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

[armd]

"Got it," Abby tells her, and leaves her to her poking and prodding, cutting a path through the people and toward the little cupboards and cabinets up the back that houses supplies. Everybody is busy, moving constantly. Her fingers scrape the bottom of a container; there isn't any elfroot left. Shame.

She brings back everything but the scissors.

"Did I ever mention I came here from a place overrun with the undead," she remarks idly, handing over the needle and string of cat-gut. The lamp she'll hold onto, lighting the scene for her, "This whole thing feels a little... homey."

[elegiaque]

At least between them they certainly have more than enough knives to make up the difference. Gwenaëlle glances up from where she's in the process of unbuttoning half her shirt and her trousers to get at the slash between hip and ribs—it's more awkward to heal than life-threatening, it'll be better for cleaning and stitching in place—with a cocked eyebrow.

“Here I thought I was from somewhere fucked.”

She still is, that's the joke.

(And don't worry, she's got elfroot.)

The efficient way that Gwenaëlle sets about what she's doing speaks for itself to experience, though probably not the sort that Abby might imagine. Probably, she reflects, there is a great deal about their lives they wouldn't imagine of each other.

“Wardens get away with all their bullshit because they're so useful keeping that sort of thing at bay.”

[armd]

"You are." It's Thedas. Demons are real.

She leans up against the wall in lieu of taking up a second seat, and lifts the lamp a little higher, bathing Gwen in soft yellow light. It flickers, due to the flame, but that can't be helped.

"Well, maybe Riftwatch can get away with a little bullshit after the dust settles, too." It's not too much to ask for, is it? To be appreciated by the people they've just protected (or at the very least, not feared by them).

[elegiaque]

The sound Gwenaëlle makes is indelicate, and before she actually speaks it isn't entirely clear whether it's a response to what Abby's just said or a reaction to the fact she's cleaning herself up in preparation to suture her own flesh closed. Either is plausible, but “Don't hold your breath,” does push it in a certain direction.

It's probably for Abby's sake and not her own that she ties off her shirt above the wound rather than just taking it off (there's nothing underneath it, because why would there be when she has no tits); too many nude portraits of her exist for it to be any actual modesty on her part.

“We're not going to get much credit with Kirkwall for something that can that easily be spun as just our problem in the first place. Motherfucker,” is an unrelated complaint, because this stings.

[armd]

Yeah, even to her own ears it sounds a little too hopeful. Whatever. Abby shrugs, and watches her tend her own wound, and doesn't ask if she wants a hand because it's more than obvious that she doesn't. Besides, Gwen's having her hold the light, she's– helping.

"That's bullshit," she mutters anyway, because the kind of unfairness grates on her too easily. She's young, and has a strong sense of what's right, and: "We didn't do anything wrong."

She can see the way it'd be spun, though. City wouldn't have been attacked by skeletons in the first place if the city didn't house people worth attacking. She frowns, and glances out across the busy infirmary, and spots Margaery in among the bustle, the top of her head bobbing and weaving urgently through people, arms loaded with supplies. Abby watches her for a moment, quiet.

"What happens next?" After they patch everybody up, after the sun rises and they have to face all the damage left behind?

[elegiaque]

It's happened a time or two, here and there, scattered through recent years: that disorienting moment when Gwenaëlle realizes how far she's come only through the prism of someone else's youth. Of realizing how much younger they feel, even as she knows perfectly well she's still stumbling around like an idiot herself, that there are certainly people in Riftwatch who'd like to put a cloak on her and see if there's an adult she could be returned to.

(Thranduil. Ha, ha.)

“A couple of years ago,” she says, taking a breath in before she pushes the needle through the first pass, “a group of us were lured into a trap and then some dickhead tried to sell us into slavery. Nearly quite successfully, actually. We escaped the caravan taking us north, and had to walk back with nothing. All of our weapons, personal effects, traveling supplies, that was all gone. Took weeks.”

She is, actually, quite good at suturing.

“We got back to our own memorial service. Matthias had learned to pronounce my name and he was really proud of it. S'how I met him. Anyway, we saw healers if we needed to. Got cleaned up, recuperated. And then the same thing that always happens next happened—put your finger right there, I just need you to hold the skin tight—we made a mental note of how fucked up it was, and went back to work.”

[armd]

She is good at suturing. Abby listens, and watches her hand pass over sharp ridges, delicately threading the needle across the gap in her skin to pull the edges tight. She wonders if this isn't the first time that Gwenaëlle has sat, stitched herself, and soothed some stupid newcomer. In gentler terms, she's told Abby that they just get on with it.

Abby already knew that. She's a newcomer to Thedas, but not to battle, or war. It helps to hear it again anyway; the alternative would be to give up or leave, and she can't do either of those things.

But she can put her finger right there.

"Okay."

She's very tired. Soon, she'll get cleaned up and recuperated too, and she won't feel as somber in the morning. "Thanks."