ᴛʜᴇ ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ ᴜɴᴅʏɪɴɢ (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
necrolord) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
deercountry2021-09-03 09:19 am
necrolord) wrote in deercountry2021-09-03 09:19 am
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! ]
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! ]
no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
"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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
"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."