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

[ombranera]

"This is where I would say 'ah, your loss' but I am right now quite undesirable and thus you are a terribly wise man indeed." A good laugh at himself now and then is required, even if the laughing makes his chest ache and his head throb.

But anything that could help him sleep? He would kiss someone for it. Well.

When he was better and no longer 'slimy gross' as Sera called him earlier. Curling in a chair was less a thing of grace and more a quick collapse, bundling himself in another tight huddle as he had on the stairs. "Who am I to deprive them of my normally fine self?"

[singularwill]

"A man with his own mind, one should hope," Solas replied, but it was more amused than chastising, and he fetched a clean mug for Zevran, slipped a few tea leaves into it (his own mixture, he'd long since given up on the horrid stuff granted by the Inquisition), and then poured the hot water into it.

"Let it sit a moment." He poured his own cup and sat down across from him.

"I have heard other stories, beyond your romantic escapades."

[ombranera]

"Just so." Zevran crackled a soft laugh that twisted into a cough- low and rough and truly, was this his fate? To die of fever high in the mountains without so much as a lover at his side?

It could be worse, he supposed.

"Those are all true as well." Whatever they were. Kind, cruel, true, false- many tales and he owned as much as he could.

[singularwill]

"Mm, are they." A flicker of a smile crossed Solas's lips as he leaned back.

"I know something about stories. The Fade is full of them - all truths, in their own way, all false, in another. Stories are never the measure of a man. They only indicate what the world needs him to be."

[ombranera]

"And do you mean to take my measure? We'll have to put it off until I feel slightly less like death boiled over." Not warmed, not with how he is feverish and aching in his chair.

[singularwill]

"I think it is easiest to take the measure of a man at his worst," He said, his head tilting as he watched Zevran.

"I think you would keep your humour to the very last - and keep your friends backs, at the same time. Is that not a fair assessment?"

[ombranera]

"Then you will be waiting awhile longer yet." This was a moment when he was vulnerable to be certain- but this was not him at his worst. That had come and gone, come again and left once more.

"But if you wish to make your assessment now? I will not deny you." Nor will he confirm nor deny what he's chosen to believe.

[singularwill]

"I am sure I will continue to refine it, over time." He says it with a smile, because he doesn't doubt his assessment, at all, but no person is ever fully rendered at any given moment. Not unless you were a Spirit. That was what made Spirits so beautiful. All of their being, on display. They could not lie to you, or themselves, about what they were.

The same could not be said about elves, or men.

"However, you should find a better place to rest than stairs."

[ombranera]

"When I have finished this I shall dutifully return to my chambers and be a miserable lump there instead." He'd meant to make it down to the Valley- but if he cannot make it down the stairs? It will have to wait until the worst of this passes.