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

cw: homophobia, slurs

[notathreat]

The memories crash and converge, and the ghosts latch onto Ellie's thoughts, as if they're being pulled into being by the very thought. The roll of guilt and regret is a tidal wave, crashing against them, over them. Ellie gasps for air.

Before he went missing.

"How would you rate our kiss?" Dina says, cocky and flirting and just the smallest bit anxious. A young lover. The smell of weed, gunpowder, blood, and the crook of Dina's neck. The scent of her hair.

Music crashes around them, Crooked Still, and ghostly dancing figures surround them, whirling, spinning. Joyous. The taste of brandy on her tongue. A kiss.

"Hey. This is a family event. Remember next time, there's kids around." A male voice, harsh, and the specters form like shadows around them. Ellie tenses in Astarion's arms, watching breathlessly.

"Yeah, like you're setting such a great example," Dina answers, as the shadows still around them. She's visible now, disheveled and lovely, with dark snapping eyes and hair falling out of where it's tied back. Her hand is tight around Ellie's shade.

"Just what this town needs. Another loudmouth dyke."

The voices scramble, run together and Ellie rushes him, and Dina's calling out.

"Ellie! Ellie, don't!"

Before Ellie can get there, though, another ghost materializes from nowhere. Joel.

Healthy, whole. He cuts between Ellie and the man, tall and imposing, his voice low and gruff, and pushes him back several steps. They struggle, and the man backs off as others come to aid them, breaking everything up before it comes to blows.

Joel turns. Approaches her.

Her. The Ellie in Astarion's arms, who is staring at him because she can't look anywhere else.

"... are you all right, kiddo?" he asks, anger shifting to concern. To love.

A breathless sound cracks out of her, a tear running down her cheek. She can't answer him.

Instead, her shade does. It pushes through her, a version of herself she no longer is, but still carries with her.

"I don't need your fucking help, Joel."

The hurt on his face is beyond words. He looks away from her, can't bear to meet her eyes. Folds and crumples into himself. Defeated.

"Right," he whispers.

And leaves.

[illithidnapped]

Ah.

And it isn’t like a light bulb clicking or a momentary spark. It isn’t a grand moment of understanding. It isn’t anything but a tangled snarl of sickening memories clotting her heart, her mind. The painful reality. The simple, ugly truth— that she’s cold, and she’s wounded, and she’s tired there, shivering in his arms from a hundred little cuts harbored in the shadow of a past she can’t change.

The lights go dim on that scene, and the air is frigid as his fingers, and he continues coursing them on in slowed patters falling down across her head. Her neck. Her shoulders.

“You were there when he died.” Astarion says, like a digging reminder. Like a segue.

She was there. She wept. She fought. She pleaded.

And so.

“He knew you cared.”

[notathreat]

"He didn't know."

Ellie's voice is thick, deadened to the world.

"That I was there. He was too far gone."

She'd seen his eyes. She'd screamed for him, screamed his name. She'd told him to get up. She'd begged him to get up.

Did it make it better, or worse? That she was there? Was it easier? Would it have been better? What if she'd gotten there afterward, found a corpse instead of something quickly on the way to becoming one, his murderers fled instead of nearly finished? Was it better to have fought and failed to save him? Or was it better not to have had the chance at all?

"But he knew I cared."

Ellie chokes it out, softly. It's not a regret, so the whispers of the ghosts are formless, like a drawn breath, like they're waiting for her to speak.

"... he knew I missed him. He knew-"

It comes in fragments, that moment after Joel turned away from her, when the rage fled her in a rush. Left her grieving, longing, hurting from punishing them both.

"He knew I couldn't let him go."

[illithidnapped]

The kiss he fits to the crown of her forehead is slow. Weightless.

His nerves have gone dead as rotten roots after two centuries of weeping over his own split wounds. He can't spill more now— he can't mourn her plight— and she doesn't need it, anyway. Not any more than he'd want her grieving over the man he once was. One she never knew, and never had the chance to know.

Things are only what they are. Horrid and hateful. Muddied by fate.

But he has her now. And she has him.

"And so you haven't." He murmurs, fitting the words against her skin. If she had forgotten Joel, this place, these images— they'd never have existed in the first place.

"But you should let the memories rest, darling. Keep them away from these wretched ghosts and their need for more pain."

And, to that extent, he shifts in how he holds her: drawing her up into his arms, hold fit beneath her shoulders and the underside of her legs, carrying her with little effort.

She's always been light as a feather in his grasp.

[notathreat]

The soft kiss, the way he holds her, it all feels like some -- twisted form of forgiveness, or a permission to let go.

Ellie never truly will. The only thing that will help is time. She blames herself, she has always blamed herself, and letting that guilt go, letting herself be happy, feels like the worst type of betrayal.

Sometimes, she understands that living and being happy is the best way to remember Joel. That he gave her a chance, and he'd do it all over again, no matter the price. She knows that. But other times, the guilt and grief and pain take her back, and she's a devastated little girl again, watching everyone she loves slip through her fingers. If it hadn't been for her, if she'd died in that hospital, as she meant to-

Astarion lifts her, and Ellie holds onto him tightly, pressing her face into the side of his neck as the dam gives way.

It's not a worsening of the pain. If anything, it's a catharsis. A purging. A surrender, and a trust.

Astarion can take this, can carry her without staggering when she needs it, and he's the one person she's not afraid of breaking. He will not mire himself in her hurts. He has been through so much worse.

Around them, the ghosts cry out wordlessly, but they are echoes now. They no longer feel so very real.