deercountry | o1 . like an old enemy

Entry tags:

o1 . like an old enemy

Who:

necrolord and you!
What: A necromancer comes to town.
When: Early September.
Where: The docks, Gaze, and anywhere.

Content Warnings: Undead, implied murder of NPCs, and all the usual warnings of this character.

(1) ghost ship.

Maybe, in your wandering, you've come to the harbor. There are fishing boats and trading vessels here among the dark, choppy waves.

One of them looks like astonishingly bad news.

If at any point you got dredged up by pirates, you will recognize it immediately. The hull is dark and oily; the sails are tattered and grim; the crew are all horribly corrupted. They are scaled and tentacled and barely-human. But they seem to have lost all aggression: they move in rote, mechanical ways, taking no notice of their surroundings.

Only one man stands out from them. He looks remarkably average: dark clothes, dark hair, dressed in a captain's coat of black and gold. What might stop you, though, are his eyes. They are black from edge to edge, sclera and all, with an oily shimmer that feels wrong to look upon.

"What do you think," says the captain, to whoever has stopped to stare. "Corpses or skeletons? Skeletons are a classic, but I do hate to get rid of the tentacles; loses the novelty."

(2) weak and weary.

Gaze is absolutely drenched in ravens. Dripping ravens. He's pretty sure ravens don't flock, typically, unless they are scavenging the dead on a battlefield; so that's promising. Regardless: there is a man before you trying to coax one of the ravens onto his wrist.

It perches there, and he looks briefly, utterly delighted. He reaches out a few fingers to stroke its feathery breast, and the raven lets him. His voice drops low, soft, somber:

"Is there balm in Gilead?" he murmurs. "Tell me; tell me, I implore."

The raven considers this. It cocks its dark little head towards him. It leans forward, the shaggy feathers of its throat bristling, to speak.

FUCK OFF, croaks the raven. It pecks the Emperor Undying on the forehead, takes a shit, and smacks him with a wing on its way out.

The man, left in the wreckage of this situation, does something vaguely impressed with his eyebrows. He chews his lip. He says, "Welp."

Then he turns to you, the poor sap who witnessed this, and spreads his hands in defeat.

"Worth a shot," he says. "Did you know the collective term is an unkindness of ravens? I see why."

(3) wildcard.

[ Happy to match formatting! ]

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"I don't know about this place, but stuff like this was pretty common in Deerington," Willow answers.

She shifts around in her seat, checking for a paddle, or anything they can use to try to guide the boat to shore. It's not a huge shock when she finds nothing, but she still lets out a sigh of resignation. Of course it wouldn't be that easy to get off Trench's very own riverboat ride of horror.

"Most of the time, it was like a puzzle or something. Or at least, it was in the dream - this could be something completely different. But usually, there was a solution - you just had to figure it out."

"Like a puzzle," he echoes, and he begins drumming his fingers along the wooden edge of the boat. "Do you have any examples? Overarching themes, maybe?"

There is something bobbing in the river, up ahead. John is aware that it is a corpse, and so he politely ignores it.

Where to begin with the incidents in Deerington where people would be thrown together and have to work together to figure out a way to escape whatever horrifying situation the town chose to inflict on them.

"There was a lot of making people work together to get out of a situation. Um. There was a hotel room I got stuck in once - you had to, like, let the other person help you through your worst fear or experience to get out." She was not a fan, and she really does not like the idea of him learning anything more about her than he already knows.

She spots the object bobbing in the water and leans forward to try to get a closer look at it. She instantly regrets it as soon as she realizes it's a body and sits back again.

"That's, uh, not a good sign."

"Your worst experience." He murmurs this in echo, faintly wondering. Almost impressed. The man who became God turns to survey the river of blood and bodies around their rocking boat, and he makes a sound like Huh.

"That'd do it," he agrees, to nothing in particular. There are more bodies up ahead, now, bobbing like horrible bloated fish. This does not remotely faze him, even when they brush the hull of their little boat.

No, what catches his attention are the birds. Up ahead they are truly swarming, as they do in Gaze: picking their way along the barbed-wire fences of the banks, croaking and rattling to each other. They are swarming over corpses. Something about the first corpse holds his gaze; the chest is an open and bloody ruin, utterly shredded, and the face has been picked at by birds. But it is plainly a woman, her hair the color of an overripe apricot.

"Fear and memory," he muses, but he does not stop looking at her. As they pass, he speaks without any change of tone, but his expression has gone utterly graveyard-still. "Or fear and honesty, maybe. Those are the throughlines?"

"Uh huh," Willow is thoroughly distracted by the bodies in the water. One was bad enough, but the river seems to be quickly piling up, and they all have this horrible look about them like they've been in the water for far too long.

The movement of the birds draws her attention away from the water, and the bodies on shore seem to be just as numerous as the ones as the ones in the river. She's not sure which is worse - the bloated corpses floating in the water, or the ones being picked apart by the ravens on shore.

She catches him staring at the remains of the woman, and perhaps if she had only been listening and not seen the way this particular corpse holds his gaze and the stillness in his expression, she wouldn't realize how this particular body was affecting him.

"Maybe," she answers quietly. They are not friends, and she's still mostly sure this is the last place she wants to be with someone with power over the dead, but she can't help but be a little concerned for him as well. She doesn't want to directly ask about who the woman is, so she decides on a slightly different route and a gentle tone.

"Does, uh, any of this look at all familiar to you?"

He parses the gentle tone, and it strikes something sweet and sad in him. She is being cautious, but in a kind way. She probably thinks he looks upon the corpse of Mercymorn the First with despair.

He does. He has loved her so fervently. He has ruffled that dead-apricot hair a hundred thousand times.

He did not want to have to kill her.

"Very familiar," he says levelly, and turns away from the sight of Mercy's decimated chest. "This resembles a necromantic phenomenon we know as the River. But the River does not always have a consistent appearance; it is simply a projection in the mind of the viewer. Can you tell me what you see?"

A necromantic phenomenon. Of course it is. It certainly explains the bodies, anyway. She wonders briefly if it's something he's done to drag them here, except, no, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't explain why she's here with him.

"Uhh, yeah, okay. It's a river, full of blood and, um, dead bodies. The shore is pretty much more of the same..." she trails off suddenly. She's caught sight of one of the bodies that looks far too familiar, tied to the fence, arms outstretched, and completely devoid of skin.

There's no shortage of horrible things she expected to see on this trip down the river, but this was certainly not one of them. She looks away as one of the ravens swoop in, cawing as though trying to draw their attention back to the body.

"It seems pretty necromantic, I guess? Are you seeing the same thing?"

She trails off, and he thinks, ah. It's making a point to both of them, then. He spots the flayed man, and does not recognize him.

He cannot help but be curious what regrets this pleasant and principled young girl might have, when it comes to a man eerily stripped of skin.

"I am," he agrees mildly. "This is not actually the River, of course. The River itself is a place beyond our world— or just under it, perhaps. I could get into some very colorful metaphors to help conceptualize the liminal nature of the space, but it's more relevant to say: this isn't it."

But there is a strange sense of something pressing in on him. He finds it uncommonly difficult not to look at Mercy's body again, as they drift by. Were this the River, her spirit would be here. He could face her again like this. But this is not the River, and her corpse is just a corpse.

"This," he says, "is just a halfhearted replica. An homage. If memory is theme, they must be leaning on mine."

She puts her focus on him so she can continue to ignore the bodies. It's not exactly the same as the River, but the suspicion is it's ripped from his memories of it. That makes a strange sort of sense - that whatever put them here is taking from the most horrifying memories it can find.

She wonders briefly if maybe they're here because he offended one of Never Mind's ravens by quoting Poe at it, but she quickly discards the idea. Surely neither the ravens, nor Never Mind, would be quite that petty. Still, it's impossible to deny the connection to the birds.

"When you were at the Archives, did you read anything about Never Mind?" Maybe if they can work out the motivations behind why they were brought here, they can figure out how to escape.

"Oh, sure." He puts his knuckles to his mouth in thought, frowning faintly past it. Around them, there is no open water left in sight: bodies have bobbed to every available inch of surface, and their little boat plows straight through the tumbling sea of corpses. This does not seem to bother him. "They've got a whole pantheon, here, and I wouldn't call Never Mind the local god of memory. He is king of understanding, of seeking and learning. Simply archiving past horrors would be more the domain of Remina, the Eye."

He turns a wry sort of look on her, dropping his hand as their boat continues to jostle among the corpses.

"But I suggest taking self-elected gods with a few large grains of salt."

She is not yet aware of all his titles; it's funny only to him.

"So there's probably something we're supposed to gain understanding from in all this, or something to learn from it." She figured knowledge and learning was Never Mind's primary interests, given the school and the archives, and clearly he likes puzzles as well. "I've been researching too, but there's a lot to dig into here - I haven't gotten much into the local Pthumerians yet."

The jostle of the boat is startling, especially since Willow had been deliberately not trying to pay attention to their surroundings, and she grabs his arm to catch her balance. She releases him immediately, and puts her other hand on the side of the boat instead, a flash of embarrassment turns to alarm when she realizes by just how much the body count in the water has increased. It looks like it's more dead things than either water or even blood at this point. The smell isn't getting any better either.

"Oh. Um. Sorry. Okay, we gotta figure this out fast - we're gonna end up getting stuck here soon." She looks around, biting her lip thoughtfully. Her eyes land once again on Warren's skinless corpse, and she quickly looks away again. Their environment can't be based just off his memories if Warren is here. She glances back towards the woman she noticed him staring at.

"What about the bodies?" She finally asks reluctantly. She doesn't want to talk about Warren, and she can't imagine he would want to talk about any of the figures he recognizes either, but nothing else strikes in the moment. "Do they look familiar at all?"

He opts not to inform her that getting stuck among corpses is not really a problem for the God of Necromancers. He could raise a walkway of bones from the bodies, a path of flesh from the bloody waters. She probably wouldn't be a fan.

She turns to look at Mercy. He lets her.

"A few," he agrees. "Which does lend credence to the 'memory' theory."

There is another body, up ahead: the corpse of a man, tall and slim, something tarry-black dripping from his ruined mouth. A faint tremble runs through John, there and then gone.

"Fallen family," he says, softly. His tone is still mild, but there is something faraway to it. His gaze is a billion lightyears away. "Those I've lost."

There's more than enough horror all around them without her imagining what else he can produce with the number of bodies surrounding them. She's not even going to consider that with him being a necromancer, they would not actually get stuck anywhere.

"I'm sorry," she says gently. She means it - it's not easy seeing Warren, and the reminder of what she did to him, but she carries no fondness for him. She can't imagine how she would feel if it was the remains of someone she genuinely cared about she found herself faced with.

It doesn't make sense. Why is he faced with the remains of the people he cared for, when it's just Warren she's seen. Part of her knows she ought to take another look around and see if maybe she recognizes anyone else, to see if some other part of the puzzle will fit, but she can't bring herself to do it. She does not want to recognize any of the other faces.

"He was a misogynistic creep," without looking, she gestures vaguely in direction of Warren's body. She does not want to talk about this, not even a little, but maybe it will give them some ideas as to what's happening and how to stop it. "We went to the same high school, but I never knew him until later, and I definitely didn't like him at all. I'm not sure why you're seeing people you loved, and I'm seeing... Well. Him."

She is so carefully earnest, so sweetly sympathetic for a man she plainly does not trust. It does nothing but draw the distance in his expression even further.

The body of Augustine the First looks almost impeccable. It's only the eyes that are wrong, and the mouth. There are teeth where teeth shouldn't be; there are wet black tendrils that look too little like strips of gore, and too much like tentacles. He's not sure the implications hold any real merit; he's not sure anything would need to get inside Augustine's body, when Augustine was inside something worse.

He tips his head to her, and his voice is unbearably gentle.

"I'm going to guess," he murmurs, "he had more skin back in high school."

The pressure is still building. He is more keenly aware of it now; it is very difficult not to look at Augustine. It is a dry, hot anger somewhere far off and deep, and it is rising to the surface with every word he doesn't say.

"Yeah. He did," she admits with a nod. The gentle tone and the tip of his head makes her instantly uncomfortable with the conversation. Like it's an invitation to tell him what exactly happened, and it's not a topic she feels particularly inclined to discuss with someone who she barely knows and certainly does not trust.

Instead she puts her focus on the next body, and its strange appearance. She can't help but wonder what happened to the poor man that he's appearing here, now, covered in what looks suspiciously like tentacles, and out of place teeth.

The solution has to be in the bodies they're seeing. She nods towards Augustine, and her tone remains gentle. She doesn't want to push him on this, but she wants to be able to leave this place behind too.

"You know him too, huh? Is he also family?"

She rebuffs the gentle prompting, and he is briefly angry. Or, perhaps not briefly; he is deeply, simmeringly, persistently angry, but he is briefly less certain he wants to keep a handle on it. Something very like impatience flickers in his face, an edge to the distance.

The pressure is still building. He increasingly does not care for this game.

"He is," he agrees, present-tense for reasons he does not care to examine. A saint is eternal; call it an honor for the dignified dead.

He does not look at Augustine's corrupted face. But the pull towards it is there in his mind, like magnetism.

"Perhaps it's a slideshow of our significant dead," he says, because it's far gentler than his other theory. "But towards what understanding, I couldn't say."

A slideshow of their significant dead. It's a theory, but she doesn't think it's the right one - if it was just their significant dead, she's absolutely certain she would see Tara before she saw Warren, or Jesse, or maybe even Buffy, or her mother.

Against her better judgement, she finds herself scanning the shore for any sign of the corpses of people she actually cares about. She can't help the sigh of relief when she doesn't spot anyone else she recognizes. It doesn't last long, though, as realization hits that any one of them, or all of them, could be anywhere further up the banks of the river.

She does not want to see them in the same horrible state of decay as the bodies that surround them.

It's tempting to try a spell - maybe she could just teleport them both out, but she already knows her magic does not work properly here, and it's impossible to say if she would just end up with another headache, or if they would end up somewhere far worse than this.

"I don't know. I don't think that's it." She doesn't offer an explanation. She should give him something, but it's too easy to clam up, surrounded by the dead - she's worried if she thinks too hard on one of her friends, or says anything out loud, they will manifest either on the shore, or in the water, and she doesn't think she could stand it.

She fumbles for the words for the question she does not want to ask, both because she does not want to give him any ideas about Warren and because it's a particularly difficult question to ask.

"Do you, um. Do you - do you feel... I don't know... Responsible, maybe? For any of the people you've seen so far? The ones you know, I mean."

She hits upon the theory before he can begin to hint toward it. The corpses are so thick there is not really any water between them, now: they are crowded in among the ugly press of bodies. They do not drift so much as they cram together, interlocking with horrible pressure. He is ready at any moment for them to surge up in attack.

They don't. The tension merely builds, and builds, and builds.

"Responsible." He drums his fingers again along the wooden side of the boat, heedless of the dead crushing in closer and closer. He knows what the bodies in the River can do to a person; he knows how quickly the ravenous dead can move. "I could give you a very long answer to that, Willow, or a very short one."

John should not look down the riverbank, but it is truly in his head now. Worse, he knows it. He knows this pressure is external, and dangerous, and still he gives in to it.

There is another body pinned with spikes, up ahead. He knows it will be the body of a woman.

"Perhaps we'll save time," he murmurs, "and choose the short one: yes."

There's too many bodies - they're crowding the boat too closely, and the only thing keeping her seated is the worry that if she gets to her feet, the jostling of the boat might make it too hard to keep her balance and she might end up overboard. Instead, she slides in a little and lets go of the edge of the canoe.

Willow is more willing to trust him over the bodies in the water - the situation is clearly escalating, and she's not confident that if they can't find the way out soon, the dead won't spring to life and try to attack. Especially given his answer that, yes, he's responsible for the people he recognizes on shore. Without her magic, she feels particularly vulnerable, but hopefully if the dead begin to move, she can count on him to keep them at bay.

She turns her focus to the simple answer to his question. It's not a surprise his body count goes beyond the pirates on the ship he took over, but he also said these were people he thought of as family. It begs further questioning, and she does not want to pry, but she does take a few seconds to consider how much she's willing to give him about Warren.

"Yeah. Yeah, me too," she confesses with a small nod.

There's another one up ahead too. God, does she even want to know how many people he's responsible for killing?

It's unwelcome confirmation. Still, wearily, he puts it aloud:

"Then they are not a slideshow of our relevant dead," he amends, "but our relevant killed. Metaphorically speaking, I'm sure." He is immensely not sure. "Our enemies harmed, our families failed."

It more than explains the crush of bodies beneath them. He'd heard the indictment not a week ago: I charge you with acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the human race—

He is achingly, splittingly angry. The pressure builds, and they are drifting nearer to the body of the woman. She is right there on the riverbank, hanging gruesomely suspended for all to see, the smooth line of her sleeping throat picked at by birds. He is instants away from turning the whole of the river to his weapon, and crushing the life out of anything that would dare defile her.

But it isn't real, and he is being foolish.

"The question," he says, in tones of patience stretched to breaking, "is what we are meant to learn."

Edited 2021-09-14 14:47 (UTC)

Oh, there's no metaphorically speaking when it comes to Warren, but maybe he's referring to his own situation, so she nods.

"Yeah, that sounds like it's about right." She sounds about as happy about it as he does, but at least it gives them a clue. She glances to the latest body, as the birds pick away at her. It's intolerable - gruesome set of remains, one after another along the shore, and a river full of more of the same, and somehow they're expected to face all this horror and work out how to make it stop at the same time.

She's liking Never Mind and his ravens far less with each passing moment.

There has to be more to it than just feeling responsible for the bodies they've left behind. She hasn't seen Rack here, after all, and she killed him too. Asking the details for every single death they've seen laid out here feels too time consuming. It's probably more sensible to just take the leap and see if he can work it out.

"He killed someone I love," Willow says finally. Her tone is quiet, and resigned. She still does not want to talk about this, especially not with someone she does not particularly trust, but there seems little alternative. "Warren. He was aiming for my best friend, and one of the shots missed, and he killed my girlfriend."

She pauses, considering how much more she wants to share. He doesn't need the full story, she decides. Just the parts about Warren. She lets her eyes find focus on a point on the horizon, and takes a deep breath before continuing. "I kind of lost my head over it, so I tracked him down, and I killed him."

It is truly unfortunate they are using her to bait him. Dangling a vision of Mercy, gruesomely dead, is not exactly going to break him down to weeping; he is still too freshly angry for that. But to parade out every person he has loved and set them under the ravens, to rub salt in the wound of his newfound powerlessness by putting his Annabel Lee on the illusionary rack—

He does not look too closely, for fear her eyes will be open. He does not know what color they will be.

John's fingers have tightened on the side of the boat, but he does not take the bait.

Willow provides a helpful distraction by confessing to murder. He turns his eerily dark gaze upon her, somber and thoughtful, wholly attentive in the face of this sin. She looks away, expression gone distant, to the horizon; he turns his gaze down to his hands with a gentle exhale through his nose.

"You will hear no condemnation from me," he murmurs. With a wry edge of humor: "I have always had an overdeveloped sense of vengeance."

A man killed her lover, and so she killed him in return. It is an ancient logic, a tit-for-tat with an inherent simplicity he cannot deny. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, et cetera.

With the woman's corpse at his back, it comes out soft but intent, terribly genuine: "I am sorry you lost her."

She is not sure what she was expecting from him - clearly, he's not the type to shy away from death, but it wasn't gentle sympathy and what feels very much like genuine kindness.

She nods in acknowledgement but stays silent for a few moments, apparently lost in thought. Maybe she has him figured wrong. Maybe necromancy in his world really isn't the same corrupting influence it is in hers. Maybe he's not as bad as she originally thought. In all of their encounters so far, he really has been nothing but pleasant to her.

Still, there's an awful lot of bodies surrounding them and an awful lot of death he's responsible for.

She turns back to him finally and gives him a small, sad smile.

"Thank you. You too," her tone is equally soft. "I'm sorry for the people you lost too. I know this is probably way harder for you than it is me. I don't even like Warren - I can't imagine if it was the people I loved I was seeing like this."

He watches the caution fall off of her like weight released; her smile to him is pitying. There is something marvelously novel in that, and something that stokes the simmer of his bitter, boxed-up fury. John has lived on his pedestal for a very long time, and it had been refreshing to step off of it, in a sense. Now he merely finds himself wrong-footed on solid ground.

But she is a child trying to be kind to a stranger. He exhales a long, slow breath, and it feels like pressure releasing.

"It's not the flesh that disturbs me," he confesses, which is mostly true. "The implication is heavy-handed, but it's not off-base."

He is peripherally aware that there must be a spell upon him, because speaking this truth feels like the lifting of a curse. It feels like shaking off some jittery, poisonous energy that has been building in him unseen.

"That's the sting of this show," he murmurs. "The blame. These are all the people I have lost through my own failures, Willow, each and every one of them."

It's not terribly surprising that it's not the visual display he finds most disturbing, given what she knows of him so far. It's probably hard to be disturbed by the appearance of dead bodies as a necromancer, although she still suspects it would be less easy when it's people you cared about.

"They're people you loved. You did the best you could, right?" It's less of a question, and more of an assumption. "It's not your fault if you did everything you could. Sometimes you can do all the right things - or, you know, what you thought was right at the time, and it still just turns out wrong."

She can't help but think of Buffy, and the harm she caused inadvertently with the resurrection spell, thinking she was doing the right thing. It's no small mercy that Never Mind has chosen to focus on the people she's killed rather than the ones she's hurt.

"I shouldn't have killed him," she admits. "Warren, I mean. It's just... things got really out of control really fast."

Some of the anxious energy creeping up over the bodies starts to fade before she even takes a moment to look around and see that ahead of them, the river is beginning to clear.

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necrolord - 2021-10-05 14:35 (UTC) - Expand

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frogfear - 2021-10-05 20:31 (UTC) - Expand

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o1 . like an old enemy

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cw corpses intensify, some gore

cws continue

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