PRIDE BEFORE A FALL | Closed.

[limier]

WHO: Lakshmi + Coupe, Kitty, Gwenaelle, Helena, Iorveth, Marcoulf, Merrill, Solas.
WHAT: Fade cannonball
WHEN: You can't make me date you
WHERE: The Free Marches
NOTES: OOC Post, Discussion plurk.

This is routine.

A rift, high above the ruins of the Hammer’s Edge Bridge. It cuts into the sky, green and pulsing as a wound to spit out spirits like misery. This is routine — but the position is precarious, so near to a cliff ledge. Watch your footing, a fall promises only sharp rocks and water below.

The task is straightforward: Close the tear, or provide a diversion for the Rifters doing so. Keep yourself alive, and keep your hand to the task, no matter how it aches. When respite comes, it’s a matter of seconds: The Rift stabilizes, and,

And Lakshmi breaks from the group. Moving fast (too considered for the pace, every demon dodged, never a misstep on the odd root or rock) as she sprints for the edge. Maybe you tried to grab her, stop her, stop someone else from grabbing her.

She launches herself legs out, flatly determined in her aim —

Maybe it’s only that like it or not, she’s going through that rift. Maybe it’s that there’s no good reason not to join her. Maybe it’s that everyone else is jumping too.

Routine, right?

 

Comments

[shri]

She's lost to it, half mad with the grief of being back here - seeing it. Hearing the screams of the dying, the war cries of the desperate. Staring and staring and staring and she can fell the impending loss creeping up on her.

"We can't - these are my people. They will die." Her lips caked with dust, her voice hoarse from screaming out orders, words, she remembers. Gwalior raged for day in, day out. A siege in the heat so deep it blisters the skin. Somewhere, far up in the palace, her son is watching, she knows.

[dirth]

Solas knows the face of a person lost in their own thoughts and memories - it is not the first time he has witnessed it. It settles around him awkwardly and for a moment he isn't sure what to do with himself; it seems dangerous to attempt her to break her out of it. It seems dangerous to challenge this, especially when they're trapped in the Fade with physical bodies before them.

"There is nothing we can do here," Solas says, voice low and careful. "There are spirits and demons wandering this place. We cannot simply stay here and wait for the battle to be quiet."

[shri]

The chaos of it all whips around them. The volley of gunfire is broken up - when something far worse splits the air.

Canons, canons like thunder. The horses scream, men shout - and the carnage is instant, bodies are ripped apart, cut in half. Limbs are strewn about. Death, death without meaning, or warning. Skill, heritage, power, it means nothing in this place. Good warriors die next to untried fools, in the same wash of blood.

There is nothing to be saved. She blinks, - that sting of shock she barely understood at the time. As she looks around, about her. "They are my people, how can I walk away from them?" The grief too raw, too much herself, too often forgotten. She does not turn back, she never turns back, either to face her regrets or her victories. That way only lay ruin. "I should have died with them. I should be with them. Why did this place bring me here?"

She only, only wanted to return home. To finish what she had sworn herself to.