o1 . like an old enemy

[necrolord]

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! ]

Comments

[necrolord]

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."

[frogfear]

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."

[necrolord]

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."

[frogfear]

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?

[necrolord]

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."

[frogfear]

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."

[necrolord]

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."

[frogfear]

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."

[necrolord]

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."

[frogfear]

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.

[necrolord]

It is so painfully naive and gentle a reassurance that he cannot bring himself to shatter it. What you thought was right at the time... It is a low bar to meet. He has always tried, yes; he has always loved his family. Here he is with none of them left, all the same.

"Revenge often does, I suppose." They are passing the shoal of corpses, and clean water is washing in. He flexes his fingers, grips the edge of the boat hard a moment, tries not to hold the building anger in the set of his teeth. It is like a condescending pat on the head, a good job, you shared from whatever pseudo-god rules them here. Never Mind. A king of ravens put his Annabell Lee on a spike to coax him to confess his sins to a teenager, and one day John shall make known his feelings on that.

"It seems to be clearing up," he murmurs. There are no further jutting spikes ahead, which is nearly offensive in itself. He has so many more beloved dead they could run through. Their voyeur has evidently lost interest in the show.

[frogfear]

It's such a relief that the river is clearing that Willow can't must much anger at Never Mind for subjecting them to what seems to boil down to traumatic Deerington style group therapy just now. She will still never look at the Pthumerian and his ravens the same way again, nor will she be tempted to touch another discarded feather again any time soon.

"Yeah... it can be a - a powerful force." It's impossible to miss the anger in the set of his jaw, and the way he grips the side of the boat, but she tries to put it out of her head. It's not directed at her, and they'll soon be free of this place anyway.

"I guess we managed what he wanted from us." She leans forward as she spots a dock on the shore up ahead. "That must be our stop."