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

[nonvenomous]

For someone whose primary magical ability (ostensibly) consists of healing, Richard Dickerson rarely spends time in the infirmary outside of rare spats of triage after emergencies. Triage of the sort going on elsewhere in the primary wing of the facility right now, all bustle and voices and clattering tools on the other side of the barricade.

He was initially watchful from afar, his head turned and his pale eyes fixed after snatches of conversation about what sounds to have been a close call.

As the ordeal has gone on, he’s leaned long and bony and patchy with salve to retrieve his satchel from beneath his cot. He’s shirtless beneath his blanket, chewed behind the shoulder where an old scar cleaves down his side and more recently seared raw at one elbow and beneath the sheets. A wide notch flicked out of his ear on the same side also looks fresh.

All of this and the stranger he’s sharing the room with is seating herself on the foot of his bed. He pinches a joint out of his tobacco box, the stink of elfroot heady as it is sweet. And there’s the rune of the lighter also, tested before he tips the box shut and measures her degree of expectation with a look.

It’s clear he was planning to get blazed and be torn to pieces by evil skeletons on his own.

“Richard."

[delphian]

Something, something, make a plan and the Maker laughs. If anything, she looks more expectant in the face of that look—at least until he gives her his name, and there's really no discernible reason why she should look as surprised by it as she does. The expression is all too fleeting, but the tilt of her head remains.

Maybe he doesn't look like a Richard.

(That can't be it. He definitely looks like a Richard.)

“I have only been rescued from one death sober and alone,” she informs him, “I don't intend to meet a second.”

Ideally, not dying at all. Hopefully, Riftwatch can live up to the admittedly minimal hype she understands it has. All else fails, though, it'd be great to die high in company. It's at least better than it would have been in Tevinter.

[nonvenomous]

This creature who looks like a Richard takes the beat of her surprise, fleeting as it is, to seat the joint at his lip and light up -- a short kick of breath and a stifled, painful cough to get them going. The lit end spindles smoke while he swallows the scratch in his throat and looks at his life, looks at his choices.

It’s easy to see at a glance he has not slept well -- the lines around his eyes are cut sharp and the shadows are dark. All the moreso for the halcyon blue of their color otherwise.

But he clears his throat and tries again and is more successful upon his second attempt, smoke held in while he offers the joint out for her to take.

“I take it the first was recent.”

[delphian]

Her expression can't be quite called a smile—sort of an affable neutral—but her mouth quirks, what gave me away, in a way that underscores the affable part. Something about her affect is almost like reserve, but it's hard to call someone reserved when they've invited themselves into a private party; she takes the joint and breathes in and out smoke, not relaxed so much as

shit, this might as well happen.

“Quite. My Nevarran name,” and every vowel and consonant of her explanation resoundingly Starkhaven, “earned me early release from lifetime slavery for good behaviour.” she ads, passing the joint back. If Antosha believes that caring about his fellow mages or countrymen carries any water post-turncoat—not with Tsenka, even having directly benefited from those tender feelings.

Least he could do. And years past due, besides. Wanker.

[nonvenomous]

A great rolling furl of smoke is his answer -- a skip in the vortex where it threatens to catch into another cough. He fights to stifle it, coughs anyway, and takes the joint to hit it again before he’s fully recovered, wasting no time. Nothing to savor until it’s taken hold.

The more thoroughly he pumps it down in there, the quicker it’s likely to happen.

“Congratulations,” is the polite thing to say once he has a mind to, with a hoard of possessed skeletons rattling in the halls. Undead aside, he looks like he has plenty to smoke about, distraction baked dry into the scruffy lines around his mouth. This is a man who had plans and is resigning himself to dying without pants on instead.

“You must be thrilled.”

He does proffer the joint back out to her.

[delphian]

Bit less than a few hours ago.

Nothing unusual, lately, about her life hanging in the balance held in someone else's fist. On balance, still better to die after having been rescued than before. She makes a loose gesture with the joint itself, smoke twisting around her as she breathes out a cloud of it—

“Well, I love what they've done with the place since I've been gone.”

A reflective pause, briefly studying him as they trade it back.

“You lot, aye, anyway.” Skeletons aside.

[nonvenomous]

“Not much has changed since I’ve been here.”

Rifters and natives come and gone, objectives identified without meaningful progress made. There is some talk of having a lift installed. The lyrium skeletons are a surprise.

He arches a brow over this latest trade. Would that there had been more drama he cared to gossip about over their inevitable doom. His own wrinkled, serum-spattered sheets are very interesting to him, suddenly, roughly around the region of his navel.

“When did you see it last?”

[delphian]

“It's quite different from then. The early '30s,” an elaboration and answer, with a gesture that trails elfroot smoke behind it. “While Starkhaven's tower was being rebuilt, a taste of Kirkwall hospitality.”

Such as it was, under Meredith Stannard. It's not a place with warm memories, or anywhere she'd hoped to see again; if she'd never seen Kirkwall at all, that'd have been fine.

She breathes out smoke, handing it back: “Stannard would love this place, a crypt.”

[nonvenomous]

“I understand she’d be pleased by the added embellishment of red lyrium.”

Dishearteningly typical of a human to conclude the power vested in them by an evil glowing sword anointed them as chosen. He’s slower to take the joint this time, reflection lulling in the slack between eddies of smoke.

“This world is unkind to its mages.”

But not so unkind that he’s been inclined to stop fooling around with someone who’s hunted them. It’s complicated, he decides, a disembodied shade of apology in the glance he gives her before he finally tokes.

[delphian]

Richard has the distinction of being the first rifter that Tsenka has had a conversation with, and that makes that sort of a buckwild thing for someone to say to her. He's not wrong, but the framing of it gives her a moment of pause. Richard is an ordinary sort of name that any man might have, but she tilts her head as she studies that reflective look, thinks of him naked and afraid and knowing himself to be Zseiless.

And the dirty great snake that the Senior Enchanter had taken the place of.

Right.

There is a knowing, in her lopsided smile, when she says, “Is yours a kind world?”

If she were a betting woman.

[nonvenomous]

He reaches to flick a stub of ash off onto the infirmary floor while he thinks about it; his crooked mirror of her smile is more subdued, barely there.

“For some.”

For most, really, accounting even for disparities in wealth and status up against the ever-looming crisis of war, Corypheus, the darkspawn, demon possession, and so on.

“Skilled mages are mentored at a prestigious university at the center of the world. Dwarves and elves are equal in station to humans.” They are smooth-skinned and unadorned with horns or tails or scales. Very kissable. “The world is still ending for all of them,” it's important to add.

[delphian]

“That's the thing about the world, isn't it.”

Here in Thedas or wherever it is that a man resigns himself to the inevitable end of enormous snakes — her world had been so small. Even after she had spilled out of the walls that had kept her cloistered, her world had still been small, her experiences remaining inextricable from the context of all that cloistering. The people beside her who had never lived a life different than she had, even if they had felt the weight of it differently, been molded into different things.

Her small concerns ... not nothing. Not entirely insignificant, when the small concerns of mages have recently rewritten the face of Thedas, and may do more yet. But particular. A corner of a great big tapestry

which is currently on fire. And the whole thing will burn, and that's not why she's here but it's not not important.

“I wanted to see everyone else's before I died,” she says, reflectively. “Or at least more of them. A few I might do without.”