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

[stabsbooks]

"You are not the first to tell me so," Cassandra replies dryly, rolling her eyes. Of course, the useless nobles littering the Orlesian and Nevarran courts had never described her lack of poise and elegance quite the way Sera does it, and neither had her uncle, but the underlying sentiment remains.

She gives Sera's arm a tug, trying to urge her along. "It suits well enough. It is warm and dry, and visitors rarely venture to the third floor. I have become used to the noise." Belatedly, she realizes her mistake in letting Sera knows where she sleeps, and she sighs inwardly. Time to start seeking out a new place to lay her bedroll, just in case.

[arsebiscuit]

"Bet you've got all your pointy bits for fighting demony shit there too, yeah?"

A nice squishy bed would've been better, but Sera's not one to turn her nose up. She and million other people had slept in worse. So so wraps her arms around one of Cassandra's, using the woman a bit to hold herself up.

"Take me."

[stabsbooks]

"There is no need to fight the spirits. You must face them, unafraid. The closer you look at them, the more difficult they are to perceive."

She looks at Sera in bafflement. "Take you - Sera, you must have your own bed somewhere, and I am certain that wherever it is, it would be more comfortable for you than mine."

[arsebiscuit]

"Demons and shit!"

Cass, how are you not understanding this?

"You need to stand vigil. Or whatever virgin shite knights do for ladies, yeah? I'm in...whatever women get into. For saving, yeah? You've got oaths."

[stabsbooks]

"You are hardly a damsel in distress, Sera," Cassandra says, unable to mask the laughter in her tone. "I have seen you fight worse than this."

She sighs. The ridiculousness of the situation aside, she knows perfectly well that Sera's fear of demons and magic is very real. She has not yet forgotten her childhood, or the fear of the Necropolis that had often stolen sleep from her until dawn. "Perhaps just for a while."

[arsebiscuit]

Give Sera an inch and she'll take the whole damn nation. She predicted this day ending with her and Cass both sleeping the demons off, safe in company and not alone over tables or whatever. But for now there's just a grin.

"Good enough."