faderift | THE SEAS SHALL RISE & DEVOUR, Part I

THE SEAS SHALL RISE & DEVOUR, Part I

WHO: Any Inquisition members + all rifters
WHAT: A semi-involuntary tropical island vacation
WHEN: Kingsway 20 onward
WHERE: The sea and an island east of Rivain
NOTES: OOC post.

I. THE JOURNEY

Two ships depart from Kirkwall on the morning tide, sturdy vessels crewed by veteran sailors--but a mere skeleton crew, as it turns out, or so a few of them would have you believe. They're prone to assigning tasks to anyone who happens not to look busy, shoving ropes into hands without a care for station or experience, barking out instructions and expecting to be obeyed. With plenty of work to do the journey seems quick, and besides the unexpected chores it's otherwise smooth sailing through the Waking Sea. Some claim to've spotted the Windline Marcher one night, but it could just as easily have been clouds on the horizon, and that's it for excitement until the ships round the island of Brandel's Reach and out into open ocean, the ever-present coastline finally falling away behind.

The sky is bigger out there and the waves are too, especially when a storm strikes a few days out, dark clouds and driving rain sending any inexperienced sailors below decks to wait it out. The worst of it being the pitch of the ship rolling up and crashing down the massive waves, and the way the hold fills with the stench of people being sick. But the next morning dawns calm and clear and with no lasting damage done.

The group is bound for a desert island, drawn on maps with a big deep cove like a bite chomped out the side it, and a narrow channel through the surrounding reefs to reach it. That's the only moment of true tension on the voyage: as soundings are taken every few feet and the helmsmen adjust and readjust in response, carefully threading the needle to avoid running aground on ship-killing banks of sharp coral.

Both ships make it, and anchor offshore in the bay in the sheltering lee of a cliff, safe from future storms. The first party ashore reports back that Qunari are present in the area, but while they've displayed a palpable wariness, hostility does not seem their aim today, and they retreat back up to the hills above the beach as Inquisition forces arrive. Anyone able-bodied is tasked with assisting in unloading, and those less hale with helping the quartermaster's assistants track the process to make sure nothing goes astray between hold and shore.

Camp is to be a collection of tents: large ones beneath which makeshift facilities for cooking, eating, and working are set up, and many small ones designed to hold 2-4 Inquisition agents. They're still hammering stakes into the sand and tying off ropes to the sturdier palms when a shout goes up, though anyone present who possesses an anchor shard will not need to be told: a rift has opened nearby, a couple hundred yards out into the bay, a knot of shapes splashing about it. Better hope the rifters can swim.

II. ARRIVAL

Rifters

You were asleep--deeply or fitfully, for the last time or just resting your eyes for a moment-- and then you were not. And wherever you were was not, anymore, replaced by nothing but the sensation of falling, tumbling into endless, bottomless nothing. If this were still a dream, you would wake before you hit the ground. You can't die in a dream, they say. In some worlds.

In this world, when the afterimage left by a flare of too-bright, greenish light fades, you will find yourself at sea. Not metaphorically (though perhaps that too) but literally: dropped into what is unmistakably the ocean, from the salt in your mouth and the incessant slosh of waves into your face, the squawk of gulls circling overhead. You had better start treading water.

Thankfully, if you can keep your head above the waves long enough to make a quick inspection, it turns out that land is in sight, only a few hundred yards off. Unfortunately, between you and it is a strange slash of greenish light. It sticks up out of the water but seems to continue beneath as well, turning the otherwise-turquoise waters the same pale greenish shade of a man gone seasick. The cluster of demons emerging from the rift are tall, spindly stick-things with too many eyes who flail about like stickbugs dropped in pond, but use the long reach of their arms to attack. Some are hunched and hooded with no eyes at all, their shrouds sodden and draped in seaweed. Others are mere wisps of greenish light that float easily over the surface. While you might get the impression they are as surprised as you to find themselves in the drink, any humor that might bring is probably outweighed by how angry it seems to make them.

If that were not enough to contend with, there is also the narrow splinter of light the same sickly green as whatever brought you here that now glows out of the palm of your left hand. It aches, a bone-deep pain that gnaws even through all the distractions. But there is some good news: from the beach over yonder boats are launching. Perhaps they'll save you.

Rescue

As if rescuing rifters from drowning and demons weren't hard enough work, all the commotion in the water inevitably draws the attention of the local predators. But what arrives isn't the usual eel or ray or even a shark: it's something much bigger and much...redder?

Slinking through the water comes the flash of a fin and the glint of a scaly back, so quick and sinuous it's hard to say how many of the sea serpents there are. As wide around as the circle of a man's arms, with snapping jaws lined with an unnatural number of curving teeth, but what should be smooth snakey curves are instead jagged with the jut of brilliant red crystals that catch the light and make the sea seem to be already splattered with blood. They're studded all over its body, making any even glancing blow carry twice the danger: there's not just the stunning force of the strike to worry about or the possibility of being coiled in a crushing grip, but also being sliced and gored by red lyrium.

And the serpents aren't alone. While all eyes are on the churning water and the incredible sight of demons battling it out with sea monsters (because everything in that water is fair game to the beasts, not just the Inquisition), one sailor is suddenly plucked out his boat and carried screaming down into the depths by a great, crystal-encrusted tentacle. Cleansing runes are effective, but the monsters are canny enough to avoid capture, falling back into deeper water before attacking again. The arrival of a red lyrium-tainted kraken is just about the final straw for the ship's crew, and after seeing the monsters come dangerously close to cleverly flipping one of the longboats, they insist that the Inquisition row back for shore.

If flight is hard to stomach, consider it a tactical retreat: in shallower water the great bulks of the monsters become a liability, thrashing about among the rocks as they try to give chase. Escape back to the beach is possible, and surely the safer course, but it may be possible to lure one of the sea serpents into a tide pool or to beach itself up on the sands. The rest continue to prowl the bay, visible circling the ships at anchor and making any return impossible for the time being.

III. STRANDED

Once everyone is safely on land and out of the monsters' reach—after any wounds have been seen to, with particular attention given to any that may have been exposed to red lyrium—it's obvious that there's no way to leave for the time being. There isn't much to do but to try to make the most of things and try to accomplish what you came here for.

Some of the team will be tasked with continuing to set up camp. Now that the stay might be longer than a single night, it needs to be a little sturdier. The beach and cove are protected from harsh winds and exposure by a half-circle of rocky cliffs, and the Qunari communicate in grunts and one-word answers that large predators make sleeping in the jungle itself a bad idea. They've only been here a few days (that much can be gleaned despite their reticence), but some of the untamed jungle has been cut through to make clear paths to fresh water and fruit sources.

Penetrating the rest of the island is slow, difficult work—though magic may make it easier. The goal is near the top of the formerly volcanic peak in the island's center, but hacking through the growth to create a path may abruptly become a waste of time when it gives way to a steep drop-off or an equally steep incline and forces everyone to double back and try another route. If there was ever a clear road to the top, it's gone now, grown over during centuries of abandonment. But there are signs of past habitation: the lower portions of the island are spotted with crumbling ruins, chunks of moss-coated wall rising out of the forest floor, the occasional pillar looming up amongst the trees. Some have architecture and faded murals that are distinctly elven. Others, more recent, are clearly human, including a statue of Andraste in the center of a clearing. Others are harder to identify.

The predators the Qunari were trying to warn everyone about turn out to be real--they're large, jet-black cats about the size of a height of a mabari but longer, with short manes, near-scaley skin, and horns almost like the Qunari's. And before anyone gets any ideas about keeping one, they're fiercely territorial—always likely to try to eat your face, but doubly so if you come near their adorable kittens. Feeding them may buy a moment or two for escape, but nothing is going to win them over.

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Perhaps hiding in a lowtown inn for several weeks has helped the gossip, perhaps it's made it worse. Cade has nowhere to go from here but up, and he's more appreciative than Araceli could ever know for her casual, amiable company.
"No," he admits with a shake of his head, peering at the note with a useless shrug. Maybe a squid did write it. "Just... just when I was a boy, and then twice with the Templars." Going to and from Kirkwall from Ferelden, naturally.

Luckily for Cade, someone else stepped in with what he'd been involved in and Araceli had her own affair or two to wade into. Templar personal business isn't the safest or smartest thing to go poking your nose in too deep when you're a rifter no matter how long you've been here (maybe even being here too long muddies the waters, says something about comfort, familiarity, that others might wish to disabuse any of such notions.)

"I think...I think we're looking for vegetables - no one's going to care save the cook if we take the wrong thing up, and ship's biscuits." Half a mutter to herself because reading it belowdecks is going to be a pain. "My father is a captain, I used to go sailing with him sometimes if the trips weren't too long - did you enjoy it? Coming to Thedas, I met people who hadn't even seen the sea. I couldn't imagine that. Skyhold was very hard for all that time so far from it."

Cade begins to rummage for something resembling vegetables, screwing his face up in concentration as he listens to Araceli. "...I... don't know," he admits, retrieving a sad, broken carrot, and holding it up for her inspection.
"I suppose... coming back across from Ferelden was nice. But the other times, I..." He digs around and finds another one, this carrot looking a little better. "....I was afraid of what I'd find on the other side."

These are the supplies the Inquisition gets? Xabi, Ezequiel and probably Rhiannon need to get pulled in on this one to make sure she knows if there's a reason behind it on the naval end. As it is, she huffs out a little frustated noise and her smile pulls tight. "It'll be chopped up where it's going but that one's going in the maybe. Who was in charge of any of this?"

Waste not want not but is it too much to ask that hungry bellies have good food to go in them? Apparently so, welcome to Kirkwall and life from here on out it seems. She goes for the crate of potatoes. Hoping for potatoes. Not black slime. Or potatoes sprouting new and interesting forms of life from themselves.

"For us, the journey is more important than the destination." That's seldom if ever the case in Thedas in what she's managed to experience so far from meeting other people. It's hard to know what to say around Cade sometimes, never wishing to upset him but not wanting to insult him by tiptoeing so she tries anyway. "When I teach people to fall from heights, I have to teach them not to brace themselves for the hurts they think are going to come because that's how they hurt themselves. And in a way, they're living it twice if it happens. Anticipating it and then whatever comes. But...there are things here I've seen and heard that even with all my practice I'd find it hard to stick to."

Rivain sticks out. Rescuing the mages from Dairsmuid had been a nightmare and that had been when it was all over. She doesn't know what it'd be like to live with how anything was. She can't pretend that she does, it's insulting to everyone that did.

"Sorry," Cade says, for no reason, since it's not like he packed the shitty carrots himself. He sets them aside and keeps looking for what they need, a little more intent now on finding it.
"What sort of things?" he asks, intrigued by her line of thinking.

"That's not your fault, it's fine." Not wanting to upset him or seem as if she's ignoring it, Araceli's not sure what way to go with the apology. It doesn't sound bad but it could sound better.

She pauses, thinks about it more and pops her left thumb in the dark quiet of the hold. "Emprise du Lion and everyone locked in cages. Dairsmuid where they made a last stand and tried to keep their ways and died for it. Halamshiral where they were burned inside their own homes or were cut down all for the sake of a throne. Knowing that people need to take lyrium after I was made to take it knowing what it did to me and what it's done and what it still does and will do. And those are bigger things. Not what each person lives with when they carry it all with them, all the time, all the hurt and the pain because it's just expected of them, because the world said once 'this is your lot, this is what you do'." How unfair all of it is and it hurts, lodges somewhere bright and sharp as the shard in her palm when she thinks about it too long and maybe Cade didn't expect this answer, maybe it isn't helpful to him or to her but here it is: it isn't fair for anyone to live their lives the way most people have no choice but to.

Cade doesn't seem to mind Araceli's response, his apology being compulsory; he barely registers it happening.
His face slowly turns ashen as she describes all the things she's seen, but he feels a strange kinship wash over him. Some nights he fears he'll never sleep again, and some days are just as bad for functionality. One can't just see things like that; they haunt a person forever after.

"...lyrium isn't so bad," he says, with a weak smile, as though trying to assuage Araceli's fears. "Once you build a resistance to it, I mean. It's bad the first bunch of times you take it."

Templars take lyrium. Mages take lyrium. Mages don't seem to need it the way Templars do from what she's gathered so far but it still troubles her and it's easier to keep going, to toss out a few bad potatoes instead of addressing it right away because she remembers. Or remembers some of it. How her mind slipped.

"Should it be like that?" A loaded question when they're on a ship headed for an island with only so much space to avoid one another and every possibility they might have to work alongside each other during their time there but she remembers how that felt. "It's different to training with a blade. You get sore, you pick up skill and muscle, the skin changes in places from where you handle the weapon all the time but you put the blade down long enough you forget. You get soft. Your hand and arm ache when you pick it back up. I don't understand why people are given a thing that would cause them pain unless it's on the path to healing." Her voice softens towards the end since some things doctors do aren't pleasant (setting bones, stitching, even things that make you throw up) but it stops. It stops and you get better than you were before you needed those things. Lyrium doesn't work that way, that much she does know.

Cade has never thought about it that way, or at least has never let it become that dark of a subject in his mind, despite common sense stating that it... really is. He hesitates in his work, staring into the crate. He still has to take lyrium, even though he's not a Templar anymore. The addiction remains, now with no purpose.

"....I don't know," he admits, more defeatedly than he intends, and drums his fingers on the edge of the crate a few times, made uncomfortable by the thought process. "Because it helps us fight mages." A pause. "...helped." His face falls.

She gives him time, finds an empty crate to start moving over enough potatoes to take up for dinner before sealing up the lid on the box again to keep any of the damp out - the ship has at least one cat somewhere with eyes glittering in the dark for catching rats so that's less of a worry in her mind than them getting wet and rotting into nothing before they get where they're going. So he really isn't part of the Order now, the little bits of gossip really were true and her face falls. To be part of a thing then to be without it...she felt that way in Thedas at first, rudderless, attempting to chart a course with her gut and never knowing what she was steering into each time.

"It seems a very high price to pay for the rest of your life. We make decisions when we're young," she rolls up a sleeve in the dark, black ink standing out on her forearm with the thin scar and bump down by her wrist where she clipped herself falling off a roof and broke it badly. "And then we live with them for the rest of our lives. But we still have the rest of our lives. To decide what we do. Right now, Corypheus has a lot of mages of his own. So we need people who know how to fight them to teach us who don't how to do it better, in the sparring ring or with instructions, things mages do, things we can do. Things someone who made a choice as a younger man knows that a lot of us don't."

(Would it have helped, knowing how to fight mages better when a group of them went to seal rifts at Craintellier? Maybe not but it might help the next group never have to live through that.)

Working quietly as Araceli speaks, Cade simply listens at first, trying not to let his thoughts careen in the direction he knows they will, staying momentarily grounded at least by the roughness of the tubers he's holding. "I don't..." he begins, is silent for several embarrassed seconds, and more quietly continue, "...I don't know that it was my choice." Part of him wants to stay ever-loyal to the Templars.
Another part knows he was meant to be one before he could even read. It was a life chosen for him, albeit one he never resisted.
"...and I won't be of much use to anyone. Unarmed." Perhaps permanently. Feeling that he's said too much, Cade quickly shakes his head and gathers the potatoes a little faster. Stupid.

"Thedas makes a lot of choices for people that are older than they are. Or their parents. Or older again."

Her life at home wasn't a noble girl's life. A common girl's life. But not the same sort of life she might have had if she'd been born somewhere in Thedas, even if those places had been Antiva or Rivain. Fewer choices or chances, not nearly so charmed, not nearly so safe and loved and wanted as she's been to chase after the things that she wants. All her choices have been hers. The hand at her back has been there ready to catch her or to hold if she's been afraid, she's never even needed the nudge to do something. (Could have done with being held back perhaps but if the sea guided her as it guides all of them then she landed safely each time, if not always well.)

"Cade," she stops what she's doing to cross to him, hand outstretched but respectfully not touching since she doesn't know him well. "There are ways that aren't the blade. Tactics that people have to stop and listen to. Someone who has to be there at the other side of the ring to say 'no, you pivot on this step so they can't attack'. You have a whole life. You have a whole life and time to make a choice. To be around so many people doing different things to stop, and look, and listen, and try, and experience all of it. Everyone has an insight and opinion that's needed if this is going to work. No one is useless, Cade, no one."

Cade enjoys the status of nobility without any of the actual perks, which he technically gave up to join the Templars. Now that everything's out of wack, who knows? But he's never going to claim it.
He freezes when Araceli approaches and extends her hand, staring at it for several long seconds before he gingerly accepts it and gets to his feet. He listens silently, looking at the floor as she speaks, finding the words as uncomfortable as he feels in his own skin. These are all things he knows, logically, but can't seem to fit into them.
"I'm..." Cade begins, but trails off, blushing slightly. He's so, so awkward, tongue-tied at all the worst times. Say something, you idiot, anything. "...I'm all right at finding potatoes."

Every single one of them comes with some sort of weight about them, the question is only how much they're asked to carry, how hard it makes life again.

Helping Cade up is difficult, Araceli staggers back a little under the sudden reminder if yes that's a full grown man who spent years with swords and armour unlike you.

"Beleth," the name follows a moment of hesitation but Cade's need is more important than old confidences, "has spoken of you fondly. I don't know how many other people we know overlap I'd imagine many but Beleth has strong opinions. She's forthright. You've been good with the knots too so you ever want to come down to the docks when we get back just let me know. And if you want to cook the potatoes you might find," she smiles again hoping it helps, "I always like cooking."

He's even lighter than normal, on account of being nervous and underfed, but it likely makes no difference to Araceli, who is tiny no matter what.
Reassured by Beleth's name, the corner of Cade's mouth twitches upward into a faint smile. He nod to the rest, blushing slightly, his usual awkward response to receiving a compliment, but he at least takes it without falling apart.
"Thank you," he says after a time, in a voice so quiet it's near a whisper, "I might."

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THE SEAS SHALL RISE & DEVOUR, Part I

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