faderift | In the Armor of the Dead

Entry tags:

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.

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Two things are clear: the dead are coming from the ship, and the ship is not big enough to have held this many. The natural assumption is that there must be an eluvian in the hold delivering them directly from Nevarra City, which means someone needs to go break it. This is complicated by the two red-lyrium-clad enemies who appear to be directing operations from the deck of that ship, and even more by the fact that the ship is sinking.

The mass of raging undead in its hold have somehow pierced the vessel near the waterline, and by now it is reaching a critical state. Water is pouring in belowdecks, sloshing up the stairs, even beginning to slop in through the portholes. But sinking the eluvian won't be enough to stop the enemy continuing to send forces through it, especially forces that don't need to breathe. So the team must venture into the flooding hold to find and smash the mirror. It may already be underwater. Along the way, they may encounter more undead, the host's red lyrium-coated leaders, or any of the other hazards typical of a sinking ship full of random merchant goods.

[ OOC: This should be a single thread and is a free for all--there are no sign-ups required to participate. Precisely which dangers they encounter all the way are up to you. If you're not OOCly interested in RPing about trying to find and destroy the eluvian and just want your character fighting a skeleton underwater, you're free to include that in your own top-level separately. ]

Once the attack is well underway and there are distractions aplenty, sharp eyes may spot a group of undead behaving unusually. They don't quite follow the flow of the rest, instead somehow heaving a crate up and over the walls with them and clustering around it as they carry it into the fortress. Somewhere in a corner of the central courtyard they will set it down, lingering nearby but trusting the general commotion to distract from this new addition. Roughly four feet square and otherwise unremarkable, it could be easy to miss.

Investigating will require fighting through some of the dead and breaking open the crate--and whoever does so will trigger a Glyph of Paralysis inscribed on the inside, paralyzing anyone within 2 meters for up to 30 seconds. Inside, the crate is packed with broken chunks of red lyrium, and in the center is some sort of device of clockwork, with an arm attached to a series of metal hammers poised over metal panels inscribed with more glyphs (repulsion and fire mines), and surrounded by glass tubes filled with a viscous liquid. Its workings aren't immediately clear, but its intent isn't so difficult to guess, especially for rifters who've ever seen a dramatic ticking bomb reveal on TV. The mechanism is clicking.

[ OOC: This should be a single thread and is a free for all--there are no sign-ups required to participate. We assume that your characters will succeed in disarming or otherwise neutralizing the device, since otherwise people will die and the Gallows will become uninhabitable! How they go about that is up to you.

We're not engineers, fantasy or otherwise, so we don't have any detailed idea of how this thing should work, just that it's a kind of clockwork mechanism involving powerful glyphs of repulsion and fire mines, designed to fling Antivan fire and sticky burning red lyrium all around. You should assume that it is well-designed and difficult to disarm, with possible fail safes and the need for careful work. It is not something natives will have seen before. Beyond that, make up whatever you need to to make RPing about it fun. ]

"There's water below the deck! The boat is filling with it!" comes over the crystal, from the strangely-situated form of Mado, formerly a rock dove, now a man in the crow's nest of the merchant vessel.

"We must hurry, or it's all going down!"

[ starters coming below, hmu for plotting. anyone, whether or not we write an encounter during the attack, is welcome to notice he's not entirely himself — more distracted, irritable, brutal with fighting the corpses than is strictly necessary. ]

( hmu @

keanuleaves if you'd like infirmary shenanigans. )

[starters below etc etc]

On the one hand, it's terrible that people close to Benedict were injured in the previous night's attack. On the other hand, it's convenient that two of them are in the same room, which means he can visit them both at once. He brought them coffee.

He's seated in a chair next to Byerly, taking notes on things he needs to deal with in the office in the ambassador's temporary absence, when a violent thudding comes at the door. It's accompanied by shouts of alarm and sounds of violence, which brings Benedict's writing hand to a total standstill as he stares in that direction.

After her rescue, and the assurances made by Marcus Rowntree that hers was a legitimate case, it had made sense for Tsenka to spend the earliest days of her time with Riftwatch in the infirmary. At some point, presumably, she'll be allowed out for long enough to discover that a few gifts were left in her designated mailbox for Satinalia; from the sounds of things outside the infirmary doors, that isn't going to be today. She has bathed, and been given something to wear besides bloodied, stolen armor, and been examined by healers—

Rest, and food, and then exercise and some continued observation. It isn't a dungeon. She isn't tied to anything or confined anywhere. If she asks nicely, someone who has time might take her for a walk, and let her sit down if she gets tired or overstimulated. The door to where the infirmary beds are has been barricaded, however, and is locked now; she is perfectly aware why, but dislikes it, still.

Not much she can do about that. But she's not alone here, or probably in disliking it at least a bit, so she swings her feet off her own bed and treks down the length of the room to the other occupant of this part of the infirmary, in a borrowed night-dress and clutching her staff, which she uses to brace herself so she can hop up onto the end of Richard's bed.

(Carefully, not to jostle either of them.)

“I'm Tsenka.” This passes for a greeting, to judge by her expectant elfin face.

Edited 2021-11-06 22:32 (UTC)

Byerly isn't unconscious. He was not, in the grand scheme of things, so dreadfully injured as all that. But he is...taking care with his health, reluctantly, and seeking treatment, reluctantly, so that he is not left with any long-term effects.

Which means that he's perfectly capable of sitting up when there's that thumping on the door.

"What the fuck is that?" he demands. And then, for good measure, "For fuck's sake."

The night is young.

But the air is already heavy with the clamor of battle: frantic movement, weapons clashing, bones clacking, and the occasional scream. Holden is heading in the wrong direction, for the right reason, or the right direction for the wrong reason, depending on how one wants to look at it. He's running towards the old mage tower; his sword is still in his room, and other weapons besides, though they're either too unreliable or too new to him to be of much use. The thought of staying there, in potential relative safety, doesn't occur to him.

The first corpse he'd seen had almost killed him. It was more mummy than skeleton, leathery flesh old and rotted, glowing red spikes making a mockery of its hands, its knees, its shoulders. He'd frozen; the swipe it'd taken at him with its cudgel that might've taken off his head if he'd stayed that way. If there's a bruise blossoming around his sternum, he's frankly lucky it isn't broken.

He's less lucky now: a cluster of them move between him and the tower door. The good thing is that the door is shut, which makes the building secure — God fucking willing — for the time being. The bad thing, of course, is that he's still out here with them, weaponless.

The worse thing is when one, and then two, and then three look at him, and his heart kicks into overdrive, and his breath seems to trap in his chest. It's not protomolecule. But he blinks, and the dead are everywhere, blue-glowing and scabbing with crystal, blue fireflies dancing in the air, and he blinks, and one levels a spear at his stomach.

Edited 2021-11-06 23:41 (UTC)

[starters below]

Barrow had been on the verge of considering climbing the stairs to put the day out of its misery, but his plans were diverted by the sudden influx of a horde of walking corpses.
Without having all that much time to decide what to do next, he'd used a stray chair to carve a path for himself to the armory, where he keeps his plate and his proper weapons.

It's a half-cocked effort, with how difficult it is to fasten one's own breastplate et al with arthritis and not much time, but when he reappears in the hall of the central tower, it's with his two-handed warhammer. He positions himself at the stairs and swings the hammer widely from side to side, cutting a swathe in the ever-oncoming crowd of dead as they try to make for the higher levels.
Periodically, when he can fit one in, a pillar of light forms in the crowd to stun a few assailants.

Usually with at least a modicum of cheer at even the most stressful times, Barrow is stonefaced with concentration. He just has to hope relief comes.

Benedict's eyes dart anxiously to Byerly and the door and back, with the faintest shake of his head; no need to let anyone know we're in here, Byerly.

For someone whose primary magical ability (ostensibly) consists of healing, Richard Dickerson rarely spends time in the infirmary outside of rare spats of triage after emergencies. Triage of the sort going on elsewhere in the primary wing of the facility right now, all bustle and voices and clattering tools on the other side of the barricade.

He was initially watchful from afar, his head turned and his pale eyes fixed after snatches of conversation about what sounds to have been a close call.

As the ordeal has gone on, he’s leaned long and bony and patchy with salve to retrieve his satchel from beneath his cot. He’s shirtless beneath his blanket, chewed behind the shoulder where an old scar cleaves down his side and more recently seared raw at one elbow and beneath the sheets. A wide notch flicked out of his ear on the same side also looks fresh.

All of this and the stranger he’s sharing the room with is seating herself on the foot of his bed. He pinches a joint out of his tobacco box, the stink of elfroot heady as it is sweet. And there’s the rune of the lighter also, tested before he tips the box shut and measures her degree of expectation with a look.

It’s clear he was planning to get blazed and be torn to pieces by evil skeletons on his own.

“Richard."

( starters etc, hmu @

keanuleaves )

Hightown is a significant distance from the Gallows—it had been a trek back, late last night, pouring Margaery and herself into a carriage and rolling it onto the platform to be hauled up sheer cliff-face in what's become not unfamiliar routine. Guilfoyle, waiting for them at the other end, ushering them out into the interior courtyard where essentially a silken, cushioned fort had been built and surrounded with braziers to keep out the encroaching chill even as the pavilion remained open. As places to wait out an attack go, there could be worse—

so it's where she's left Margaery behind, likely to be investigated by Raoul and Thomas when they rouse, slipping out of the house and hitching a ride by griffon back to the Gallows before her grandfather can get wind of her intentions. The leap she makes from the back of the creature onto the battlements is enough to have her heart in her throat, but she lands squarely kicking through the skull of somebody's dead ancestor, grinding it into the stone under her foot where she lands and surrounding Jim Holden with the shield that bursts out of her hand unceremoniously.

“You look like I feel,” she says, which can't be a compliment.

Edited 2021-11-07 06:15 (UTC)

Something, something, make a plan and the Maker laughs. If anything, she looks more expectant in the face of that look—at least until he gives her his name, and there's really no discernible reason why she should look as surprised by it as she does. The expression is all too fleeting, but the tilt of her head remains.

Maybe he doesn't look like a Richard.

(That can't be it. He definitely looks like a Richard.)

“I have only been rescued from one death sober and alone,” she informs him, “I don't intend to meet a second.”

Ideally, not dying at all. Hopefully, Riftwatch can live up to the admittedly minimal hype she understands it has. All else fails, though, it'd be great to die high in company. It's at least better than it would have been in Tevinter.

Walking corpses are the worst, huh. At least Abby's finally in her element. Or– she's in her element as she fights her way through the hall tooth and nail, and less so the moment she's blinded by a sudden pillar of light.

Magic. "Shit," she growls, "Was really hoping you fuckers didn't know how to do that–" and smashes a corpse in the side of the head with her mace, blinking rapidly to clear the spots from her vision as it crumples.

At least she remembers to use her boot to pull the mace out of it once it's on the ground to keep from touching it with her bare hands. Learned that one the hard way.

"Is anybody alive in here?" She calls, twisting her head. There's so fucking many of them, but at least they're all contained on the ground here. There could be people asleep in the towers who don't even know what's going on yet. Makes her feel sick to her stomach.

He should be more surprised to see her — whether the abrupt entrance from the sky, the unanticipated assist, or wait, so are we on speaking terms? Instead he only misses maybe a beat, safe enough within her barrier, before a blast of energy comes from his own shard to send a few undead invaders tumbling down the Gallows' walls.

This might as well happen. It's a less unwelcome surprise than the attack.

He looks raw in a way that's rare. James Holden usually folds away his emotions to be safe harbor in a storm, but tonight it's more like he's been cut open and left to bleed. He may be shaking; he may not be; it's hard to tell. There's something unfocused in the way he looks at her, not all here, halfway mired in the horror of memory. If this is how Gwenaëlle feels, she's wearing it better.

"Is there anyone else with you?"

Should he be expecting any other flying leaps onto the battlements? Less a deliberate dismissal of her comment, under the circumstances, than a white-knuckled cling to composure.

[ although she'll be recuperating / hiding out in hightown for the attack, Margaery will be throwing herself into helping take care of the wounded in the aftermath.
pls feel free to hit me up if you'd like a custom starter, or just come at me with one! c: ]

“It's you, me and the dead.”

Gwenaëlle feels—

hungover, mostly, more sluggish than she'd like from that and from sleeping little and poorly, less because of where she'd done it than because of the events preceding. She'd wanted to be more alert than not, and after as much wine as she'd already had to drink, it had been a push in the first place. And on closer inspection, that is clearly not actually how he feels, but it's no less familiar for that.

The words she mutters are Orlesian, but he probably doesn't need to understand the words to get the gist of them, or at least the sentiment. At least they're not the only two people trying to close a rift.

(She's sort of friends with Stark. She suspects he couldn't actually stand anything else, which is—fair enough, actually.)

She shoulders her bow, gloved and anchored hand in front of her and her free hand closing around his forearm. “Where are you?”

Where is he?

That's the question, isn't it. And the answer should be obvious: here in the Gallows, and here in Kirkwall, and here in Thedas, the same as he has been for a year now. The same as he will be until he vanishes or dies. And he's had so much time to acclimate to Thedas, to recognize that his life is here now and that his old life is over. It wasn't easy, but it was growing familiar.

There was a time when he was deeply afraid, every day, after Eros. That he'd just barely escaped with his life, but it would keep following him until it'd claimed every survivor. It took Miller. It almost took Earth. It followed him to Ilus, even, wearing Miller's face, speaking of a hundred thousand screaming souls. They'd found peace, finally. He'd helped with that. It was time and even more galactic crises and some kind of closure.

Except he's here in the Gallows, and here in Kirkwall, and here in Thedas, and he hasn't gotten away. Because here he is, with the dead, and with what is too much like the protomolecule. The anchor in his hand, also the wrong color, a known piece of Fade, still itches at his mind. He's had this nightmare more times than he can count. The point of contact, at least, makes it easier to focus on her. Whole and alive and human.

"I've seen this before," comes harshly, on just this side of unrestrained terror. It feels like so long ago that he was talking Margaery down from something not so different.

"OI!" comes the desperate shout from one who heard Abby, the head of his hammer briefly rising over the heads of the skeletons before it swings back down again, crushing them out of the way.

"Slowing down!" he calls, though whether he means the enemy or himself is unclear. Judging by how the former continues to swarm, one can make an educated guess.

He sobered quickly once the light in the courtyard went a hazy red.

Then came the dash up the stairs to the erie, scabbard bouncing against his hip, to the agitated griffins. Saddling Coupe was easy enough, despite the general irritation of the flock, and griffon was far faster than the ferry.

He could have turned back when he saw none of the dead in Kirkwall's harbor. Perhaps he should have. But still, he made for Hightown, for the de Coucy estate, Coupe coming down in a flurry of feathers and her particular high, shrieking cry. It drew attention, a servant peering out a high-floored window, one of the duke's men coming round the corner, hand on the pommel of his sword.

"Tell the duke the Gallows is under attack," he said, in Orlesian. "Red lyrium. The dead."

He did not spare more words, turning to the pile of pillows, because there was Gwenaëlle, safe and whole.

"Are you sober?" he asked.

Edited 2021-11-08 00:52 (UTC)

By the time Thranduil speaks, his entrance has drawn more than enough attention and Gwenaëlle has slept lightly and poorly enough that he does not see her in the pile of pillows when he looks to it—she is already on her feet and moving by the time he asks to receive the terse answer of,

“No. Wait here.”

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In the Armor of the Dead

BOAT

BOMB

putting this here too why not

james holden.

tsenka abendroth.

Benedict

Infirmary (Edgard, Byerly, anyone else injured/visiting)

richard. & the senior enchanter, in spirit.

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gabranth.

Barrow

let the bodies hit the floor (ota)

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gwenaëlle baudin.

holden.

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margaery tyrell

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