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]

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.

[armd]

That makes her grin, a welcome moment of levity. Jone's good to fight with. Abby keeps her back to her and trusts her to hold it, and it works beautifully. She keeps them off of Jone's sides, and Jone shepherds them back and up, into a funnel of sorts, and from there it's easy.

Gives them a moment to breathe, anyway. Abby's doing her best to take apart the bodies as they fall, but sometimes they get back up for another go before she can; the irritation is only fuel for her attacks.

"Stay down!" A hard kick to the chest, and one scatters to pieces.

[poleaxed]

Having relatively similar builds helps immensely, Jone's found, even if the style coming from that body doesn't align. Void, sometimes especially. Two motherfuckers back-to-back, making the same calls? It's double the weak points, is what it is. This is simpler and viler. A dirty kind of excellence.

"Don't waste your time on the chest!" Jone spits out, blood flying, and she hopes her words can be understood. It makes sense to hit for the center, a boxer's excellence, to knock the wind out of someone. But the dead have no breath to steal.

"Face and neck!" Terribly vulnerable without healthy sinew to keep it in place. "Then break the spine!"

It's ugly, crude, and methodical. No one ever said battle was glorious- well. Yes, they did. But they were gobshites.

[armd]

What, Abby thinks wildly, turning her head– Jone's speech is a mess of blood and busted lip but she understands once more words come accompanied by action, a flurry of blows.

"Got it," she pants, and redirects: she's used to going for the limbs and core. Break an arm, break a couple ribs, that's a fight won. This is similar but with parameters shifted, and once she finds her macabre rhythm of popping heads off of shoulders, it's fucking easy.

Almost fun. Good, hard work.

Something sharp gets her in the side, sinking between two plates of armor, pushing deep. She exhales, a rough, angry whine of sound, and kneecaps the monster with an off-balanced swing. Whatever stabbed in came right back out in the scuffle and blood is already wetting the shirt underneath her armor, but Abby ignores it, electing to grit her teeth against the pain. The river of dead is finally thinning.

[poleaxed]

From nearly a lifetime of training, she can tell when Abby gets hit bad. Something in the way she moves, or doesn't move, the sound she doesn't make. A strong fighter, this one; with a little polish, she'll be unstoppable.

But for now, you have to get there, and they may be pushing their luck. The hoard is thinning, and that means they have room to maneuver. Staying where you are is just begging for more trouble to come lumbering by.

Jone moves toward a staircase, trying to bring Abby along with. It winds upward in a circlet, giving those at the top a special defense. Even in death, it seems these corpses remain mostly right-handed, and Abby seems to be as well. All the better, then, to run up the stairs, winding especially to allow right-handed fighters their swing while hampering the attempts of those surging upward.

[armd]

Jone is a terrifying fighter. The way she orchestrates the action, drawing the both of them back out of the battle, is incredible. She's an expert, her eye sharp. Abby can almost hear it in her voice as she reduces another enemy to a pile of bones, directing everybody into place with her poleaxe: you, over there. You, wait your turn, you- come with me.

Abby follows her. She breathes in deep and holds it, counting seconds. Whatever stabbed her didn't go deep enough to puncture anything. She would feel it, she's very sure of that; she can keep going, and she does as they make their way backward and then up stairs, two at a time.

She's wheezing a little when they make it to the top anyway. The skeletons aren't as fast: she has time to place a hand across where she's hurt, and lean heavily against the stone.

"These fuckers don't give up so easy, huh."