open | holiday spirits

[cozen]

WHO: Whoever, plus some spirits.
WHAT: Everyone spends an evening regretting the past. So basically a normal night.
WHEN: Wintermarch 5-6
WHERE: A castle in the mountains north of Kirkwall
NOTES: OOC post including less vague/pretentious haunting mechanic descriptions. Fantasy violence and swearing and so on are assumed, but please use content warnings in your subject lines for things like explicit gore or sex, slavery content, body horror, etc., if you go any of those routes.

THE CASTLE

Their convenient shelter from the unexpected blizzard that whips up around them in the mountain pass isn't too convenient. Anyone with a reasonable detailed map will find it marked there; reaching its clifftop location requires a slight detour. When they approach, it has no warm ethereal glow or suspiciously welcoming lit torches. The windows stay dark. The portcullis is raised just high enough to be ducked under, but the heavy doors of the keep don't swing open to welcome them.

The only immediate sign that something is amiss is the thorough, all-encompassing emptiness of the place, and it might take some investigation before that begins to feel strange. The fortress' abandonment seems recent and abrupt: ample firewood has been cut and stacked for the winter, nothing has been done to protect the furniture or strip the beds, the kitchen is fully stocked and even has some perishables that do not seem close to perishing, the stables are equipped to comfortably keep any animals along for the journey, and a chess board before the hearth in the (humble) grand hall seems to have been left mid-game. But there are no messages, no bodies, no footsteps dimpling the crunchy layer of old snow accumulated in the bailey beneath the fresh snowfall.

As they search, the castle's visitors may begin to find signs that the castle hasn't been entirely abandoned. It begins with whispers emanating from the dark ends of corridors, voices they recognize and others they don't, or faces both familiar and unfamiliar flashing in still water or window panes when firelight hits right, or forms moving on the edge of vision but vanishing before they can be looked at directly.

By the time this becomes worrisome enough to drive anyone back out of the castle, the portcullis has fallen shut and won't budge. Neither will any other doors to the outside. The windows won't break; doors won't give way even to makeshift battering rams. The only walls that can be climbed or reached by stairs face out over a deep ravine. It might be a survivable climb, if the wind and weather allowed, but it would not be a survivable fall.

THE SPIRITS

--so back inside, then.

The keep is built like the Gallows' towers, square and tall, and it won't take long for Riftwatch to notice that whatever is wrong is more wrong the higher they climb. The whispers and glimpses on the lowest floor become voices and lingering shadowy figures on the second. Someone might turn and find their hand briefly held by an unfamiliar man's, warm and real for the moment it takes him to say, "Come with me." Or behind them, a woman's shocked and seething voice says, "What are you doing?" Or maybe it's a hand they do know and a voice saying something they've heard before.

As people venture to the higher floors--whether intrepidly seeking the source or involuntarily herded onward by spirits--these moments will begin to last and linger and repeat. And those who don't dare venture higher won't be exempt, confronted by stronger spirits that emerge like ants from a kicked hive as the upper floors are disturbed.

As they approach the uppermost floor, reality will begin to slip away from them. They may find themselves lost in a maze of rooms, even though that shouldn't be possible in so few square feet, and ultimately enveloped in comforting worlds where they didn't do that thing they regret and that, like dreams, feel real until they suddenly don't--until something is too unbelievable, until someone interrupts, or until a demon is holding them under the water of the warm bath they were tempted into, shoving them off a balcony, or whispering into their ears and minds, let me in and you can keep it.

The hauntings will continue until morale improves the eldest, most powerful demon has been dealt with.

THE END

When it ends, it ends abruptly. Weaker spirits vanish; stronger ones retreat into the dark. The lesser demons on the upper floors linger, and some may put up a last-ditch physical fight, but without their superior, they've lost most of their mental pull and emotional sway. The castle has changed, too. Its abandonment no longer looks so recent. The food and firewood is gone, along with any sense of warmth or satiety anyone used them to acquire earlier. There is dust where none was before, mildew and rot, and a few scattered, unfortunate skeletons.

The sun is not quite up, the sky a faintly luminescent grey. But the weather is survivable, though it will be slower travel than it would have been without the fresh snow. The doors will open, and the portcullis will raise. Everyone can set off on their cold, hours-long journey back to the city. Talking about their feelings or avoiding eye contact the entire time: the choice is theirs.

Comments

[armd]

From this angle it's so much easier to see the unease on her dad's face. Abby has to wonder, if she hadn't tried to reassure him... if she'd been on Marlene's side, would things have been different? If she'd stuck up for the nameless girl soon to be laid out on the operating table and insisted they wake her up to make the choice for herself, would any of this have happened?

Would Joel have let it go, and walked away?

The hindsight is almost unbearable.

She wipes her eyes, and sucks in a wet breath.

"Yeah." Her voice is rough with emotion, arms folding tight across her chest. She can barely watch her dad turn to look at the younger Abby and drop his hand reassuringly over the back of hers, squeezing for comfort. She's homesick for his touch, selfishly missing the time before this terrible moment when she didn't feel like this. Grief never goes away completely. Missing him is an ache she'll always live with, a wound temporarily reopened.

Realisations about Ellie will hit later when she has time to sit and sift through this. She's guilty of having paid her little thought in the memory. Never even knew her name. Never knew Marlene didn't...

"Nobody asked you?"

She has to confirm that. Abby doesn't know what she thought up until now: that Ellie had said yes, but Joel said no? Maybe. Honestly, she hadn't thought about anything but the greater need, and then what she lost because of it. Ellie faded out of existence after what happened at the hospital.

[notathreat]

Ellie focuses on that hand, instead of Abby's face, or the faces of the ghosts. A testament to a long-ago injustice, something that still echoed. Would always echo. Maybe enough to doom a world.

It's wrong, and it's still wrong, even if she understands.

"No," she says. Her voice soft, cracked. "Nobody even told me."

Ellie blinks, fast, breathes in.

"... I almost drowned. On our way in. I don't... remember being in the hospital at all. I didn't see anyone. Couldn't ask any questions."

She takes a deep breath.

"I didn't even know Marlene was there."

[armd]

She remembers that, the drowning... somebody told her. Maybe Owen, when he came to get her and her dad? It was too long ago. The memory blurs outward from the center: her dad in the heart of the storm, and everything else unimportant, half-forgotten.

Even watching this now she'd forgotten so many pieces of it. All the little reassurances.

"Fuck," she whispers.

What else can you say?

Even the fact that Ellie knew Marlene is unreal to her. It doesn't fit with what Abby already knows, not after hearing her say, "If this was your daughter, what would you do?". It at least implies the same level of closeness between them. She doesn't understand, but Ellie doesn't seem to either.

Her expression crumples.

Too much to think about. She barely knows where to begin. Her attention eventually shifts back to her dad, who has taken the plate at Abby's gentle insistence, and is picking at his food. She watches, and worries her thumbnail between her teeth, and presses her shoulder up against the doorframe.

It's all she can bring herself to do for now. Take a little bit longer to stand here, and be with him in the smallest of ways.

[notathreat]

Ellie bears witness silently. Watches the way Abby looks at the shade of her father, the whispers of memories, the expression on her face. They are nearly the same age. And a few hours after this, Joel killed this man.

She's always thought that Abby hated Joel for dooming the world, when really, it was that her world was one person.

It seems fucked up that this is where Ellie draws the line. That this is what feels like too much. Voyeuristic, intrusive. Wrong. But between one breath and the next, she just can't be here anymore. She turns away from the doorway, walking blindly down the hall to find the next corridor, the next room. Going anywhere as long as it's away.

The whispers have started around her, but they're nothing she hasn't heard before. She keeps walking.