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grell-writes-stuff · 4 years

Text

A Self-Indulgent Second Chapter

Acknowledge me! First Chapter Here

Words: 3588

Genre: Young Adult/Paranormal

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I wake up reluctantly to Ivy poking my face at two o’clock in the morning. She’s already back in leggings and a hoodie, and contains an unwarranted amount of pep for such an early hour. I rub my eyes, grab my own sweatshirt to fight off the chill of the middle of the night, and rise.

“Okay. Let’s do this.”

“That’s what you’re wearing?” Her damning gaze judges my pajamas.

“Ivy, I need you to understand that I’m not putting in more effort than the bare minimum in order to go sit around in a graveyard with you at three a.m.”

Her eyes roll, but she ultimately drops it, and we’re out my bedroom window, walking along the roof over the back porch, and carefully scaling down the trellis at the side of the house. We cut across the unfenced yards of our neighbours. The last house at the corner before we make it to the sidewalk is Ivy’s. We walk under the big beech and shabby treehouse that we used to play in and that is most certainly a deathtrap. It’s intentionally a deathtrap. Ivy literally read the OSHA guidelines to see how many petty requirements she could ignore in one project. Her dad was building it though, so there’s not too many infractions, but I still almost broke multiple extremities on multiple occasions.

The streets of Kinross eventually lead us to Riverview Cemetery, the massive graveyard bordered by the woods near the edge of town just where the houses and other outskirts buildings begin to spread further apart. I know for a fact that the fence out front only extends about halfway around the whole place to decorate the side of the road, so it’s easy to break in, however it still takes me two full minutes to talk Ivy into taking that route and out of her idea to scale the locked, iron gate looming in the darkness. Chances are she’d scurry up it like Spiderman and I’d impale myself on one of the points at the top. We hike through the trees and sneak inside where the stone wall begins to crumble.

“All right,” Ivy huffs triumphantly. “Now we just have to find her.”

“Find her? You said you knew where she was.”

“Yes, I do. In the historical section…somewhere.”

“Ivy!”

“What?”

I’m happy it’s dark so she can’t see my exasperation because I’d get a lecture on optimism otherwise. I slip on what I think it a neutral-feeling face, and pull my phone out for a second. I blink away the blinding brightness while I check. “Okay, well, if you actually want to be at her grave at three, you’ve got, like, under ten minutes.”

That seems to be enough for her because Ivy begins to march ahead between the headstones. I shove my phone in the pocket of my hoodie and trail her with an air of reluctance and a want to get this over with and take my money from her bad bet.

Both Ivy and I come to Riverview what I would consider a normal amount and, more importantly, exclusively – until now – when it is light out. I probably come more than she does though. Ivy will stop by every few years to say hello to her Grandpa Gil who died before she was even born, but my dad and I come twice a year for my mom: once on her birthday, and once on the anniversary of her death. She passed away when I was really little, so I don’t remember her, but everyone who knew her made sure I learned what kind of person she was through stories and stuff. My dad couldn’t speak more highly of her, but his retellings always hold a tinge of hasty justification for their whole relationship because my mom was gay, and so is my dad. Growing up, they’d always been best friends, and so the other person seemed as perfect as could be for a lie that would turn out to be mutual in the end. They only both came out to each other after my mom got sick, and by then they were a few years in to a marriage that was domestically comfortable, but nothing more, and had already had me. I don’t really feel so sentimental when anyone mentions the absence of my mom because I was really young. I end up sadder that she was taken while trapped in the lie of heteronormative narrative and never had the chance to experience the kind of love she wanted to have beyond the platonic and familial feelings she shared with my dad and I.

Ivy and I walk past the sections we’re familiar with toward the back of the graveyard where the stretch of ancient headstones begins. Kinross was founded way back when America was just a group of colonies and Massachusetts was dotted with clumps of communities built by pilgrims and Puritans. They needed a place to put their dead people, and so Riverview was established a couple miles from the Hollins River which runs on the edge of town. Only groundskeepers come back this way as far as I know since the names on most of the rocks have faded into obscurity, and the only ones that are remotely recognizable belong to the people we learn about in school for a week leading up to Founder’s Day.

I slip my phone out again and check the time. “Five minutes.”

“I know, I know. Shut up. She’s around here somewhere.”

“Couldn’t you have just Googled a map of the plots? You read the most obscure documents for fun, but fact-checking this–”

“One lapse in good planning, and I get lectured.”

“Ivy.”

“Okay, okay! This way.”

I’m pretty sure she just picks a random direction. She yanks her phone from the waist of her leggings and the beam of the flashlight cuts through the darkness and starts inspecting epitaphs. I leave her to it, and she doesn’t complain because she must have guessed I wouldn’t be willing to help her when I didn’t want to be here in the first place. I periodically take my phone out to glance at it and count down her time limit in my head when, suddenly, Ivy says:

“Oh, fuck yes.”

I look up and follow her light as it points toward one of the larger monuments, a giant, grey mausoleum with cracks and crumbles and a chained, iron gate as it’s front door. It’s flanked on all sides by overgrowth and tall flowering plants that look rich and purple in the peripheral of the beam. She raises her phone so it illuminates the name carved just below the peak of the roof: Ann-Marie Kelly.

“Okay, Ivy,” I start before I have to take a pause. I feel her gaze land on me while I inhale. “I don’t mean to discredit your apparently strong belief in witches, but would they give an actual accused witch an entire, enormous mausoleum like this if anyone actually believed she was magically terrorizing Kinross?”

“Oh, Sid, she had allies. Have you really not heard this story?”

“No, Ivy. I really don’t care about what was going on in Kinross in seventeen-whatever.”

“Sixteen-whatever,” she corrects before she slides her phone back into her pocket and struts up to the tomb.

I groan loud enough for her to hear it and follow, but I barely make it onto the concrete step just outside the door before Ivy’s foot connects with the gate and makes the chains rattle.

“Oh, my God, Ivy.”

She ignores me and kicks again. “Wake up, Annie! Sid’s gonna owe me money!”

“Ivy, stop.”

“Okay, but one more.” I don’t have a chance to object because she quickly lines herself up and swings her leg, and delivers one massive blow directly to the center of the barrier and –

The chains and padlock clatter onto the stone at our feet, and we both jump at the sudden noise. Our eyes are both wide, but in very different ways. I’m shocked. As old as this building seems to be, I did not expect that.

“Holy shit. Completely rusted through,” Ivy observes with glee. From the corner of my eye I catch a particular sparkle of something that I don’t like a split second before she suggests, “Dude, we’re going in.”

“No, we are not.”

She’s already pulling open the gate, and the sound it makes reverberates through the silent night, the squeal of something dying in agony. While I’m recovering from the assault to my ears, she’s stepped inside the structure and disappeared into the blackness. I call her name, but there isn’t a response, and when I try again, there’s a pause and a begging, “Sid, come on!”

I hesitate for a moment, like I’m sure anybody standing outside of a mausoleum at three in the morning would, before I trail her in. Then something clamps around my arm, and a noise catches in my throat while I leap out of my skin.

“Jesus, Sid! It’s just me!” Ivy turns her phone’s flashlight back on and we can see each other yet again, her smug, me only slightly less terrified than I was a beat ago.

“Don’t do that!”

“Sorry.” She sounds only half-sorry as she releases my arm, and then she sits on the filthy, hard floor right in front of a big, long box, the sight of which forms a pit in my stomach. She sets her phone before her, face down so the flashlight beams up at the ceiling, and reaches to pat the spot across from her. “Sit. I’ll tell you the age-old tale of Ann Kelly, Kinross’ first and last witch.”

“Ivy, I will pay you if we can leave right now.”

“No, sit.”

I put everything inside of my lungs into my sigh before I sit and kick up dust and cough. I pull my inhaler from my sweatpants’ pocket to take a puff so I can ensure I don’t suffocate on the grime in this horrible place, while Ivy launches into her story with a shit-eating grin and exaggerated, formal diction.

“In fair Kinross of the sixteen-nineties where everyone was farming, religious, and paranoid is where we lay our scene. In the other corners of our state, pointed fingers were frantically flying to women of questionable affairs in order to defame them with accusations of witchcraft, and Ann Kelly was no exception. She was accused by some guy of blasphemy, of murder, and of bewitching her young niece who was visiting town. She was ultimately arrested and brought to trial.

“The trial lasted I-don’t-know-how-long, with a verdict of guilty-as-hell, and Ann Kelly was sentenced to be hung. Perhaps, dear Sid, perhaps, as you suggest, she was just some unfortunate woman, but on the day of Ann Kelly’s execution, when the rope was placed around her at the gallows erected in town square, when she was asked to say her final words before the platform dropped, her neck snapped, and she slowly and painfully died, Ann Kelly secured her title as ‘The Witch of Kinross.’ For, you see, Ann Kelly, in front of eye witnesses and all the divine people watching Upstairs, placed a curse upon the executioner” – she slips into a gravelly, spooky voice – “‘An eye for an eye, a claw for a claw, thou accuseth a false Devil, thou art the beast he hath saw–!’”

“Are you done?” I interrupt her theatrics.

Her voice turns to normal again with the volume cranked up. “Blah, blah, blah, they hung her. But her niece contacted her brother and nephew. They came down to Kinross and Ann Kelly’s husband and brother murdered the executioner as revenge. I mean, it wasn’t well-thought-out revenge because then they were hanged, but yeah. That’s the Ann Kelly story.”

“Awesome. Great. So worth breaking into a graveyard at three in the–”

Bang!

The tomb seems to shudder with the noise, the sound of something rock-solid slamming against the back wall, resonating through the floor beneath us and travelling up my spine as a striking chill. My mouth hangs wide open, stopped mid-thought, and Ivy’s brows abruptly rise and then knit together. For a long time, it’s completely silent in the cold darkness inside the mausoleum and we sit like statues.

When I can speak again, I only just stop myself from using one of Ivy’s favourite swears, and find a substitute. “Ivy, what the hell?!”

She looks up at me like soon-to-be roadkill.

For a moment, I can’t keep the anger and accusation out of my voice, masking the constricting grip clamping around my heart and throat. “Who’s out there?! Who’d you get to help prank me?! Someone from the soccer team? Julia? Abby?”

I cut off my demands when I really see her face angled by the shadows. Her lips are hanging parted and mouth the word “no” like she can’t get it out. Her eyes are twinkling with worry emphasized by her crumpled brows. Fear. The quiet stretches between us for a too-long pause this time. Only our tandem, careful breaths echo in the chamber as we wait for…for something.

Snap!

The small crunch of a twig, soft as it travels through the open doorway from the direction of the east wall of the mausoleum. It reverberates up my spine like it’s tangible. A branch could break beneath anything, but after the loud hammer to the side of the structure… My gut churns with an uneasy vibe. Ivy vocalizes her own unwanted feeling to herself before turning to me again.

“Run for it?” Ivy’s voice is tiny enclosed by the darkness.

“Brisk walk?” I suggest.

“You have your inhaler,” she states pointedly, getting up. “We run.”

I curse under my breath, but give in because she’s right. If we get caught after breaking into somebody’s grave, our parents find out, and we are in an unfathomable amount of trouble. Ivy pushes past me with a quickened stride that I match until we’ve both stepped off the concrete slab just outside the door and into the overgrown grass and purple flowers. Then we’re scrambling into a run toward the night, dashing ahead in a straight line to dodge the headstones sticking out of the ground like blunt fingertips ready to grab us. Two sets of footsteps violently stomp on the earth…until we break into the treeline, and the third joins the noise of our escape and my desperate pants rising in volume.

My chest has been lit on fire. I gasp, “Ivy!”

“Don’t use names!” she yells back to me. “Just keep going! Just keep going!”

I try, and I push myself like I’ve never had to before, placing one foot before the other, taking in what air I can and holding it so I have something in my screaming lungs at least for a moment. But my feet are starting to stumble and my clenched hands begin trembling because I can’t breathe. My heart is overclocking from exertion and panic. I fall behind Ivy, the silhouette of her auburn ponytail disappearing into the blackness ahead while a pain flares in my side.

I yank my inhaler from my pocket again and take a puff, but it’s impossible to hold it in long enough while running and suffocating at the same time. My steps have to slow down more and more so I can actually let my crap lungs jumpstart again. What I’m doing can just barely be defined as jogging, and even that’s pushing it. My chest wants to explode!

Slam!

Gasp!

My shoulder hits the earth hard and the air escapes from me instantly in one forced exhale. Something heavy lands on top of me, pinning me down, and I want to yell at Ivy and threaten that she’d better stop this stupid prank or else, but I can’t speak with empty lungs.

But neither can I scream with empty lungs, and yet I manage to because I am offered no other choice. The skin of my thigh breaks open. Sharp hands support themselves on my chest for just a moment, though I only barely register their weight before it leaves all together. My leg feels like it took fourteen different knives to it, and it’s wet and hot. I scream more.

I keep gasping in what I can and it just comes out as weak noises of pain – agony – shooting up my body. I feel my heartbeat pulsing in the wound. And through it all, I hear from the trees, “Sid! Sid!”

Ivy.

She catches up with her voice calling my name, and her feet trample through the brambles, but…but from the opposite direction my attacker had flown in. A light blinds me for a second while she drops down onto her knees at my side and I hear her tone quivering as she uses her favourite swears over and over again. My eyes follow her flashlight.

There are uneven tears in my pants, the fabric already soaked through in a deep red. Blood. My own blackening blood pouring out of me. Immediately, my stomach lurches, and I have just enough time to get myself up on my elbows, and turn away from Ivy before everything inside of me comes up. I can not handle blood. Any blood. But my blood is so much worse. My stomach convulses and my throat burns.

“Sid? Sid, it’s okay. It’s okay. Just…just don’t think about it. It’s okay.” Ivy’s speaking so fast, and it sounds like she’s trying to convince herself and not me. She shrugs off her hoodie. I’m just getting back my breaths after losing my dinner on the forest floor, but they’re all shaky.

Ivy attempts to bend my leg at the knee, but I yelp when the sting abruptly travels from my leg through the rest of me like a bullet train. She hums something softly, but I have a moment of seeing stars, and everything sounds garbled. Then there’s pressure on my thigh. She’s tied her sweater around it as a makeshift tourniquet.

“Come on,” she says quickly. “We have to get out of here. We need to leave.”

Before I can protest, she grabs my arm and throws it over her shoulders before managing to haul me up to my one leg. I can’t bring myself to say much because that image is burned into my brain, and my raw throat tastes bile down at the base already. I can’t look down. Ivy is seven inches shorter than me – she is down and I tower above her – and she somehow has it in herself to be my support. I wince trying to put any pressure on that limb because the result is blinding pain.

“Stay with me, Sid,” she coaxes, and I find her repeating that as she limps me out of the woods. She doesn’t stop talking, or saying those things to me. The trees all look like blurs and dancing, random lines, but Ivy is something I can grasp. When I feel like I’m about to trip and fall off of the face of the earth, Ivy is what grounds me to reality.

***

Ivy announces there’s no way I’m climbing through my bedroom window, and I don’t have to be a genius to agree with her. She hobbles me up onto the porch, we use the spare key, and we try to hop upstairs as quiet as we possibly can so we don’t wake my dad. Ivy sits me on my bed and disappears to grab something more reliable than her sweater which I am certain is absolutely ruined now – I don’t have the stomach to check, or anything left in my stomach to throw back up if I check.

When she comes back with a wet cloth, she cleans my wound while my eyes stay firmly fixed on my ceiling. I decide to screw it and liberally use Ivy’s entire dictionary of swears as whispers, grunts, and groans each time the sting intensifies.

“It looks really, really bad, Sid,” she tells me. “It’s like something big bit you. You need a doctor, like, right now.”

“No!” – a muttered curse injects itself between my thoughts – “No doctors, Ivy. Your parents and my dad will be pissed.”

“Your dad will be more pissed at me if you die.”

I catch her gaze and ignore everything in my peripheral. I think we’re giving each other the same look on our tear-streaked faces: eyes that are shiny, lips in straight lines threatening to turn down at any moment. We hold that for a few seconds, neither of us saying anything because she’s right – she is – but I tell myself the opposite. I tell myself that “It can’t be that bad.”

“Ivy–”

“Will you stop being such a man?!” she demands with some fire in her tone. There’s a pause, and then she pulls the washcloth away. “Fine, okay. We’ll give it a week, but that’s it. If it still looks… One week. I mean it.”

I relent and breathe, “Okay.”

She nods and grabs the spool of bandages she managed to dig out. She proceeds to wrap them tight around my thigh while I hiss complaints, fingernails digging into my sheets. She secures it and sniffs something away, like trying to banish this night from her memory.

“You know, if you go rabid, I’ll have to be the one to shoot you,” she jokes flatly, even though neither of us have the energy to appreciate it.

#writing #wip #untitled #my writing #my ocs #ya #young adult #writeblr

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dalishious · 5 years

Note

What’s your opinion of the fact that it was Corypheus’ presence under Kirkwall that made it such a hellhole; thin Veil, demons, possessions, crime rates, etc?

Corypheus’ prison was deep in the Vimmark Mountains, not Kirkwall–but the wardens did speculate if he had influence on Kirkwall being… like that.

However, I think the high rates of demons and possessions and the thin veil is more likely be attributed to the fact that the veil is thinner in places of great violence and arcane intervention. Such, as, you know, the fact that Kirkwall was once the centre of the slave trade in the Free Marches, with over a million slaves passing through the city gates. The blood sacrifices, torture and general violence and suffering Kirkwall was the site of was immeasurable…

“Because the new slave outpost would become wealthy beyond imagining, competition among prospects reportedly took over twenty years to resolve, resulting in great bloodshed in the frontier, well away from the archon’s eyes. Magister took arms against magister, mostly in the form of small armies of serfs and mercenaries. Over half the slaves in existence allegedly died in these battles…”

“The statues are not monuments to the suffering of slaves. Every inch and angle of the courtyard was designed by magisters bent on breaking the spirit of newcomers. Executions here took place daily, sometimes hourly, and corpses were hung from gibbets throughout the yard. New slaves trudging in from the docks saw what awaited them.”

“The Overseer lined seventeen slaves up, one behind the other, at the lip of the quarry. The second slave in line was ordered to push the man in front over the edge. The third slave pushed the second, the fourth the third, and on it went. Workers in the quarry heard the screams, the crack of bone against rock, and then the survivor’s anguished cries as the Overseer’s dragonlings feasted on the sixteen helpless bodies splayed upon the quarry’s basin.”

“Radun’s growing influence prevented the magisters from touching him, but eventually they had him poisoned. Furious, a group of Radun’s supporters stormed the Gallows and were massacred, and so began a bloody yearlong rebellion. The city burned, and wealthy Hightown was sacked. The magisters hung before cheering crowds. Emerius assumed the new name of Kirkwall, “kirk” meaning “black,” after its jet stone cliffs. The new city plunged into anarchy for over a decade, and its defenses fell into ruin. Kirkwall has been conquered many times since, the city’s own independence suffering since the freeing of its slaves.”

“The list of elven children is numbing: “three maimed, two mute, and four serviceable.” These numbers don’t add up. For every thousand slaves that came to Kirkwall, a hundred disappeared. I checked the tax rolls, as well, and the discrepancy exists there, too, if one has the wit to see it: 203 slaves went missing in the Imperium’s 312th year! That’s just one year. Other records showed similar discrepancies. Over centuries, practically a whole civilization of slaves simply disappeared.”

“The blood of countless slaves was spilled beneath the city in sacrifice. Whole buildings were built upon lakes of blood. The sewers have grooves where blood would flow, all leading down. The scale is hard to fathom. A blood mage can channel great power from a simple cut. At least a thousand unfortunates died here every year for centuries. For what ungodly purpose would one need so much power?”

…And the magisters were purposely thinning the veil The were doing something in a whole secret city under the city, (the reason for said massive sacrifices) and I mean fuck, Kirkwall’s very design is made up of ancient magic glyphs… (Like having recently finished reading then watching Good Omens, let me just say I am entirely prepared for Kirkwall to go up in flames)

“The magisters had hundreds of mages deep below Kirkwall. They lived and researched here, far from the scrutiny of common men. Many ancient cities specialized in arcane research, but why did Kirkwall hide its efforts here? Why go to such great pains to keep it out of sight?”

“The mason showed me a plan of the city, and my heart skipped a beat. There were patterns in the intersections, back alleys, and boulevards. Some magisters believed in the power of symbols or shapes. In the oldest parts of the city, one can make out the outlines of glyphs in the very streets! What manner of magic is this?”

“It is well known that the Veil is thin in Kirkwall, small wonder given the suffering in the city. But we’ve discovered the magisters were deliberately thinning it even further. Beneath the city, demons can contact even normal men. Did they seek the Black City to compound the madness of their previous efforts? Or was it something else?”

All in all, Kirkwall was fucked long before Corypheus ever moved in next door.

SOURCES:

Codex Entry: The Bone Pit (DA:2)

Codex entry: Kirkwall - The Gallows (DA:2)

Codex entry: History of Kirkwall: Chapter 1 (DA:2)

Codex entry: History of Kirkwall: Chapter 2 (DA:2)

Codex entry: The Enigma of Kirkwall (DA:2)

#kirkwall #free marches #magisters #da lore #88y53 #ask

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