In the Armor of the Dead

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone in the Gallows
WHAT: An(other) attack on the Gallows
WHEN: The next night after Satinalia. Enjoy dealing with two weird attacks back to back, now while hungover! Sorry.
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: This is the somewhat belated October mod event, as the theme may indicate. In addition to this open post there are also several open top-levels below with specific tasks PCs can help accomplish. There's also an open crystal catch-all post for event-related chatter. If you have questions, hit us on the Mod Question channel on discord.

Just after dusk, those standing guard duty on the walls will hear an odd rattle and clatter, like debris knocked by waves against the rocks below. Except it grows closer, scraping up the side of the fortress. Rats, maybe? Things do echo oddly here in this tall stone fortress with the sea crashing at its base on all sides, especially on evenings like this where the fog has rolled in across the harbor, catching some sounds and carrying others. By the time this noise is enough for someone to look down over the parapet, it's already too late. A host of dripping corpses has already clawed its way up the walls and now they come over it, pouring up and over the eastern battlements first but the others only moments behind. They come in numbers uncountable, crawling over each other, enveloping the Gallows in a wave of the dead.

Many are skeletal, the rest with the shrunken shrivelled flesh of a mummy still clinging to their bones. A few are dressed in the tattered rags of the long-dead, but many are in armor or finery from ages past or the blood-spattered outfits of everyday Nevarrans. It won't take long to figure out Nevarrans is what they are--surely the still-possessed dead of Nevarra City, old and new, somehow transported from that abandoned capitol to Kirkwall. A year out in the elements instead of in the protection of the Necropolis has not been kind, but the weather is not the only thing that has been working on them. Each and every corpse has red lyrium growing within it, crystals jutting out from bones or erupting through leathery skin, crusting stripes across skulls or adding vicious spikes to limbs.

They tumble down the stairs into the courtyards and flood through the fortress until they meet resistance or doors too heavy to batter down (there are some benefits to living in a prison). The spirits possessing the dead hum with the aggressive intensity that lyrium inspires. They fight viciously, without magic or any great intelligence but a primitive instinct for destruction of any life they encounter and an inhuman lack of fear. Some are armed, with weapons running the gamut from ceremonial swords and halberds to tools and household implements. They will all continue to attack as long as they are mobile, or until the demon within is destroyed. Their rage is indiscriminate but not undirected: anyone caught in the city when it happens can attest that the swarm is confined--for now--to the Gallows only, and any dead driven into the sea at the ferry launch will seek to climb back up rather than turn for other shores. No attempt is made to hold any particular position; they ebb and flow through the complex in constant pursuit of the living.

As Satina rises the temperature drops and the sky clears, the light of the full moon highlighting a merchant ship at anchor not far to the east of Gallows Island, though not so close as to have inspired suspicion. It has been there for at least a day, its position unremarkable in a harbor crowded by traffic too frightened to travel the Waking Sea further. But now a dark mass of lurching movement scrambles over its side into the water and on its deck are two spots of glowing red. A spyglass will make clear the details: a mage on the quarterdeck crowned with a strange helmet of red lyrium, chains of the crystal strung like armor down chest and arms, crusting his staff. On the fo'c'sle a Templar in an identical lyrium helm, armor studded with lyrium and cut to accommodate the crystals that grow out of her arms and shoulders. Their eyes glow red and lips seem to move in unison.

By dawn, the the eluvian the dead arrived through will have been destroyed and their flow halted, and the bomb they delivered into the Gallows disarmed or otherwise neutralized. There will need to be a thorough sweep of the fortress to ensure that all are located and re-killed, and the dead-again will need to be disposed of. The presence of red lyrium in the corpses may require some additional Cleansing of the fortress as well. The morning will also bring news from agents elsewhere in Thedas that Kirkwall was not the only target. A similar attack struck Cumberland, and another was intended for Val Royeaux, but the ship carrying the eluvian was intercepted before entering the harbor by the heavy Orlesian navy presence guarding the capital and instead the dead swarmed over several naval ships before they were destroyed.

Comments

james holden.

[acreage]

[ starters coming below, hmu for plotting. anyone, whether or not we write an encounter during the attack, is welcome to notice he's not entirely himself — more distracted, irritable, brutal with fighting the corpses than is strictly necessary. ]

gabranth.

[acreage]

The night is young.

But the air is already heavy with the clamor of battle: frantic movement, weapons clashing, bones clacking, and the occasional scream. Holden is heading in the wrong direction, for the right reason, or the right direction for the wrong reason, depending on how one wants to look at it. He's running towards the old mage tower; his sword is still in his room, and other weapons besides, though they're either too unreliable or too new to him to be of much use. The thought of staying there, in potential relative safety, doesn't occur to him.

The first corpse he'd seen had almost killed him. It was more mummy than skeleton, leathery flesh old and rotted, glowing red spikes making a mockery of its hands, its knees, its shoulders. He'd frozen; the swipe it'd taken at him with its cudgel that might've taken off his head if he'd stayed that way. If there's a bruise blossoming around his sternum, he's frankly lucky it isn't broken.

He's less lucky now: a cluster of them move between him and the tower door. The good thing is that the door is shut, which makes the building secure — God fucking willing — for the time being. The bad thing, of course, is that he's still out here with them, weaponless.

The worse thing is when one, and then two, and then three look at him, and his heart kicks into overdrive, and his breath seems to trap in his chest. It's not protomolecule. But he blinks, and the dead are everywhere, blue-glowing and scabbing with crystal, blue fireflies dancing in the air, and he blinks, and one levels a spear at his stomach.

[archademode]

It might be said there is little difference between them. Between the restless dead and Gabranth himself: unliving and yet not yet wholly vanquished, lingering in defiance of natural law. No relic should remain upright as they do now. Driven by purpose above all else.

But there is no kinship felt when Noah— darkened silhouette emerging from the shadows cast by reddened lyrium— slams the whole of his armored weight against the nearest cluster of skeletal figures crowding Holden in a rotted, shambling crescent, their brittle mess of bone and crystal crunching under momentum. Splintering bright before ebbing like cast-off embers.

His helm twists, horns limned by narrow bands of broken moonlight.

“Return to your senses, Captain— now— ”

[acreage]

He nearly jumps out of his skin at Gabranth's arrival.

The space left by simple surprise makes it easier to anchor in the present moment. He's always haunted by ghosts, but these subside for now — draw back to more like background noise. Potent enough that his heart still feels like it may slam out of his chest, tremors rattling down his limbs, but not all-encompassing.

One skeleton had been a little away from the main knot of them. It shambles towards Gabranth's back now, bones rustling noisily, and Jim remembers that he isn't, exactly, unarmed. He raises a hand quickly and shoots a blast of green Fade energy at it, hitting it hard enough to slam into the nearby wall.

But it isn't obliterated yet.

[archademode]

Noah stands corrected.

He’d assumed something had gone awry, given the advancing horde, the look on Holden’s face, far too still for present circumstance. Instead, the air fills with the nauseating scent of scorched magic, that telltale, disorienting strangeness borne of the Fade. Green light surges, blotting the area like a crack of lightning, and when Gabranth turns to chase down the target of that attack— heel quick to snap against the brittle crystalline glow of its fetid skull— he realizes he'd misjudged Holden's present state.

His capability as well.

But power alone will not suffice. Not with seemingly endless swaths of undead in play.

Gabranth’s decision is swift. The shorter of his swords flipped, out of its own reversed position in his grip, and thrown high with its blade tipped upwards toward Holden— only a bark of warning preceding it.

“Take it! Defend yourself.”

They’ve the outer base of a tower to clear, the two of them.

[acreage]

He hadn't really, is the thing. Misjudged.

Even as Gabranth crushes the remains of the skeleton Jim's anchor blast had injured — as much as anything dead can be injured — if you can call this living — because a hundred thousand people died on Eros; try carrying that around in your skull —

because even as pain twangs through his anchor hand after the blast, there's a panicked, animal instinct to claw the shard out of his goddamned skin.

So he doesn't catch the sword; not a failure to succeed, but knowing where he is well enough not to try. He dives for it instead, gets a good enough grip on the hilt despite the cool evening dew. It's just that this wouldn't be the first time he's had to fight for his life through whatever is happening in his head; and it wouldn't be the second; and it wouldn't be the third. Gabranth's presence is grounding, and, importantly, something to defend.

(James Holden, and having something to protect. The song remains the same, in any time or place.)

"How many?"

[archademode]

“Too many to be counted— ”

Cut off by a failed attack that slices through the air mere inches from the front of his helm, retaliation swift, and painted with a burning gust of flame spat hot from the edge of Gabranth’s own blade.

“Put your back to the wall, prevent them from beating down those doors at any cost!”

The smell in the air is cloying, the nonexistent reverberation of red lyrium damning to their senses, though thankfully not so pervasive as to be entirely overwhelming.

Yet there is no telling how long this might take. How long they might need to hold their ground with little chance of relief. Something to protect with no end in sight.

And it is with that knowledge that he worries, fleetingly, for his friend.

[acreage]

He's moving before Gabranth is even done speaking. Endless enemies, a home to defend; they're as bad odds as he's ever known. Gabranth's own alarm speaks volumes. And yet a strange calm seems to settle like a fresh fall of snow.

There are worse ways to die.

So he cedes himself to the adrenaline, to the part of his mind trained to operate in these circumstances. Positions himself as suggested, though not without some reservation — he's seen these creatures climb, and he and Gabranth can defend the doors all night without it mattering if they're bypassed. A problem, but not one he has an answer to. In the meantime, he fights. The blade used against anything that comes in range; Fade blasts as often as he can bear for those further out, and for climbers.

[archademode]

Magic does much to mitigate what reach alone cannot: the green crackle of the Fade, the scorching heat of spent flame, extending high and harsh in order to clip would-be ascension—

But eventually, the assault turns rampageous.

Gabranth slips back closer to the doorway. His back to its reinforced span, sweat a thick, uncomfortable film beneath the shadow of his helm. This world takes its toll in ways he is unused to. In ways that exhaust a body not designed to age, to weaken, to weary.

He feels himself growing less efficient by the second.

Imprecise as it is, a blow finds its way between the gaps in his armor. More force than agony, the sting of it only settling in when he moves to lift his arm in the next moment— defense nearly shattering for an agonizing flicker of pain.

Determination is enough to keep him going. Rage itself is enough. With a furious headbutt he slams the horns of his helmet into the skeleton nearest to him, sending bits of bone splintering away.

[acreage]

This isn't sustainable.

He'd known, of course, even at the beginning. But the more time passes, the more the writing on the wall becomes clear. The bruise across his chest makes breathing, moving, feel more like fire; the blade in his hands seems to grow heavier and heavier; and he's reaching his limits with the Fade energy. The pain throbs through his palm, down his arm, and a part of him can't help thinking that he might be starting to understand the kind of agony Wysteria dealt with.

Stranger still is seeing Gabranth start to tire. After all his assurances of his immortality, despite the severity of the battle, Jim had half-expected to see him fight inexhaustibly. The man's will is ironclad as always, but for the first time the fear of watching him get killed grips his heart.

Protecting the Gallows is a noble cause. Dying for nothing is not.

He lashes out with the sword, then shouts, "Fall back!" There is nothing in his voice that brooks argument: this is an order. The door is right there. He hasn't forgotten the danger of skeletons following them inside, adding, "I'll cover you."

He doesn't wait for agreement, fights his way forward instead of trying to stay in place. It's less because he thinks Gabranth wouldn't, than to be sure his intentions are clear, that he says, last,

"And keep the goddamned door open for me!"

Then: a bright flash of green.

[archademode]

It is a fair decision. The right one, regardless of how it feels in the moment— how they might be swayed to excuse another minute, another push, another lull between bursts of waning strength. Were he convinced this was Captain Holden’s own sacrificial gambit, there would be no concession. No accord.

Instead, that final demand is enough.

It takes more power than perhaps he has left to spare, but through raw effort alone, Gabranth forces those heavy doors open. Half-pressed against its angled span as one final gout of flame circles Holden’s heels.

“It is done— get inside, now!”

[acreage]

He doesn't need to be told twice. He turns and books it, ducks to dodge a well-aimed strike from one bony hand clutching a hammer, and all but stumbles through the doorway. He braces himself against the nearby wall, turning swiftly in time to see the doors shut, the both of them on the right side of them.

And only then, finally, lets out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding.

[archademode]

It is not relief that he feels, sitting down to press his back to the shut (and shuttered) doorway, feeling it vibrate with the hammering of withered fists and weaponry from the opposite side.

The night will be long in spite of this reprieve, and there is more they’ll need to do once they gather their strength.

But for now, Gabranth’s glance is sidelong. Assuaged, as he pulls away his helm in order to catch his breath.

“I did not think you a mage.”

derrica.

[acreage]

It's around nightfall, the next day.

The dead are gone, the fortress purified of red lyrium. Everything is, finally, quiet; and it's likely that most of them spent the daylight hours finally getting some sleep after the attacks of the last couple of days. It's possible that Derrica's still asleep, and he's ready to take the stairs back down if so. He's sure she must've spent the morning with the newly wounded, the last night in the battle, and she deserves the rest. He can wait.

But her door's ajar, so he knocks, pokes a head in.

"Derrica?"

[tender]

Yes, the door is ajar. And yes, Holden is welcomed in. Derrica is sat up on her bed, in the process of braiding her hair. There are still fading bruises and scrapes, nearly healed, peeking from the loose collar of her tunic. A soft wool tunic is draped over her shoulders. In her lap, an assortment of jewelry gleams, set within easy reach as she works. She flashes a soft smile, fingers pausing in their work only long enough for Derrica to tip her head towards the unoccupied chair by her window.

"Jim," she answers. "Is something the matter?"

Beyond the obvious aftermath of the disaster they'd just dealt with.

[acreage]

"There aren't any more skeletons trying to kill me," he says, crossing to the open chair, "so it could be worse."

You absolutely cannot use "could've been worse" as a Thedas measuring stick is something Cosima says to him in the near future, but he'll use it in the meantime. And it's good to see Derrica, whole and fairly unhurt, braiding her hair like it's any other day. Comfort in the familiarity, maybe, or just in her.

His own tunic is a loose-fitting one, something maybe a size too big that somehow wound up in his closet. The reasoning for it is clear enough when he tugs at the dark green neckline, revealing the top of an impressively purplish bruise.

"You wanted me to tell you," is said halfway to apologetic. "That's the worst of it from last night."

Added in a way that's meant to be, hopefully, comforting; and is true, in the physical sense. There may be another story in the gloves he's unearthed even for this indoor trip, the reflexive grasp for levity instead of giving her a straight answer.

[tender]

"Thank you."

It isn't that she'd doubted him. But she had wondered exactly what the likelihood of Holden downplaying his own injuries would be. It's an ugly mark regardless. Her fingers work faster to finish off the braiding so she can stretch a hand out towards him.

"Will you let me ease it?"

Despite having directed him towards that chair, she is already beckoning Holden back towards her. There is room on her bed. Derrica occupies one half, close to her nightstand. She might have implored him to sit beside her to begin wth.

[acreage]

"I was hoping you would."

His mouth tugs into a smile as he stands without complaint, moving instead to sit on the unoccupied part of her bed. Facing her, he keeps his hands in his lap and out of the way.

She'll find that someone took a pretty nasty crack at his breastbone, extending down onto his chest. But it isn't the kind of thing, it's true, for which he might normally seek out healing. There's no blood, nothing broken. Nothing that could kill him. He'd had serious thoughts of letting it be before remembering his promise to her. He'd had, briefer, serious thoughts of letting it be regardless.

[tender]

Twitching the fabric of his tunic aside, Derrica can see the purpling spread of bruise across his skin. Painful to touch, surely, so she is very careful when she lays her palm over the marks. The bits of jewelry in her lap clink together at the repositioning of her body as she turns more fully towards Holden, plucking up the threads of power, gathering her strength as she considers the injury.

"You're sure there's nothing else?"

With her hand set here, along his collarbone, her thumb set into the hollow of his throat, she can feel the beat of his pulse. Reassuringly steady. Alive.

[acreage]

"Nothing much."

Smaller nicks and bruises, probably, things he may not even notice till later. He's sore, of course, exhausted; the shard hand a little sensitive, but much improved from the pain overnight. Nothing worth mentioning, and certainly nothing worth worrying her about.

"You're okay?" He can see for himself, of course. Sitting still for her to do her work, the answer is clear. But some things are more comforting to be told than seen. "I didn't see you during the attack."

[tender]

"I went for the infirmary as soon as I could," Derrica explains, quieter as light blooms under her palm. Green washes against Holden's skin, warm like spring. "Once it felt like the tide was turning."

Whether or not she should have been in the infirmary from the start is a different conversation, one she's sure Holden wouldn't instigate.

"Are you alright?" she repeats gently, as the light fades. This time she doesn't mean cuts and bruises. She means will he be able to sleep? She means what's weighing on his mind, because she's sure there's something. Derrica's busied her hands flipping back the collar of his shirt to inspect her handiwork, and maybe to be sure there isn't some further injury lurking just outside her view.

[acreage]

One could reasonably expect Derrica to stay out of the fray about as much as one could expect the same of Holden. She's right to think they're built too alike for him to suggest otherwise. And he's seen her fight, hasn't he; he's sure she played a role in the turning of the tide.

Under the glow of her power, the pain eases, then vanishes. He breathes more easily, reaches upwards to catch one of her hands in a quick grasp of thanks.

"I can't sleep," he admits, slowly. "That was the most afraid I've ever been in Thedas."

Which must sound like such a strange thing to say. The undead had been frightening, of course. But he's seen the inside of torture chambers, dreamt Venatori prisons, been there as Corypheus's own dragon laid waste to a city.

[tender]

It's not such a strange thing to say.

"It's worse when something happens here," Derrica agrees, softly. "This is where we live."

Stopping just short of calling it home.

She draws their hands down from his collarbone, folds his hands between her own. There will be so much to do today. They were very lucky, but it would have been so easily for this to have been a devastating blow. They might have been swallowed up by the dead, if their luck had been a little worse.

"Will you lay down with me?"

Braids can wait. Everything can wait. Time was going to be mixed up today, regardless of all the repair that must occur. Derrica is so sure Holden means to occupy himself elsewhere immediately, but if she can stall him, then it is a blessing.

[acreage]

A part of him is tempted to say, that's not really it. But isn't it? Seeing the dead like that would've been a shock anywhere; he'd never expected to see something so like his protomolecule nightmares in Thedas.

But in the Gallows, where he lives and works every day?

So he makes, instead, a soft sound of assent. Nods too to her question, though he can't help a wry murmur,

"Don't get your hopes up."

Of him falling asleep. He's spent some time in his room staring at the ceiling already. But there's better hope of rest here, right now, than in nervous pacing; and he is fucking exhausted.

me suddenly like, does holden fit into gallows beds

[tender]

"It's okay."

Even if he doesn't sleep, if she can wring some of the tension from him and keep all the things weighing on him at bay, it'll be worthwhile.

"Lay down. Let me put these aside," she instructs, uncoiling to lean over to put her jewelry onto the nightstand. She can work the jewelry into her hair later, whenever the pair of them have to go about their duties.

Her bed is still untouched, blankets pulled up and neatly tucked into place from the night before. Derrica must have borrowed pillows from unoccupied rooms, because there are more than one person might need arranged against the headboard. She gestures at the far side of the bed, which may or may not be intentionally meant to keep Holden from hanging off the side of the bed in an effort to be gentlemanly.