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

[fightingale]

"'Bizarre' is an apt word for it," Leliana agrees. It had been horrifying, in those naive days, to see the truth of herself. A cold gaze, her mouth carving a cruel line across her face, a ruthlessness that she had once been so desperate to deny and leave behind. If she had accepted the truth of herself then, if Jonas had not tried to imprint on her some ideal of herself, how differently might things have gone? How much more effective might she have been?

Leliana pauses, making sure Korrin is steady as they reach the doorway and move towards the stairs that are slick with rain that still drums a beat into the sheen of water and light up with the crack of thunder overhead. "Careful, here. Lean against me." She is stronger than she appears, and better at reading the motions that might precede a fall. "At least there is no combat awaiting us."

[gatheringstorm]

Korrin tries to envision what she might see, if she had to face herself like that. Would she be anything like the stereotypical 'savage Tal-Vashoth' image that hounds those free of the Qun? Probably not that extreme, though it's likely there would be an unpleasant insight into herself from it. It's harder to dismiss faults when they're on display like that.

But that's all the thought Korrin can give it, as her focus slides away. The stairs are a challenge, and she nearly slips more than once. There's some hesitation at the thought of leaning against a smaller human, but she doesn't have much choice at the moment. "It's crazy, but I'd almost welcome that. I may be shit at doing anything right now, but at least combat is familiar. Seeing and hearing across the Veil like this...isn't. I just want to get rid of it."

[fightingale]

"On the other hand," Leliana ventures, as they finally reach the end of the staircase and work past that particular danger, "Combat in your present state would most likely lead to injury, and I would guess that healers herbs or unconsciousness would leave you all the more susceptible to the visions of the Fade, with less chance of liberating yourself."

Sister Nightingale, always ruining people's days. "Better we stick to the current plan, I think."