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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Fern might appreciate the shirtless aspect of the good will if she were older, and if he were not a gross shem. Still, if she squints and tilts her head, she can kind of see what makes some of the other women she's been around titter about him. Kind of.

Oh--he's asking for help, isn't he?

"You've got to move over first," she informs him smartly as she marches across the sandy beach to take hold of whatever this sturdy thing is--one of the poles for one of the tents?--and holds it in place with a fair amount of certainty. She squints up at the top of it, eyeballing where it is supposed to fasten into place against another plank of wood, and starts to angle it where it ought to be. She can't quite bear the weight of it alone, but she's got a good idea of how to align it.

When Fern appears, Simon feels suddenly a bit indecent, though he's far from the only man who's stripped down in the humid heat, and there's nothing wrong with it anyway. It's the principle of the thing. Fortunately, she gives him plenty of distraction.

"I'll move over for someone who knows what they're--"

Oh. Well. Shut him up, then. "--all right, I guess I may as well stand aside." He shifts to give her enough room, providing the steadying strength now as she lines everything up as it needs to be.

"Picked this up on the farm, did you?"

"Yep," Fern says without looking back at him just yet. She squints in concentration until she's able to get the wooden joints properly lined up. "See that bit?" she adds, pointing out the bit in question. "You're tall--pull it down so it's snug here."

Once that's done, she's more or less through bossing him about for the time being. Dusting some sand and wood bits off her hands, she straightens her shoulders and lifts her chin, evidently quite pleased with herself for having sound something to do around here to prove that she's useful to someone. "You have to get the shelters up right quick when moving the sheep to new pastures," she tells him at last, as an explanation for her peculiar skillset. "I just--learned as I went, I guess."

She tugs her (slightly ruined) wool sweater around herself and looks with some uncertainty towards the new rifters that were pulled from the sea. "I've never seen elves like that before," she confesses to him quietly.

"As you say, milady." Deadpan sass aside, she's far more help than he'd expected to find when he asked, and the shelter begins rapidly to take solid, steady shape.

He's fond of putting things together and working with his hands on his own time, a self-taught hobby he doesn't often get to indulge on this scale, but he doesn't have the level of practical experience she does. It isn't something he'd ever needed to do as a templar, and he hadn't been nearly so confined as the mages he guarded. He has the uncomfortable and nagging thought that she wouldn't be the cheerful little fount of practical knowledge that she is, that they need right now, if everything back in Ansburg had gone as it should have.

He follows her gaze toward the new arrivals, glad that someone else is saying what he's been thinking about them. "Aye, they're some big bastards," he concurs. "I don't like when anyone's that much taller than me. It's just unnatural. If it was just the one of them, I suppose it would just be a fluke, but--that's just what elves must be like, in their lands. There's a place out there beyond the rifts with qunari-sized elves. Boggles the mind, doesn't it?"

"Bet shems wouldn't mess with us so much if we all looked like that," Fern mutters, then gives Simon a sideways look. "Sorry," she adds, and she is... a little bit. He's one of the Good Ones.

Once the shelter is up, she tosses herself down onto the ground beneath it and tugs her knees up to her chest, still watching those strange elves with fascination wrought across her face. "Where are they from?" she asks, because Simon seems to know.

The initial assertion gets a noncommittal "mmm" out of him, and the apology an awkward but appreciative shrug. "S'all right," he says. "I know it's...a thing." Ever eloquent and appropriate when it comes to matters of racism, is Simon. He tries. Myr's certainly schooled him firmly enough.

He wedges himself into the structure alongside her to get out of the sun, propping himself on his elbows because sitting up without smacking his head is a bit much to hope for. "I don't know exactly," he says. "I don't think anyone knows what brings the rifters here or how. They're not all from the same place, I know that much, and I suppose we can conclude by now that they aren't demons or spirits, so they can't come from the Fade. I never thought there could be worlds even further beyond us than that."

She budges over to make more room under the shelter for him--he certainly takes up a lot of it, being barge-sized and broad shouldered--and listens to the rest of what he says. The larger implications don't quite reach her; she doesn't have the schooling or the experience to offer back anything approaching intelligent in response.

She can ask some uncomfortable questions, though. "I wonder if the Maker exists where they are," she says thoughtlessly. Great thought to voice to a Templar.

Simon would concur sincerely, though, ever appreciative of an opportunity to discuss Chantry rhetoric or explore a theological dilemma. And this is an awfully thorny one, to be sure. He hasn't even heard it speculated on much.

"Well, He must," he says excitedly. "They had to have been created somehow, and there's nobody but the Maker who has that power. 'You who made worlds out of nothing,' we call Him. If we didn't know about those other worlds to set them down in the Chant, that's our mortal ignorance, not any reflection on Him. But there's plenty who'd disagree with me, I know. I've a friend who's been wondering if, theologically speaking, rifters have souls like we do at all. He knows the Chant as well as anyone I've known, and he's a mage besides, so familiar with the Fade into the bargain, but, well. I don't know as I buy into his theories exactly."

"Right," she says, but she says it in the kind of voice that one adopts when maybe they're not completely sure they agree with what they've just heard, not truthfully. She drops her eyes to her hand and rubs her thumb a bit against the anchor in her palm; it's beginning to hurt, but she can't tell if that's because they've been too long away from Kirkwall, or because she's injured herself some other way.

Fern sends Simon a sidelong glance and chews her lower lip. Surely she can voice her questions to him without fear at this point, can't she? He's an all right sort, he wouldn't admonish her for her curiosity...

"I've been talking a bit to some of the other elves," she says lightly, like it's nbd, "you know, the Dalish ones. About the Creators and things." She tries to shrug nonchalantly.

"...aha."

He won't admonish her, no. It cuts him a little deeper than he would have thought it might, a surprisingly personal little twinge of disappointment, but he's come to believe over the years that no soul was ever truly won for the Maker through threat or force--and the elven souls always have borne far more than their fair share of that.

And Fern isn't merely a soul to be won, any more than she's merely an apostate he might yet have to lock away. She's a kid who deserves some leeway for curiosity, doesn't she? There's always a good chance she'll come back to the fold on her own, if she was raised right, and in the meantime...

"What have they got to say about it?" Whether he means the Dalish or the Creators, even he's not quite sure, but it's a sincere enough question.

Edited 2017-10-11 06:35 (UTC)

A little shrug, accompanied by a little smile, too. She digs one of her heels into the sand underfoot and wiggles it a bit. "Well they've got so many of them, to start," she tells him, then adds hastily, "gods, I mean. There's--" and here she gives the slightest pause, trying to recall how Ellana had said their names, "--Elgar'nan, the All-Father? I suppose that makes him sort of like the Maker, but Ellana said they aren't the same. I think Mythal the All-Mother is supposed to be his wife, and all the other Creators are their children or family or the like."

She rests her elbow on her arched knee, her chin in her palm, and considers it with a daydreamy expression on her face. "I still believe in the Maker, you know," she adds to him, almost absent-mindedly, "but it would be nice if they could both exist together. You know? I hope they're all real."

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THE SEAS SHALL RISE & DEVOUR, Part I

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