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

Potions for Jone are a... she heard the word once, but can't recall it. Anachro...? No, the other thing. Where two opposites get combined. Honest politician, that sort of thing. The closest she can come is inimical, an old favorite of Lady Lefevre when she deigned to speak trade. Jone and potions are inimical. They don't work with her fighting style, which relies on some level of calculated risk.

"Naw, mate," she says, and positions herself in front of Barrow, a bulwark. "Just have to tough it out, I reckon."

Figures, but Barrow isn't surprised enough to be disappointed. There's little room for anything in his mind at the moment, aside from knocking the dead apart and getting the fuck out of here.

"Out then," he grimly concludes, and takes a decisive step forward, punctuating it with a swing of his hammer.
"Can block up the door, maybe," he thinks aloud.

"That'd be grand," Jone drawls, getting in a few salvos against the dead while they chat. "And then what? Door'll hold... few minutes, I reckon."

But she keeps backing toward said door. Clearly his suggestion has been taken.

"Few minutes's better'n nothing," Barrow grunts, his breaths coming fast and rough-- he's grateful for the short reprieve Jone grants him, and repays her in kind by creating an opening for her to get to the door all the faster.

"Fucking stupid way to go, this," he remarks, the sweat beading on his forehead. He doesn't look as though he intends to go this way, but one can't always decide these things.

"Then we'll not," Jone says. As heroic speeches go, it's sorely lacking, but no one ever expected her line would produce a speaker of grand encouragement. You holler, and you hope it sticks.

She helps him get clear of the door, kicking an antique writing desk over to try and stem the tide. "C'mon, mate, don't be so morbid."

She snorts, rather than laughs, at her own pitiful joke.

With the momentary reprieve and the aid of the desk, Barrow can actually take a moment to crack a smile, casting a look to Jone as amused as it is grateful.

"Glad you're here," he replies, knowing better than to delve too deeply into sentimentality. He leans then on the desk, granting it some of his bulk in the way of holding it in place while also giving himself a bit of a rest.

"Think it's just us?" he asks after he's had a moment to catch his breath, "or you think they've erupted out their fucking graves all over Thedas?"

"Don't start sobbing; I can't take it." Even that sentimentality is, apparently, too much at the moment.

Jone searches the room they've forced themselves into for a staircase, a window, something. It seems they've ended up in an abandoned storage room, but not, thank Andraste Almighty, a larder. There's a window with a ledge that has pretensions toward being a balcony. She makes her way toward it with half a smile, half a mad grin.

"Only one way to find out, mate," she says, ripping the window glass off its hinges rather than bother trying to unlock the rusted thing. "Survive this shitestorm."

Chuckling wearily instead of sobbing, Barrow shakes his head and hefts himself off the desk to come help with the window.

"You first," he decides, "just in case." Jone is smaller, healthier, faster; it won't do either of them any good if he struggles to maneuver the escape and she gets stuck inside behind him.
The doors behind them groan against the desk, which seems to be holding for now.

She rolls her eyes, clearly loathing this attempt at strategic altruism. But she doesn't grumble, either, hefting herself out. She'd be more nimble out of plate, but you work with what you've got, as the hangman said to the squire.

"Looks like we can jump-" a grunt. She is preparing for the feat even as she speaks- "to a proper balcony. Ain't far..."

“Andraste’s tits,” signs Barrow, any semblance of good humor leaving him the moment he catches sight of what lies beyond Jone.

“Dunno mate, think ‘down’ is the only way I’m headed.”
Jump? To a balcony, with his joints, in this wearied state?
Sure.

The thumping, scraping howl from the other side of the door grows louder.

"Rock and a hard place, mate," Jone says, leaning forward. "Pick your poison."

And she jumps.

“Fuck,” Barrow says with little inflection, watching her make the leap and hearing the scraping at the door and wishing he had better lungs so he could sigh longer.

There’s no fucking way. He gets up in the window’s opening, casts his gaze about, precariously balances one foot on the sill— there’s no fucking way, if he goes for the balcony he’ll fall odder and hit worse.

Instead, he maneuvers himself around as best as an ox of a man can, braces himself against the windowsill, and tries to drop and catch himself to lessen the distance.
It actually works. At least at first, his fingers gripping the ledge while he kicks at the side of the tower for purchase, cursing like a drunken sailor.

In the Armor of the Dead

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