The Graveyard

[EtherealNoire]

All had fallen still within the twilight, as those from daybreak withdrew into dwellings hewn from dying oak and weary stone, condoning her sole passage through the waiting realms of Night. None dare tread the pathways left to his haunt, where spirits pined within gnarled woods as ancient as the earth, and all whom dwelt beneath their boughs were those forsaken by the threads of time. Yet their voices called to her, clinging to her soma with grasps as familiar as the howls rising in the dark. Few hours remained between her summoning and they that waited beyond, with their talons stepping in pools of silver. 
For with every whisper the trees shared and every sudden squeal that shrieked from iron gates shoved ajar, they made their presence known. 
Silent, she edged amongst them, a spectral beckoned into their harbor of graves.

The moon had long since claimed its throne above the heavens when she traversed those solemn grounds, and its pallid aura bathed the restless twilight. Where spirits roiled, its presence gathered on every stone and forgotten seraph, illuminating their hazy forms and catching in the fog that twined about her legs. She braved its reign, letting the hands of frost and mist embrace her as she drew nigh the mausoleum, swallowed by light. 

And betwixt the lurking shadows, Night's presence called to her at last.

In a wave of darkness, he washed over her, when the moon above had choked on its own breath. And for a heartbeat, it blotted out those vile eyes that shone betwixt the graves, but their voices never faded. They drew closer when her gaze fixed on the path yonder, and a chill tickled the inside of her ears. Moaning, nearly like the wind. It wailed through the trees, yet it was not the wind that called her name in the dark. She knew not to look. Not to face them, though they circled nigh at the edge of the fog.

Instead, she gave herself to Night, letting him claim her final steps across the cracked and fissured stones. Bitter metal stung her skin when it came unbound from a door far older than she, and Talea released it with a clang against rock. Still further in the twilight, the sound answered. Louder. A gong beating without rhythm, only reverberating in her quailing heart.
No lock could silence it when the shadows trailed her to the door.

Continue the thread here. But know... They are watching.

[Boo Ghostie]

The silent haze of the graveyard gave way to an eerie yet calming ambiance. One mat sat amidst a sea of names, all of it a constantly decaying stream of memories. That of those lost, or those who long fled the Estate. Flynn stared blankly at the endless lines of stone and marble. While he could not transcribe the names etched down in history, he at least knew their stories. But one by one he felt that they were all beginning to blur. To become distant in a fog of... Confusion? Neglect?

This did not bode well with the weary bounty hunter. As the faces of those who once walked the Hamlet began to become obscured. Even if he was surrounded by the very monuments to remember them by. It has become clear that things have become... Different. There was a quaint fondness to the inhabitants of old. And as he began to contemplate, he had realized how much of his life has passed by. Still wracked with grief as the old denizens dwindled by the numbers.

'Where had they gone?'

He thought to himself. The present company that now filled the Hamlet seemed all too alien to him. And it seemed the only remnants that had left was his closest ally. And even then, he had grown into a different person. Someone that no longer resembled the old Roland, just fresh off the stagecoach.

Soon this bit of reminiscence turned to sheer terror as he tried his damndest to remember the slightest details of those before... 'There was that Arbalest... Fine lass... A plague doctor... No two? Damnit... The cultist? A man-at-arms... That same one I threw bees at... How many crusaders were there again? Shit. C'mon Flynn, remember one of them.' 

Flynn's hand gripped the gravestone that marked the resting place of his beloved. Only for him to finally curl up and break down sobbing. 'Damnation... Sweetest Darlene... It's been so long since I've- I-I'm so sorry... I wish I could just remember... Just to be there again... I don't want to forget your face... Not like the others...'

Soon, the familiar sounds of plated sabatons began to echo behind the gravestone. Before the familiar sound of glass clinking against stone brought him out from his stupor. With Roland now looking down on him, with a bottle and two tankards.

"I see you're still coping well." Roland let out, his tone comically stoic before uncorking the bottle. Pouring the tankard to the brim before extending it down to Flynn. "Schnapps. Something from home."

Flynn looked up, wrenching off his helmet and tossing it to the side. His eyes red from what could be hours of pathetic sobbing. Before taking up the tankard. "I don't see her anymore, Roland... Whatever she was... The one that always appeared where she rests, the one that wore her face... She's gone... I'm just afraid that I may not remember her anymore."

The penitent knight began to pour himself a drink. Before sitting against the side of the grave, adjacent to Flynn. "It's part of letting go, Flynn. At least you mourn one that departed on good terms with you."

There was a brief pause as Flynn looked at Roland in disbelief. Before the two began to break out in laughter. "Did ye' really just say that? Holy shite, yer' fockin' terrible."

Roland raised his tankard to the side, receiving a hearty clink from Flynn, before taking in a long gulp from the drink of his people. "Do not tell Sister Harina of that. Or of this for that matter. Lest I add a breach of sobriety and dishonesty to my list of penances."

"Ya' really gettin' quite close to the new sister, aye? Me lips are sealed." Flynn let out in kind as he took a swig from his tankard. The bout of levity was very much needed given the two's long road of hardships. The two simply sat there in silence, enjoying the simplicity of drinking within a graveyard. A morbid pass time, but given the Hamlet it would be the more tame of pass times. "Roland... What happened to us?"

The crusader perked his head to look at Flynn, "What do you mean?"

"I mean... We've- well you've- come 'ere fer' solace. N' I came 'ere ta' stick with ya'... But I just feel things 'ave changed y'know? Not just us, but the whole damned Hamlet."

"Things are destined to cha-"

"Not what I mean ya' dim bastard. The people of the Hamlet just aren't who we knew before. Sure we barely spoke to anyone 'ere. But at least they were familiar. At least back then there was some kind of... I dunna', kinship? Brotherhood? Just as we arrived the Hamlet's been under constant siege by light knows fockin' what. N' now? Just seems so... Complacent? Threats are now far off, and yet the folks we've stood by with are jus'... Gone? Yet the people 'round 'ere now seem... Wayward."

"This place attracts the dregs of society." Roland mused, "The people do not matter, for we all come here for the same purpose."

"Ye' ta' fight spooky shite. Now I jus' feel like our time 'ere is done and we fockin' leave this damned place and forget all the shite we've seen and been through. But every time I build up the bloody strength ta' grab ye' for the next stagecoach... I just feel like I can't leave this shitehole. Like... I've got some kind of need ta' stay. But I dunna' if I can keep goin' on."

"That feeling is duty." Roland spoke out solemnly, "What happened here, the person you've lost, the hardships you've been through. That is why you are here. Why we're both here. I know it's hard to fathom, but at least take solace in this. You are doing this not for yourself." He patted his armored gauntlet against the gravestone, "You are doing this for her."

Flynn sat there silently for a moment, staring blankly at his drink as he began to contemplate these words. Before Roland stood up and began to march off. "Where the hell are ye' going off too?"

"I've an Oath to maintain for Sister Harina. There is a creature within the Warrens that demands the light's retribution." Roland turned his head back as he continued to march, "If I don't return, promise me that you'll continue fighting."

The bounty hunter stood up with a sly grin on his face, plopping his helmet back on to raise his tankard. "You always return ya' dumb bastard."

[Bloodtrailkiller]

[TRANSITIONING FROM GUILDHALL TO GRAVEYARD : HLOKK, SAOIRSE]

|HLOKK|

With the bodies set in the handcart, along with her Hassemesser, pushing the bodies up the hill was the last trial to surpass; it put Hlokk into a sweat, and even in the cold night, she felt hot and angry at her own weakness. Not in her limbs, for even as she bled gently, she made proud progress to the Graveyard and up its stony steps.
No, a weakness stirred in her gut, that rose to her heart and throat as she stared at the corpses; faces young and terrified. Human and afraid; their ambush had failed, defeat stank upon them harsher than any miasma to Hlokk and it brought a wetness to her eyes. She knew that weight well, and knew what terror came with it. What shame.

Even as she let out a haggard grunt to set the handcart down near an open patch of soil, she brought a hand up as if to wipe her brow, but thumbed away the budding tears. She hated feeling so weak to an enemy she should hate for striking her, but that hate died as embers to a felwinter.

Two shovels were laid in the handcart aside Hlokk's Hassemsser; she removed her greatblade and sunk it into the soil before pulling out the shovels and offered one to Saoirse in solemn sympathies. Though her bitterblue eyes glistened sincerely and there was a gentle redness at their corners, her brows were furrowed in frustration and her lips curled in a slight scowl.

"What were their names." She more demanded than inquired...

[rosallora]

[Saoirse]

She takes the shovel from Hlokk's hand. It'd been a hard walk - both in her emotions, and in the walking itself. Hauling corpses with familiar faces, voices that rang still in her mind, wasn't something that she considered to be a good time. She'd had a few tears on the way here. She wasn't immune to the sour pangs of pain that seeing this would force into anyone, and in the moments where she can't help herself, she'd turned away from Hlokk to make her peace with the situation.

Her face takes on the stone-like quality of someone far older than her as she looks at their bodies now. All still. All cold. Lips blue and eyes wide an some of them missing parts of their bodies, some of them with limbs in different parts of the cart, some with tendons sticking through and bone splinters jutting out of their flesh. Of course. Of course it'd all end like this.

"That's Sanjit," she says, looking at the man lain next to Riley. "...And Riley. I knew them." Her lips press together, a lump in her throat forming. "Fuck." She digs the spade aggressively into the ground, "What's there to say? What's there to say other'n that they're dead. They're dead and I should be too."

[Bloodtrailkiller]

|HLOKK|

"We say; They fought hard, and they fought well. When this world, or the next, is filled enough with hatred; may we see their ferocity again." Hlokk's own square face is set like a grim statue in kind to Riley's, only offering a grave and solemn nod as she looks to the soft soil and begins to dig.
"Riley. Sanjit. Hjalda. You will find your vengeance." She furrows her brow, a strange wash of emotions stirring in her gut... or perhaps it was some coagulated internal bleeding.

The Warrior woman works hard, and fast; she'd spent her youth in luxury, but the callous North demanded even the aristocrats to shovel snow from their paths and porches. It was one of the few necessary labors of her life before.
In the measure of minutes, she's waist deep in the soil, and only then does mist escape her breath and steam bead from the sweat on her brow....

[rosallora]

[Saoirse]

She wasn't as used to digging graves. But as the sun rises, slowly, and she feels more exposed to the air and the light and to the eyes of people, she tries to like it more. She sees them moving. Walking their little predetermined paths, tinker toys on repeat. She is scruffy, dirt-scuffed and angry and they left a bloody trail through their streets. Ice piles up into slush as the people get out their shovels and start the work that snow asks of them.

She turns towards the dirt, and she tries to convince herself that it's more interesting than the people.

Hands go into the open holes. Heads. Torsos. Legs. She feels morbidly lucky when she sees that Hog's body has been slashed and pierced into at least a few separate pieces, making him capable of being moved into his grave. And it's all done so unevenly.

She imagines the amalgamation in Hell, burning, with three heads and one leg and five arms, screaming with overlapping dissonance. She empties another shovelful of dirt on top of worn leather and iron beltbuckle.

"Vengeance," she says, mirthless. "So I'll get another chance to kill you?"

[Bloodtrailkiller]

|HLOKK|

"Aye." Hlokk replies hoarsely with a heavy exhale through her nostrils, flared like some great dragon; proud, ambitious, and venerable.
"And I will have another chance to kill you as well." She offers a grim smile with a roll of her shoulders before she moves to help bring the corpse pieces into the hole she made.

There was some burning comfort in knowing she'd see these faces again, in the clamor of battles beyond this realm. Every locked blade, clashed fist, has already fragmented like iron to hammer;
"Fate is nay weave nor stuck in stone. It is storm and sea. Broke Iron and scattered. With blood hands we grasp it, with fury we forge it." She recites to the stricken faces in the pit before seeing to bury them. Though their visages haunt her in the shadows cast from the rising sun; it is only when the hole is filled that she finds some peace in patting the soil flat.

"Your will for vengeance is the flame that lets you fly when you fall." Hlokk's brows were furrowed less in frustration at her emotions, and more in determination and recollection.
She brusquely tossed her shovel into the cart before hefting up her blade from the dirt.
"Ready to go?"

[rosallora]

[Saoirse]

She rubs her thumb over a braided bracelet, grabbed from a corpse. Dyed an untrue, bluish purple with a concentration of blueberries and sunbleached with time. She wraps it around her own wrist, knotting the worn straps of leather, and makes it a bruise on her own arm.

"Guess we'll see which is stronger, then." The idea of grasping at the sea sounds... reasonable enough. In that it was futile. In that no one could ever capture it. Saoirse looks at the tamped earth, and spits. "Louts," she says. "Fuckin'..." she trails off, feeling that painful spike of tears in her eyes, that burn that she didn't want to feel again. "Fuckin'..." she mashes her mouth into a disgusting shape as she controls her sounds, the feelings spilling out of every pore in her skin.

"Yeah." She croaks. "I'm done here."

[Bloodtrailkiller]

|HLOKK|

She'd heard worse last words, and she'd read enough, done enough, to know what curt words meant to a grave. There was an uncanny retrospect in seeing Saoirse gloom over the graves, holding memorabilia, caught between wanting to remember and to forget.
It was in these throes of anger that her Ancestors had first banded together, in mutual spite; in eachother, in the world, in the universe.

Hlokk's fingers curled tight about the hilt of the Hassemesser and hefted the wheelbarrow with one fist about a handle before moving to depart without a word...

[TRANSITION TO TAVERN]

[twostepsback]

Charis is seated on a bench near the entrance to the graveyard, patiently waiting for the other members of the expedition to Torki to show up.

[EloHim]

-[Constantine]-
He digs.
That's what he usually did here, that was his job. Dig. Open up wounds in the earth to put in the dead... but sometimes... he digged to take them out.
He hums a tune to himself as he throws the earth out of the hole. Soon. Soon he will be there. He never buried people too deep. Easier for them to be taken out...Harder for them to be taken in.
Sometimes it happened. Coffins turned out empty with a clawed out hole in the bottom. Sometimes...there was no coffin. Something from below...took them. He never managed to catch it.

The shovel hits the wooden lid.
"Ah. There you are."
He says as he starts clearing out the remaining layer of dirt. He listens for a moment, should anything rustle in the coffin. Then he smiles.
"Now now, no need to complain, Simon. No one's been visiting you for at least a year now. And you know what that means."

It's been a necessity. To remove those dead that were no longer visited, had no relatives or friends left. Else the graveyard would've covered the entirety of the Hamlet by now. Ever since the Estate got...to its current state, the amount of dead people grew monthly, if not weekly. Some people managed to bring back their dead from outside, from the outer villages... people that could not allow their dead to be buried in accursed ground.
.. Others brought those that were left ages ago for their proper Last Rites. 
Some died from a sickness inside the Hamlet. Someone getting stabbed in the back in a dark alley. There was never enough dead people to be buried.

Suffice to say, Constantine never was without work these days. He made his coin from it.

He cracks open the lid, a cloud of ancient decay wafting over his covered face… and disappearing. An arrangement of bones, no longer connected with each other greets him.

[twostepsback]

Hearing the digging, and a bit of Constantine's one-sided conversation, Charissa wanders over to investigate. "I hope you have the Heir's permission to be digging folks up..." Charis drawls as she leans against one of the larger gravestones.

[EloHim]

"Been here before the Heir. Will be here looong after he gone."- he says, carefully taking out the bones, one after the other and respectfully placing them on a large piece of faded red cloth with golden embroidery.
"Mean no disrespect to our benefactor by saying it, sister, but the word of "the Heir" means little to the dead and those who tend to them. We hear him, but aint bound by no law to listen. The ground belongs to the Church, no matter how much misbegotten gold one man decides to pour into it, Light bless his heart. And the Church belongs to the Light, no matter what vices plague its brothers and sisters, Light save their souls. Or so the wisdom goes."
He finally places a skull atop the small pile of bones gathered on the cloth. and clambers out of the grave, removing the scarf from his face.

-He’s not a frail man, not by a long shot, but the years on him could hardly be counted by one set of human fingerbones. White thick eyebrows over squinted hazel eyes, a long, droopy horseshoe moustache, big wide nose... And wrinkles,lots of them. What remained of the hair on his head was just a few stray strands sticking together.-

[twostepsback]

"Just wanted to make sure this was on the up-and-up..." Charis says with a shrug, as she moves to inspect the bones. "Yikes, look at this chap's knees." Charis remarks as she picks up one of Simon's femur bones by the shaft, and holding up the hammer-like end for inspection. "I doubt he was getting around much in his twilight years, just look at these bone spurs." She intones as she runs a hand over the ragged, irregular surface.

[ricarditoreyes]

Her head hung low as she brisked past the weathered tombstones and grave-markers. She brushed her hands against the graves as she walked by, feeling the moisture on the moss covering the most aged constructs. Eileen took in a deep sigh of relief, and the rabble of the town - alongside her morning migraine - began to slowly fade away. For now, there was only her and her two most trusted - two shabbily constructed wooden crosses plunged into a patch of hardened dirt. "Kain" and "Boren", carved on each of the markers respectively, the one reminder she had of the only people she could truly call friends. They were not actually buried on these grounds, of course, yet the markers gave Eileen a chance to enjoy the much needed serenity the dead could experience here.

She approaches the markers, resting a hand upon each one.

"Last job, eh? Load of shite that was."