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

[obi_wanmanshow]

"Now that I very much doubt. It can't all be death and sorrow," It wasn't a supposition, the way he says it, but a certainty, punctuated with a nod, "There are good memories, as well."

But those truly were private, for one. He wouldn't push. But he could feel the dark turn of her thoughts, the despair rising around the room like a fine mist, like a smell with no source. It seemed patently unfair that she should have been made so vulnerable, and have no reciprocity; to just leave seems, somehow, impossibly rude. Obi-Wan hesitates yet again, then settles back more comfortably, on the floor rather than the bed itself, leaning.

"Y'know, I... It's not the first time, I've seen something like that. The first time, I was just an apprentice, not even past my Knighthood trials. I lost my teacher."

[stabsbooks]

"Can't it?"

It isn't, of course. But every happy memory she has is corrupted, it seems, shot through with loss and regret. Everyone she's loved, she has lost. Or, Despair tells her, she is going to lose.

Her expression flickers with familiarity and old grief as he shares his own pain. A young apprentice, too young to be prepared to lose a valued mentor - she doesn't even have to imagine what he must have felt.

"I am sorry," she says, and means it, but she frowns. She can tell what he's trying to do, or thinks she can. He is trying to...to connect with her, to make her feel less alone. "But you do not have to do this. It will not change anything."

[obi_wanmanshow]

"As I've been pointing out to an increasing number of people since arriving, whatever reason I was brought here, it wasn't for my protection," The Force moves in mysterious waves, like ocean swells, invisible and powerful, and it's not until you're bouyed along to distant shores that you really understand the magnitude of that power. Obi-Wan is philosophical about his status as a rifter, as in all things, "It's about what's right, not what's easier. And, anyways, if it were that easy with you..."

Well, she'd have a lot more friends, for one thing.

"...It's not wrong to grieve, and fear helps to keep us alive, but too much of it only leads to anger, and even hatred. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We Jedi call it, the Dark Side," His voice, quite calm, fell away. A deep breath, a sigh, "I watched him die-- he was killed by an assassin, a Sith Lord, as we call them. Like Dark Jedi, the Sith are traitors to everything we should stand for. I wasn't fast enough to save him, and when I was able to strike back, I was so consumed by rage and vengeance that I was nearly ensnared by the same Dark Side that the assassin served. It was a harrowing struggle, not unlike your own, I suspect."

[stabsbooks]

It is as if Obi-Wan is describing a strange, alternate version of her own life. The dead mentor. The traitors. The mad drive for vengeance that, for years, had threatened to overtake her entirely - though that had been caused by the death of her brother, and not Seeker Byron. The details hardly matter, though. It is the same.

Not that she's about to tell all of that to Obi-Wan. Not that she's about to tell him about Galyan, or confess to him the most personal details of her own struggle against rage and resentment.

"If you fear I will be lost to anger and hatred, you can stop worrying," she tells him instead. "Take your platitudes to someone else. It is a lesson I have already learned. I do not need to hear it again." Suddenly she aches for Galyan, for Anthony, for everything she has lost, and she turns away, curling in on herself and facing the wall, so that Obi-Wan will not see.

[obi_wanmanshow]

"It's not a lesson, Cassandra," He sighed. And what else had he expected? Time to go, then, "It's life. And revenge isn't the only path to the Dark Side. Try not to let fear and despair get the better of you; I know it's easier said than done, but... you are better than that."

Obi-Wan stands, then, shaking out the dust from his trousers, and turns to go. But he hesitates before descending, looking back, considering. She seems, not small, exactly, but drawn-in. Hiding.

"If you like, if I... notice anything happening that you'd rather keep private?"

[stabsbooks]

Ridiculous. He doesn't even know her - and what he does know of her is nothing complimentary. He's the one, after all, who had thought so little of her as to condemn and undermine her publicly. She had interrogated him at his first arrival, been harsh and hostile and treated him like a threat. He has no reason to think she is better than anything.

She stays where she is, curled on her side and facing the wall, all too aware of him as he stands and looks down at her. Somehow, she knows that it is safe to turn her back on him, just as she knows that he would never tell anyone what she had so unintentionally revealed to him.

She cannot bring herself to thank him for that. Not when loneliness and the great weight of loss press down upon her, threatening to crush her. Not when Despair crowds eagerly over her, moving in to fill the space that Obi-Wan had occupied.

It seems colder, the farther he moves away.

But he's asked her a question, and she must answer. She swallows the lump in her throat, along with her pride, and jerks her head in a nod.

"Please."

Better that Obi-Wan know all her secrets, than all of Skyhold know even half of them.