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

[arlathvhen]

"Not all demons attack." Beleth points out. "Some try to bargain with people. I don't really know, though. Solas might, he's the guy that's smart about all this Fade stuff. I suppose that it doesn't matter, really. The Veil is there, and it's probably for the best, all in all." She flippantly waves away whatever weird conspiracy theories she'd been thinking of. There's certainly nothing she can do about the way things are, and they're probably that way for a perfectly good reason.

"Thank you, by the way. For helping me. For telling me about the dangers but letting me do it. Instead of just writing me off as...I don't know. Crazy, I guess. Or dangerous."

[justice_is_blond]

He might have to ask Solas about that later, but for now he's only just met the elf during all this mess and he can't really justify harassing him already.

"You're welcome. And the Chantry's done enough of that for anyone, I think. Our understanding of the Fade has been held back by fear and by the Chantry, just the same as so much has been held back by that combination. I didn't see a risk to talking, and I was here to help. ...Thank you for trusting me for that, also."

Because not a lot would.