RIFTER ARRIVAL: Justinian 9:44

[faderifting]

WHO: New rifters & their rescuers.
WHAT: Welcome to Thedas.
WHEN: Justinian 12, 9:44
WHERE: East of the Hundred Pillars and Perivantium.
NOTES: This is the arrival log for all new rifters, open also to current characters who would participate in their recovery. New players can also assume everyone survives and arrives back in Kirkwall within a couple of days, but please note there will be a brief quarantine period when they won't be permitted to leave the Gallows, to get them up to speed while ensuring they're not diseased or otherwise going to kill anyone, before they're set loose on the city.

You were asleep—whether deeply or fitfully, falling unconscious for the last time in a pool of blood 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 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, bathed in the light of a flare of too-bright, greenish light you will find yourself hitting mossy cobblestones with an unforgiving smack. You're alive, and you're fine, except for the narrow splinter of light that now glows out of the palm of your left hand. It aches, a bone-deep pain that gnaws even through all the distractions. Above you, hanging suspended in the air, is a shifting, crystalline tear in reality. It's the same color as the mark on your hand.

Beyond it, the sky is a clear and black, with stars that won't show until the rift's blinding light has been extinguished but two moons visible now. One hangs above you, beyond the rift. Another is lower in the sky, cut by the jagged line of mountains on the distant horizon. There's nothing in between to obscure the view or to block the steady, warm wind from the east, which isn't howling or whistling over the flat expanse of land so much as gently humming. Not gentle: the ground beneath you, which is more rock than sand. Further to the east there are dunes; here, the land has been stripped by the wind. It is nonetheless indisputably desert, with low, shrubby foliage and the earth beneath the rocks cracked and sun-baked.

But this isn't really the time for sightseeing.

You aren't alone here. There are other people on the ground around you—humans, or at least humanoid—with matching green marks, and an assortment of junk that might be familiar or might be very much not. Beyond them, forming a crescent ring around one edge of the rift's light, are a dozen wraiths, each capable of shifting between elements and hurling blasts of damaging magic. There's also a swarm of large buglike creatures determined to eat your teeth and three ghouls in suits chasing one rifter in particular.

All of these things would probably like to kill you. But you're not alone. In the dark beyond the rift's light, a group of armed and armored people swiftly descend on the scene. Many are wearing a symbol that looks a bit like a hairy eyeball being pierced through by a sword, and at least a couple of them seem to know what they're doing. Almost like they've been waiting for you. In fact, exactly like they've been waiting for you.

---

AFTERWARDS, it's only a short hike to an Inquisition camp in the greenery where the landscape begins its shift into plains, where everyone can patch up any wounds, have something to eat, and ask what in the void is going on here. But don't wander off. In the dark beyond the campfires there are other hazards: prowling wildlife, scavenging bands of darkspawn, unfamiliar lands and no map to guide you if you don't already know where you're going.

Comments

[shri]

She didn't last this long by accepting so simply without consideration. Especially from a stranger. Her eyes stay on his face, lowered in her gaze behind thick lashes. Her hand taps at the outside of her skirt, regarding him.

"You honour me, Priest of the Djura, and your own Queen in your respect to me." She hums, waiting, watching. To become this again she supposes is not so strange. "I would have your name before I have your loyalty."

She can at least, be sure, that for all the strangeness that has just come from their mouth - this is not a servant of Lord Hastings. "I am Jhansi ki Rani, or the Queen of Jhansi, as you say."

[divineshadow]

The Priest returns that long regard, unblinking and yellow-eyed as a cat, hands resting loose on thighs. Strange and stranger are the woman's responses, so much so that the Priest seizes on the least-strange piece of it to reply to first, leaving the rest to puzzle over in silence. "This one is the Ebon-Plumed Sorcerer Who Frightens Beasts, who learned of Bone-Ash Eidolon. This one is contemporary of none." A hand lifts to press fingers against the great tooth secured beneath the borrowed shirt; the Priest's calm expression distorts. (Grief, fury. Why did you do this, half-my-heart.)

Hand curls to fist, drawing pain from the bruised toothmarks marring the side; pain focuses. The Priest resumes equanimity like a mask between one breath and the next. There is much to be done here that emotion cannot be allowed to impede. "To forestall a falsehood, o queen: This one is loyal to the Divine Shadow before all else, and the djur after Them. A Priest may offer assistance but not service unstinting.

"Are those who serve heaven otherwise in Jhansi?"

[shri]

That was quite the name wasn't it? But she bows her head to it in greeting no matter the more private thought: strange, this one. Solemn, if nothing else. Her composure keeps unfalteringly. When near everything pointed at you becomes a gun, there stops being a need to flinch.

"It is the same. But they can find space for their devotion in the patronage of many like myself. To them, then, they keep good faith." Or betray you. Is the bitterness in her words, that does not come. Old wounds at least do not hurt in suddenness anymore. If only all could be as you were Vishnubhatt. "Or there are some, like myself, for who my family is, I serve both as a ruler and in many religious forms." How glorious, how kind, it had been, to stand in on the ceremonies of so many and bring her people happiness.

How warm, her husband had looked at her for it. Half-drowned in the memories of her dreams that she'd been torn from. She blinks them out of her gaze. "You have given me more than enough respect. I have no want for you on your knees. Here it looks like we both must be upon our feet."

[divineshadow]

How odd--how monstrously odd the ideas a few words paint; how alien. A society where a queen might also serve as Priest and the gods' servants sought patrons among earthly rulers. Who could ensure orthodoxy with so frightful a blurring of the necessary divisions? Who kept watch on the queens if they held the livelihoods--the lives--of their Priests in-hand? Or themselves spoke for the gods?

The whole thing hangs in the Priest's mind's eye, quivering and delicate and half-realized, unable to bear much close scrutiny else it collapse under its own impossibility. Better then not to lean so hard on it; wait, open-minded, for more information to fill in what is missing. Do not come to rash conclusions yet.

The Priest rises smoothly when bid stand, not looking away from Rani. "Yes. This world is strange beyond belief." There is a quiet awe behind the words, a moment's shift in focus from the woman to the shrubby ground beyond her shoulder, to the horizon and the stars. The living stars! "And you have given this one much stranger to think on."

If all who looked as she did lived as she did... Though there is an errant assumption in there; the Priest might not be the only one reshaped by capricious processes lurking in the rifts. "Your wounds need tending and these soldiers," a look toward the Inquisition troops, a gesture of head and chin, "are impatient for safe ground. But before this: Were you born to this shape you wear now, o queen?"

[shri]

"A poor man's daughter, and save for being a sight smaller, yes, I have been always this." What a strange question - but at least lets her not answer the one about tending her wounds. She'd rather they not waste resources on her over something like these little teeth marks.

But she holds no shame over this. "And you, were you born different?" Bemused, but after the oddness of it all... who could she even say, she would believe in some ways, she suspects.

[divineshadow]

So, and so. That affirmation has the Priest looking the woman over head to toe once more, noting points of comparison for when a mirror might be had. Learning how to tell these creatures apart may well be a vital skill if they are so numerous to be found on either side of the rifts. (Could the alfar be as well? Ugly thought, to think their slavers so widespread when the djur were doomed to die on their single world.)

"Very different. The djur do not go about on two legs only; they are armored against their foes, with teeth to tear and claws to rend." Once more, the Priest touches fingers to Servant's tooth; considers the size of it now, that once fit comfortably in a djur palm. "You would not come up to the joint of this one's arm."

Another smile, tooth-baring, though not a threat. Simply a predator's amusement. "It is disappointing, to be so small, but the shape will serve.

"Come." The Priest looks again toward the Inquisition troops, takes a step that way--pauses, respectfully, to invite Rani's lead. "This one would trade questions still, if you would. But that may be done anywhere."

[shri]

She swallows - something unhappy in her jaw, that she makes sure not to let get any further than that. The thought of being smaller something, and the exact reason that had happened to her. The smell of wet fur, gunpowder and blood. She expels the breath.

"By all means. If only you are happy to answer mine." She begins the short journey of the soldiers milling about and collecting those that had come so ceremoniously out of the sky.