faderift | OPEN: Cloudreach Event

OPEN: Cloudreach Event

WHO: Anyone at Skyhold
WHAT: Cloudreach showers bring weird shit.
WHEN: Cloudreach 15 onward
WHERE: Skyhold
NOTES: For information about the illness, its effects, and its cure, please make sure to also read the OOC Post.

This high in the mountains, snowstorms are to be expected. But this one is large and lingering, hanging over the valley and the fortress for days. In Skyhold, with its eternal spring, the snow becomes rain before it hits the ground, leaving inhabitants and visitors to wade through puddles and mud in the courtyards. In the valley, snow and ice accumulate under cloud cover—and worse, when the clouds finally thin, a whole winter's accumulation of snow begins to melt in the sunlight.

Within a day, the ground is sodden and mucky enough to give the survivors of the Fallow Mire (or Ferelden in general) unpleasant flashbacks, and those who live in tents are issued additional hastily-constructed wooden pallets to raise their floors above the mud. It is worse outside the fortress: streams and rivers have overflowed their banks, rapids run twice as fast as normal, and flash flooding has made even road travel treacherous.

On Cloudreach 17 a mudslide buries the pass into Skyhold from the west, and on the 19th a sheet of snow loosened from a mountainside collapses into the shadowed passage from the east. An Inquisition supply caravan is caught in the latter, scattering wagons and goods across the hillside and leaving a dozen people and horses in need of rescue and medical care.

Healers may find themselves stretched thin, as in addition to the usual rash of blisters and sniffles that come from days of rain and flooding, an illness begins to sweep through Skyhold's ranks from around the 16th onward. It's marked first by climbing fever, then by flashes at the edges of vision—green light and jagged formations that aren't there, beings of light and shadow gathering around people or clustering in corners—and distant voices, coherent for brief moments if you're quiet and still and not trying too hard to listen.

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When one spies Malcolm, or is around and not paying attention, one might catch glimpse of and hear a spirit of Hope, lingering at one shoulder, chatting with the demon at his other shoulder, the flip of the coin, Despair. They talk as though old friends instead of mortal enemies.

Around

A mild fever isn't going to keep Seeker Reed from pulling his weight, directing refugees where to move if need be and how to better set their tents against mud and flood, as well as actively assisting in doing so. He is directing the gravely more ill inside where he can, to the nearest fires, to where the most healers are busy. He is carrying them himself if he must. He's Fereldan, even if at times that feels so long ago; the weather barely bothers him.

The animals, too, he makes sure are staying fed and as warm and dry as they can be when not being used to help otherwise. (With a little extra attention to Charles, his horse, and Milady, his poodle.) He even takes a whirl in the kitchens to help relieve any overworked staff trying to pump out hearty and warm meals more than usual, to keep the tea flowing.

The focus helps to ignore the oddities in the background of his fever. The flits of light and smoke and green. The quiet noise of altered whispering. If he stays busy, then perhaps it will not matter as much. Clearly it's only when he rests for a moment, or when his mind wanders too far away from his task. Which happens more often through the days, more than he would like.

Caravan

Illness be damned, he will not allow supplies to simply cease or people to be out in the cold and the muck and snow and die just because so many are down and out. If he can move and still be of use, he will do it and suffer the consequences later. Here he gives commands to his animals despite the weather and terrain, Milady to help track down those buried in the snow and dig them out, and Charles to rope wagons and even other horses to to pull out and back onto the pass.

Occasionally, he pauses to press the remnants of the collapsed snow to his forehead or against him elsewhere. Occasionally, he pauses and stays paused, watching or listening to something or another, at least until his dog nudges him eagerly and wetly with some new item fetched from the hillside.

Dreams

There's so much light and noise, the distinct flashes of magic thrown around and the glint of swords. Yelling. Battlecries. Someone screams for their fallen mother. Another voice distantly pleads why, cries stop. Indistinct bodies on the indistinct ground.

Vasran doesn't know whose dreams she's seeing. She's only fairly certain they aren't her own. Feverish sleep brings few comforts — the haze of being half-awake and plagued by visions brings even less.

Magic and steel and broken, bleeding bodies. Is this the Hinterlands? As soon as she asks the question, the dream wavers and fades, only to return when her mind begins to drift. For the moment, Vasran relents to allow the dream to play out before her. This too shall pass... she hopes.

Soldiers charging forward. Some wearing the sword of the Templars on their breast, to be sure, but others with the Seeker symbol emblazoned on theirs. Their faces unkind, single-minded determination fervently marked on their features. Fire follows at their heels. They storm through any orders or please to halt, stop, wait, please. Bodies trampled beneath steel boots.

--abruptly, the images disappear, faded, so to speak, back into the fade. A weary groan, from nearby. Malcolm sits up, rubs at his eyes to try and banish the images. And the memories that come with.

Despair nearly touches him, so close the demon leans, to whisper of guilt, while Hope is quieter and farther away, chanting about a new life and new beginnings and a better world. He allows himself to drift between sleeping and waking fully, to take a moment and hear, before banishing them from his sight and senses with a shake of his head and an attempt to focus.

There are too many Templars. Too many dead Templars — and then the dream winks away, then a familiar voice sounds from somewhere close. Her eyes barely open, Vasran wrinkles her brow. There's a whisper in another voice, low and cold and rasping, but she isn't paying attention to it — isn't trying, anyway. She's still trying to work out whether that groan she heard was part of the dream or not.

Her eyes blink open a little more, and she sees him.

"Malcolm." He's not 'Ser,' not anymore. Not here, at least.

He jerks in surprise, focus darting to Vasran. "Did I...wake you?" He squints a little, the haze of sleep and dreams starting to slough off. "Did you wake me?"

Vasran scoffs softly, weakly. "Who even knows." Well, actually — no. She knows. A bit. "You didn't wake me."

She knows that as long as she looks directly at him, she won't see the demon hovering nearby. Still, her eyes keep wandering off, until she sees the green flickering at the edges of her vision, the billowing cloak of the demon over his shoulder. It's terrifying, but she does it all the same, like worrying at a sore spot on her lip.

She herself doesn't have such constant companions, at least at the moment. A Wraith of some sort hovers over her, almost mirroring her posture. Every so often, a looming Terror demon stalks by the tent.

"I saw..." She swallows thickly, wanting to know, not knowing how to say it. "...it wasn't my dream." Is that even possible, or is the fever making her just that delirious?

She is present but not present. But he supposes that's many people right now, even occasionally him. That he can see her drifting lets him know she's...focused without focusing on something else. Something just out of the corner of his eye.

Stay here, and he won't notice it. He'll try not to notice it. "There's a lot being seen lately that isn't...our own. It was a dream that you saw?" That's worrying. The details are crisper in his head, but even in the Fade, the details are twisted. He's not sure if that's better or worse than the actual memories sometimes.

In a dim sense, she recognizes that he can tell she sees the demon, that it's making him uncomfortable, maybe more aware of the demon himself. She does her best, then, to focus, to bring her attention back to him.

"It felt like one." When she looks away this time, it's involuntary, a part of trying to remember, to gather up the threads of what she saw. She closes her eyes. "It was — bloody. A battle. Not in the Hinterlands, I think."

"No," he says tiredly, "far from the Hinterlands in fact." He doesn't talk about Dairsmuid, and he certainly shouldn't use a word like annulment around the mage. Easier on both of them that way. "Better not to dwell on these things, hm? As if we haven't enough to grab our attention while we're awake, I suppose dreams must also start bleeding through."

"It wasn't mine." It not being the Hinterlands confirms as much, though she'd already suspected it. Seekers have always seemed untouchable, even more than ordinary Templars.

"Was that real? Did it actually happen?" He can go into as much or as little detail as he likes. She just wants to know.

"Nothing in the Fade is ever truly real." He mops at his face with his blanket, a mix of cold sweat and fever sweat dabbed off. Despair keeps saying how he could have, should have stopped them. In a way, it's almost nice to have a voice saying it that isn't his own.

For a half-moment when he looks up at Vasran, he can just make out a flash of a hooded figure in his periphery before it's gone. "It's based off an event that did actually happen," he says, honestly, though with some reluctance. "That I was present for."

Despair speaks clearly enough for Vasran to hear, and though the sound of its voice makes her stomach clench, she pushes the thoughts aside. A Seeker's duty must be grim, from time to time. It's no more than the cost of responsibility.

"Don't let it tell you that. Don't believe it." Months ago, she wouldn't have dreamed of telling a Seeker their business when it came to demons. For the moment, the fever's broken down whatever barrier to that sort of talk still remaining. "You must have done what you had to."

"I was following orders," he says as sharply as he can manage, and despite the fever, it's still a cutting edge. "The orders were wrong. I did what I thought was right." It's what he always does, always tries to do. "I did not do enough."

The authority in his voice is still enough to make her lips snap shut. She wasn't seeing the whole picture. Of course she wasn't.

And that thought prompts a hard sigh. She isn't thinking straight in general. Vague visions from the Fade are only making things worse.

"Still." A demon is a demon. He doesn't have to take that. "They'll say anything to get to you."

"That doesn't always make them wrong." Still. He did what he had to, did what he could. The numbers were not in his favour. He has to remember that just because the demon gives voice to the doubts in his head doesn't mean it's right, either.

Time for a topic change. Or at least a shift of focus. Off of him and the things done in the name of the Chantry. "And you, are you having any unfortunate dreams people around you can see? Hating this bloody illness..."

She lets out another huffy sigh, which makes her stomach lurch — eugh.

"Don't know if anybody's seen them." But there's a certain fairness in admitting what she's dreaming about. She butted in on his, after all. "But it's — dark. Close. When the demons took over Kinloch Hold, I hid in a trunk... I think it's putting me back there."

"A trunk saved you from that madness?" He shakes his head, wondering at the little miracles and mercies the Maker grants them. "Perhaps nobody would know if they saw your dreams. Might not be anything there they can see."

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OPEN: Cloudreach Event

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