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]

"Okay."

She'd like to reassure Margaery if she could, give her a moment to breathe, but Abby recognises the need to push past vulnerability. In a way, Margaery's said I promise in the same way she did earlier. Sometimes you can't get into it. Sometimes you don't need an audience. She respects that, and she drops her hand.

The tear is still on her knuckles. She rubs it in with her thumb, unthinking, and turns on an angle so Margaery can stitch her side unimpeded.

"I remember." She's answering the question. It can be both distraction for herself, and for her doctor, "I was thirteen." The way she'd bugged the Fireflies for a weapon for months leading up to her birthday... the thought of it makes her smile ruefully. "Shot one in the head that was going for dad. He cried."

They were fine, they were both fine, but– she thinks he was scared, for her. And sad that she'd had to do it in the first place.

[molineux]

There's something telling in the way Abby (and Ellie, now that she thinks about it) tells their stories. Violence, smoothed over by experience, until it's just become routine, expected, etched into the pattern of life. When Margaery was thirteen, she was already an adult, but only by the blood in her bedsheets and not on her hands. And her brother - well on his way to becoming a knight. Jousting for sport and only expected to go off into a real fight once the armor was thick enough to be put on by someone else.

She thinks she can understand why Abby's father might have cried.

"And how did you feel, afterwards?"

It's probably different, killing something that's already dead, but - once, perhaps long ago, they were human. And the act of killing isn't any different no matter what the target is.

Margaery's eyes skirt up to Abby's face every once in a while, gauging her expression for too much pain. "Tell me if you want me to pause."

[armd]

This offer is met with a slight shake of her head; Abby grits her teeth, shifts her weight. "Don't stop, or I won't let you start again." It's so tender, and she doesn't want to anticipate the press of the needle. Better that the both of them push through.

"Good," she answers honestly, shifting her attention elsewhere. "It was going to kill him, but I stopped it. I protected him."

I've got my little girl here to keep me safe. A joke to Jerry Anderson, and a job that Abby took too seriously, right up until she failed him.

[molineux]

Margaery's stitching becomes more methodical then, years of learning how to embroider pretty designs on a stretched canvas finally showing some promise as she works diligently, and quickly, even as she speaks.

"Tell me about your father?"

A suggestion presented more as a request, just in case the pain of remembering is worse than the feeling of her needle. But there's genuine curiosity, too. So much of Riftwatch come from worlds that Margaery can never imagine, no matter how badly she tries, no matter how universal it is that they've experienced love, and family.

"What was he like? What ways do you take after him?"

[armd]

Abby falls silent. What a loaded question.

What a new question; is this the first time that somebody has asked her this since he died? It very well might be. Everybody in Abby's orbit grew up with her and her dad. After she shifted her grief cross-country she didn't let anybody new in close enough to ask, and barely hinted at her loss. Survivors generally don't ask anyway. Everybody has a sad story, there's no need to get into them.

Margaery is stitching dutifully, the pain constant but bearable. It's clear that she doesn't need an answer, but that she'd like one if Abby wanted to give it.

She finds cause to loosen her tongue after a moment's thought.

"... Smart," is what she says first. She's gazing off to the side, suddenly distant. A little softer, in the way she holds herself. "He was a surgeon. He used to work with animals before the outbreak, and then he had to shift to people."

A soft snort, her tongue briefly running over her teeth. "That isn't where I take after him. I think he wanted me to, but the idea of surgery kinda freaks me out." She'd probably fuck that kind of thing up. Too much responsibility.

Anyway, to actually answer the question: "I guess we're both stubborn."