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

[byblow]

Alistiar accepts the hand up, without actually using it for much; he's heavy, and he's also capable of standing up on his own, but he doesn't want to turn down an offered hand. But he's quick to release it, once he's on his feet. For a moment, while she speaks, he's frozen and almost sad-looking, wondering which of them changed to cause this to be so difficult.

"Morrigan and I are getting along," he says, italics for compare and contrast to you and I. He busies his hands and the bulk of his attention with sluicing mud off his trousers. "And I could say that she's very clever and a good mother and I could see how someone other than me might find her attractive rather than terrifying, but then the world would end, and I thought that's what we were all here to prevent."

[fightingale]

Round they go, again, to Morrigan and attraction and it specifically not being Alistair who is apparently so burdened. She takes a step further out into the rain, looking up at the grey of the clouds, rolling and blurred by rainfall. The rain maps paths down her face and her jaw, and she exhales what could have been a laugh on a better day as the pieces fall into place. At least, they seem to be in place, though she is not fully convinced, herself.

"You think I am attracted to Morrigan?" And that was enough to incite all this. "Alistair, you are a very strange man." She even sounds fond and bemused, rather than exasperation.

"We need to get you some good books so you have better means to entertain yourself."

[byblow]

"No more books, please," Alistair says. He's spent enough time in the library—a thing he hates not out of any specific distaste for the written word, but in comparison to what else he could be doing, something outdoors maybe, something involving swords and darkspawn. Something that would feel less suspiciously like doing nothing at all—

—he thinks, hypocritically, while harassing Leliana in the garden rather than doing anything useful. At least it's outdoors. With his attention on her face the air tints green and glows behind her, and his eyes slide to the spirits for a moment, but they're gone as soon as he looks, and he doesn't say anything. Knowledge stored away. He knows what peers at him, too, and none of it means anything.

"What I think," he goes on, refocusing, "is that I'm within my rights to wiggle my eyebrows. If you think she has a lovely neck or assets worth displaying, that's your business."

[fightingale]

"We do have stables in need of mucking out," Leliana offers. "I believe the hands that see to it are rather overcome by fever, at present."

And, and he continues to be absurd. She isn't surprised, and she probably shouldn't be even a little impacted.

"That was ten years ago!" Indignant, yes, because she feels a little indignant, and because despite everything and despite how hurt she is by Alistair and Zevran's silence regarding Anders, they are still as brothers to her. They still remember that young woman from the Fifth Blight, and even with all her frustration, there are brief moments when she remembers just how infuriating they both were. Leliana stops a moment, shakes her head, and when she has exhaled she is the Nightingale again, not some silly girl with dreams about how she was chosen.

"Wiggle your eyebrows at your leisure," she replies, rather more dryly. Clearly that momentary indignity was nothing more than his fever, a delusion. "Though I would remind you it is you who has felt the need to discuss Morrigan's assets, not I."

And if she did think Morrigan was very beautiful, still? What of it?

[byblow]

Leliana bursts—only for a moment, a flash—and he smiles at her; it's a small smile, fond and not too smug, close-lipped and crinkly-eyed. That's what he was after, that burst, and it feels worth the wet and the mud and the barbs, the same way a few minutes of getting his schoolmates to laugh with him instead of at him now and then was worth any amount of punishment from the Sisters. When she withdraws back into herself the smile shrinks but doesn't vanish.

"I have eyes," he says, and is quick to clarify: "Respectful eyes. Eyes that I'd like to keep where they are and not have removed from my skull."

So please, for the love of Andraste and the Maker, don't repeat this to Morrigan.

[fightingale]

"So," she starts, tone immediately helpful and entirely compliant to his wishes, "I must be sure to pass one your feedback."

That is what he's hoping for, yes?

In truth she isn't sure what to do with the smile, the fondness there, which feels like it lies so much in conflict with the things that have happened between them. She offers another look to the sky, and looks up towards one of her scouts, standing where Alistair had been before he came down here to join her. Business calls, as it alway does, and her gaze settles back on Alistair.