OPEN: Cloudreach Event

[faderifting]

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.

Comments

[nadasharillen]

[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.