questions compel me.”

[heirring]

"Miss Ellie--one of the new Rifters--suggested something similar when we first met. She evidently has been to a place between Thedas and her own, and the phenomena of people appearing and then receding back allegedly to the place from which they'd original come occurred there too. She described connects to that place as a tether, or an anchor. Something which kept travelers in that place, and without it they may be pulled back to where they came from."

She lifts her glass, but doesn't actually get around to drinking before continuing:

"If were were to say that place was similar to Thedas or where we came from, and that the invisible space between was all the Fade or something like it and our projections, for lack of a better word, are of a similar nature regardless of what world we travel to and in some way reliant on the bonds we forge with others--Well. I think it rather funny, is all. Someone somewhere might have reason to call that a sort of possession."

After all, spirits who cross into the world require minds to lean on to remain stable as well.