RP:The Barrows Wake
Background
This rp is part 2 of the arc: Old Haunts and New
Hazy barrows
The barrows continue on, seemingly endless in their misty confines. Though no tree or shrub livens the landscape, noises can be heard from afar, but they are formless, and directionless. The area lends a feeling of hopelessness and despair, as if at the end of the world. Westward lies a tall hill, formidable to climb with the anguish of ages weighing down on one's soul, and, through the mists, a road can be seen to the east.
John Tall knelt beside his man. The view was of high noon that looked and smelled of morning. John Tall suspected this was why the bossman chose here. The land of whole days that tell you it's morning, the land of whole nights that tell you it's about to be. As John figured it, he must like morning. The man sat tucked up against the high throne, on its north side, looking out over the great vast expanse of lower-than. His knees against his chest, his arms on his knees, his one hand clasping the other wrist. His face the color of morning: an odd pale that was as though a god had promised the color grey that it too would one day be beautiful, and maybe it would, at that. The grey of somethin with a sun behind it. John took up and started down, he had to look amongst the barrows for his folk. Gnat took to climbing them last night, as he left to see to the boss, and though he'd made her promise she wouldn't try and curl up in them, she very well might've. Don't know what other folk might be about. Brig was halfway down the steeps, sitting on a boulder. "Seen the girl?" "Not a peek." "Seen anything?" "Angry folk." "Mhm. Have to turn the boss on them, eventually." "I suspect." John turned his saunter into a walk like a man steppin stones in a river at great speed. He kept his eyes everywhere and heard Rivers holler. War holler, he thought. War holler. The dead want no company from the dead. John Tall began to run.
There are some places where the lines between things blur. Worlds, people, the two opposite sides of any coin. Madness. Reason. Here, it was mainly the latter, and Life and Death, quadruple siblings on the barrows famous for their mists and ghosts and ancient wars barely anybody remembers anymore. Jolie remembered a little of them, only from the old stories that old people tell when the age they live in gets too tight around the gusset and they wish to shed it and put on the past like a pair of comfy pants. Jolie walked, because her mare would not come here. She walked here from the town to the south, because something had told her to, and she wore the mist like widow’s weeds. She breathed the mist in, and breathed it out as a dead man exhales his soul all in a smoky plume.
Gnat was throwing fists and gnashing teeth on a barrow's top, full encircled by the disturbed of centuries. Rivers at its base, doing damage and taking it in turn. John Tall came on the scene with a whistle like birds imitating speech, or speech imitating birds. Rivers fell out and swung round, the folk following after, and John Tall scampered up the side and caught the girl by her wrist, whistling Rivers off to the north. Brig burst onto the scene like a dam gave way. The folk, sleepy and anguished, closed around them like they were shrapnel cauterized into a wound. Brig broke openings and Johnny watched them collapse on themselves like holes cut in the sea. Gnat cussed each of them at least once, the men, their wives, their mothers, their children, cursing their descendants which walked alive even now. "May your blood be as acid in their veins! May your lineage rot their mind like water rots the earth! I will seek them out and haunt them unto insanity! I will haunt their graves and torment their mourners with intimations of their wretchedness! Your fathers were all rapists and you have no sense of humor! I will put you to sleep with the back of my hand! This is war! War! War!" Johnny smacked her upside the head and took her over his shoulder. Brig took Johnny up on his shoulder, and Gnat tossed around, shaking her fists. Mr. Rivers shook around them like wind in the bushes, and the bushes they shook as though angry with the wind. The man came forward and put out his hand. All was quiet and smelled of morning, as though the world had taken it.
There had been a moment when her vision swam, as she passed by the ancient mounds and Jolie saw the world-between and all its various sorrows and struggles, and sighed. The god-botherers from the temples of Light liked to dream of peace, angels floating like clouds, if clouds were harpists with beatific smiles and gossamer feathered wings. The woman they called Tenebrae knew death for what it was: little better than life at best, and worse for the lack of whiskey. She ignored the ghosts, thus, and walked on until the ground rose under her feet and lifted her beyond the mists and their damp, fingerless grip. Beyond the haze, there was a hand. Beyond that, a man she knew. She breathed in and out – once, twice, staring at him the while. Then Jolie took his hand, gingerly, as if not quite sure what to do with it once she had. “I should have known,” was all she said.
The man stood a moment, his white roots looking like mist taken up residence, the black rest of it drawn all over one shoulder as he bent forward. John Tall had never been beaten to death twice. He did not know what would happen if they lost. He did not feel sore, but he felt loose. As though being torn, slowly, from the world. Brig was bounding around the barrows, little idea where he was, shooting up them and leaping between them, the awakened folk everywhere turning from their nothing to attempt violence upon them. Mr. Sleeps-in-Rivers ran beside him, like a foxhound who found only wolves, occasionally tossing Gnat back up when she squirmed out of John's hands and ran cussing at the clan of angry folk. John curled around Gnat, when he had her, and took the blows which came for Brig's skull. He said, "No hope in it, sir, without the boss." Brig came up top of one, and tore his eyes around the horizon, looking for contours in the whiteness, running again shortly, a few thousand dead warriors awakening all around him. A few hundred thousand left after that. The man pulled her forward and turned himself about, pulling her up to his side and walking them up the hill. "You should be quick, now. It will be getting very cold, shortly. And crowded. I have been admiring the view. You're welcome to join me."
Jolie followed, of course, and while she was drawn to cast a look about the barrow-lands that stretched into view almost as a panorama while they ascended that ancient height, she’d now and then slide a look toward the wanderer, who simply did not.. seem himself. Not the self she’d known, at any rate; he’d been far more taciturn in the days when he’d haunted her last, more inclined to violence than polite phrases. “The view is.. lovely,” she murmured, for something to say, but meant it. Others might see a wasteland here, nothing but a grim desolation. To Jolie, it was a field of treasures, a vault of tales unheard and memories buried, waiting for somebody to turn their dirt pages.
The Lost Throne
After a high climb you come atop the slate grey precipice that overlooks this vast and dreaded land. This place, west of the dwarven kingdom, from this vantage point, is more horrible than beautiful. The misty veil seems to capture the magic of nature's desecration, mercifully stealing it from the plant life, save one tree to the north, growing surprisingly healthily near the misted cairn. This is Dante's throne, the highest point west of the mountains, giving full view of this new, dangerous world. Even the spine of the world, the Xalious mountain range, can be viewed, specked by twinkling fires from the Dwarven city of Craughmoyle. At the crest of this tall post is a remnant of the old days. Set by magic, embedded in a block of pure mythril, in turn set into the rocky throne, is a blade who's origin and power has been lost in time. It seems, though, that Dante's blade, adorned with an emerald stone affixed firmly into its hilt, still keeps the deathly beautiful mist from penetrating the surrounding area.
In his childhood Brig once saw a cat carrying kittens, one by one, out of a burning building. Brig suspected, when the cat came out the last time, that she had managed to get out all of her children. Not because she had. In fact, the cat was to let three of her brood burn to death. But that's the kind of thing Brig would assume: that she wouldn't have stopped unless she'd saved all of them. And that is the way in which Brig ran toward the west, toward the hill with the mist breaking on it in pools and eddies. With the conviction that there was nothing which would stop him. The conviction that the tide rolls back and reveals the only half-drowned bodies. The conviction that meteors will only be beautiful, and not once strike you if you walk abroad on nights of arcane whimsy. It is this conviction which brought him to his death, and brought him near it a thousand times before he went, but it is also this conviction which brought him to the foot of his hill, and took him immediately up it. The barrows heaped and swarmed and gnashed like primeval earth in the days of reckoning, when god ran fingers like great tornados all over the boiling land, and was scalded. With his one arm at the small of her back, the man directed her toward the throne, and sat her down against it. His eyes took on queer shapes like moons waxing and waning at unreal rates, and something seemed to coil in his ears, like someone holding down a spring with the palm of their hand, about to release it.
Jolie settled her spine against the cold stone, and let her gaze linger over the mistless tor, feeling a little like she was intruding on the realm of some forgotten minor god, with earthbound clouds ringing them and the great throne rising above her head. “This is a very old place,” she said, rather redundantly, looking into and then looking away from the strange tides of her companion’s eyes and finally settling her attention on the rolling white horizon, through which peeked a little light now, breaking on the tops of the taller mounds that seemed to butt the crowns of their bald heads upwards like tonsured monks trying to get an early glimpse of heaven. “It was.. it still is… the throne of Dante.”
The man returned himself to the ground at his feet, and the words heard by him. He sat down next to her, but facing her side, she looking north from the throne, and he looking west into her. When Brig whistled his arrival the man waited for him to crest the hill and dismissed him to the chambers below with a specific motion of his hand. Mr. Rivers stayed outside the hole, at some queer attention, the springs coiling in his mind as he listened. When the arrival began he tucked himself away into it, and was gone. The many thousand folk struck against the crest of the hill, and began spilling around it, as though asteroids of a shattered planet falling into orbit. They poured into place, the full circle of them formed and bolstered, as though molten souls layering into a mould, to temper a great crown, which would sit on the brows of celestial beings. The man listened to the lady speak, and leaned himself back some small amount. The folk in the direction to which he leaned, leaned backward with him. The folk in the direction from which he leaned, leaned forward with him. When his spine seemed satisfied with the gesture, he took himself back again. The folk leaned with him. The circle was kept, with him at its epicenter, against the longing of the dead things around him. And when it pushed, that longing gave, and when it gave, that longing pushed. You could feel their bodies sweating in their graves with the hunger of killing. The man listened to the lady speak.
“He was a great Vampire Lord, who started a war between vampires and elves long ago, a terrible war, which spanned generations and brought the elven nation to its knees entirely.” Jolie's voice seemed distant, cold, perhaps a symptom of the dead air, perhaps a sense of the long-dead settling in herself. The necromancer shivered and instinctively drew closer to the body beside her as if to steal some warmth; foolishly, for his body was as cold as the mists and Jolie was not actually cold at all but suffering the weight of the multitudes of the dead on the tiny hairs of her arms and the nape of her neck. “The forests were all burned, and many druids with them. Untold thousands died. Those elves who didn’t perish fled and went into exile among the humans.” For a moment, her sight dimmed and she thought she heard a deep, dark peal of laughter, or perhaps it was distant thunder rolling between horizons. The tor was slowly bleeding her of even her lycan’s volcanic heat. She spoke on: “But as all wars do, it passed. And as all warlords do, he died.”
The man got up. He looked around him, and kept listening. He began to walk the circle, looking each of the sleepy folk in the eye. They held their positions. He walked the circle. He came to the throne, and leapt atop its back, like a leaf took by the wind to the top of a chimney, and left there. He stood himself up, entirely erect, on the throne's back, and looked out at the place. "Who made this land as it is? Who brought the towers down, and filled the hills with bodies? Who made the mists so hungry, and the sun such a coward? Such stories. Such stories." He pulled a strip of ribbon from a deep breast pocket, and pulled his hair back, binding it up with it. From the same pocket, reaching into it slowly, the wind rocking him on the arches of his feet as they held him on the throne, he pulled his knuckles. He slid them on and stared at the horizon, as though considering when to strike it. The mists looked as water does, in the rivers you encounter as a child, when you dip one finger in the current, and it forms such tiny whorls around it.
Jolie had watched him, all the while he moved, and spoke not a word until he grew still and set his gaze on the mists. Now she remembered, why she’d cared for him, all that time ago, despite himself. Despite herself. He was like this tor, and the throne, the ancient hollows below – something that can only ever be dimly understood, something distant and grand, and no matter how much it captures your mind, or your heart, knowledge of it is only ever a story you tell yourself in small pieces of truth, imagining the rest. “I don’t know,” she said, her elbow leant on a carven corner of the throne’s lower tier, her pale face tilted up to the wanderer, “I know there was a terrible war and the land was cursed forever. That is all.”
All at once the mists stopped writhing, the hill was covered, and the graves were emptied. The whole collection filled the air with cold like someone dumping iced water into a warm bath. It moves around your legs and twists up your arms, an individuated stream of undercurrent, and finds its way to your neck, before rolling all down your breast. "Well," he said, and dropped himself to the earth before her. He knelt down, took both his hands, and covered her eyes. He leaned forward and kissed his knuckles, before taking them from her. He looked into her. He smiled. When he stood, he would watch her eyes, to see them see what they would see. "Why don't you ask them."
Jolie might’ve asked, if she could have found a voice once he’d peeled his hands from her eyes and she gazed out upon the swaying masses, who gazed back – not at her, but him. Of course, she’d sensed them, as any good necromancer would, but as the cold that even now seeped through her in the opposite way to any natural kind of chill. This one seeped from the marrow out. Jolie saw them now, in all their misery and fierceness, triumph and wretchedness brought level to each other by the great plane of Death. Still, she didn’t ask, but pulled a thread from the threadbare tapestry of her own knowledge of Venturil’s ancient history: “The Dark Immortals brought ruin to a lot of places. So many..” it was a whisper. “But why have they all come? Why are they all …” And then she looked at him, too.
"They have been disturbed." The great lot of them shook from their feet to their eyes when he raised his hand. He brought it down on the brow of a single ghost, his palm against it and his fingers shooting into the hairs above it. They wound around his fingers as he raked them through, knotted and clasped in centuries of rest, a kind of cosmic bedhead. He looked pure into the spirit's eyes, put pressure on his scalp, and forced him to his knees. The spirit shook with rage and felt the ecstasy of contact. The man stared the ghost in the eyes until they were also lowered. He said, "You will introduce yourself to me now."
The spirit wore the engraved steel of a man of rank, in life. He wore it in death, too, minus the helmet he’d lost on the battlefield to an enemy’s pike, and with it half his right ear and a good piece of cheek below the blank, white slate of the eye above, it capacity for vision also left behind in the seconds before breath ceased. “Banks, Captain, Third Infantry.” The tone he used was as yet wooden, a military man captured by an enemy, giving by rote his name and rank. In truth, he’d been every bit as wooden a conversationalist when alive, and being dead had not helped the matter any. “In the army of Arrecation.” At least he thought so. Thinking was not his strongest suit; his brain still leaked a little, reduced to thin grey smoke now, which curled from the hole in his skull where he’d carried away with him, in his final and agonised stagger, the broken-off tip of the pike. When he shook his head, Jolie fancied she heard a dull rattling. “Or was it Dante? Perhaps he came after. I may have seen him in passing. I may have heard his name from…” a ghostly hand flapped toward the phantasmal masses, “… somebody. Or other. I have a dreadful…” Headache, he was going to say, but didn’t say it because it was a lie. At least, he thought it might be, and Wescott Banks had ever been an honest man. “Memory.”
The man withdrew his hand from the brow of the spirit, but his eyes kept it down. He looked around him and smiled. "What happened. Hah. It was, of course, a foolish question to think to ask a soldier. I've never met a soldier who knew a thing about history. Maybe one or two who knew a thing or two about the history they wanted. Not a thing about the history they had. Or were. No, it's better to ask them about the rest of it. You, boy. Tell me your name and the color of your mother's hair. Tell me who taught you to use a blade, and tell me about the first man you killed. Tell me where the sun set in the view from your window. I want to know what your first woman smelled like, when you pulled out. Did you like dying. Did you like living. Would you come with me if I asked. Would you like me to ask. Boy, what is your name?" He pocketed his knuckles and knelt before him, stroking his cheek once, in a swift slip of his index finger.
Jolie watched, or watched as much as she could. There were masses out there, thousands, craning and jostling. It was so cold now that a rime of frost had settled on her eyelashes, and she was shivering like a dog on a bare porch in winter. She watched the wanderer dismiss the leaky-headed soldier, and summon the boy.
The ‘boy’, who wasn’t much past that, and looked younger for the sparseness of his pale moustache, leaned his face toward the man’s hand and seemed very glad of somebody who would talk and listen both. His voice was soft, but did not falter. “I grew up on a farm, sir, thirty-seven miles south of here…” And on he went, describing as best he could recall: the sunset and his mother’s red hair in the same breath, and his father who was grim and opposed to uselessness when not soundly in his cups, and the small but fertile property he was to inherit but did not, and the plump, tow-headed girl he never proposed to because he was promised glory, a chance to shine beyond the turnip fields and horse-sweat of home, and he thought she deserved a man like that. On and on, trickles at first, then words fell like a black cloud bursting, drenching the tor, and Jolie listened sometimes, because there were others now, a thousand murmured litanies of memory rumbling beyond the hill as the myriad dead joined the soldier in his recounting. “William,” he said, finally. “William Jonas Deed is my name. I don’t recall how dying went. And yes, I’ll come with you, sir. I got nowhere else better to be.”
The man said nothing. He reached with his one hand, and covered the boy's eyes. He leaned in and kissed his knuckles. He whistled in a clear way, with the note muddying towards the end, like a spit-valve over-filling on a horn. John Tall came out of the crack in the ground. He walked to the boy and took him up by the shoulder, pulling him from the man's hand. His wounds were gone. John Tall took him below ground, and said things to him as he went. The man stood and said, "I will not need all of you now. Anyone who wants it can lay themselves before me. I do not know what happens when you die, though I have my inklings, same as any man. I do not know if it will be preferable to return. I know that you can tell me you are mine, and I will call you when I need you, and you will sleep when I don't. Whatever infinity has been closed from your mind, or whatever abyss you have been called from, you will remain apart from. If the risk of it would make you wary, to miss that ending or to resume it, make your decision accordingly. In a moment, I will raise my hand and draw my fingers to a fist. When it is closed, you will go the way of your minds, and I will hear no more of you." He said this all with his eyes on where the boy had knelt. He curved his neck to the right, blinked his eyes like leaves crossing over the mist-moving moon, and said to the lady: "If there be anything, now, that you should like to ask them—you must now ask them."
Jolie rose to her feet to face first the wanderer, then the phantom throng. “I…” an uncertain glance went Duke’s way, then she once more faced them, and spoke, her voice a clear bell made tinny for her chattering teeth. There were so many things she wanted to ask. “I want to ask where there are treasures, here. Powerful things, lost in the earth. In return, I will tell you new stories as I search for them.” The dead were always hungry for those, she knew, new tales to pass between them in the sleepless, lifeless dreams of ghosts. She turned her face toward the wanderer. “You’ll search with me?”
The man raised his arm, in a long, slow motion, which looked like comets rising from the earth, and drew his fingers toward his palm, his palm into itself. When the hand was put into the air, the ghosts shook. When the fist was closed, the ghosts were gone. The man called forward the remaining three who had had something to say. He turned to the lady, and said, "These will tell you what you want to know, and if it's of use we'll see what to do about it." He turned from the four of them and seemed to watch the cold coursing through the air, the air coursing through the mist, the mist coursing through the light. He seemed to watch it, and to know it. Know it in some new, intimate way, which things had not been known in before. His every look a new intimacy. The wastes were new again under his eyes.
The first stepped up. Well, glided. She had no feet, a whore from the horde camps mutilated thus as a warning to the other camp-followers in general against running off with pillow talk to the enemy when the army moved on. “I know secrets,” she simpered, “But you will pay me first.”
The second snorted, his words a rough series of grunts tortured into words, “The secrets of women are worth nothing. Their power is between their legs.” He was an orc, not large for his race but broad and scarred, “I know where true treasure lies.”
The third said nothing, and did not move at all. The figure was hunched, picking at something in the dirt, a mouldy pelt slung across its shoulders.
John Tall came and stood behind the man. He looked out with him, his right hand holding the wrist of his left behind his back, and seemed to follow the eyes which went before his over the expanse. He said, "We're all tucked into the mountain, boss, ready at the next command. Thimble should be back shortly. I've given the order for the crew not to be about in the barrows, temptin' the remainder. Not polite, anyhow. Not even sensible. Told that girl. You know, there's all the dead that's died, and they're all gone somewhere. And god bless them's that got no call for crossing paths with that hell-minded runt. I could just beat her until she smarts, drop the s, and hope for progress." The man raised his hand. "Do you have preliminaries to direct me, or does all the work wait for Thimble?" "Tell Brig he needs to stay watch while you rest." "Boss, now—" The man raised his hand. "Tell Gnat she's to go to the edge of the barrows and apologize, out loud, to whomever's there to hear." "Yes, boss." "Rivers is to track whatever forces may have been drawn by this confluence, kill what he finds if within his abilities, report what he finds which isn't. Remember the watch, John. There's things with their ears to the ground that will not have missed that herd." "Yes, boss." The man turns to observe the dealings between the lady and the three. John is gone by the time he has.
Jolie addressed the girl, who was dirty and had a missing front tooth. The whore was sulking terribly now and glaring at the green-skin; she had a sensuality about her face and motions that made her seem more beautiful than she was.
“Yes, I’ll pay you,” Jolie told her. “In a moment.” She was used to orcs and their ways, and the squat warrior was spoken to next:
“You were spat from a woman, who clearly lost none of her power in being rid of you..”
The orc grimaced, guffawed to find one who knew the ways of his people. “You could dribble only ladyboys from your stinking loins,” he returned, more affably.
“Your pizzle is so ashamed to be attached to such a coward,” Jolie smiled, “That it burrows into you like a frightened worm, leaving only a hole.”
Jolie left the orc to his laughter and knee-slapping and stepped to the third ghost, whose hair was a mud-nest. “Hello?” she said, more gently. The ghost looked up, its eyes white and its teeth black, and shook its head so the ghosts of lice were forced from their dreadlocked heaven to land on the discomfiting and hairless purgatory of the stony ground below. It jabbered something unintelligible, and pointed out into the mist, which thinned as the grimy spook gestured that way, but only barely enough that Jolie could glimpse a monolithic stone wedge standing at slanted attention on a hill some ways away.
Jolie looked to the wanderer. “Might we take a walk, then?”
The girl was making rude gestures at the orc’s back, but stopped and said, “First. I want my story.”