faderift | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Velanna has been in and out of the Healer's tents. Not so much for her own good, because she wouldn't let most of the healers touch her, but helping in her own way. Dropping off cooling salves or herbal mixtures she's put together, small things that will do nothing more than give healing magic a rest from constantly having to soothe those who are worse off.

She's not really doing great herself, it's mostly stubbornness keeping her going.

This afternoon she's not dropping something off for patients so much as for the healers themselves. One of her latest attempts at a healing tea, doesn't do much beyond providing a little energy boost, but she knows she's not the only one who needs that. Anders gets priority because she likes him, and she also imagines Justice isn't making things easy. She holds the canteen of tea out to him when she approaches, looking wobbly and much less put together than she usually does, wrapped in a blanket, with her hair down around her shoulders because pulling it back was making the ache in her head worse.

"I brought you tea," she's even less one for greetings now than usual.

He looks at her and tries to figure out if the struggle to get her to rest is worth it. In reality, it might not be, but he worries nonetheless as he takes the tea.

"Thank you. Stay a time, take a seat?" Anders nods to a nearby chair. Once she's off her feet, there's a fair chance she won't want to get back up. It's the easy way to win this from the start. "It'll give me reason to sit and drink this as well instead of rushing off to the next patient."

Just because he's not good at manipulation doesn't mean he won't try it from time to time to help people he cares about. She's one of them, whether she likes it or not.

She's not entirely convinced by his reason for getting her to sit. However she's just tired enough that she only eyes him for a moment before moving to the chair and slumping into it. The second she does she sighs, pulling the blanket higher around her shoulders.

"How are you doing?" she asks, after a moment of trying to coordinate her breathing and swallowing.

"Could be worse." The slumping's a good sign, for once. It means she won't be climbing out of the chair any time soon. To be sure, he grabs another blanket and wraps it around her before leaning against a desk himself. Chairs are traps right now.

"There are more than a few who are so feverish they can only lay down. None of the healers are there yet." Velanna might be close.

He pours a glass of the tea and sips it, taking a breath. "The problem is," Anders glances around to make sure there aren't eavesdroppers, there's no need to spread fear, "I can't find a way to fight it yet. No system in the body to trigger to provide a natural means of overcoming it, no substance that it responds to. I don't even know how it's spreading."

She doesn't even object to the second blanket, a clear sign she's probably on her last legs. People fussing over her makes her grumpy. She does frown at him when he doesn't sit, but doesn't say anything, adjusting her arms beneath the blankets instead.

"It's either airborne or in the water," she replies after a moment, trying to get her thoughts in a row from what she'd been contemplating. "This place is old and Elvhen. This is some kind of magic I'm just... not sure what."

"Or the food. It's something in something, rather than disease." Her lack of trying to get up says everything.

"I didn't realize it was Elvhen, though. Old, certainly. What are you seeing that makes it Elvhen?" Other than the old. A lot of old things were made by the Dalish, but he's not exactly familiar with what says Dalish and what says humans when it comes to buildings. At least he knows that if it's underground, it's made by Dwarves.

There's also a good reason to keep asking questions - if she's working to think up answers, she's not working to get up, and she's not paying attention to how much more tired she's getting. Soon she'll be resting, a very rare sight.

"Food seems unlikely, we are not all eating from the same stores," she points out before coughing. She looks almost irritated by the inconvenience of being sick. At his question she shakes her head.

"It's just a feeling. I could be wrong," she replies, a hand coming up from the neck of the blankets to scrub at her face, pushing her bangs away only to have them fall limply back into her eyes. "I've had a Wisdom spirit following me. She seems to speak mostly elvish, and I haven't understood everything she's said."

Contaminated food can spread easily... but it doesn't entirely fit. Air or water fit more. He'll put more work into this; it has to be something that can be figured out, and soon.

"No, that could be... Perhaps not relevant to the disease that's going around, but it could be useful knowledge about the place itself. Or maybe it is related. If more than usual can see spirits and demons..." He doesn't like the idea of the disease being magical, though. There's already enough stigma mages have to face. If this has magic roots, it could set them back yet again. But there's also nothing to do about it save keep working and make sure they don't lose anyone to this.

"Would you like something with which to pin your hair back while you rest?" She's not getting up at this point, he's pretty sure. And he's glad of it.

"It seems magic, to me. I do not know of any regular poison that could cause someone to see through the Veil." Their world may be ever dancing with the Fade, but not in this way.

She frowns at his offer, realizing she had in fact been tricked into resting. She thinks about trying to get up just to defy him, but even the thought is exhausting, so she just shakes her head.

"Pinning it up makes my head ache worse than it already is. I'm fine."

He can see the consideration in that frown, knows what she's about to try, and feels a great deal of relief when she decides against it.

"All right. Could you use anything else? Because you are here and I truly would like to help." Even if she doesn't know of anything non-magical that could have caused this. He doesn't know how to spin this if people start worrying about magical diseases on top of everything else in regard to mages, but he's going to have to figure it out.

"You should rest, too," she responds immediately, tilting her head as she looks at him. She knows he can't be doing much better than she is, which is obviously why he won't sit.

"You won't be helping anyone if you collapse."

"I'll rest when I've made a little more progress on figuring this illness out." He knows she's right. He also knows that both Justice and himself feel a need to do more. They're needed. If he can help, he has to.

"And I'll do my best to avoid collapsing. I know that falling asleep on someone is not going to help them. Most of the time. I am pretty, it may build their self-confidence until I start drooling on them." She gets a weary half-smile. "Get some sleep, Velanna, please."

OPEN: Cloudreach Event

healer tents

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