faderift | OPEN: The Western Approach

OPEN: The Western Approach

WHO: Everyone!
WHAT: The Western Approach is a terrible place. You should definitely go there.
WHEN: Bloomingtide 15 onward
WHERE: The Western Approach
NOTES: This is open to everyone. Characters who would not happily go to the hell desert probably have to go anyway; it's a war, not a vacation.

Once these wastes were a land of plenty. Can you believe it? The rain came north over the Gamordan Peaks, turning the plains green and verdant for three months of the year. Eight hundred years ago, that changed. During the Second Blight, darkspawn spilled out of an enormous crack in the earth, corrupting it with their foul blood... and it never recovered, even after they were driven back underground. The Grey Wardens built Adamant Fortress to stand watch over that chasm, but eventually even they abandoned it to the wind and the biting sand.

What few of us eke out a living in this Maker-forsaken place do so knowing that any number of deaths await us: darkspawn raids, dragons, bandits—not to mention starvation from the lack of water and game. If we stay, it is because we know there are treasures buried in the bones of this place, ruins from the time when Tevinter ruled, and even earlier. We pass tales around our campfires of the things we have seen shrouded in the dust storms. My favorites are the ones about relics that could restore the Western Approach once more... but I don't believe them. Truth be told, on nights when the wind is calm, I can stand on a hilltop and see for miles in the moonlight over a stark beauty of which no other Orlesian can claim to know the equal. On those nights, I hope it will never change.

—From Lands of the Abyss by Magistrate Gilles de Sancriste

I. THE DESERT

When Scout Harding calls somewhere the worst place in Thedas, that's probably a bad sign. Even when nothing in the Western Approach is deliberately trying to kill you, there's nothing kind or forgiving about the landscape: bare and arid, carved through by sharp-dropped canyons, dotted with abandoned mines and signs of the deaths of lost travelers. Winds sweeping through to whip stinging sand into uncovered faces, and periodic dust storms obscure visibility entirely. It's warm enough to be dangerous but not so hot, at this time of year, that heat exhaustion and dehydration can't creep up on you while you aren't paying attention.

And at any given moment, something probably is deliberately trying to kill you. The food chain in the region is top-heavy, with quillbacks, phoenixes, hyenas, and varghests roaming hungrily and as likely to attack one another as the sparse local prey population. Compared to their natural competitors, the Inquisition's forces look like easy marks. The camps the Inquisition scatters at lookout points throughout the region require constant watch, and going anywhere alone is inadvisable. Not only because of the hostile local everything, but also because it is incredibly easy to get lost. One rock formation looks much like another after hours in the sun or bathed in shifting moonlit shadows, and good luck finding many other landmarks. There are a few: chunks of pillars or arches from some ruined structure, or the occasional odd pillar that might, if someone investigates, prove to mark a trail of sorts.

Plus: the only people who seem determined to survive out here are cutthroat bandits and stray Venatori. Double-plus: a high dragon makes occasional fly-bys, scouring the ground below for anything edible, armored or not.

Some reprieve comes at night, relief from both the sun and the area's primarily diurnal predators. But that's when the darkspawn come out.

II. GRIFFON WING KEEP

Bloomingtide 16-17: Taking the Keep

Only a small force of Tevinter cultists remains in Griffon Wing Keep when the Inquisition arrives, seemingly on their way out the door already, but the sight of Inquisition banners is enough to make them stay and fight. There's no need for siege equipment, but there is call for a little bit of patience. With it, a small battalion is able to evade the mages and archers on the walls and storm the doors with few casualties. Fewer than three dozen warriors wait inside. It's a quick, brutal fight; it only takes a night.

Bloomingtide 18 Onward: Home Away From Home

Once the Keep is cleared of occupants, it's ripe for the Inquisition to… occupy… But with implicit permission, at least. Those who aren't needed for fights elsewhere may be put to work clearing out debris and small animals and the remnants left by the cultists, and within a few days the fortress is a serviceable outpost, much more hospitable than the camps out in the sand. Barracks mean even those who don't have beds at Skyhold may have one here, and it takes less than a week for an enterprising merchant to arrive with ale.

III. THE STILL RUINS

Despite signs of recent activity, the lavish Tevinter palace tucked incongruously into the canyons is quiet and still, when the Inquisition discovers it—quiet, still, but not empty. The ancient ruin is brimming with demons and Tevinters in incredibly outdated fashions, all frozen in place, as they have been for hundreds of years. No one breathes or blinks, but their skin is still warm and alive to the touch.

Beyond the entryway and halls and through the courtyard, there are signs of research and experimentation, and one man stood unmoving with his hand clasped around something unseen.

Perhaps someone will discover the cause. Perhaps someone will undo the spell that's been cast over the palace. Perhaps, if someone does, someone will take the opportunity to not immediately murder all of these valuable sources of ancient information, and instead only murder most of them. In the meantime, however, it is unlikely that anyone will ever be able to get this close to a rage demon without receiving a face full of fire. Take advantage.

IV. CORACAVUS

Signs of the Venatori point upward: up the hills, up ladders and towers, and into the ancient Tevinter prison, Coracavus, that was built into the mountainside. The ruin is filled with sand now, with half-collapsed walls and anything not made of stone worn away by winds, and the Venatori are long gone, their hunt for relics from the glory days of the Imperium abandoned when an excavation attempt opened the prison to darkspawn, instead. The darkspawn have retreated as well, but there are signs of their presence. Namely the smell and the half-eaten corpses of slaves—primarily elven and dwarven—who were left behind to their fates when the Tevinters fled.

There's no sign of them now, but digging through their abandoned camps may turn up a name, if anyone would like to see that he pays.

V. ADAMANT FORTRESS

A day's determined walk from the nearest Inquisition camp, Adamant Fortress overlooks the vast chasm—dubbed the Abyssal Rift—from which darkspawn poured during the Second Blight. It stood abandoned for nearly 150 years before the Grey Wardens' recent reoccupation, and it's abandoned again now, emptied out well before the Inquisition's forces arrive. There are signs that the retreat was a hasty one: scattered belongings, opened doors, abandoned meals, and no fewer than fifty bodies left on a mass pyre that only half-burned without anyone to tend it.

The Veil has always been thin here, and it's thinner now, where demons have been pulled through from the Fade. Rifts hang over the battlements and in the corridors, and escaped shades lurk in the dark corridors, siphoning away the willpower of those who linger until they come close enough to attack. Those who visit the Fortress set up camp outside of it rather than within it, wisely.

There are clear signs of blood sacrifice, for those who look: the bodies, blood stains on the stone floors, neat lists of names systemically crossed through. Sorting through documents left behind may turn up vague notes in a mage's runic shorthand or the journal of a trepidatious new recruit (Lourde, a pickpocket, crossed through on the registers). Behind a locked door in the lowest rooms are the bodies of sixteen mages, still in their Circle robes, left lying where they fell when the Joining took them. Mages who were among the rebels in Redcliffe may recognize a face or two as belonging to the hardliners who left with the Tevinters.

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Though Hermione had helped close it, she doesn't know that anything had been spat out of the rift other than demons until some time later, when she hears someone remarking on how the crate had almost crushed Adelaide. Concerned for her, she makes her way to the healing tents at her first opportunity, meaning to check in on her.

She waits until Adelaide isn't helping someone, though she gathers from that much that nothing so bad has happened as to have any sort of negative effect on her. When they're finally alone, she approaches Adelaide, looking her over carefully. "Are you all right? Sorry, I've only just heard that a box of some sort had almost hit you during the fight. I didn't know cargo could come out of the rifts."

"I am well, thank you." At the time it'd been terrifying, yet one more thing spat out from these rifts that could have been anything. An explosive, weapons, a box of yet more demons- but now? She's sifted through the mass and found some amusement in it- even if it'd almost cracked her in the skull when it'd fallen through. "And you? You've kept yourself hydrated and from overheating?"

It's a concern for everyone- but the younger members of the Inquisition, all the more so. "This seems to be...shades, I think Church called them. Sun glasses."

"One of the few spells I've been able to manage consistently is my water-making charm," Hermione replies, voice a touch dry. "It's why I didn't complain too loudly upon hearing that we'd be venturing into a desert."

The mention of "shades" strikes Hermione, if only because she'd only heard the word used lately in terms of demons, which is where her mind goes at first. But then Adelaide explains what she means, and Hermione can only blink at her curiously for a time. "Sunglasses?" she asks, unsure that she'd heard correctly. "You mean... eyeglasses with tinted lenses to protect from the sun? Those sorts of sunglasses?"

While she'd never really thought about it, she wouldn't have pegged Thedas to be the sort of place with sunglasses or sun hats or anything quite like that. Some of the hats are fairly large, but those seem to be more in the name of fashion rather than function.

"I must admire a pragmatic mage." Student or no, her own spells and strangeness to her or no- Hermione is a mage in her own right. Or a wizard. That seemed to be the term she preferred, odd as it felt to say.

"I do not know where they came from on the other side of the rift but- yes. A wooden crate of sunglasses. That was what almost struck me." At least some have found them quite useful- a few more even found them stylish or amusing to which Adelaide...had few opinions that were worth offering. "I've been handing them out to scouts- well. Handing out the ones that would be useful."

"Pragmatism is one of my better qualities, I'll admit," Hermione returns with a small smile. Smiles are hard to come by here, but at least hearing that Adelaide is all right is enough to bring one to her face for at least a little while.

"A wooden crate of sunglasses," she echoes softly. "I... I'm not sure what to make of that. They are useful, yes, but an entire crate of them seems a bit like overkill."

"I have learned to not be quite so surprised at what the rifts spit out. Demons were strange enough. People from worlds where there are computers, worlds where magic is hidden but not reviled, where robots wander around with human souls?" The words are strange on her tongue but they seem a marvel. She would give much to see them- but not when there is still so much left to be done, here.

"... robots with human souls?" Hermione asks, clearly unfamiliar with that one. "I wasn't aware such a thing-... but then, I suppose it shouldn't really be a surprise, in the midst of everything else." Shrugging a little, she adds, "But those are all living, sentient things. If inorganic material can also come through on its own, unattached to anyone else, that's something new, isn't it?"

"Something Church spoke of concerning his own world. I've no idea what he could possibly mean but it sounds terribly complicated." And something she is glad to not have to mind in Thedas. "It is not the first time a mere item has fallen through. Papers containing essays from another world slipped through while we were in the Emprise du Lion, but this is the first thing quite so large that I have seen."

Hermione frowns at the mention of Church. He had mentioned, when they'd first met, that one of his bodies had gotten "shanked," but he hadn't explained further and she'd had no idea what to make of it. It might bear asking the next time she sees him.

"Oh?" she asks, immediately interested in the essays from another world. "What sorts of essays? I'd first arrived in Emprise du Lion, and I've met most of the rifters that arrived with me, if not all of them. I might know who they belong to." And she still remembers the mess of things her enchanted bag had made when it had literally blown up upon arrival, so the papers may even be something she'd had in her bag, if they hadn't found the owner yet.

"Historical essays from one of the rifter's worlds. He collected them in the field, they are with him." That is all she truly can say on the matter safely- it is not her story to tell. "Though it did confirm one thing- not all worlds have the same means of writing, even if we are all able to understand one another. Fascinating, truly."

Something else they could look into- when the wardens weren't strange and the desert wasn't trying to kill them. "I think a pony fell through one roughly around the same time."

"Ah-... so long as it got to the right person, then." Though really, there's still a small part of Hermione that would have liked to have read them for herself, but she isn't going to put up a fuss about something like that. It isn't her concern, after all. "You've noticed that, too? I thought it was a bit odd, that I could understand the messages on that message board in Skyhold even though the letters looked foreign. Magic, perhaps?"

But that's quickly pushed aside at the mention of an animal in distress, given the rather upset look that crosses over her face. "A pony? Really? How terrible! I hope it hadn't gotten hurt. Or... well, worse." Because if demons had looked at Hermione and had seen an easy meal, she'd hate to think of what they'd seen upon finding a pony.

"For some they've managed well enough, for others they've had to learn. Perhaps it has to do with how different the alphabets are from one another? The more foreign, the more difficult?" That explains Galadriel's difficulty in the early months, at least. Pinning down anything that could be considered consistent among the rifters is more than a little impossible.

Yet she continues to try.

"Ah- he arrived safely in Skyhold some time afterward, with someone of his world. As far as I am aware, he remained uninjured." Demons, apparently, have no taste for pony.

"Yet it all sounds the same," Hermione muses softly. After a moment's thought, she asks, "What do you call the language we're speaking now? Back home, it's called English, since it originated in England. It's one of the most common tongues in the world."

She stops, then, frowning a little. "The... pony was from someone's world? You mean like a pet of sorts?" The idea that someone can come through with an animal had never occurred to her, and now Hermione's left wondering if it might ever be possible to come across Crookshanks someday. If any animal from home could find their way here, he'd certainly be smart enough.

"Does it?" Some of what she hears rifts speak sounds terribly strange to her- then again Tevinter, Elvhan, and Antivan are all strange to her as well. It is not the most fair comparison for her to make. "This is called Common or Trade's Tongue, it was spread by the Dwarves when their reach extended to most of Thedas though the Deep Roads. Before the Darkspawn.

"I suppose so? I have not asked after it since I learned he is unharmed." Mostly out of academic curiosity, to be honest. "As far as I am aware it is the only living thing that is not a rifter to have fallen through. I suppose it answers the question of whether or not horses dream."

Edited 2016-06-07 00:17 (UTC)

"Aside from accents, that is," Hermione remarks with a shrug. It strikes her as interesting that English - or Common - had evolved from dwarven culture, but it also makes some sort of sense to her. "I wonder how close the parallels really are between languages and cultures. I've heard Scottish, Spanish, why, yours sounds French, but France doesn't exist here. It's all fascinating, really."

The idea of horses dreaming strikes Hermione as amusing, and she lets out a small chuckle before clearing her throat. "So the pony doesn't have a shard in his hoof, then, I take it?" The idea seems preposterous, but given that every other living thing that had come out of the rift had one.... "I suppose he should count himself lucky."

"France?" It is not the first time she's heard that (thank you Church) but it is no less puzzling a second time. "If you wish to make some manner of comparison chart for what worlds have in common and what they do not- it could be a fascinating side project."

After everything else they're already doing. "...You know, I had not thought to check. It would be just the wya of things should it find itself with a sharded hoof."

"I could do that," Hermione muses. "But then it would mostly be a matter of people trusting my word on the similarities and differences, and thinking me biased one way or the other. Unless I got other rifters from similar variations of Earth involved." After all, the French and the English have a strained past - anyone and the English have something of a strained past - and so she wouldn't want to inadvertently cause any silly imaginary rivalries based on things that might be more coincidence than direct parallels.

"Oh, don't say that," Hermione remarks with a small frown. "I'd hate to think of some poor animal being dragged into closing rifts and all that sort of thing."

"Or you could make it a cumulative study where everyone offers what they have found of their worlds to be similar or different here. That would increase the scale considerably but- imagine what we could learn of one another? Points of commonality- they do not make up for the fact you are here instead of home, but they may make both Rifters and those of this world more easy with one another." Which would be invaluable, truly.

"Honestly, I do not think it is something we ought to fear. He seemed perfectly healthy."

"I've been more or less asking that of most rifters, but informally," Hermione admits. "I'll have to check my notes and expound upon that, or else find those people again and ask deeper questions. Which shouldn't be too much trouble, really. I consider most of the ones I've spoken to friends." Or, well, as much as she consider anyone here a friend, given how hard it is for her to really trust people beyond simply being friendly.

"That's good. I hope his owner is managing to take good care of him, even if resources might be different here than it is wherever they might come from."

"Excellent initiative, Hermione." If Adelaide ever had any doubts that Hermione is less studious than she seems (she never has, honestly, and likely never will, but IF), moments like this would lay those fears to rest.

She tries not to look too pleased by the praise, but she can't exactly help it; Adelaide is the closest she really has to a professor here, so she'll likely react that way during the entirety of their working relationship. "Thank you," she tells her with a smile. "I don't know if you've caught wind of it, but there are also going to be regular meetings between rifters, to sort of talk about our concerns and our place in this world. I can always ask them to talk about that there, or else give them each some parchment to write down some differences and similarities, then collect it and make up a chart of sorts to see where the major points lie."

That could work quite well, truly. And I am glad that you are organizing somewhat. There must be more you have in common aside from not being of this world- but all the same you deserve a means to discuss what is happening in here, what we are asking of you, without...oversight? No, that is not the word. Fear of reprisal." That was the phrase.

Hermione falls silent for a few moments before shrugging a shoulder and remarking, "I can't speak for everyone, of course, but I wouldn't say the majority of us are particularly afraid. I haven't heard of any violence befalling rifters simply for being what they are; if anything, my only concern is how quickly some people with whom I'd been having a very nice time will suddenly shut me out upon finding out I'm a rifter. It can be a bit discouraging, but if nothing else, these meetings help us feel as though there's a group to whom we truly belong while we're here."

"I would rather not say such a thing will not come to pass- I know Thedas and how it treats the unknown far too well to think so." But she could hope, perhaps, that it would not. "It is good that you have that. Somewhere to be united in puzzling out our world, somewhere that you have something in common with everyone else."

It can be grounding, that connection. It is something she wishes more people had.

"... it's why I don't like leaving Skyhold, to be honest," she admits after a moment. "As much as I'd like to see some of the towns throughout Thedas and see just how different daily life differs from what I'm used to, the idea of going somewhere and having people try to run me out because they noticed my hand or because I was forced to use magic to try and help someone.... No, it's easier to live openly and honestly, and unfortunately, Skyhold is the only place where I can really do that, with varying results."

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OPEN: The Western Approach

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