our hearts are open graves

THE CLANS IN THE MOUNTAINS
The treacherous Gath mountains have always been rumored to house all manner of vampires and werewolves; beasts disguised as humans and hungry for flesh and blood. Frigid and often impassible, the snowy hellscape is a backdrop for misery and fear to all who gaze upon them.

In reality, most denizens of the Gath mountains were thugs, miners, and fur traders. The Morir family was a little bit of each, living in cavernous Harrowden-- an ancient palace carved into the heart of one of the many heights. Life in Harrowden was brisk and brutal. There was little time for indolence and the people who lived there were of hearty stock.

Carolena was the youngest daughter of the Morir clan leader. In some worlds, this might've made her a lovely princess, but in Harrowden she was just as rugged and vicious as her clansmen. If not a bit more so. From a young age she showed cruel proclivities, which her father fostered with bemusement. She and her eldest brother, Donovan, stoked a hateful rivalry, because she had made it clear she would challenge him for leadership when their father died. They fought with regularity, often physically, something Carolena seemed to enjoy.

She enjoyed the hunt and the fur trade, she enjoyed patrolling the mountains for outsiders to rob and murder, she enjoyed weapons and poisons. She enjoyed exploring the treacherous Gath mountains for their secrets and their ruins.

That was how she found the necromancer-- a slip of a woman alone in the crumbling remains of an ancient mansion. Adrienne Barbet had been driven out of the cities for her unsavory craft. Now on the verge of death in the frozen edges of Gath, she had little choice but to accept Carolena's hospitality. She hadn't the strength to fight when the trapper threw her over a shoulder and carried her back to Harrowden.

THE LOVER'S BLUSH
Carolena attended to the necromancer's recovery personally. She hid her prize away in one of the many rooms and kept her all to herself. She was curious and possessive of the woman, spending hours at a time simply sitting in the room, whittling and waiting. Privacy was not something much afforded to Adrienne under the trapper's watch. While the necromancer tried to remain stoic and surly, her captor's patience was greater than her own. So they talked about where Adrienne had come from, what she had done.

She had, of course, played with Death. She had played with the corpses of people's loved ones, used them as experiments, pieces of art, and slaves. This intrigued Carla, who of course had heard tales of necromancy and monsters, but had witnessed little beyond the beasts she was familiar with in the mountains. Adrienne's lurid tales of untapped potential and untold power enchanted the ambitious Carolena.

She wanted to hear more, and to see more, and perhaps most of all wanted Adrienne all to herself. Difficult to call it courting when your suitor was your captive, but Carla began to bring the necromancer gifts. Foul grimoires and potions that might stimulate the woman's research anew. It became increasingly obvious that Adrienne might be able to manipulate herself to freedom if she used this mountain woman's obsessions against her. She complied to the extents that were required. To say either of them were in love would be a disgusting abuse of the word, but there was interest and motive enough between them.

Over time, Adrienne began to complain of her confinement. She said the cramped quarters were insufficient. She promised Carolena so many more wonders, if only she were given the room and resources to expand her research. Carla said she would see to it, if Adrienne was bound to her-- before the entirety of the clan. It was a threat, that should the necromancer betrayed her, all of the mountains of Gath would descend on her.

As a wedding gift, the crumbling mansion where Adrienne had first been found was given refurbishment, supplies provided, and the two women moved in to their new home.

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS
The necromancer's mansion remained cold and decrepit, despite the meager work done by the Morir clan to prepare it for them. This bothered Carolena none at all, but in response to Adrienne's complaints, kept herself busy with some small repairs. Her preferred pastime was to observe the necromancer in her work-- to watch her read, and chant, and dismember. Bodies were brought to them intermittently: thugs who had challenged the wrong strangers, traders who had failed in their swindle, and anyone with the misfortune to wander their way into the Morir controlled passages of Gath.

The mansion became a nightmare of bones, blood, and bodies. While no one lived to accurately recount its existence, the continued disappearances of increasing numbers of unwitting guests into the Gath mountains began to spin tales. Vampires. Werewovles. Witches. Necromancers.

Occultists sometimes came to visit, but more often than not they were poisoned or murdered, their bodies looted and their bones added to the piles. While the two women were happy to learn and benefit from any visitor, they were not willing to share those spoils with the world.

With so much more freedom of movement and resources, Adrienne also began to poison her new partner. She assumed this would be slow acting enough that little suspicion would fall upon her for the deed, and when the clanswoman was disposed of she would continue to reap the benefits of her allegiance to the Morirs. She was, after all, now family. However, she had no insight into Carla's own interest in poisons. She had not expected the woman to detect it. She was not particularly pleased when Carla returned the favor, smiling from across their table.

When she tried to hex the woman, she found that she had taught Carla too well and that she was warded off. There was always the option of turning the various hulking abominations they lived with against the woman, but that lacked the subtlety she had hoped to maintain. The option became more and more appealing the longer Carolena Morir continued to live.

It was impetuous, when she finally slit the woman's throat in their bed. Impetuous and immediately regretted.

A WRAITH
She did a poor job in raising Carolena Morir. Panicked and rushed, Adrienne dumped the body into a circle and read the rites without conviction. The soulless, flesh hungry creature she raised began its screaming immediately. Adrienne chained it down until it regained some sense of itself.

It was a poor decision, all of it. Why had she raised that thing? To present a puppet the next time the Morir kin came with supplies and carts of bodies? Or had the violent game between them gone somewhere she hadn't really intended. Perhaps she had grown her own obsession with the woman that would not set her free. The tables were turned now, was there any pleasure in that?

No, looking at Carolena's unusual sentience in the throes of undeath, assuredly not.

As the beast calmed, and as Adrienne accepted the reality of this debacle, they reached an unsteady detente. Adrienne fed her, soothed her, and cleaned up the wounds she had made.

On the other side of it all, Carolena had always wanted to know the secrets of Death. Now she did, and she hated it. She existed in a fog of numbness punctuated only by hunger and sorrow. She would have liked, quite dearly, to kill and eat Adrienne then and there... but bound under the necromancer's magic, she had little choice but docility. So long as she was fed.

While her kin noticed something was not right with her, they also had little understanding of what their strange clanswoman may or may not have dabbled in voluntarily. She had, after all, taken the necromancer as her woman in the first place. She had come to live in this research hall of her own accord. While Carla seemed strange, she was far more well kept than the other creatures. Despite losing weight, seeming foggy and distracted, she did not appear undead. They preferred to leave it alone, to drop off their supplies and receive their payment. They were urged to do so by Adrienne, besides.

While Carolena's body was meticulously maintained, her mind continued to rot. She forgot more and more any reality but hunger and obedience. Humanity lifting from her, until she would hardly be able to pretend to think before an audience.

LADYBIRD LADYBIRD
That was when the ladybug appeared in the window. Just a little bug, tiny and red as fire against the cold stone sill. It whispered to Carla in a voice that could hardly be heard: make a wish.

Of course she only had one wish: to live again.

But one should be careful to whom they confess their wishes. While the ladybug granted her wish, the price of it was suffering. This wasn't a difficult price at all, one does not simply pass back and forth between the veil of death in so many forms and not suffer. Now breathing, but not ever truly able to live again, Carolena was feral with conflicting instinct. Infected with the rage and hunger of her zombification, outraged at her imprisonment, and still violently obsessed with the necromancer... At first, she was determined that she was now force Adrienne to stay with her.

Imbued by this little demon that had snuck into their home, Carolena was now immune to almost anything Adrienne tried to do to destroy her. Carolena's obsessive attentions grew more violent and controlling than before. Of their own making, they were entwined, suffocating one another in the hall of horrors they had created.

Surrounded by bodies, bones, meat, and blood Carolena's lingering hungers grow more and more spasmodic. What she did not eat, she toyed with, using the demonic energies inside of her to raise and shape all kinds of ugly pets that she then slowly tortured to death once more.

It was inevitable it would turn on Adrienne. Inevitable that Carla would at last lose all sense of where the line of possession lay. She killed and ate the necromancer, fashioning a beautiful mantle out of her bones that she then donned.

LADY OF SORROWS
No one comes to the mansion any longer. It is haunted, awake with the dead and ruled over by a screaming corpse that devours anything that sets foot inside her walls.

full * application