OPEN ↠ FALSE GODS, GREAT DEMONS (PART I)

[faderifting]

WHO: Time Travelers & Future Kirkwall Residents
WHAT: Time travel, captures, escapes, explosions.
WHEN: ALTERNATE FUTURE, Early Cloudreach 9:48
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES:.This is the first plot log for False Gods, Great Demons, specifically for the time travel team and adjacent plot efforts. An open post for general Darkest Timeline adventures will be posted separately! A plotting post specifically for the escape from Kirkwall can be found here.

It's been over a year since the village of Haven was burned, ransacked, and buried beneath snow and ice--a year for the snow to melt and leave behind blackened, rotting wood for a new year's snow to fall over. The stone walls and Chantry stand, but the rest of the village is a jagged scar, and the path up the mountain to the Temple of Sacred Ashes still shows signs of the battle against the Breach: toppled carts, abandoned crates, a broken bridge.

Given the debris, obstacles, and lingering demon-infested tears in the Veil, it takes the better part of a day for even a well-armed team of trained fighters to make the trek from Haven to the Temple. Despite that, there's been a steady stream of pilgrims to Andraste's final resting place--and now the site of the Herald's death. More still wait on the road and outside the entrance to the Temple ruins, guarded now by Inquisition soldiers until the recent deaths within the walls have been investigated.

Save the wind and quiet crunch of bones being gnawed on, the Temple itself is silent. The molten-ash corpses that were once outside the walls, contorted from their final moments of agony, have been removed and given rites--but the icy dust beneath the band's boots is still partly bone and burned flesh, and patches of red lyrium still resist efforts at removal.

The bone-crunching comes from down the main staircase and around a corner. Five corpses are slumped around a campfire, dressed for warmer weather, preserved by the cold somewhat but withered and too decayed to have died within the week, let alone overnight while no one else was looking--and with one arm currently being chewed on by a bear while two others amble nearby.

Stopping them from eating the evidence is a good idea, probably. And perhaps as the effort to chase them away from the carrion gets underway, in the midst of the chaos and roaring, someone will notice one of the bandits splayed out across the icy stone floor. She's as withered as the rest of them, save one outstretched arm that's still fleshy-plump and pink where it falls outside some invisible line.

But if anyone does notice, it's too late. There's a flare of light that shifts quickly from rift-green to a blinding white, a white-noise roar and a gust of windy force that propels everyone forward to--

Exactly where they were, except a few yards to the left, and in the last two seconds the few stubborn scraps of red lyrium on the Temple walls have crawled and expanded to form whole walls of crystal. For a moment it's silent again, save the wind. The one of the bears--the only one carried along with the group--lets out a bewildered, irritable roar. Beyond the walls there's a shout, then another, then too many for it to be only the handful of Inquisition soldiers posted outside the Temple.

Seconds later, they're surrounded.

Comments

[tactical_alert]

He'd seen Red Templars and knew something of their ugly progression even before Wren had introduced him to the scribbled madness of the journal. He knows what monsters they become. He's not that. He has to hold on to the idea that for as far as he's fallen, he is no monster. Just a quiet man that sinks into the overwhelming song like a brooding drunkard listening to a tavern bard.

"It isn't just the lyrium. They are not so kind. The physical punishments can be ignored if your mind is in the right place and the Maker goes with you, but--" His skin is already pale enough, but whatever colour is left fades away. "They can find effective methods. I haven't given them anything, though," he says quickly. "Nothing...that I can recall. At least in that way I can suggest I've kept my pride."

And kept the others safe. He can scream and Chant all he wants, but so long as he doesn't utter a single syllable to be used against the Inquisition, he's won.

"Aleron is kept in solitary. Frustrates the guards, I know. Reaching him...would risk the entire operation. It might be a suicide run," he adds with a look that flickers into something akin to amusement, wheezes out an almost-laugh.

[limier]

The grim twitch of a cheek at that. Literal Gallows humour.

"There may be a chance, depending on how the charges blow."

Pride is what all the good Chantry boys call integrity. It's nothing she doesn't know, couldn't guess, but it still hurts to hear. Hurts the same way it did to hear that Saoirse knew the cells. Hurts the way it did once upon waking, to hear the news from Val Royeaux —

She can't fix any of it. Not for him, not for the others. Nothing she says, no steady glances or fraternal jostling are going to change six months of torture. Suffering cannot be taken back, only spawns more of itself, until done.

And she can see this done, one way or another. She can see this done. Pragmatism and duty and fear engage in a brief mental fistfight. Duty wins, as it always has,

"If there is, once the researchers are out, we'll take it."

At that point, it poses less a risk to the group. There'll still be muscle with them, and fewer mages in their path. She'll be less necessary.

[tactical_alert]

Their time is running out, and this talking does exhaust him, even if it's...it's good to have an honest conversation with an ally. He licks his lips, though his mouth is about as dry. Considers her in a quick glance.

"This hurts you." Not a question. She is a Templar surrounded by red. "Being near me hurts you. I don't have any answers to how it's possible." Maybe being near Cassandra, by her side, even after she had apparently contracted it, made him more susceptible. She didn't know how it could be, and neither did he, nor does he know now. "If I could reach inside and rip it out, I would." He still might be able to, when the time comes, just through a far more direct method.

"I wish you and the others had not come back at all, to see this. We fight--we will always fight--but this is stalling the inevitable. It will only get worse from here."

[limier]

It's darkest before the dawn, sure. It's also pretty dark at the bottom of a well. To say which this might be?

"It will get worse," She agrees, an exhale that just turns into a cough. It sort of ruins the dramatic effect. She shakes her head, continues. "But I'm not sorry we're here. Would that we had been sooner."

Whether they can change this or not, it's still their fight. She considers the information, flips through it like so many stolen pages. No answers. Not yet. Not from Inessa, and not from the Seekers directly.

"When you burn it," The lyrium. A practical question. There's little point in addressing the rest: Of course this hurts her. All of it does, half the fortress is shot through with red rock veins. She's been scared shitless since the first ambush. "Does it burn you too?"