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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It was different than it had been before: it came on slowly, distant through a fog, a song that would hum in his ear every so often like a passing insect. It was as if spirits were gathering, pressing close to a Veil that had worn thin...

Only it wasn't. The song drifted by, then departed, shifting in and out like a tide. Meanwhile, people kept getting sick. Cole did what he could, drifting through the healing tents and offering a cold cloth here, a sip of water there, filling in the gaps of care to make sure the ill were as comfortable as they could be.

Until there were too many of them. Until he couldn't set foot near the tents without feeling the fever flare across his skin, or a sympathetic lurch in his stomach. Even if he could allow himself to be pulled forward despite that (it was only their pain he was feeling; he couldn't fall ill himself... at least, he didn't think so), the experience became particularly disturbing when he moved too close to someone whose eyes were closed, skittering behind the lids.

That was when he could hear their dreams.

[Ariadne]

Ariadne would come across him in one of the tents, kneeling at the side of one of the sleeping ill, holding a cold cloth to their forehead. He was rocking slightly, gently, back and forth, a tree swaying in the breeze, and muttering urgently under his breath:

"Climb the cliff, carry the water, don't spill a drop. Must be careful, must keep moving. See the sun breaking over the edge, oh — not much further, now..."

[River]

The swirl of spirits around River was louder than the rest. It always had been: only now, they were more like a chattering whirlwind, spinning around her and cooing and trying to press against her mind. They were so loud, Cole didn't see how she could keep from getting lost in the Fade — even if it was mostly his own fear that made him raise his voice when he approached.

"Leave her alone!" he tried to command them, even drawing his dagger — but they paid him no mind.

[Solas]

There was only so long he could stand it before he had to peel himself away from all of them: still in a trance, his feet carrying him (it seemed) separate from any conscious thought. Nothing but the instinct to move away, to be somewhere else.

The fog and the fever draw back, leaving a cold realization: he couldn't do anything more for them.

He couldn't simply go off and be by himself. He needed someone to help him make sense of this. So he followed the sense of still, quiet waters, until he found Solas, appearing crouched at his side.

"Drifting through dreams, asleep and awake. Glittering glimmer in the silence, in the heat, hush, listen but don't try to touch. They won't hear you... I heard the spirits speaking, like they do. I couldn't make it stop."

Ariadne knew precious little about medicine. But she had strong arms and an almost-strong back and she knew how to fetch and carry just as well as anyone else. Outbreaks weren't uncommon in the refugee camps back home, so she knew what to do. Even if this wasn't exactly like other outbreaks she'd seen before.

Throughout the days, she darted back and forth from the medical tents, doing whatever she could.

She had to admit though, it didn't feel like she was doing nearly enough. Or much of anything at all.

Cole was a surprising sight. And then not at all surprising. She was on her way with an armload of fresh linens when she saw him. And heard him too. Uncertainly, she took a few steps in his direction. She didn't want to disturb him, if he was reciting some kind of healing spell. But she listened carefully.

"Hello, Cole." Cole's speech patterns don't bother him - they never have. Instead they are just a mark of his pure form - thought and speech mingled as one.

"It is not yours to make them stop," He said, turning to look at him as he stood up from his patient. "This is not a simple problem, offering a simple solution. No trick of the Veil - it is as strong here as it ever was."

Ariadne knew that she was next-to-useless when it came to healing and medicine. But the way she saw it, she had two strong arms and an almost-strong back. She could fetch and carry just as well as the next man. And seeing as the next man was sick, it was only right for her to pitch in.

She carried everything. Water. Linens. Food. Occasionally a small child.

More than anything else, though, she carried a burden of uncertainty and guilt. First that she hadn't succumbed to the disease. Second that it might somehow be her fault. Or all the Rifters' faults.

It was hard to tell.

But she never stopped, not once. And exhaustion became her, in a way. Because at least she was in her element. Caring for others.

She paused when she saw Norrington, offering him a small curtsy, as she shifted the weight of the basket of herbs she was carrying. "I'm glad to see you well, Lord Norrington."

"Up and over. Safe in the sunlight. Walk on, to where? It doesn't matter, but we have to keep moving..."

His free hand was curled around the hand of the dreamer. It shifted, grip adjusting, but still holding tight. Cole sensed someone next to him, in the real, physical space — Breathe. Feel the earth. Remember what is real.

His voice steadied. He knew he was talking to someone other than himself, now.

"Dreams that drift them away when they're not trying. Seeing through spaces, but I can't sense them." Frustration there, even as he gingerly moved a bit of hair away from the person's forehead.

Eirlys drags one of the camp beds they've been using for the sick and wounded closer so that Korrin has somewhere a little safer to land if she keels over again. "Can you sit down for me? I need to check you over."

Cole canted his head so that he was looking down at the patient.

"Yes." He'd known something was different about all this. The visions of the Fade had all been filtered through the fog and the fever — no less troubling once there were suddenly so many of them.

"The Fade isn't any closer to us. They're getting closer to it." His hands worried with one another, fingers pulling at stray threads on his gloves. "Slipping into spaces where they shouldn't be."

"Yes," Solas agrees, his brows furrowing, reaching out to touch the forehead of the patient - clammy and far too warm. "I admit I have never seen anything like it."

It was not something that could have happened, in his youth.

"But the spirits don't seem as if they are... any closer to touching them, as it were. Perhaps they merely gather because they find it so interesting to be able to hear what they otherwise would not." He turned his head to Cole, looking at him. "How do you feel, Cole?"

[Wreckage of the Caravan]

Despite the slightly ashen pallor to her normally swarthy skin, Nahariel is out with the group who'd volunteered to salvage the caravan. Normally the mindless work of digging, prying, pulling, would have the elf whistling tunelessly to keep rhythm and energy, but today her teeth are grit against the rising ache in her joints.

After a few hours of silent work, the bad footing and febrile weakness finally sends her slipping to her knees with an outpouring of mixed-language cursing, the sack she'd been pulling slipping back down the incline.

[Healing Tents]

Cuts, scrapes, a nasty case of sniffles from wading around in the ice and mudslide at the caravan, and the idiot--and repetitive--notion that she was almost certainly able bodied enough to go back and continue the salvage-work if someone would just give her some elfroot. Her emerald eyes are dark and shiny with fever, and ever so often they dart around sharply as if trying to catch a glimpse of something just on the edge of her vision.

[Dreams]

During the illness, when she sleeps long enough to dream, it's of hunting something through a dark and endless forest. Her clan needs it for something, it's absolutely vital, but it's never clear what it is, and it's always just out of her sights.

Edited 2016-04-18 21:05 (UTC)

The healers do their best, but there are only so many of them. Cole is there to fill in the cracks, to offer comfort when there are not enough hands to give it.

He kneels beside Sina, folding the cold cloth in his hands over on itself.

"You said I could come and tell you when I got lost," he says. "But I'm only pulled along the paths where the others lost their way."

Her dreams, or the spirits creating them, are singing to him. His voice becomes a murmur as he leans forward to press the cloth gently against her temple.

"Sand bites at my feet, waves cold and green and endless. You need this more than me."

Far from the places where the sick are gathered, Cole feels the effects of their illness less. So he can't precisely see the spirits, not in the way one of the ill would, as gently glowing, semi-corporeal clouds of smoke. But he senses it all the same, in a familiar way, feeling their whispers against the Veil.

He waits until Sam's conversation has concluded, or at least reached a pause, before he speaks up. Their duties might have taken them along different paths in the last few months, but he still remembers Sam.

He's sitting on a nearby windowsill, his feet swinging.

"You found a friend."

If she'd come down with something, then Sina--still recovering--almost certainly had. Nobody at the healing tents had seen her though, so she made her escape from the healers during the general confusion of so many patients. Someone else could better use the cot she'd been in anyway.

After asking around--no few replies heavily implying that she should return to the healing tents herself--someone finally said they'd seen a white-haired Qunari woman carrying her.

After some blurred travel, the hunter found herself at Korrin and Araceli's tent, rapping lightly (or what she thought was lightly) on the tent post.

"Korrin? ...Sina?"

Most of the healers are stretched too thin by the efforts to curb the sickness, but not all of them have a spirit crackling under their skin. It's Anders, then, that Cole goes to check on, in one of the moments where he's let himself rest.

Anders will drift out of his dream, away from the lullaby, to find that someone is still singing. The voice is breathy and frequently comes just shy of hitting the right note, but not so often that the song is unrecognizable.

Cole is sitting cross-legged at his side, softly singing in the language of the Anderfels.

She feels it, but it hasn't felled her. Maybe that's why Cole finds her easy to approach — or it could be that she's simply there on her own, away from most of the people in need of healing.

He sits on a bench nearby, watching her watch for a while, not speaking. He doesn't say a word until he's worked it out — at least, some part of it.

"If you try to see it, it won't be seen. It doesn't want to hide — it just doesn't want to know you're looking."

His hands continued their fiddling, occasionally pulling on a finger.

"It's — hard," he admitted with some hesitance, "being too close to too many at once. They start to blur together. I could see the spaces — I didn't try to follow, but I was afraid I might fall through."

He cannot feel a change in the Veil around Skyhold, so honestly it's weird to be hearing other voices that aren't Fortitude, and even then it's stranger still that he can make out a form for the Spirit when he's not even in the Fade. It's all strange and a bit worrying, but he's more used to it than those who... well never experienced this stuff in any form.

So when Sam hears a voice from behind him it isn't all that unusual, but it is certainly different from the others. More clear. Noting Fortitude's interest he eventually turns around, blinks when he sees nothing, then looks up.

"Cole," he mutters, eyes going a bit wide at seeing the spirit boy after so long. The comment runs through his head a moment and he turns to regard Fortitude. "I have. It's been a while."

Solas reached out, placing a hand on Cole's shoulder, as if to ground him, and offered him a small, sympathetic smile.

"You are here." It was both a reminder, and happy truth. "You will remain here as long as you wish to. You cannot fall through - you cannot return, unless you decide to do so."

Church peers--peers, through squinted eyes, trying to focus, and then trying to make himself not focus, and it's probably entertaining to anyone who might see him--at Adelaide over a bowl of stew. The heat rising in his body isn't the part he's hating about this, it's the weakness. It's slogging through Mire-like mud and feeling like he could just sink down in it and fucking drown himself in it if he didn't keep going.

But whatever. He's not bad enough to be bedridden--honestly! He's not! Those cots and beds are for sicker people. This is just a cold. Flu. Whatever's going around that this stupid body caught. Still, he's both trying to and trying not to pay attention to the harried mage when she enters, bustling about even harder than usual.

Maybe it's a blanket? Surely that's a blanket. But it's not. And he knows of Compassion and knows about Addie's glowing hands and magic and... "I thought we weren't supposed to see those."

She hasn't figured it out yet, might end up being the last to know, simply for being a dwarf. That she has, on and off this day, been seeing strange things in the corners of her vision that simply shouldn't be, and gone when she looks again, has her shaken. Some kind of stupid surface illness? Is this somehow the sensation of losing Stone sense? Or is the weather just making her go a little crazy?

Ser Kain has taken to training even in this awful mess of weather (better prepared for any eventuality or clime, she supposes), and at first she's going to pass by on her way to somewhere drier, hopefully, but it seems to her that he's in the middle of a fight--those seem like people, after all, instead of dummies.

And, as usual, when she looks, there is nothing but air. But he keeps going, and he looks exhausted. "Might want to take a break. Before you drop into the mud and drown in it."

Rachette's doesn't set in immediately, out and about as she gets, drinking plenty from the river or the rainwater. But when all the bodies of water start flooding and making everything too dangerous, and all the game has gone into hiding anyway, then she spends much more time within the hold of Skyhold. And drinks there instead.

While she's around, she's a little worn, but still in okay spirits (so to speak). Trying to watch out for the mud. Helping heft tents up out of it. But it's when she starts seeing things that obviously aren't there when she starts to get concerned. Green structures in the corner of her vision. Or, hearing odd whispers passing by someone but no one is there upon turning to see. Or...more ghostly apparitions flitting by, just for a scarce half-second before she tries to see.

Concerned about her state, she eventually heads to the healing tents, and when she shudders through a flap, it seems extra crowded and confining. But no. They're not all...really there. Rachette does not frighten easily, but this is getting out of hand. She overhears 'spirits' and 'fade' and has to dismiss it, has to--she's a dwarf. She can't. But she has to back out for the crowded, crawling feeling on her skin.

There are always a few straggling spirits around her, finding a dwarf to be a new and curious thing. Thankfully for her, even when she's more alone and thinking, when she hears voices around her, she tends to ignore them on default. When she's huddled in the tavern with a drink, she pays it little mind. She's used to being talked about behind her back. But she's also afraid to look and find, yet again, nobody there.

Maybe it's the illness. Making her antsy and anxious and jumpy. Surely that's it.

Not a spell, then. Not an incantation.

Carefully, Ariadne made her way over, putting her fingertips lightly on Cole's elbow. She could almost see the frustration rising off of him, like heat off of the stones. Not that she entirely understood it. But sometimes, you didn't have to understand. Sometimes, you just had to be there for a friend.

And she was reasonably sure that he was a friend now.

"Are they hallucinating?" she asked quietly.

The ways in which Cole relaxed in response to the encouragement might have been imperceptible to someone who didn't know how to look for them. Some of the tension left his shoulders under Solas' hand, and the motions of his fingers became less frantic, more idle. He looked from Solas to the prone figure in front of them.

"I watched them as they were dreaming." That part of things seemed interesting now that he thought back on it, despite the distress. "The spirits were showing them parts of memories, or things that almost might have been."

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.

The cloth was starting to get warm. Cole lifted it, giving the patient's forehead another dab, giving his own head a slight shake.

"They're dreaming." Another loose thread of the dream caught at him, and quickly, quietly, he added: "Scrubby plants, no water for days, we might have to drink..."

"Interesting." It wasn't a dismissive word - it really was interesting, but it was something that Solas was going to have to think on, more in depth.

"I wonder... It doesn't seem a natural state, that much I think is clear. Is there anything else that you feel, here? Something - different, not necessarily with the Veil? Something different with the sick, perhaps?"

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OPEN: Cloudreach Event

Closed - Multiple

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Healing Tents

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as she dreams

Around Skyhold

[K&A tent!]

Dreams

Garden

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Kitchen (big surprise)

Training

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