( closed ) player plot: the stars go waltzing

[eviscerates]

WHO: Adelaide, Araceli, Avery, Bellamy, Bruce, Ciri, Cosima, Daenerys, Jamie, Korrin, Lexa, Martel, Merrill, Ruby, Sabine, Teren.
WHAT: catch all log; the capture of shardbearers, their rescue, and related shenanigans.
WHEN: Gently timey wimey for flexibility, Team Rescue arrives at the outpost on the 10th.
WHERE: Orlais/Nevarra borders (roughly halfway between the Fields of Ghislain and Trevis), and then a Creepy Place.
NOTES: Log for the missing shardbearers player plot; ooc here & here. Only the travel threads for teams one and two are going up for now, the rest will go up on Friday :]b And to clarify - when I say party style, what I mean is subthread to your hearts content!
WARNINGS: HORROR THEMES. Abduction, experimentation/torture, forced ingestion of lyrium, implied past deaths/murder, violence.

SPEEDY LINKS

• TEAM ONE: travel to Craintellier
• TEAM ONE: rift two attempt & Venatori attack
• TEAM ONE: dungeons
• TEAM ONE: escape attempt — Cosima, Jamie & Lexa only
• TEAM TWO: travel to Craintellier
• TEAM TWO: post rift investigation — Adelaide, Bellamy & Sabine, Bruce, Korrin & Teren, Ciri & Merrill
• TEAM TWO: take the outpost — Attack & Distract & Stealthy & Stealy
• TEAM TWO: regroup & into the dungeons — plus a Lexa-shaped guest star
• ALL: finding your shardbearers
• ALL: boss fight
• ALL: epilogue & return to Skyhold — tba

click for bigger version. full map of Thedas here.

East of Perendale and south of Trevis, next to a river's winding course, there lies the bones of a fortress. It is an old and almost forgotten place, a dramatic, clawed seeming thing reaching up into the sky, harsh against the the rolling hills.

It is an ancient place, dating back to 660TE, a testament to an Empire suffering after civil war and grasping to restore its wealth and influence after it had been so shaken. It stands as a memory of grandeur, rather than an icon of it, and bears the marks of devastation and scarring that so much of the land suffered during the First Blight. It was all but abandoned thereafter, host only to the desperate and the greedy, and never for long. Once ornate mosaics now only hold flecks of gold, flakes that stubbornly resisted the hands of looters trying to pry them away. Other colours, reds, whites, greys and blacks, they all remain.

The site was chosen for its riches, sitting atop a mine that once held immense wealth, seams of gold that would bring wealth back into the Empire and help restore stability. Opulence, the central Tevinter staple (aside from slavery and blood magic, some might say).

But they dug too deep, and when the First Blight came so too did the darkspawn.

It has a new master, now, and he serves the Elder One. Parts of this stronghold may be in ruins now, but remember: it is not what lies on the surface that counts, but what lurks beneath it.


AD VICTORIAM, AD GLORIA.

Comments

[unsullies]

The alley demons wouldn't get much from her wallet, honestly, but she would appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.

"It is," comes the reply, after a pause. The woman looks familiar, though no name immediately comes to mind. "Though... Well, I did cross the ocean once, but I don't remember it. I was an infant."

And that doesn't count, right?

"It's... really beautiful," Dany decides. "Though I feel for those who have gotten sick."

[thecookery]

And her name not coming to mind is more or less the way she likes to keep it. She does her job in the kitchens and avoids all this silly socializing when she can. The fact that she's started this conversation at all is surely a sign of the strange mood Avery's in at the moment.

She snorts at the comment about the sick folk though. "Well, they can always turn back around once we hit shore and have another look-see, if they're not too distracted. I've never been, but I've heard this city's a massive one."

[unsullies]

"What else have you heard of it?" As a Rifter, her own experiences and knowledge of the cities within Thedas are based almost entirely on hearsay, except for the small pieces she's seen herself. Skyhold and the Frostbacks. Halamshiral. The road that stretched in between.

"You are from Thedas, then?" she asks, in addition, but the question is easily answered. Avery has no glowing shard embedded into her palm.

[thecookery]

"Yeah, from Denerim," Avery answers anyway, nodding. "Never been this far away from it though."

Then she smirks a little. "But Cumberland... It's Nevarra, yeah? So they've surely got their mad death-worshipers building statues of their dead grandfathers and such in every space in the city that's not already taken by somebody else's grandfather.

"Also, I've heard they keep the mages in Cumberland in a palace fit for a king. That half the place is made of solid gold or something like that, but they call it a 'college' instead of a castle. Though who knows what the state of it is now, with the war going on."

She pauses to think of any of the other rumors she ever heard off of the traders who passed through Denerim. "There was some other stuff, I think, but it's been a while. Something about dwarves, maybe? They've got a whole lot of them or they had them build part of the city or something like that. I don't remember."

[unsullies]

"What is it like?" she asks, curious. She's only heard bits and pieces about the great capital of Ferelden, but imagines it to be like Kings Landing in Westeros (or, what she's heard of the place, anyway, having never been there).

"They value their mages better there than in these areas, then." She hasn't heard much positivity about the mages in these parts of the world... save for from the mages themselves. Being a bleeding heart for the 'oppressed,' the Targaryen finds that she sides, at least within her own mind, with the mages more often than not.

"Dwarves are very different in Thedas than... where I came from," she explains with a little smile. Of course, they are treated much, much more cruelly in her world, and they are far less common.

[thecookery]

Avery takes her time figuring out how to answer and address the girl's comments. She's not often asked for her opinion on things like that, or much of anything that isn't her work, really. "Denerim's a wild place," she answers eventually. "A stinking maze of districts and alleys it's easy to get lost in and get your purse stolen if you didn't grow up there. But it's full of people and full of life. Not so much as it was ten years ago, mind you, but it's getting there."

She stretches a little, popping her neck. "As for dwarves and mages, I've met my share, in passing. But most of both have always been kept away from folk like me, locked up in their towers or down in their underground kingdoms. Until this rebellion started, that is. Now there's children with lightning bolts in their hands running wild and burning half of Ferelden down, while templars panic and start executing anyone they think might have smiled at a mage in a tavern six years ago. Who knows? Maybe the dwarves'll follow suit and start popping up out of the ground like weeds. Weeds with axes.

"Suppose it could be different in Nevarra though. I hear the whole country's run by some secret circle of necromancers, and they've graveyards the size of cities to raise an army from if they need to."

[unsullies]

Denerim sounds enough like some of the Free Cities that Dany nods mutely, listening. It makes her think of being a girl in Pentos, clinging to her brother's clothes as they wandered the streets.

"Templars and mages," she repeats thoughtfully. "I imagine it will take more than a single rebellion to change their dynamic." If half of what she's heard of both groups is true, that is. "Do the dwarves quarrel with anyone in that same way?"

With the elves, perhaps, or even the humans? She hasn't heard as such, but it never hurts to ask.

"Nevarra... is still mostly a mystery to me," Dany states. "I haven't met anyone from there yet, I think, and have heard very little." Though, an army of the dead? Makes her think too easily of Drogo, alive, but out of her reach.

[thecookery]

"One of the heads of the Inquisition is from Nevarra actually. Seeker Pentaghast? Scary strong, that one." There's a hint of a smile as she says this though. Goodness, those arms.

Avery smiles a lot less though when she goes back to the previous question and answers, "Dwarves though... The ones the dwarves are always fighting are the darkspawn." It's been a decade, but she still remembers her own encounter with the darkspawn. She can't imagine what it would be like to be at war with them constantly. "I don't know how much you've heard about them, but they're monsters, plain and simple. They want to kill us all and destroy the whole bloody world, and though they come to the surface sometimes, they mostly live underground. Same as the dwarves.

"So they've been fighting for hundreds, thousands of years. Something like that. Most of the dwarven kingdom has already been destroyed, but there's still a couple of fortresses down there holding them back."

[unsullies]

"Oh - " Dany hesitates, then offers an almost sheepish smile (almost). "I... met her, actually, in Halamshiral. She told me about the elves..."

Dany hadn't been particularly polite, given her relative indignation about the alienage, but Seeker Pentaghast had been... informative. Level-headed.

"I haven't heard much," she admits, "but if the dwarves are fighting to keep the... darkspawn from reaching the surface, then I am grateful."

They have enough problems without more monsters, don't they?

[thecookery]

"She's good people," Avery says simply and leaves it at that. She doesn't know much about Cassandra personally, but she has a lot of respect and gratitude for her.

"And I think helping us is a nice little extra, but mostly the dwarves are just fighting for their homes. They don't like the surface for weird, dwarfy religion reasons I don't really get, but it's the only place they have left to go if they can't hold their ground where they are. So that's what they've done."

She runs a hand through her hair as she pushes down some unpleasant memories that threaten to surface and says, "If you really want to know more, I'd ask a Grey Warden. Dealing with darkspawn is their whole thing."

[unsullies]

Darkspawn. Grey Wardens. Dany nods, making mental notes of the advice.

"I can understand their keeping to themselves," Dany remarks of the dwarves, looking out at the horizon. "It isn't easy to abandon the old ways, or to leave home."

If they've lived underground nearly forever, for religious reasons or otherwise, then it can't be easy or appealing to come to the surface where they are likely not treated with the same regard as humans.