faderift | In the Armor of the Dead

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

( isn't much of a combatant, but will be about for specific scenarios, hmu @

keanuleaves as per )

The Gallows is overrun, and the smart thing to do would be to barricade herself somewhere and stay clear out of the way of those who can actually do something about that. For all her new stamina and energy, all the exercise she and Isaac had decided it was probably a good idea for them to start doing, and even the lessons for some idea of what to do with a knife besides pointy bit, other guy—

Some people to take to that sort of thing. Joselyn is perfectly aware that her skill level is at buy time to escape and not rescue a sieged hold. The best possible thing she could do would be find somewhere with a thick door (hardly difficult in the Gallows) and put herself behind it until all this is over.

And she will.

—soon. But first: it would be really useful if they had some of what's overrunning them to study, afterwards.

"What do you think you're doing?"

That voice comes from somewhere to the side, where Emet-Selch stands with a dagger in one hand and shadowy magic gathered in his other, open palm. He looks somewhat tired, by now, though more from physical exhaustion than lack of sleep-- these are his preferred hours, and there are no dark shadows reflected beneath his eyes in whatever light may be found here. Just a degree of weariness.

He'd at least spent enough time with her on their trip to do some initial evaluation, to deem her probably not a combatant by the looks of her, and by this time he's sure she should be somewhere else entirely. He just exhales a sigh, then, conceding: "If you've somewhere to be, then let's be about it while we can." At the least, he can help escort if need be; there are no active dead right in front of them, evidently recently cleared and not yet to be swarmed again, with a few stilled bodies lying around.

The suddenness of it—actual speech, instead of the ambient sounds of absolute fucking chaos, and also the sheer volume because she is still sort of hungover—nearly startles Joselyn out of her skin, which means instead of greeting him or defending her actions immediately the first thing she has to do is try and catch the severed limb she's just dropped.

Her hands are gloved. Her satchel is open. She is holding a dessicated body-part, carefully not touching the red lyrium crystals even with her gloved hand.

What does it look like she's doing.

“I need it,” she says, “we need it, they don't normally look like this—”

At her feet, there's movement.

"We do, yes, but can this not wait until-"

Until they've all stopped moving, he means to say, but he catches that movement at her feet, and he doesn't hesitate. He stretches out the hand with shadow gathered to it, and the magic flares briefly in intensity before a bolt streaks right for the source of that motion. The corpse's hand falls flat, and he shakes his head.

"...we will need to move. Bring it with you, then."

Joselyn makes a gesture with her satchel he can presumably interpret to mean that's the plan, flipping it open efficiently as she walks to join him and snapping the hand and fingers into pieces that she stows in an assortment of glass vials and stoppers before discarding what's left over and dusting her gloves off.

She puts the blade of her staff through the skull of something that looks like it, too, might start moving again as she does it. Combat-ready, no; squeamish or typically easy to jolt, no.

“When this is over, they'll burn the bodies,” she says, briskly. “Someone has to think to preserve something before everyone's too exhausted and sick of the smell.”

At least there's that-- by this point in the night he would vastly prefer not to handle anyone squeamish or skittish. He's tired, lower on both stamina and patience, exhaling a breath before he moves forward.

"There will be time for it yet. They cannot all simply be set alight where they lay, after all, and we would be well-served with a complete specimen."

Sometimes you just need to commandeer a corpse or two for work purposes? That's fine and reasonable.

What's not fine is the sound of approaching footsteps, uncoordinated enough in their rhythm to be identifiable as more of the undead. Surely there must be an end to this, but until that time-- they will simply have to hold out until they can reach somewhere safer.

"This way," he mutters, glancing ahead. There should be a door nearby if they can fight their way through.

In the Armor of the Dead

joselyn smythe.

emet-selch.

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