Haunts and Memories
Seventh Day of the Twelfth Month 293 AC
Sea Dragon Point, the North
When the dead come Mia is expecting them.
It's almost a relief they are here, she tries to tell herself as the air grows chill with more than rain and sea spray as the mist rises milky white, like a blind man's eyes.
Lingering Dead are reactive threats unlike the Hungry Dead. While they may act with the intelligence they possessed in life in a limited scope, they struggle to contextualize anything outside of whatever pain or sorrow binds them to the earth, she quotes to herself from the relevant passage from Lady Drekelis'
In Memory of Death. It is not as comforting as it would have been away from the wind whipping about them, cold as a knife about to cut and the voices of the damned.
"What do wish for here?" the voices ask.
"You need no shelter, you bear no burdens," Where the smoke of the fire touched the mist
faces began to form twisted with pain and rage ravaged by half-glimpsed wounds.
"No... no... she does, yes," the mist starts swirling about Leila.
Something passed between them, lost to the others but enough to make the golden haired mage's already pale face bleach as white as the mist. "They want me to kill the Ironborn, they know somehow that I was... taken."
"So kill them," Tor's voice comes unexpectedly from behind them, almost making Mia jump in spite of her training. He must have slithered back there and then taken human form again, and now there he was combing his fingers through his beard not the least concerned about the spirits of the dead. "They were going to die before we came here, slitting their throats is a swifter death than they would get at the tender mercies of wraiths."
Nothing he said was untrue, but true was not the same thing as palatable to someone who had until recently only used her magic for healing and enchantment. Mia wanted to ask the damn fiend what he as playing at but the last thing one did in a confrontation with a foe, much less one who seemed to be able to gleam more than it should, was show open dissension.
"No... I can't... we don't know..." Leila began. The wind was picking up and it was getting colder.
"We have no legal obligation to preserve their lives," the rakshasa hissed.
"What did they do, why are they here?!" Leila all but shouted the the specters. She sounded more angry than frightened.
"We called them here to meet their fate, to know our pain, to die struggling but unable to move, screaming but unable to open their mouths. Kill them... kill them... or join them."
Mia met Anya's eyes across the stretch of grey stony shore. She could see her friend agreed with her on the merits of dead Ironborn if it meant being able to talk to the ghosts instead of fighting them, but Mors Umber was looking mulish, not that he actually cared for the dying men around the fire, but someone had told him to kill them and it was not a voice he acknowledged as having authority over him. Northerners could be as fixated on heir honor as knights, for all they did not mean quite the same thing by it.
"Wait!" Kira's trained voice cuts through the gathering cacophony. "You can't kill them all like this, you'll sooner try to drink the seas dry than kill all reavers one boat at a time. You kill and kill and kill and still thralls and salt wives wail, of them are born the sons of reavers to be reavers in turn like the tides wearing away the shore."
Silence falls, unnatural as a leaden curtain, even the sea's voice seeming gone, then a whisper from a parched throat, one of the soon-to-be corpses is speaking in the thrall of the specters.
"Know you of a way to kill them all?"
For a moment Kira looked around uncertainly.
Fuck, she doesn't have a plan, Mia thought readying her magic and sharpening her sight enough to see the skeletal silhouettes in the mist.
"Kill the Drowned God, kill what it is that makes the Ironborn and let the children of their flesh scorn the ways of their fathers," the incarnate said with such confidence you would have thought she had actually planned this.
The mist faded, the door to the tower creaked slowly open.
"Well... it looks like we have negotiations to partake in," Mia said, her voice sounding a touch forced to her own ears.
Before she could turn towards the tower Leila burst out. "I couldn't kill them without knowing what they had done. In Tyrosh the mas... the slave trader I was sold to sometimes made slaves kill other slaves who were no longer useful, so we wouldn't think to band together. I was..."
Mia shook her head, swallowing bitter laughter that she could be standing on an island of the vengeful dead marveling at the evil of one who had been nothing more than a mortal man under the sun.
OOC: Well diplomacy saves the day again, Kira had all her buffs on and alter fortune but even so she needed good rolls to pull this off. Also, the enemies here are not just smoke haunts, that's just the base creature onto which I could add templates and character levels more readily than a more powerful undead.