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

jone | ota.

[poleaxed]

A fight in the Gallows leaves Jone well equipt and prepared. She has her poleaxe at the hand, and new black armor that... look, if you mention it matches Gabranth's, don't you have better things to be doing? There's a war on.

(a.) Jone fights, and she is a terror. Axe swung back and forth, from her mouth she issues howls, battle-cries to match the dead. She has not realized they do not think, do not feel proper fear, or the skeleton jabbing at her with a fork would be in a much different predicament. Moments later it is dissembled, wet bones under foot, and a fork sticks out between the chinks in her armor. Blood drips down its bent handle, and she seems not to notice.

(b.) Always, there are those caught poorly. Bad moments, worse decisions, or just the frailty of luck leave them at the mercy of monsters; Jone makes her way into whatever corridor the dead have overswept the living.

She holds her hand out. A green beam clashes, ugly, with the glowing red, but several skeletons are knocked asunder.

Over the clangor, she yells, "I'm comin' for you!"

Her voice haggard with battle, it could be as much a threat as a promise.

(c. closed to abby) Luck runs out for everyone, given enough time. Jone's strength is finite, and comes in quick surges-- it is not meant to last long and hard on the battle field. Find her body, armor shining black in moonlight, beaten against a cobblestone. Blood pours from her face to match her hair, matted with shame. Her movements are slowed as she prepares to make this her last stand.

(d. wildcard) [hit me im good for it.]

stick insect rescue

[armd]

Its been a long night. Abby is sweaty and tired, there's grime on her face and her hands. She's relatively uninjured but her shoulder is aching, the old bursitis flaring from where she grips and swings her mace. She offers her free hand to Jone to hoist her back up on her feet. Luck doesn't have to run out just yet.

"C'mon," she pants, wipes her face on her arm, "You can't stop, we're not done."

There are skeletons in the room with them yet.

[poleaxed]

Perhaps it was the fall, or a weapon-- later, Jone will not remember. But her face has been hewn, and blood pours forth from that empty space, a small deep cut from nostril to lip. The growl she puts forth in answer only widens the space where red teeth and gum can be seen.

"No stopping 'til the end," she says, but she puts forth no effort to make the words intelligible. Aspirant consonants are a muddled thing with a newly post-natal harelip. "You've your mace?"

A timely gift.

[armd]

Abby gets the gist. Jone wants for stitches but there's no time to give any. Perhaps if they clear this room out they can take a few minutes to breathe, but until then-

"Yeah," she pants, and flashes a grimace at her, hefting the mace in her hand. As it turns out, touching red lyrium-laced skeletons isn't a great idea. Her palms are blistered and sore, but there's not a lot to be done about it; the potion bottle she slips out of a pocket of her trousers is briefly soothing on the irritated skin. She presses it into Jone's palm.

"Happy Satinalia." It's deeply sarcastic, "You were right, about the swords." The mace suits her so much better. No finesse required, only all of the strength.

[poleaxed]

Jone may need stitches, but she wants for the howling fury of death and its salubrious violence. Abby-- now, there's a name easily remembered-- Abby may have a skill for fighting force, and Jone won't deny it when she finds her mind in better sorts. As of now, all of it is battle-lust, hungry and offended. Why ever did she stopped?

It seemed a good time.

Well, bollocks that. There's work to be done.

"Always right, I am." She swings the poleaxe over her body with practiced precision. It cleaves a skull in two, and in returning, short, to Jone's hand, dethrones another. "Even when I'm wrong. The weight's good?"

Something is wet on her chin. She speaks the language of blood.

[armd]

"Weight's perfect– behind you."

A warning before Abby deals with the intrusion: the skeleton reaching out a rotted, weather-pocked hand for Jone's hair. She raises the mace over her head with both hands and smashes it into the skull, splitting it. The weapon thunders down through the collarbones and into the ribcage where she yanks it out again with a grunt, and growl.

A glance across the room. More coming, always coming, piling across the courtyard, almost falling over each other to get to them. She hoists her mace, and grins at Jone, blood on her lips. "Bet I can clear more than you can in ten minutes."

[poleaxed]

Jone has been a fighter all her life, and all her life, she has been asked: why not cut your hair?

It's an old, silly question she no longer entertains, but when she was younger and maybe a scratch more beautiful (with or without the delta of missing upper lip), she would answer. Because I ain't caught. You're dragging yourself closer to me.

Abby's quick action makes the old retort-- momentarily shining in Jone's mind-- unnecessary. Freed from the glimmer of the past, Jone pushes forward. Her smile is hideous, and frees only more blood from her head, down her chin, her throat, into the darkness of her armor. Blimey, it's like a fucking faucet.

At least it's warm.

"Clean you out, I shall." Poleaxes have an advantage of reach, and it's that thought her jumbled mind focuses on, taking as meany dead down to where dead men go.

[armd]

Abby came to Thedas from a zombie apocalypse in which she maintained a meticulous French braid trailing to the center of her back. She's been asked that exact question many times, and never has a verbal answer outside of none of your fucking business. Simply put: her dad braided it for her when she kept it shorter, and after he died, she grew it out so she could do it in his place. Jone may not ever know that about her, but perhaps she would understand it if she did.

"Don't doubt it," she mutters, watching the glint of the poleaxe, a silver snake darting through the hoard.

"Watch your blood loss," is all she'll say about it, calling it out before she turns in the other direction to start her own head count.

They've got their work cut out for them. They're pouring out of the Gallows.

[poleaxed]

"Watch your blood loss," Jone murmurs, talking just to talk. It hurts, hurts her face and her pride, hearing the words slide out slippery and uneven, but she keeps going. Fighting is about pain. Controlling that pain makes you a master. "As though I ain't been since before you were squirted out. Ought to spar more when this is done. You earned the time."

More strikes. Fighting with her back to Abby's, Jone spits blood in her opponent's eyeless faces and maneuvers them, as best she can, to a place of higher vantage. Of advantage.

b

[thereneverwas]

"Jone."

Barrow thought he was exhausted before, but this is an enemy that doesn't slow, doesn't even stop when it's knocked apart. Even demons have their limits.

It's by the grace of his plate armor that Barrow hasn't been torn asunder himself, standing taller than the majority of the assailants and continuing to swing desperately at them with his hammer, knowing that his adrenaline may run out and leave him to be swarmed at any moment.
That green beam may as well be a light from Andraste herself.

[poleaxed]

Jone hears her name like a hound, but well-trained to listening, not obeying a master's call. That tone is as familiar as the name. For once (as is more frequently of late) his name comes with bell-rung clarity. Barrow, you great sod.

A poleaxe works well in close quarters. A hallway jammed with death, and her maneuvers are quick and spiteful, carving a place for herself amongst the corpse-throng. It is not quick, but her time is not labored. She reaches the shape of her friend, bent doubled.

Her hand, shining bright through fabric, between gaps in metal plate, reaches his.

"G'wan up, now, you great bastard."

[thereneverwas]

"Up," Barrow pants, glad for however many seconds of reprieve Jone's presence buys him, "you outta your fucking gourd?"

It's enough time for him to reposition his grip and reaffirm his stance, taking care to face in such a way that his next swing won't crack Jone in the face.
"'s out or nowhere," he growls, smashing the legs out from under a wave of dead, "you got... any potions?"

[poleaxed]

Potions for Jone are a... she heard the word once, but can't recall it. Anachro...? No, the other thing. Where two opposites get combined. Honest politician, that sort of thing. The closest she can come is inimical, an old favorite of Lady Lefevre when she deigned to speak trade. Jone and potions are inimical. They don't work with her fighting style, which relies on some level of calculated risk.

"Naw, mate," she says, and positions herself in front of Barrow, a bulwark. "Just have to tough it out, I reckon."

[thereneverwas]

Figures, but Barrow isn't surprised enough to be disappointed. There's little room for anything in his mind at the moment, aside from knocking the dead apart and getting the fuck out of here.

"Out then," he grimly concludes, and takes a decisive step forward, punctuating it with a swing of his hammer.
"Can block up the door, maybe," he thinks aloud.

[poleaxed]

"That'd be grand," Jone drawls, getting in a few salvos against the dead while they chat. "And then what? Door'll hold... few minutes, I reckon."

But she keeps backing toward said door. Clearly his suggestion has been taken.

[thereneverwas]

"Few minutes's better'n nothing," Barrow grunts, his breaths coming fast and rough-- he's grateful for the short reprieve Jone grants him, and repays her in kind by creating an opening for her to get to the door all the faster.

"Fucking stupid way to go, this," he remarks, the sweat beading on his forehead. He doesn't look as though he intends to go this way, but one can't always decide these things.

[poleaxed]

"Then we'll not," Jone says. As heroic speeches go, it's sorely lacking, but no one ever expected her line would produce a speaker of grand encouragement. You holler, and you hope it sticks.

She helps him get clear of the door, kicking an antique writing desk over to try and stem the tide. "C'mon, mate, don't be so morbid."

She snorts, rather than laughs, at her own pitiful joke.

for gabbo.

[poleaxed]

A horse would have been a daring idea. A dracolisk makes it the sort you marry a man for, but such thoughts are kept in the lockbox between Jone's ears. It can scarcely be called a brain of late, being fucking surprised by the dead and backed into a corner. Violence, and an offered hand in the aftermath: she follows him over, up onto Maric. Lucky thing the beast is fastidious with burdens.

And the other beast, she clings to. A whisper pitched to fit over his cape, under his helm, around a poor haircut and into his ear: "Where next? Clear a way to the gates?"

She has her poleaxe, and she is righted. Nothing will have her down again.

[archademode]

“No.” Noah determines coldly, his voice a gritted, unwelcoming snarl. One of her arms rests tight around his midsection, and the moment she's fitted in the saddle he near-mirrors that hold with a similarly fisted grasp of Maric’s reins along the same side— his other hand drawing back to rest across the lengthy grip of her poleaxe, gloved fingers wedged against her own.

The dead have found difficulty in assaulting the Gallows’s towers. In architecture designed for imprisonment, the word unyielding becomes much more than a descriptor: it leaves them clustered near doors, in the corners jammed against sloping stone walls, a scurrying, shuffling tangle of stick-narrow bodies, all competing to complete the same mindless task.

One single spur of his heels, and Maric takes to sprinting at pace, heat blooming to settle in along the length of Jone’s poleaxe, as they’ve done before.

Surrogate magic.

“We keep them here. And we cull them to the last.”

In finality, this time.

[poleaxed]

Something roots through her skin, a serpent alive with another's energy. His magic, in her hands, the metal between them sealing rather than barring. They are together in this, entirely.

What has she to say to that? What can she say? His proposals are always inescapable, not from some sickened attempt to cage, but from pure palatability. He knows what rouses her. Or perhaps they are roused by the same thing.

"To the last."

[archademode]

His hold is loose through the fingers, tethered only across the arch of his armored knuckles; conjured fire sustained against his own usual inclinations, and wholly hers to wield.

His focus falls on the path ahead, cluttered with sickly red and skeletal remains, trampling the thinner portions of the herd rather than risking overturning them both, until they’ve reached one of the tower’s reinforced doorways, clotted with clamoring bodies, their rusted weaponry wielded like imprecise threats.

[poleaxed]

It's magnificent. It's everything Jone thought being a knight, a grand fighter, would ever be. No doubt Noah is in this moment the very image of seriousness, but Jone is ebullient, and it shows.

Her laughter echoes off the walls, falling heavy on the dead they crush, burn and skewer.

[archademode]

Her elation is an echoing thing, laughter ricocheting across steep stone, overwriting the nauseating song of red lyrium where it might otherwise sink in like slower poison. For Gabranth, this is a grave affliction. The threat of ruin, kept at bay only by the thinnest of defenses. Many of their own lay wounded within the towers they safeguard. More are exhausted, and will no doubt prove at risk for mistakes that may cost dearly.

Yet the heat of Jone's fervor matches the arcing flow of magic that surrounds them, wholly unrestrained for the first time in months. And for as long as it lasts, it bolsters.

A pity that it does not last.

Despite their combined efforts, the mass of unliving corpses grows too thick. Eventually, something must give— and that something is no longer the passing array of skeletal remains: in a split-second, Maric rears, the world itself topples, and Gabranth feels the hard snap of stone against the plating of his armor in a sea of crimson.

[poleaxed]

One moment she's up, the next she's not. The weight of Gabranth is inescapable, through the pain of it-- something broken or at least bruised within her. She gasps raggedly for air as the dead begin to swarm, an axe raised, skeletal fingers in her hair-

Pain is strength, and strength is pain. She pushes him off bodily, so she can swipe at the dead one-handed

[archademode]

He does not balk at her shove. It is momentum, necessary for them both in the defining second stretching between recovery and ruin: what she grants sees him to his feet against the rising tide. What he returns— all he can return— is the wide arc of his blade, attempting to force an opening for her to use. To buy her time, and a modicum of space, for he trusts her not to falter here.

Not to let it take her.