OPEN ↠ HARING EVENT

[faderifting]

WHO: All
WHAT: WINTER IS HERE
WHEN: Haring 15-Wintermarch 1
WHERE: The Gallows, Kirkwall
NOTES: You can use this post as an event-style mingle log, or just use it as background information for your RP elsewhere!

It's been a chilly month already, but in mid-Haring the temperature suddenly plummets. One day it's merely cold, and the next morning the Inquisition wakes to frost on the inside of the window panes and an icy draft whistling through every crack in the tower's masonry. Downstairs, the pipes that feed the bathing chambers and the kitchens creak in the walls, loud enough to be heard even out in the courtyard, where they run beneath the stones, and around midday, when the sun has failed to raise the temperature above freezing, a blocked pipe finally gives, cracking open to spill water across the central court and send it running down side passages. The whole area floods several inches deep and almost immediately begins to freeze, presenting at first a gigantic, treacherous slush puddle and, after a few hours, a sheet of sheer ice.

Melting a safe path from door to door and laying down sand or wood to keep it from becoming slick again is a simple enough undertaking, but before the entire courtyard can be thawed, someone appears with ice skates—and that’s a better idea, surely, for at least a few days. Anyone who complains about the frivolity can be assured it’s good exercise, not to mention good training for a force that may have to travel or fight on ice in the future.

Temperatures remain cold enough that even some parts of the harbor begin to freeze, first just at the calmest edges of the shoreline, and then the more protected nooks and crannies of the bay, inlets and the spaces between piers and beneath docks. It snows most days--not real storms, just a couple inches here and there--little enough for the window to blow most of it off the icy plain of the courtyard and other wide open, paved spaces, accumulating on branches and in alleyways, and creating growing drifts in corners and against walls.

After a week or so actual chunks of floating ice begin to fill the narrow channels of the harbor, threatening smaller and less-sturdy vessels, and the situation in the poorer parts of the city begins to grow dire. With the Viscount's blessing, Inquisition teams (particularly mages) are called in to help. Some are assigned to the docks, to clear ice that makes landing and unloading treacherous, others to help escort ships into harbor by melting a path ahead. Others are sent into Lowtown to clear ice and snow and to provide warmth and medical attention where needed. At least one mage is sent with each team, and while many neighborhoods are pleasantly surprised and grateful for the quick work fire glyphs make of cold hearths and frozen streets, a few are unable to overcome their distrust, and refuse the teams entry, determined to take care of their own without the help of dangerous outsiders.

In the last week of the year, a true blizzard strikes, snow falling steadily for more than a day, blanketing the city at least three feet deep. Digging out the Gallows will be a group effort, and most non-essential trips outside the base will be cancelled for a few days until travel is less difficult, while those who reside in the city or elsewhere may be encouraged to stay a night or two in the fortress so they might continue to work without traveling through the storm. But on the first day of Wintermarch the First Day feast goes on as planned, with modest but plentiful food and ale served in the Gallows' dining hall for anyone who wishes to celebrate the new year.

Comments

[earthbones]

Where the griffons roost is another place to creep out of the cold, fingers stiff from working out in a frost known to her but no less welcome for that. (What's welcome in life? So little. Too little.) Some of them have come closer than Brónach for the meat in her pockets, or if her near-silent tread upsets them - these are good feathers to gather for the arrows she means to make in the quiet of her room - until this one.

Somewhere in the back of her mind there's a door darker than either Sanctuary door, it unlocks, flames reach out to lick her palm; the laughter kept shuttered behind a jaw that ached after a mountain shook--

"You find them or you don't," she says suddenly in what might pass for quiet here (there's no quiet in a city this size, not when she knows weeks without seeing faces) from the other side of the overgrown bird. "The words come or the words never do, people take a lifetime to find a word."

Walls in the dark, walls with dragons roosting atop them; her breath shudders out of her, not from the cold. "If this is a war the way they call it a war, every body is called for again and again." She's tired. Always tired, how many times does she have to see the dragon consuming his own tail?

[faithlikeaseed]

So quiet are Brónach's footsteps and so enticing the smell of meat that Buttons does little more than lift his head to blink at her complacently as she nears. Neither obvious threat nor competition for his space; no reason to rouse himself from his comfortable lassitude to offer a warning to the elf tending him.

And Myr, expecting that warning, nearly starts out of his skin when the bosmer speaks into a wordless moment. Fingers curl and clutch at the feathers beneath them, prompting a squawk from the griffon. "Andraste's tits--warn someone, will you?" he snaps, startled into unwonted anger as a cover for shame and shock. "And what would you know about it? What would--"

What would anyone else know of it, Circle mage, but more than you? He stops himself short, setting his teeth against a further outburst--and finding the words harder to catch back than usual. (Tempting to take all the blackness that's built and built in his heart out on a total stranger; tempting to burn bridges before they're even built-- But she's blameless of any of it, and Buttons is grumbling in the back of his throat, reading Myr's mood to mean danger and flexing his talons for it. Get it in check, Myrobalan.)

"--Forgive me; you don't--you don't deserve that for surprising me." The apology's slower to come than he'd like--more reason for frustration.

[earthbones]

"You snap, out comes an angry word that does nothing. Your griffon snaps, I lose my fingers at the very least. I need my fingers." What's an archer without her fingers? Nothing.

Silence came to Brónach naturally before it was honed through the guild, the brotherhood, Nocturnal's favour, and if he can't hear the rattle of her arrows in the quiver then she can drop into a crouch between Myr and the griffon. A neat and tidy distance from both for her own comfort. The sound in her throat isn't for Myr, it's the sound made for kills; it's just meat but that never means the meat has to suffer. The meat hasn't done her the wrongs so many other things have so the meat can be hushed.

"If apologies are the only words you're finding..." In the voice of someone not so accustomed to speaking as well-worn leather creaks as she settles into a more comfortable crouched, thighs spread to take her weight better. But that's not what she wants to say, that's no better than when the beast blood would set her to snapping fast and easy, same as her early days in Skyrim when the running had a fight spoiling in her. "There's a word--

"There's a word and sometimes a word is a whisper that is a shout, and sometimes they can shatter everything around them. You don't get to choose your own words when the world decides now is the time, not always. When your name is called." Feel the ground shake beneath you then have your name swallowed by the title that becomes all that you are, that's a word. A shout. Power. Her fingers have curled tight about her knees now, she flexes them, remembers how she ran from Valenwood with the grooves of her bow imprinted in her hand for days to come. "I know that it sits in your chest as if it would pin you down to eat whatever cuts it might find."