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

[chainlightning]

"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.

[apostasia]

"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.

[chainlightning]

"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."

[apostasia]

"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.

[chainlightning]

"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."