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

sorry rl caught up with me a bit

[earthbones]

Dragonborn. You're...you're Dragonborn, people said with that look when the dragon lay dead at her feet, the legend humbled, small, throat slit. A good shout for a shadow only now there's as much of her blood to be found on her by the end of this as the things she fights.

Skyrim was kill or be killed from the day Time's jaws snapped shut over his own ending instead of the headsman's axe on her neck.

The spectre is looking elsewhere, is looking to the place neither of them have been, moving with the swarm. Her grin is sharp as her hand reaches out, reaches up and blazes hot as the fires the Bosmer know move beneath the earth.

There's a war cry. Rallying. Some things go past words into the bone and Brónach looks through the haze, the way her arm is shaking, wanting to pull back but there's worse. Not fully human. Something under the skin and under again there that has her reminded of being beast blooded, running and striking until the exhaustion threw her to the ground.

The rift shudders. Brónach falls back down to a knee and doesn't get her arm up to stop the little beasts trapped now but it's shut. Stragglers to be picked off as the sweat slicks the armour to her skin.

pushes rl away!!

[shri]

She moves to do just that - fighting against what remained as the rift was sealed. Feeling the green mark on her hand pulse with the strange nature of it that wasn't... anything she knew. Not even the blackwater, in its cooldarksmooth ever felt like this cold burning.

But she doesn't have time, there was work to be done. A battle was not done until it was won, was that not what her father had taught her? The heavy slash of weapons, the little screams of pain from the winged beasties to her own frustrated grunt when they attempted to retaliate, their flat heavy teeth ripping in deeply. But at least they were quick to kill, which was a smaller mercy. Easy to move through as she makes her way back to the other woman and the offer is plain and simple.

An extended hand and arm for her grip, and a decent amount of strength to haul her up off the ground by.

[earthbones]

Arngeir had stared her down once with the wind biting down same as the teeth of an ice wraith to tell her that to learn a shout was take it into herself, and here it lingers. An eye on her hand, the burn through it that never comes in her throat.

(Part of her is afraid of what it means when she asks the question, what any of them take into themselves. If the people here even know. They ask enough questions, and so little comes from any of it but papers to be kept somewhere, lists, names, records.)

Easier to take the hand extended to her, to get up and shake her head to clear it again with a nod. "Thanks," in the space where others would offer drink she doesn't have. "I could shout again, send them running. See what else goes to tear them apart."

Another shout to test, maybe but Y'ffre help her she'd rather a herd of mammoth come blundering out next time, this is the same as stumbling into a spriggan with bees stinging from a hundred directions all at once.

[shri]

"If you have it in you."

Not a questions - questions are when there is time. Right now? There is too much to do, and she doesn't fancy losing another chunk of teeth to those little buggers if she damn well has too. Right now her hands are curling, uncurling, gaze sliding between her companion, the strange creatures, then back again.

Her words might short of breath for the effort of it, might be pissing blood as it stands - that like questions was for later. "Pity we have no fire." A plan there, but useless for the moment without it.