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

Around Skyhold - now in the right location! :D

[laurenande]

The kitchens are warm and, in the wake of the rainstorm, largely empty. At times, servants and cooks dart to and fro, scattered and harried as they try to recall what work is theirs, what work they must attend to, and how to accomplish it all. Galadriel does her best to avoid their swift steps and frantic rushing, but she is not so polite that she will avoid placing herself in their domain. She has found no remedy for the chill that plagues her and the kitchens, if nowhere else, should be warm enough to drive out the cold.

When she enters the kitchens she is, she thinks, utterly alone. There are pots, lidded and open, that sit above fires. The wood beneath the oven has been stoked, but whatever bakes inside it is not done enough to smell. The room is hot, almost eerily empty, and lit a hazy golden red by each cooking flame.

She moves to the largest of the hearths and, as she does, gathers up a stool on which to sit. It is not until she arrives alongside the golden fire that she realizes she is not alone. Adelaide was seated and leaning against an empty chopping block by the fire. It took only a moment for Galadriel to realize the human was asleep. Despite her posture, Adelaide's eyes were closed and her expression slack.

The sound of rattling metal and a cloud of steam drew Galadriel's attention from the healer and, in fact, nearly startled her into dropping her chair. Thankfully, she caught herself before she lost hold of it, but it was a near thing. There was a pot of stew, overlarge but with considerable handles, cooking away above the fire.

Surely, this was what Adelaide was waiting for.

Galadriel's smile was fond as she set her seat before the brightly burning hearth and idly took over the task of minding the stew. As she gazed into the flames, weary and half-aware of her own movements as she stirred the pot, her mind drifted. As her focus untethered, she was caught by the eddies and tides of Adelaide's dreaming.

[fleurdesel]

What she had meant to mind quietly for a moment while meditating here where it was not quite so crowded- and that was what found her listed to one side, eyes closed, limp and exhausted. Meditation is one thing but it cannot make up for the lack of proper sleep. As much as she had been nudging her fellow healers to take their turn in a cot off to the side to find a few hours of rest she's neglected to do the same. If pressed she'd mention she's gone longer without. That she was more than able to function on her meditations and catnaps caught throughout the day.

Avoiding rest was less a question of fear and more of resignation. The sickness running wild through Skyhold, the lack of answers- it left her with no question as to what she'd find in her sleep. The usual with a twist of 'but how do you know for certain this is right?'

As though a lifetime of denying them would be given up so quickly.

Pride demons never look large and monstrous in the Fade- no. They take familiar faces. Trusted peers, mentors, family members that are but vague recollections from portraits and letters. Friends found anew in this place which used to throw her; but they are known for what their true face and she has been able to ignore them as well.

The fountain in her family's courtyard frozen over perpetually, a reminder of what she is and shall ever be. While she'd expected a single shade there are several circling the fountain where she sits, reading. Or attempting to read. In the fade lettering was strange and difficult to follow- put that on top of the whispering offers, the casual demands for attention, promises of power, of knowledge- tempting in light of so many questions, so many issues.

[laurenande]

It was strange how clearly one could understand another through their open thoughts. Even Galadriel was not so old that she knew the time before language but, here, seated in the halflight of a frozen courtyard, she understood more than any spoken word could say. The spirits whispered words she could never have known and, one by one, she knew them. She knew each as dearly as the language of Aman and there was a rush to this discovery.

The shades that drifted in along the threshold of this place were indistinct but, thought by thought, they moved to resolve themselves. They adopted the idea of faces, the lilting memory of voices, but the facades they presented were unfamiliar to her. She knew none of them, spirit or memory, but within the honeyed sweetness of their speech she felt the creep of bitter temptation. To her thy seemed a petty things, laced with more desperation than malice, and Galadriel let her attention drift from them.

It did not occur to her that their offers were meant for another and, to Adelaide, they would be far more pointed and far less easily ignored.

At her side, as she had been seated before the fire, Adelaide was perched on the rim of the fountain. Shewas utterly focused on the book before her but the letters were a whorl of ash to Galadriel's eyes. Instead of attempting to read, the elf looked at the human at her side and, unbidden, a smile crossed her face.

"Is this how mages dream?" Galadriel asked and was, at once, surprised and delighted by the melodious quality in her own voice. It was decidedly a feature her waking self did not share, but it was one she was not distraught to suddenly acquire, however strange the situation.

[fleurdesel]

"...I'll admit, this is a new tactic." Adelaide murmurs, eyes narrowing upon the page. She cannot focus enough to read but giving them anything more than a few words is more trouble than it is worth. There had been a time in her youth when she'd actively spoken with them. Debated, argued, attempted to shift her perceptions and alter their presence in her dreams accordingly. Less often after her Harrowing. Never again after Robert.

Demons were demons and could not be changed, not even by altering her expectations and perceptions. Not by attempting to learn more of them; all it led to was temptation and pain. She knew them for what they were, for how they sounded- but this one?

Did not sound like the others.

"Try again tomorrow. Or not." Between one thought and the next she was herself, the Councilor, weary and ill- then younger, paler, nails bitten to the quick and a tense clench to her jaw- then back again. She is no terrified apprentice, wavering under the new tricks of demons.

[laurenande]

"Tactic?" Galadriel wondered aloud and, were she more aware of her fever, or of the nature of the Fade and dreams, she might've been more cautious. Here, she had no restraint, no guile, and she knew not how to temper herself to achieve either. Her own voice charmed her as she spoke and, with that charm, any realization of her abruptly forthcoming nature was dashed.

"Does dreaming require tactics?" She wondered and, though her thoughts were hazy, attempted to recall what she knew of this place, of such things. Adelaide had told her, warned her, that the threat of possession was severe. She feared such things greatly...but she had spoken of demons and, as Galadriel cast a weary eye across the gathered, ephemeral shades, she saw nothing that would qualify for so ominous a title.

Were these her demons?

Adelaide shifted, in stature and shape, and Galadriel wondered at the changes in her. She seemed youthful to Galadriel in all states, but the elf was a spectacularly poor judge of the ages of men. Surely the changes meant something, but she was not aware enough to take them in, nor to parse them from the fountain at her back or the moving shades that circled it.

Tomorrow she had said.

"Do they visit you so often?"