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

[coiledscales]

"...Merlin?" Alacruun looks confused, brow furrowed and expression distant, as if he's trying to call the name up out of his memory. After a moment he shakes his head.

"No. I've never heard the name. Who is he?"

[shri]

She was the last person to explain him - but Galahad lay still, sick upon a bed where she had slept beside him in a fitful need for rest as she waited for the fever to leave him.

A dream that left her here. There wasn't much for that, and she sighs a little, trying to remember the half stories she'd heard when she cared about them. "Merlin was... a wizard, or a druid, I cannot remember which. These are not my tales. But he served a once great King, Arthur of Camelot. He advised him, and when he died, he hid his body away." She frowns a little, was that quite the order? No doubt Galahad would give him a better answer. "He is the only one I have heard described with that word that I know."

[coiledscales]

"Truly? The only wizard you've ever heard described as such? We come from very different worlds, then. Wizards are... not precisely common, but nor are they uncommon. They ply their trade with magic all over the world and do their own forms of research. But... I take it magic itself may not be as widespread where you're from," Alacruun replies. He doesn't sound... disappointed. Maybe a bit surprised to hear that there's so little magic that she's only ever heard of one wizard and he from a very long time ago.

[shri]

"That - " she smiles politely. "I did not say."

She does not look or reach for it, but she feels it, heavy against her breastbone, the phial of blackwater that had been passed to her for an ancient purpose. Fighting the Half-Breed. Given to her by someone that lived longer than men ever were supposed to. "We have magic, in our stories, in the land. Just as we have monsters."

[coiledscales]

"So you didn't," Alacruun replies and his lips twitch, threatening a wider smile, "My apologies for making assumptions."

He leans forward slightly, hands folded in his lap. Again, his eyes are bright with interest.

"I make it a habit to study such things. If you ever felt like sharing the stories from your home... I would be very interested in hearing them."

[shri]

She shakes her head - bemused. Like Tesla, if none of his whimsy. Curiosity over wisdom. "They are not happy stories, sir. Nothing I want to relate for the moment."

Not when the echo of er son was in her head again. The misery those things had caused.

[coiledscales]

Curiosity over wisdom is an excellent way to put it. He does look a little disappointed that she doesn't seem to want to share, but he shrugs it off after a moment.

"Understandable. If you ever do... please let me know."

He makes a low noise and lifts his hands in a shrug, "But - is there anything I can share with you?"

[shri]

Whose feet do I have to grovel at to get a decent pair of shoes?

Rather more dully, however, her tone is rather more practical than fanciful things of monsters and magic. "How long can we expect to stay here before we move on, and where will that be? And who governs the place - aside from this... Inquisition."

[coiledscales]

"Ah. Well - Kirkwall, I believe, which has it's own government, but we'll still be under the auspices of the Inquisition. The... shard in our hands makes it difficult to go anywhere else. It's possible, of course, but... the people of this world aren't friendly to anything they think of as black magic."

It's not what they call it, but Alacruun's trying to get his opinion of these rubes across.

"There are several nations, most of them kingdoms of sorts. Or empires. All autocratic, for the most part."