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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He looks up at her and gives her the first hint of a smile he's felt in hours.

"Me? Follow my own advice? Perish the thought. I'm a healer. We give advice, we don't take it." And yet he obeys and takes a seat for at least the moment, because for one, he is feeling a little weary, and for the other, it's easier to take a short break than argue that he doesn't need one. This is faster. More efficient.

'Or one could ignore interruptions altogether and focus on what needs addressing,' Justice offers unhelpfully. Anders pays him no mind.

"How are you feeling?"

"In that case, it's a very good thing there are plenty of healers around to give each other the advice we need." She takes a seat opposite him on an empty cot, sighing in relief at being off her feet for a few minutes.

"I've had no signs of fever so far. Hopefully I'll get out of this one unscathed."

He frowns, but it's not at her. She has no fever, though she's around the ill, been working with them... Anders looks around. There might be something there. An immunity somehow, or she's not been exposed.

"Do you tend to not get ill when others do?"

"I used to catch everything as a child, when I first started tending to the sick. I'm not sure if my body's become naturally more resistant." She shrugs, not understanding the science behind it at all, or even if her theory has any basis in fact. "Or maybe I'm just lucky. In my experience it's chance as often as not."

"Would you mind trying to recall what foods you've eaten? Maybe it's simply chance, maybe it's not. I'll take any leads, at this point." He exhales and focuses back on her face. "It's not behaving like the spread of any disease I've seen before, and I've seen several. Darktown had regular sweeps of everything. This... I don't know. I'm drawing a blank, and it seems everyone else is as well."

Which bothers him. He's here to heal, not stand by and watch cluelessly.

"Some bread and cheese earlier this morning and some stew last night." She shrugs, not having thought to keep a record, although it's the first thing she'd tell others to do when an epidemic struck. "Everything I've eaten has been coming out of Skyhold's kitchens, so if one of the cooks was sick and continued working, it could have easily come from the food." She brushes a hand through her hair, sighs with frustration. "I'm more used to seeing diseases coming from the water or the air, but if it were either of those, we should have all got sick months ago, when the Inquisition first moved in here."

"Air only requires one person to be ill, and there are always merchants coming through." It's said quietly as he mentally adds her words to everything else and still doesn't get anywhere. "Except the latest group is currently caught here, which could mean they've brought something. ...Except they weren't brought in ill, and if they have something to do with it then at least one of them should have been showing symptoms by then."

Anders sighs and closes his eyes for a moment.

"Maker's breath. Someone said it might be magical but I don't want it to be magical. I don't want to have to fight against yet another mark against us, but nothing else is adding up. Unless someone brought in some contaminant, some bad food, or something, and it's only just spread through the food supply, but that's a long shot."

"I've been asking around about what people have been eating, but I haven't found a common link there so far." Magic had been her conclusion too, especially given the nature of the hallucinations the sick were describing, and it's a prospect that daunts her as she's never really treated magical illness or injuries before. "If it is magical, how would we treat it?"

"We'd need to find who cast the spell, or the object they used to... to carry it. We'd need counter-magic, or perhaps even a particularly strong dispelling, but we'd need them or what the curse is cast on. There's..."

He trails off as he tries to come up with any other way. After several moments he shakes his head. "This is even all theoretical. I've only read old accounts of a mage casting a curse or hex like this, and there's no way to tell if they truly did or if it was a plague and the local mage simply unpopular. Maybe a sort of, of, of general dispelling over each patient? I'm decent at the spell, I can find someone who will let me try it, but I've no faith in it solving matters."

And how do they even find some hypothetical culprit? He is exhausted and his own fever isn't helping there.

"Until they track it down, unless dispelling works, we can only treat the symptoms." Which is going to mean continuing to lose ground.

"Then we'll have to hope the symptoms will actually wear off." She's used to fevers lasting anywhere from a few days to a month or more, but if it really magical in nature, who's to say they wouldn't continue indefinitely. Maybe they'll strike lucky and the illness will fade away on its own, even if the cause isn't immediately apparent. "Speaking of which -- these hallucinations. Do you know of any way of treating them short of knocking the patient out to get away from them for a few hours?" She'd done just that to Korrin when the spirits wouldn't leave her alone, and she knew it was far from an ideal way to treat a symptom.

"Unfortunately, I don't. I'd suggest something cruel, like Silencing, except people who aren't mages are seeing them too, as well as Dwarves, so it has nothing to do with a connection to the Fade." And Silence is cruel, no matter how freely it's used by some.

"We... Hm." He trails off and considers for a moment. "We could offer sleeping drugs. An option of tea laced with them to make them go down more smoothly, for those who are having a great deal of trouble with what they see. But I... I don't know that we should drug mages. There's a risk in them not being able to wake up and having more demons and spirits around them than usual."

"Silencing?" She frowns a little as she tries to place the term, though her knowledge of anything mage-related is so sparse that it's not something she's familiar with, although she recognises how sinister it sounds.

"If they specifically ask to be drugged, if what they're seeing is so bad as it is, what then? Which is the greater risk?"

"Silencing. Cutting them off from the Fade and magic for a short time. It's a horrible, empty feeling." The Circles and Chantry have been so limiting and short-sighted that there are few kind ways to help mages here. With more freedom and more research, the future may hold better options.

"And if they ask for the drugs..." He sighs. "If they ask, we'll do it. We're people as well, and we need breaks sometimes. Double-check so that they're informed, first, but then allow it."

"I try to keep my patients as informed as I can, don't worry there." Something she'd always made a habit of tending to the sick in the alienage - it was one small way to feel she was empowering them, rather than simply telling them what was good for them. "If things stay as they are now, we shouldn't even have to consider something so drastic as silencing. If there are ever individual cases where it may alleviate suffering, I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable advocating it unless every healer and the mage's council all agreed to it."

"I'm certain Madame de Fer would be quite fine with Silencing." The bitter comment is out before he can stop it, and Anders closes his eyes before shaking his head. "My apologies. My temper is not what it should be right now. I can't see a universal agreement on Silencing, which is for the best."

Taking away parts of who mages are fixes nothing. Especially when this isn't a mage problem.

"The only thing I see getting worse at this point is exhaustion-related injuries. We may need to see if we can get a few people to work on poultices and boiling bandages to prepare for that."

"I can get on that," Eirlys replies perhaps a little too eagerly. It was a relief to find a task that was familiar to her, amongst all this talk of magic. "I'll have to plant a great deal more herbs after all this - I don't want to rely on outside shipments if it turns out we need to quarantine Skyhold, after all."

He nods, knowing how it feels to have something you can do all too well. "Even if we don't need to quarantine Skyhold, even more supplies in case of things going wrong will not hurt. We have storage space for dry herbs, and plenty of use for fresh. We'll not have more than we can use for a good, long time."

"And should we run out, we always have your healing spells to rely on," she replies, smiling at him encouragingly.

"And no person can ever wind up too tired for healing spells." He gives her a very amused look despite his tiredness. "Herbs and healing forever. We can attend to anything."

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OPEN: Cloudreach Event

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