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

[ancarrow]

"There are enough who wish the Inquisition harm, that it is not a possibility I would be quick to discount." She looks around nervously, feeling twitchy that if it were sabotage, whoever set it up could be listening in even now. "Either way, I've concentrated on trying to break the fever, in the hope that will make the hallucinations go too."

[fleurdesel]

"We've had members taken in the field and at least one kidnapping from the immediate area before- that is enough for me to consider our security perhaps not entirely watertight." They've enemies enough. It's possible. "Were there boils or anything more dangerous than the fever I'd assume it to be as it was in the mire- an infected corpse in the drinking water- but that would not explain the magic."

[ancarrow]

"Bad water and bad air are the two usual culprits, so it's certainly worth checking the water supply anyway just to cover the possibility." But Adelaide is right, the magic is the anomaly here that they just can't explain away easily. Eirlys blanches a little as a rather nasty possibility occurs to her, thinking back to pulling the body from the Mire all those months ago. "If it were the body of a mage, or a demon, or something else magical..." With all the tension, she wouldn't put it past one of the more vocal anti-mage groups to have knifed one and shoved them down a well. But then she's not even sure if there's any lingering magical effects after death or whether they're just a body like anyone else.

[fleurdesel]

"Most of Skyhold gets their water from the springs- it would not be remiss to check them, dredge them." At least the water is more clear here than it was in the Mire- recalling what they'd had to do to find what had gone wrong there had been...uncomfortable to say the very least. "The body of a mage is much like any other person once dead- it's a corpse and little more. Demonic bodies tend to disintegrate- but in water like that it could possibly taint the water supply? It is worth testing."

[ancarrow]

"Is there anything more I can do in the meantime? I've been treating the fever as best as I can, but I really don't know if there's anything I can do to alleviate magical side effects or whether that needs to be left to the mages." There had never been much need for magical healing in the alienage, after all.