faderift | open | holiday spirits

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

When she touches him, she can feel the rigid line of tension in his shoulder. He doesn't flinch away, or attack. Nor does he immediately look up. But he does respond, a lull in the other man's lecture allowing for it: "There's nothing to argue about."

What's there to say? That he threw everything he thought was important away and it wasn't even for a good reason? That the only consistent through-line to his adult life is misplaced trust? Neither strikes him as a point worth arguing.

"You could try to fix something," the spirit suggests, dry, "instead of leaving a shambles behind you yet again." At that, Vanya does flinch, very slightly; she probably wouldn't notice, if she weren't touching him.

Mm. Yeah, all right, no— Gwenaëlle's hand curls to grip his shoulder rather than rest on it,

“You aren't going to fix anything on your knees with your dick in your hand listening to ghosts that don't know anything they didn't steal from you,” she says, pulling on him. It's more an expectation that he'll obey her than that he'll be forced to; he's bigger than she is, stronger than she is, and probably under the right circumstances more stubborn, too.

Hopefully these aren't those circumstances. Optimistically, she is taking the cue from the spirit's approach that maybe what Orlov needs in this moment is a firm hand.

Vanya Orlov's stubbornness, when summoned, can be considerable. But she's right; that's not the frame of mind the ghost has guided him to. Instead the pull on his shoulder seems to momentarily confuse him, as if he hadn't fully registered she was there when he'd first responded. He turns toward her and starts to shift his weight before the spirit barks, a marked change of tone:

"You are not dismissed, Orlov."

Caught between them, after a moment Vanya does stand, but he still seems uncertain as to what he'll do next. Though the ghost has more of his attention, Gwenaëlle is a solid presence that it's hard to reconcile with the modified memory that he's fallen into. "I have to go," he says, but it's almost a question, and it's not clear which of them he's addressing.

“Vanya Orlov, if you do not stop listening to that shade and come with me this minute, I cannot be held responsible for what happens next,” is sharp, unforgiving, and —

accurate, even if she doesn't really know what it is she's threatening him with, specifically. She certainly can't be blamed for whatever the spirit does, and whatever is driving it, but thus far the strategy is just to bully him harder than the ghost and it's not not working.

She has to try something. He did get up. It's making a difference.

He does turn to her. "...he's not here," he says, not a question exactly, but not as certain as it probably should be the first time. He repeats it, "He is not here," with slightly more confidence the second time, "because we are in the mountains in the Free Marches."

The ghost wavers a bit, with Vanya's push, but it seems more likely to try something else than to give up, based on the impressionistic cast its features begin to take. But she's bought them an opening, at the very least, for all Vanya has the fuzzy edges of a sleeper who has just been shaken awake.

“Right,” she says, her hand having shifted from his shoulder to his arm, where she can more easily get a grip on him anyway — especially at this angle, now that he's the one looming over her and no longer the other way around. She doesn't, cannot, look at the shade of his superior; has no desire to risk it being something spun up out of her past next. “We're in the Free Marches. He isn't.”

A pedantic part of her thinks: well, we don't know that, exactly, but and the rest of her crushes it, ruthlessly, snuffing out the impulse to speak before she can give it voice and confuse the issue.

Vanya looks sufficiently confused as is.

The spirit says, “What do you know about duty, Gwenaëlle?” in a voice that she knows, a voice that she hasn't heard since before the sky cracked open, and her lips press together in a thin line as her fingers dig in harder.

The voice he doesn't know is something of a splash of cold water when she'd already pushed him toward breaking away from the vision that had caught him up. "We should get moving," he says, more focused and less unsure. "Whatever is going on, we won't sort it out in here."

He doesn't especially want to give the spirit more time to get a word in edgewise, so he covers the hand on his arm with his other hand, pulling her along as he turns for the door unless she actively tries to break away.

Vanya is harder to break away from than Gwenaëlle is, and there is no sliver of her that wants to hear what Anderson Gallagher has to say about absolutely anything, so—

“That's what you do,” he says, from behind them, “you walk away from things, Gwenaëlle,”

and she grips Vanya's hand, no small part of her finding the time to be irritated at having her extremely heroic and helpful thunder stolen, and by no less than someone she very much desires to turn around and shout at for being a projecting hypocrite.

He isn't real. He isn't real, and if she fights him, something she doesn't understand has won.

(It is a well-chosen provocation.)

He's gaining a bit of his habitual steadiness now, for all he'd been shaken. (And he doesn't kid himself that whatever is going on is done with him; he fully expects this spirit or another to try again momentarily.) For the present, though, he can keep Gwenaëlle's hand tightly in hiw own.

"If you would like to argue with me about something," he says, low and not actually a joke under the circumstances, "I suspect it would at least clear the very low bar of being more productive than attempting to engage with whatever's behind us."

He doesn't reach for fury first, himself, but it's not as if she's the first person he's known who does. It's an approach he can appreciate.

open | holiday spirits

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