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

[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.

[poleaxed]

She doesn't falter. She feels the heat in her off hand, and raises it to allow a green blast of energy to cut through a swath of death.

She'll explain later.

"Forward!" Marching orders. He was the soldier more than her; she has faith he'll respond.

[archademode]

Her voice alone would demand a response.

But she is right in her assumptions: fury boiling in his blood, he surges forward with vicious determination, all restraint gone in his movements— in the snap of arcing magic, symphonic in accompanying her own— pressing nearer to the tower with every step, though nothing more awaits them save for the rest of that cluttered, hateful tide of rotted bone and nauseating crystal. Its song resonating. Ringing.

Faint, and ignored.

[poleaxed]

She cannot think of a better death, which is unfortunate, as the Maker has chosen today to be ended with her living. But she doesn't know that, and presses on with fatalistic savagery, excited by her own capacity for violence. The romance of it is too much. If not for a wound she's not yet encountered, she'd not be parted from him for several days.

A prison or a castle-- both boast similar advantages. A staircase spiraling upward leaves both of them, right-handed, free to jab at the tide of dead who are blocked and cramped by the stairs.

"Have you strength for another go, love?" He just saw the blast her shard emitted. Perhaps, their magic together?

[archademode]

From within the reverberating confines of that horned helm, there is a scoff that— perhaps surprisingly— manages to rise over the clattering din of crowding undead. Over the sounds of their weapons as well, but perhaps that's related only to the narrowness of present space.

"I have lived too long to tire now."

His hand claps across her wrist, air blistering with the prelude to heat itself.

"Cast. I shall follow."

The flare of his magic will follow.

[poleaxed]

Fire surges with green energy, making something truly vile spew forth from Jone and Noah's hands, their energies combined. It's great and terrible, and it mows down the dead easily, hunched as they are in their disadvantaged position. The hall is clear for now, save the heavy scent of putrid char, rot, and blood.

"Fucking brilliant, that was," she says, and takes the barest moment of time to peck a kiss to his helm.

[archademode]

He is not given to grand shows of indulgence. Or minor. It is difficult, when rage leaves him, to let anything else in.

Even so, he lingers too long in the beat that follows, surveying the scene that surrounds. Appreciative of the sheer ruin they’ve wrought between them. Jone might know him well enough to detect it regardless.

“We ought seize this opportunity. Press on and ensure the others are not crippled by this onslaught.”

One gloved hand, still warm with residual magic, rises to catch the back of her head when she leans in, pulling it forward to press her forehead just against the front of his helm.

“Guard yourself, Daughter of Denerim.”

[poleaxed]

There is a difference between love and lust, of course, and Jone is beginning to suspect Noah may lust for battle, but he does not love it. What kindness, then, that he has some admiration for the destruction they can make together, and the trust he has in what she can make when they are apart.

Touching the cool of his helm, her blood sings with it.

"Make 'em regret it."

How dare any enemy ever come near them?