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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"I know; I don't have a very good imagination," she commented with a small smile.

Of course, that has never stood in the way of hallucinations, but despite her lightheadedness, she only leaned back against the cold wall, looking Cole over with half-lidded eyes. "I'm Hermione," she offered, voice a bit too thin for her to keep deluding herself into thinking she was healthy. Even so, she still asked, "Did you need something from the library? I could help you look for it."

"I found it," he assured her, quietly.

He had gotten pulled so far into the tangle of her thoughts, he hadn't paid any mind to how he could actually help her. Dreamless Sleep, he couldn't do — but there were simpler things that could be managed.

"You're cold. You need a blanket." He shifted, lanky legs unfolding as he moved to stand. "I'll come back."

She didn't understand what he'd found, or why he was getting up to move away, or why she suddenly felt colder at the prospect of being alone. She should be grateful that someone who'd been watching as she slept was getting up to go, but instead she only frowned up at him, feeling something that felt like tears stinging at her eyes.

"Please don't go," she pleaded softly. "I might fall asleep again. I don't want that."

Sleeping meant getting tortured, or running through the woods, or Splinching Ron, and she couldn't go through all of that again. The first time had been bad enough, never mind the constant re-runs that kept flooding her brain.

The plea was enough to make him stop, though not yet enough to make him sit back down. She should sleep. She was going to have to, eventually. And yet —

"Green light, too like the color of death." It's what he saw before, why he'd tried to tell her her dreams wouldn't hurt.

She might sleep in any case. It was pulling at her, an undercurrent weighing down her feet. It would be better if she stayed.

"They can't hurt you again." It was worth saying again, perhaps. And now he was sitting back down. "Echoes, reflections, ripples still spreading, but the stone is sunk beneath the water."

Hermione wasn't sure if she couldn't follow a word he was saying or if she understood it remarkably well. Either way, it hurt to try and follow him, so she leaned back, fighting the urge to close her eyes.

"How do you know these things?" she asked, not knowing if she meant the talk of the green light or the idea that she couldn't be hurt. "Are you inside my head? It's not the best place to be right now. It's a bit cloudy. Like outside."

"It's scattered. Skipping. Guided along in the groove, but then it jumps, and everything's crackling noise."

Not that he'd ever seen or even heard of a record. But being around people from other worlds, with other ways, sometimes allowed other metaphors to slip through.

As for how he knew the dreams couldn't hurt her: "The Fade doesn't make things real. It's only a mirror."

The metaphor slipped past her reasoning like only so much white noise, though she still appreciated it. She appreciated him. He was calm and deliberate, and she didn't get the sense that she'd need to defend herself from him. That wasn't something to take lightly, especially given how much of her time in Thedas had consisted of fighting in some form.

"Did the Fade make you?" she asked softly, one hand reaching out to touch his arm. "You don't look like a reflection of anyone I've ever seen."

His head tilted downward to look at her hand, but he did not flinch or pull away from the touch.

And, well. Of course he wasn't a reflection of someone she'd ever seen. She'd never met him.

"He was someone, once." A wistful, mournful note in that. "Nobody saw him. They all wanted to forget."

"... why would they want to forget?"

She didn't know who "he" was, or who "they" were, but she knew that it didn't exactly sound hospitable to want to forget someone. If that was what they were forgetting, anyway.

Whatever he was talking about, he sounded sad as he talked about it, so she shifted a little closer, turning her inquisitive touch to his arm into what was intended to be a comforting one.

"... I don't know."

He just knew they must have, to have forgotten him so thoroughly. He could piece together some idea from what he knew of the Spire and its Templars in general.

"Templars didn't like to think about the mages they put down in the dungeons. The ones that did, didn't think nice things."

Slowly linking her arm with his, Hermione leaned in closer, almost resting against his shoulder but somehow managing to keep herself from getting quite so familiar. She still had her sense of propriety, after all. Sort of.

"They put mages in dungeons? I thought they were supposed to take care of them."

Granted, she'd already heard enough to know that not all Templars cared all that much about taking care of mages. Snippets of stories she'd heard from various people make their way through her head, the Rite of Annulment literally being the stuff of nightmares for her.

"They're supposed to. It doesn't always work like that."

Hesitant, like he didn't want to admit it. Or like he was trying to explain something delicate to a child. Then, in the next second, his voice changed: a low mutter, words almost running into each other. Repeating something he'd heard.

"Dangerous, ripe for demons. Don't turn your back until they're broken."

She frowned at that last comment, beginning to pick up the vague pattern in the way Cole spoke. Sometimes he said things, and sometimes he said memories, memories of things other people had said or thought. It should be disconcerting. She didn't have the energy to find anything disconcerting at the moment.

"We're not all like that," she breathed out. "Smashing something to pieces when it never had to be broken in the first place just makes people angry."

"You're not a Templar." She wasn't anything like one. She had magic in her, and it didn't crackle and sing like the magic of the Fade. It was something inside her, part of her, like a well, deep and ready to be drawn on... or at least it should have been. That was how it felt, anyway.

Still: "Some Templars are kind," he acknowledged with a nod. "Some mages are cruel. Magic doesn't make a person. It's just something they do."

"People are just people, magic or no," she replied. "My parents are Muggles. My best friends are wizards. And I love all of them."

And she missed them. Terribly. Instead of looking forward to spending holidays with them, she was stuck here, amongst people who saw things the way Death Eaters had, in a manner of speaking.

"No one's better than anybody else just because of how they were or weren't born," she sniffed. "It's who a person turns out to be that matters."

"Yes." It was almost as if their thoughts were reflections of each other, in that moment. Not real, but more real than the things in the Fade, because they were making them.

His fingers, tentative, found the arm that was linked with his, and brushed against the back of her hand.

"I'm Cole."

While she got along with most people, this was different. Maybe she was sick and feeling a bit fragile, but somehow talking to this young man just felt easier than anything had felt in a long time.

"Thank you for staying with me, Cole," she murmured softly. "I'm going to close my eyes, but I'm not sleeping. You can keep talking, if you want to. Or walk away, if you need to. I won't fuss either way."

"All right."

She was going to sleep. It was pulling at her stronger the moment she closed her eyes. But he didn't mind. He could, perhaps, help to make her dreams a little less troubling.

He murmured in a low, calm voice, in a stream of consciousness, about a castle that wasn't Skyhold. One that was warmer, brighter, more alive. The first time a staircase swung from one landing to another. How it had felt to be looking up at floating candles.

When Hermione woke, Cole would be gone — but there was a blanket over her, and a simple straw pillow cradling her head.

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OPEN: Cloudreach Event

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