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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Dignity in illness is not something that comes naturally to most men. Martel is not an exception to this rule, recalcitrant and unamused by his own body's betrayal - how he ends up at Merrill's side is a small mystery to him, when rising to his full height gives him vertigo and the headache of the fever makes the jagged green light at the edge of his vision all the more alien and unwelcome. Still - it is curious, the way the voices rise when his mind blanks, and with his head in Merrill's lap and his hair under her hand (sweat lifts the colour, running in beads down the side of his forehead) he thinks about nothing in particular and listens without listening to everything around him.

When he slips into sleep, he doesn't notice. Others, though--

--blood running in rivers from the archprelate's holy throne, he is kneeling in it, his hands are covered in it, it is cold in the absence of god and he has no one to blame but himself--

--strips of flesh torn in methodical patterns from a screaming, shackled maidservant; a woman's laughter, high-pitched, mad, a feminine hand sliding up the inside of a torn-open thigh; the awful silence--

--you did this, she says, pale and getting paler, bleeding out around the sword that had plunged into his chest, dark hair bloody and eyes huge, you did this, you did this, you did this, you did this--

--he is on his knees and god does not forgive--

--petrana in the grass, a fistful of white hair in her small fist, the manor house burning behind her

you did this

the weight of his armor; the wounds around his ankles, the bruises from the cobblestones he was dragged across; he is bleeding to death and she puts her hands in the wound and pulls and pulls and--

might.

Color runs down Martel's forehead and stains her fingertips, the same black as the ink she edits the lies about her people with. She doesn't notice for some time, right up until Martel begins to slip into sleep (until it is not black but red, blood so familiar she can taste it, and maybe she's been lulled into dozing off herself because she swears she sees her Keeper beneath hands that she can no longer recognize as Martel's or her own). Then she jerks, startling them both out of it, green eyes glassy but voice still clear when she exclaims.

"Oh! Your hair- you're turning colors!"

Her voice is clear, but perhaps her mind isn't entirely.

"A halla in wolf's clothing!"

Her perception of Martel certainly doesn't seem bothered by either dreams of blood or hair dye. Just beyond her start to converge spirits of learning, of curiosity, just barely able to be glimpsed as they try to do their own investigations through the Veil.

Roused from his sleep - a light sleeper always, never too deeply under to fail to jolt awake at a noise, a motion, a suspicion - by her exclamation, Martel's inarticulate groan of protest has more to do with that than being declared a halla. He can't much mind being pulled from his dreams; they are nothing new, nothing he doesn't see behind his eyes each time he closes them, and he has no particular desire to wallow there if he need not.

But a halla, Merrill?

"It's a dye," he mutters, his voice still rough.

They are very noble animals, Martel! Sacred, even!

"Why do you dye it?"

She can't help but keep stroking through his hair, trying to encourage more dye away as well as enjoying the steady movement, the contact with someone she cares for.

The more she presses back, the more she can see where his roots are growing in underneath; the translucence of true white hair, a bit muddied by his sweat and the running dye. His grimace is dulled by how much he quite likes the steady pressure of her hand there, soothing, easy.

"I wore it longer," he murmurs. "White. I was a different man."

Perhaps a more striking one - but Martel is a striking man, changing his hairstyle hasn't changed that entirely.

"Your hair doesn't change who you are."

Her nails scratch lightly at his scalp now, running in whirls and spirals. She's careful, at least, not to tangle his hair into knots.

"Though I did compare you to a halla, and we do have legends of a golden one. I suppose the hair color does change the halla, in that case."

Fever rambles, but they're at least somewhat relevant. "Can I see, someday? Perhaps when we are done with the Inquisition, when we go on our trip." Because she is holding you to that, Martel.

"One day," with a deep sigh, not bothering to open his eyes, "I will clean it and grow it while we travel, and you will see."

There are a great many things that will have to happen before that day - work to be done, a breach to be truly closed, the players of these games called to account for what they've wrought in Thedas. But - one day. In time. He doesn't mind being held to that first agreement of theirs, that they'll go and see what lies over the hill.

It's a softer thought to have than any other he's entertained lately.

"Can I braid it?"

Now or then, it doesn't matter. She enjoys this time together, looks forward to the promised time in the future. One day, when things all look dark, when it looks like there's no hope, she'll remember. Whatever is plaguing her at the time will be pushed aside, because she and Martel still have an adventure to get to.

Though in the future, her hand-eye coordination will be a bit better than now, when she's feverish.

"You've already gotten to do my hair, after all."

"How can I refuse when you put it that way? It's only fair."

In the immediate future and the distant; probably not right now, either way. Martel's amusement is threaded through with his tiredness, weary things that they are; there is an ease he has in her presence that he wouldn't trade.

"And then you can do mine again, too."

Her laugh is quiet, head turning closer to him. After a moment, Merrill wiggles down so that she's along his side, practically curling up into his side. There's nothing romantic about it, of course; it's a lot more like a kitten curling up alongside a larger cat.

"We'll be very fashionable on our adventures."

'I'll be with Merrill' he'd said, as though it would offer her some comfort. Knowing that Martel is not wasting away alone in illness has eased Adelaide's mind somewhat- but not so much that she could keep from checking in with them now and then. Never for more than a moment, popping her head in, peering at them both, prompting one or the other with tea or a cold compress or bowl of broth before popping back out. Too many patients, too much ground to cover, too little time.

Now, though, when she peers in the fade yawns open wide around Martel's dreams.

Terrible things, he's done. The implication had been vast in it's vagaries.

Perhaps it would have been best to leave it vague.

Adelaide clears her throat, squinting past the strangeness, the blood, the screaming- more than a little pale with all of that floating about in fragments. "Do you need anything, either of you?"

Martel jerks slightly at her voice, pulled mercifully from dreams that have become too familiar to linger in him when he wakes; the same shadows are there that always are, and that's simply the way of it, now. His dreams blend memory with horrors conjured by his guilt, his fears, and, well. He's lived with the man he is for a long time.

(A little longer than anticipated.)

"Adelaide," he says, squinting at her. Yes. Good. Well done.

"Telquet." Gentle, affectionate- a reminder more to herself than to him that they have that close association. That she's forgiven him his trespasses. That this- whatever it might be- is not relevant.

The illness is relevant, that he is ill is relevant.

"Do you need anything?"

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OPEN: Cloudreach Event

dreaming. cw: torture, death, weird sex shit, religious iconography.

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