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]

"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.