katabasis | [psl] dos rowdy boys

A minor tip of his head communicates it's fine. He can, in the meantime, enjoy the collateral bolstering to the ego for Flint's visible irritation for the evening's interruption.

It doesn't last. Marcus' incuriousity and wandering focus vanish and sharpen, respectively, looking to the crystal, that specific pitch of urgency carried through it. Icy, the blood that goes through him at the next heart beat out, some nerve-deep recognition while the higher functions are slower to catch up.

He looks to the shout across the tavern, a snap of attention that is all at once alert, and background noises he might have ignored now simmer to the surface. There is shouting, outside. There are people running past, in the street. The man who crashed in is gesturing. Speaking earnestly. Someone gripping his shoulder, trying to calm him. The revelry of the tavern has simmered down low enough that some words make it back to where they're posted at the back of it: winged beasts, attacking the docks, over the Gallows.

The tankard is set down as he looks to Flint.

No similar such look is returned. Instead, Flint pushes abruptly up to his feet, impatiently kicking clear of the chair that threatens to catch at either his coat hems or the sheathed sword at his hip. And then he's moving, and presumably Marcus will follow as about them the other patrons of the public house surge in uncertain directions—toward and away from the gaping front door, both for and scattering from the man with the bloodied face who has caught himself on the first table and is leaking all over it. One of the tavern's girls had balled up her apron, and is moving to clamp it over the split in the skull—

And then Flint is shoving past the stunned patrons clustered nervously at the door, spilling past them and into the side street and only narrowly managing not to be clipped by a woman running past.

"Any member of Riftwatch on the Kirkwall side of the harbor is to assemble at the ferry landing," is a barked order, this one illuminating Marcus' own crystal as he says it. Then he turns, veering in the opposite direction of the people scattering up the street.

Flint doesn't have to look, with the sound of Marcus' boots on the floorboards in swift pursuit. The shape of him, now, moving to crest sidelong once they're out of the crowded alehouse and moving at pace through the streets.

He doesn't have his staff. It's an imposing sort of weapon even before its magical connotations, and he stopped carrying it with him absolutely everywhere more than a year ago. It is, currently, rested in the corner of his room, useless to anyone, and he is silently reminding himself that he is perfectly battle-capable without it (over the under-conscious sounds of berating himself for its absence).

A dim shimmer of light with the pattern of his hands as they move, flashing in Flint's periphery, and then nothing. A spell held in reserve, in case its need proves more immediate. Around them, people running.

"A rider should meet us," he says. "And bring a mount or two more."

"Make the call," is brisk as an order, and does nothing to impede his pace. If Marcus can get in the air and find some vantage there, it will be to all their benefits. But there will be members of Riftwatch down here in the streets—the evening is early enough that it's highly unlikely that the two of them are the only residents of the Gallows on this side of the water—, and they will need organizing. To say nothing of the fact that the sword at Flint's own hip would be shockingly irrelevant in the air.

They reach the end of the narrow lane. Flint turns the corner, swinging in the direction of the harbor like a compass needle bristling northward. In the same beat: two dozen yards away, the sudden irregular scattering of people already running, and a scream as the shape of something fetid and bristling with teeth bursts free of the next street and plows directly into the people attempting to flee its snapping jaws.

The natural instinct is to skid to a halt.

His own glowing crystal is fished out from his collar, a twist dampening that glow before it flickers back to life. He'd caught the voice of the person mobilising the griffons, and so it's a direct line to them that he says, "Have a rider meet us at the docks, with a spare mount."

The tone of the reply is agreeable, cautionary. Monster can be saddled up but the skies aren't safe. Before Marcus can outline the logistics, they turn that corner—

It's a shock, but one he'd at least been preparing for. The crystal is abandoned on its chain for that spell to be released in a splay of hands, abjurative magics wreathing them both (and several people running past) in a bright enough flash of arcane light that the monster up ahead twitches its draconic head towards it, eyes white-blind but somehow aware. Its bent wings now flare as it hisses, its body moving in both a languid roll of grace as well as the twitches and jerks of something undead.

It turns its head to snap towards where someone had stumbled, and Marcus flings a swiftly summoned stream of rock and flame, slamming into its turned jaw and knocking it off-balance. For the moment.

The unnatural stride of the animal's gait sends the small hairs up the back of the neck prickling—a wrongness so innate that it can be nothing but intentional. Not that there was much doubt that any assault on the city of the Gallows island must be the work of either Tevinter or the Venatori, but it's one thing to be logically aware of the fact and another to be watching molten stone scouring across the face of the animated corpse of a fetid wyvern.

His sword has sprung to hand, arcane barrier crackling about his person. "Don't let it have me," is a brisk, no-nonsense instruction, and then Flint accelerates forward against the tide of fleeing pedestrians.

The wyvern's scorched face writhes back around, needle point teeth bared. It seems unlikely a sword, however deftly wielded, will convince the spirit inhabiting the creature's body to lay itself peaceably down. But from the sway and snap of the jaws, and the immediacy with which its blind-eyed attention rolls to follow the flash of the blade, it is eager for distraction.

(Presumably, Marcus doesn't need to be told to avoid setting Flint on fire alongside with the lizard.)

The instinct to chase along after Flint is bone-deep to the point that staying at range feels like a mistake, enough so that Marcus compulsively follows for a foot or two until forcing himself to stop. Empty hands hovered as he watches the other man dash off through the backstream of the crowd.

The wyvern seems ready to occupy itself with any willing (and unwilling) target that presents itself; coiling and uncoiling, venomous ichor flowing freely between its fangs as it moves to meet Flint. Beneath Flint's feet, he'll detect a tremor that ripples through the ground, light enough that it doesn't stagger him, a flash of radial light across the ground beneath the claws of the wyvern.

A rush of dust explodes up from under the beast, and it gives a croaking whine as magic rends through its body, turning muscle and bone into rock—one back leg dragging and buckling as its rotting hide cracks like old stone, disease-like in the way it spreads across its flank.

Not incapacitated or even truly injured, but slowed as its back leg is pinned and fused to the earth beneath it, front claws scrabbling at the road.

Pinned is the better alternative. It affords him the leeway to plot a course outside of the swinging arc of the wyvern's head. The rest—tearing foreleg claws and the frustrated, uncoordinated wheeling of vestigial wings—is manageable. Or more manageable than the hard clamp of jaws and the Fade-touched pant of poison dripping out of them.

The first hack of the blade at the root of one wing affects little save to send the moth eaten sinews stretching between flexed joints, the trapped corpse twisting with the effort to reach him. But the second stroke has real bite, cleaving through old brittle sinew and shriveled thin muscle with all the grace of chopping at petrified wood.

How many cuts does a spirit tolerate? More than the wyvern might have alive.

The death-rattle shriek of the wyvern is hair-raising, unnatural, strangely absent in pain so much as frustration.

Heat, suddenly—a narrow streak of it is not close enough to actually singe Flint's clothes or beard but nevertheless, fire, slipping through the space just aside him, brilliantly bright to the eye. Where Flint's blade had parted through flesh and sinew, fire lodges itself deeply in rotted muscle, deeper still, a core of burning that burrows beneath the flesh and forces the wyvern to shrink aside.

Marcus nears, brisk strides and fingers tense, maintaining the burning bright runes kept between open palms. Still tracking his sense of abjurative shielding still limning Flint's shoulders and sword-arm, still focusing on that creep of stone keeping the monster rooted to the spot.

Not so close to catch him in the radial burst of heat, no, but the burst of flame is near enough to raise a hot spike of instinct alarm under the skin—an animal sort of not-flinch in the thud of the pulse that comes from all things without magic being so close in proximity to its more bombastic (literally) workings.

He'd turn his face away from a burst of Antivan fire splashing across a ship's rail too.

The sword is held as the wyvern twists off from it, gouging the cut deeper as the corpse looks to cringe uselessly from the gout of fire tearing through its interior. Sends the vestigial wing limp, a fleshy fan dragging across the uneven paving stones no longer fit to snap anyone across the face (or face height arcane barrier).

It affords him the opportunity to cut in close alongside, turning the cutlass blade to cleave bloodlessly down behind the wyvern's crown.

It buckles beneath the blow, blind eyes rolling wild in sockets and herky-jerky twitches rolling down serpentine spine. With fire eating through its ribcage and a leg pinned to the ground, which it resists enough to tear the flesh that hasn't yet turned to stone, all that's left is butchery.

And immediately, another, heartier screech maybe a block away. One can imagine these things crawling from the water, if news of the docks being under attack has merit, and flooding into Kirkwall like infesting snakes. Or perhaps there aren't so many as that, but it's impossible to know from the street.

That streaking pulse of fire dies. Stone cracks, begins to dissolve, transformed flesh returning to its previous state and claws prying back up from the cobblestone. Marcus letting up, carefully, trading in spending his energy on faith that Flint has it—in time for the sound of screams and panic further up the street to register. He looks, sees the spill of people running, sets about casting. Fiery runes decorating the stone at that juncture, and everyone too afraid of the thing behind them to take much notice of the queer light they scamper over.

When the dead thing in pursuit of them twitches and crawls into view, hissing gouts of venom and flaring its wings—fire, a thick column of flame erupts upwards from those runes, engulfing it. Renewed screams of those nearby are just as much in response to this shock of heat and light than the thing being immolated.

He is engaged enough with the task of incapacitating the first wyvern's jaws, and then crippling it's stringy foreleg with similar single mindedness that he almost misses the glittering sheen of the glowing runes before they're detonated in a gout of fire and sizzling flesh. Chaos burst down the street with it, running figures veering in confused directions as smoke comes heaving down the roadway before it seems to remember that it's lighter than air and begins to climb rapidly up over their heads.

The first wyvern is dead already and is insistent on continuing to be that way. But a lolling head and the last whack of Flint's heavy blade parts it's forelimb from the body at a joint just as the last of the transfigured flesh sheds its scale. The body lurches, ungainly and slow, dangerous due largely to its weight and the thrashing of its broad tail— but lingering here simply to hack the undead animal to pieces is as untenable as rending the scorched mess on the other street into disparate parts simply to see it progress fully arrested. They've more pressing matters to attend to, the blue crystals to hand illuminating with the rapid fire chatter indictive of real trouble and not just confusion pouring up through Kirkwall's lower warrens.

Fuck the street, he decides in the same moment that he reaches out, catches Marcus by the back of the shoulder and shoves him in the direction of the crooked building leaning out from this end of the street. From here, he can see the patterned shade stretched over a section of the roof—suggesting some access either through the building or along its back wall.

"Go. Meet your griffon there and rendezvous with the other riders. Get me a sense of what's happening while I see to the ground."

Across the way, the burned out husk of an undead wyvern writhes in place, fire eating through too much mass for proper mobility. Twitches, stills, smoke rising off of charred black flesh, flames continuing to nibble and lick at now unmoving parts.

Marcus is shoved by a step, stops, looks back at Flint. Where a clipped word of acknowledgment and an immediate departure would go, there's hesitation, a snag of something that hooks him in place. What scuffling had just transpired while Flint was busy hacking the monster behind him to further death hasn't been enough to dispel the abjurative magic clinging to him,

but it doesn't stay forever. Flint has been fighting alongside mages for long enough, by now, to have some sense of the spell's impermanence as well as roughly how many hits it can take, so Marcus doesn't say anything before reaching back across that distance to snare a grasp at the other man's arm, and imbue that casting once again with a pulse of power, the glimmer of light that clings to himself dimming, transferring.

It doesn't make it all feel more right that he should let go and make for that building, but Marcus does anyway, adding, "Tell me when you've made it to the docks," past his shoulder as he goes. Gathering his crystal back into hand.

Then Flint too is off, cutting sharply down a narrower side street where easy prey and the likelihood of finding a wyvern might be momentarily lessened. That gleam of protective magic goes with him, arcane light clung in a bright haze about his person.

Better for all involved that Marcus be airborne. For all that abandoning the street entirely would be a mistake, someone must have eyes on the scope of this thing. And a mage, particularly one without his staff, benefits most from a good vantage. Meanwhile, he can make do with scraping along Kirkwall's back streets and side alleys, winding his way rapidly down through Lowtown's mercantile squares and poor boroughs—following instinct, and his sense of direction, and the general way that the city collapses downwards toward the waterline to guide him more than any real recognition for the particular avenues themselves.

And then, a detour. Cutting not for the docks, but for the stockyards and auction houses and their associated cut rate public houses which cluster in the streets above it. On a good day—and this one has been fine up until very recently—there are a dozen of the Carta's lowest and half over that many hired swords to be found there.

A hasty process after what feels like a lengthy wait: getting into Monster's saddle and roping the harness about his waist, shingles clattering aside under talons as she launches up into the air, snowy wings powering higher. Once in the air, it's also hasty, seeking out one of the small pouches strapped to her saddle, procuring the vial of lyrium tucked within it and drinking it down.

Kirkwall is decently lit even at this hour, street lamps and windows shining brightness from within buildings, a full moon, but it's still no easy thing, attempting to make sense of the narrow clusters of streets, the stream of those people who haven't found a place to shelter. The crystals gleam with readiness to transmit the continuous back and forth between those in the sky, but eventually, a message directly to Flint will shuffle itself to the forefront when he takes a moment to check it—

"More are coming from the water," and Marcus sounds even enough that he may as well be on the ground rather than flying in wide spirals above a city under attack. "The Gallows-side docks are overrun with them, but the gates are down, now. They're still coming into Kirkwall. They've collapsed the western wall by the harbor."

There's time, up here, to think of why in between the other more immediately relevant questions, but it's about as evasive as trying to discern the strategic priorities of several nests worth of spirit-possessed dead wyverns.

The answer is slow in coming, though that's to be expected. Meanwhile, the Kirkwall Guard will have flooded into the streets of Hightown by now. Maybe they have begun their push down, even, while in the streets just above the docks are peppered with bursts of arcane light amand the sickly green flare of anchor magic at work. There are members of Riftwatch there in the fray, working their way steadily in the direction of the harbor.

When Marcus has the opportunity to answer it, what the message on the crystal says is—

Not for him, for starters, but rather some broad order: Flint has twenty swords with him. They are moving west for the ruined wall. Anyone on foot in Kirkwall is to make every effort to join them, but they are strictly not to take the low road directly along the water and between the harbormaster's warehouses. The wyverns are thick there.

Then, more pressing (though the message can be no more than a few minutes old): "Rowntree, see that the fire doesn't jump over into the city."

Which makes no sense at all until, seconds later, a gout of Antivan fire pours down the very thoroughfare in question—cutting a short brilliant vein along the harbor front, fueled by the bitter salt water and eager to make a meal of the dark shapes clambered from up out of it.

Marcus is already close enough that its all as loud as it is bright, draconic shrieking and hissing as fire erupts, burns, eats. Smoke curls and shreds apart under the beating of powerful griffon wings, his own magic cutting them a path of clearer air as Monster spirals above, white feathers catching the light if anyone were to spare a second to look upwards.

Maybe those near enough will feel it, the invisible force that pulls flames back from brittle, salt-weathered wood, the way heat seems to pull itself towards the water edge, or maybe most of the men that Flint has gathered aren't acquainted with the subtle sense of a mage's work in proximity.

An explosion of splintered wood, nearby. A wyvern, one caught on the wrong side of the fire, crashes through some shack, the purpose of which is made irrelevant when rendered to pulp and fiery kindling as the creature screeches, writhes, half-maddened by Antivan fire clinging oily and flaming to its scales and thrashing tail. It charges without hesitation for the gathered swords, maybe Flint amongst them.

From up here, details like that are hard to tell, and Monster's gravelled screech as she's pulled into a dive is just as hard to make out from the ground.

In the street, the shape of the fire and black smoke is dense as a weight—a force exacted against the body, embers splashing to burn fine pinpricks into fabric and the bare backs of hands, and liquid fire boiling away the moisture in cracked paving stones. There is the rush of heated air, and the thunder crack! of imperfect stone splitting under sudden heat, and the shriek of undead things as, burning, they surge from the splashed fire.

The charging wyvern bowls through the collected sword points and axe edges. Half a dozen skate off the surface of tightly knit scales. Half that find some soft point by chance and are driven by momentum into the stringy fetid flesh.

Flint, the fabric tie stripped from under his belt and wrapped now about the head and face to protect himself from the smoke and billowing sparks, finds himself being forced backwards—half clinging to the sword punched in under the undead wyvern's shoulder joint to keep his footing as the animal moves bodily through them, and half bracing to see the blade worked deeper.

No, there's little telling the shriek of a griffon from the scream of possessed wyvern here on the ground.

Which means there isn't so much warning when a griffon drops from the sky.

A controlled drop, talons extended, as though the wyvern were a promising looking elk who hadn't looked up at the right time. Monster lands with her full weight, claws sinking into rotting wyvern flesh and bone, screeching early victory as her wings flare, and she ducks in to rake her beak through where the creature's skull connects to its spine, a spatter of ichor following the tear. The undead creature in her grasp doesn't freeze up as something more alive might, but she only latches on harder.

In the saddle, sootier and a great deal more windswept than they parted, Marcus braces against the lurch of riding out her attack, a tight fist about the reins. Panting, breathless from the sudden plummet, and not able to do much to help or hinder his own griffon's participation in the battle for the moment.

A look out at the street and the people gathered, and backwards towards the ruined wall.

He flinches. It's the natural reaction, whole body twisting from the huge shape that comes plummeting out of the sky through the ash and smoke. The griffon's impact with the wyvern briefly flattens, but doesn't quiet, the undead wyvern. Wrenches the sword directly out of Flint's hands, and has him tripping free of the fray's slashing talons and thrashing wings with little more than his belt knife.

For what is maybe five seconds. Then his boot heel finds the handle of an axe similarly knocked free from its owners grip, and it promptly becomes Flint's axe in time for a second wyvern to come staggering up through the melee drawn by the stench of blood or the shriek of its sibling spirit. Or it comes simply because the fire burns, and all spirits in the waking world are drawn to the bodies of the living with the kind of hunger that makes all creatures insensate. Never mind that there is a modest armed throng waiting to rebuff it, and a griffon ripping into one of its fellows.

A brief look—he can hardly mark Marcus, save for the general shape of him there in the soot smudged griffon's saddle—, and this his attention too diverts to the wall.

The struggle of Monster attempting to rip apart the still thrashing wyvern beneath her is a little like attempting to stay on the back of a bucking bull, Marcus gripping onto the saddle and reins for the time it takes him to concentrate—

And collapse incorporeal, forming into smoke and flowing quickly down onto solid ground, embers trailing. Boots scrape in a slight stagger, and only the nearest of the gathered swords might spook backwards at the sight of a gust of smoke roiling under its own power and turning back into a man. The rest are more occupied with the crashing appearance of the second wyvern.

From here, he can mark Flint, face covered and all, more immediately for his stance and shape than anything else. This time when an arcane barrier is cast, its runes scatter broad enough to imbue at least half the gathered company, whether they recognise it for what it is or not. The flash of his magic only barely precedes Marcus moving alongside while his griffon makes messy work of the wyvern behind.

No time for an Alright?, when men and women, wielding weapons, are already attempts to ringfence the wyvern in to ensure it doesn't break through.

What there is time for in the scattering embers and floating fragments of ash under the blue glow of the arcane barrier is the thought that the wall won't have come down for nothing. Something will come passing through it sooner than not.

Then the second wyvern's lashing tail comes cracking across the face of that warding. It recoils, swinging it's great head impatiently around, and snaps it's jaws at the closest brandished sword. The wyvern earns a shout of surprise and the blade punching directly into the soft palette. Because the wyvern is already dead, this doesn't discourage it from clamping its rows of needle pointed teeth down on the arm of the unlucky unguarded mercenary.

Flint with his axe and protective barrier leaps reflexively after the animal. A half dozen men and women do the same, looking to stab and slash and hack at the fire mutilated creature—a kind of animal impulse of their own as the wyvern's jaws tightens and the caught mercenary's scream adds a curdled note to the butchery Marcus's griffon is presently engaged in.

Existing in tandem with the rise of fall of the axe: the consideration that they will need to cut up and away from this soon, and make all haste farther down the harbor to meet whatever means to make this evening more complicated than it already is.

Fire and strange green light stabs in through the crowd here and there—with decent precision, though some may feel a superficial sting of close heat or the odd prickling presence of raw Fade magic, may shy back from it. The brunt of these attacks strike true, burning desiccated muscle from bone or weakening hide under the next slamming down of the axe.

Eventually, someone gets a blade in at the hinge of the monster's jaws, and two others pull the mercenary back, his face grey and his arm and torso coated crimson, but breathing.

Behind Flint, a familiar sound, a sharp summoning whistle. It has Monster finally leave off the now disabled wyvern, clambouring down and nearer. Marcus turns, climbs back up into the saddle, and there is a brief wave of vertigo, a rush of blood where some internal chemistry is hastily configuring itself to make up for depleted reserves. It isn't unfamiliar, just something to sit with a moment before he barks across the way—

"Flint," and there's no conscious decision between it and 'Commander'. One is more economical than the other.

A fleeting glance follows in answer (to the whistle, maybe, as much as the shape of his own name). It hardens a moment later, prompting a barked order from the man to one of the an elven woman extracting her saw toothed sword from the side of the mangled wyvern's flesh and for him to bend and snatch a sword from off the smoking ground.

("Right, we'll see to the quay. You there! Stop gawping and see to tying it off. Maker's fucking tits, have I got to do everything myself," she grumbles, shucking black blood from the blade with a shake as she steps across a strewn bit of flesh.)

When he straightens, the axe is shoved unceremoniously into his belt and the sword simply remains in hand as he strides through ash and ember toward griffon and rider. He extends an arm to be hauled up when he gets that far. There's space behind the saddle, and little point in walking in the direction Marcus might see them flown faster.

"Our people should be nearing the wall if they haven't found more trouble on the way."

The last fastening of his own harness is yanked into place, and the leather strains as Marcus leans down to grip Flint's arm, helping haul him up. Monster is hardly able to stand still, let alone properly bow to make his going easier; the fire, the smell of blood and the clamour of strangers, the rotten shreds of gore caught on the rough edges of her beak. The reins are pulled in tight, neck arched and eyes blazing, to stifle some of her energy.

With the other hand, freed once Flint's gotten a leg over, Marcus collects up the half-loose leather lead intended for passengers, to guard against the likelihood of slipping off the back, and offers it as he starts to apply some pressure to the stirrups.

"Aye," he says, more acknowledgment than affirmation.

Most of the sooty cast to his clothing and skin is likely to do with his own magical run-off, where the only meaningful fire that's broken out are the nearby purging flames. Clean, otherwise, less gore-spattered or even mud-speckled from racing through Lowtown. Just smudging grey, and the slightly acrid scent of the Fade, beneath campfire overtones.

Monster peels off from the crowd with a tug to the reins, moving to find an adequate position to take flight. "No sign of the city guard making a push, yet," he says, meanwhile. "Some barricading, nothing coordinated."

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