faderift | MOD PLOT ↠ BLAZING LIKE STAR-SHINE

WHO: All characters signed up to participate in the Battle of Ghislain
WHAT: The Inquisition faces off against the armies of Corypheus
WHEN: Covers most of the day on 11.28 (forward-dated)
WHERE: The Fields of Ghislain, Orlais
NOTES: This is Post #1, covering the battle itself and the retreat. It contains top-levels for each of the teams and an open prompt for the retreat. The OOC post with more information/explanation is HERE. If you're not sure which team your character is on, there's a LIST. POST #2 covers the aftermath of the battle.

Scouts accurately report the enemy's movements: after a slight slow-down believed to indicate that word reached the of the Allies' sudden appearance in their path, they have elected to remain on-course, and arrive almost precisely when and where they were expected. By sunset the night before they are making camp just over the rise to the northeast, easily visible from the hill, and as night falls their fires can be seen winking along the horizon, a close-packed glow.

The mood in the camp is tense, openly jittery rather than the tightly-wound nerves of the past month, but with a sense almost of relief that after so much preparation and so many weeks of anticipation, the day has finally arrived. Some corners of the camp, particularly the greener recruits and the Antivan veterans, are raucous around their campfires, singing and drinking, playful brawls breaking out, but commanders are strict about the wine rations, and even those who choose to take the edge of this way make an early night of it. A scattered handful of men attempt to quietly slip away during the night, mostly Orlesian conscripts, but a few Inquisition agents as well. Some succeed, but others are caught and imprisoned--the Inquisition's few held to be returned to Skyhold where it can be determined if they are traitors or merely cowards, the Orlesians only as long as it takes to find a tree and an audience to watch them hang and spread the cautionary tale.

It is expected that the enemy, hoping to make up for its surprise at finding the Allies prepared for their arrival, will attempt to catch them off-guard by attacking before dawn instead of waiting, as is traditional, for first light. They are all roused from their beds to form up in the dim grey as quietly as possible, moving into formation in the wet grass, a heavy morning fog lingering on the field ahead. It's cool and raw, the air still. But the ground moves: the shudder and rumble of hooves striking earth, felt before it is heard. The Orlesians raise their pikes, the front line braces, and it begins.

TEAMS 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • RETREAT
Team members can break off into smaller groups within their top-level prompts—it doesn’t need to be one 13-character thread—and the retreat is an open free-for-all.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

”The wagons!”

The prized wagons of Varmas & Co., imperiled by fire. The bandits has wrongfully expected that their quarry would give up without a fight, had underestimated the pride of the Varmas family and the value of their livelihood. They’d not anticipated the giant Avvar stepping out from one of the wagons where she’d been enjoying the shade for a few minutes.

Varmas, an older dwarf with a beard that he braided and tucked into his belt, and two other employees are trying to put out the fire with blankets and water, leaving Magni and Marcoulf to see to the bandits, and she flings an axe at one of them, so it bites into his chest.

Kneeling in the slick mud of Ghislain, Magni rasps a breath, chest heavy. A darkspawn, thinner than the others, armed with a jagged-bladed dagger and a worse smile grasps the back of her head, exposing her throat with a tug at her hair. The scar across her throat is concealed in part by war paint, and she swings her hammer in a diagonal upwards arc to try to push it back, but the wrenching motion of it makes her cry out in pain.

Edited 2018-11-26 22:53 (UTC)

It's his first season with Varmas, but it isn't the first time he's seen highwaymen on the road. That doesn't diminish the blanket surge of fear and adrenaline that finds him as he scrambles up from the cook fire, kicking over the kettle at his heel waiting to be sat in the coals. It drenches his boot, promptly finds some crack in the leather or sole, and immediately makes his sock wet. Andraste's tits, he thinks, and then his sword is drawn and he's running.

Toward trouble, on account of being paid to. Which is easier to convince one's body when you're hurrying to reinforce a someone the width and breadth of the Avvar woman. He'd thought it when he'd first been hired on. Well that, and how he'd best check his manners to be sure she didn't snap him in half. Which has not strictly stopped him from asking a few impolite questions, but--

"To your right!" He barks. Another bandit swarms up to meet her in the same instant that his path to her is waylaid by his own problems: a broad man with a rudimentary spiked club, being swung with zeal at his face. Marcoulf slashes him across the gut with such automatic instinct that it's a miracle he remembers to not get hit with the club in the process.

He manages--

--to cover the ground. Somehow. One moment he's ten paces out, throwing off a a darkspawn by clubbing it in the face with the pommel of his sword and then he's there. Marcoulf runs the blighted creature through the neck, wrenching the rapier awkwardly to drive it over. It makes some horrible noise. Drops the knife but doesn't loose its grip on Magni's hair.

Barely time to close her eyes and look away before the darkspawn's foul ichor bursts from the wound. To be captured would be intolerable for an Avvar. To give way to the corruption? That was capture within your own body. She would not let herself die in that way.

She can't jerk back from its grip, her back seized up and rigid, so is jerked sideways as Marcoulf propels the creature over. The pained cry is strangled, swallowed, as she braces herself on one elbow. There is a darkspawn approaching Marcoulf from behind, steady, smiling. A little taller and burlier than Marcoulf, wielding a staff, and she grits her teeth. Get up. By the will of Korth—

They will win this fight. The Mountain-Father smiles upon his children.

Magni hears his call, and lunges forward, using the momentum to strike a bandit in the throw with her elbow as she evades the swing of a maul, and then grabs the hand holding the weapon to wrench his arm back, so there is a wet snap in the proximity of his elbow. She wrenches him around, maul twisted out of his hand, and kicks the bandit hard enough that it collides with the other—

She shoves Marcoulf aside, as ice mine under him goes off.

The pop of it is loud, something viscerally ugly about the pop of a joint even in this much chaos. And then the man in question crashes into the bandit with the gut wound. The two of them go sprawling, smeared across the dry summer grass along the road.

Marcoulf gets as far as stabbing the man on the top of the pile for good measure before he recoils, blinking back some unexpected flash of pain. The second arrow, loosed from some bowman in the hedgerow, flies wider than the first had. There's blood in his eye now, pouring down out of the graze across the top of his scalp. And there's exactly no time to do much about it; he ducks instead, moving quickly for the hedgerow. Andraste's tits, he's going to get shot in the face properly at this rate—

He's not quite flat on his back in the mud, but the crack of the trap deploying rings in his ear. He manages to blink back the sharp shock of it just in time for a darkspawn to converge on them. Before he can assess Magni near him, the blighted foot soldier hacks down with its short sword. Marcoulf parries it desperately, kicking hard at the creature's knee from where he's staggered.

They won't be at this much longer, he thinks.

"You are really really ugly!"

Even a yell in Infernal has a hiss to it, a hellish seething breath through teeth. That's what lends it the power that it has. Strong enough to introduce a moment's hesitation, a soldier's flinch. And a flinch becomes an opening, and an opening is often a soldier's downfall. In this case, the fall will, hopefully, be quite literal. The blighted soldier is open for a chop.

More distraction: Jester bounds into the scene, a shining force. Seven feet tall, grey bluish-skin, and muscles to swoon over. She's got a wound on her shoulder, sticky and showing through her shirt, when her cloak is pushed off of it. Her pink haversack is slung over her back, and above her head, a big lollipop hovers: her spiritual weapon, ready to kick ass and not bother taking any names.

In this moment, the lollipop swings down to slap flat another blighted soldier, who had been running up toward the lady on the ground. Once, and then twice, and there's a sick crack when the lollipop lands its second blow. The soldier does not try to get up again.

Jester wipes her forearm over her brow, clearing sweat. "Are you guys--" Swift, silent, the lollipop swings back up again as she talks, looming over her. "--okay?"

Her first response would be to snarl at the presence of a Qunari standing over her, if she weren't in quite so much pain, if she wasn't thinking that she might be delirious because there's a strange levitating ethereal weaponised candy hanging in the air.

As Magni tries to push herself up, her left leg gives way. Not broken, but something very wrong and very painful. An an arrow still protrudes from her lower back, another through her hip, and she's sweating heavily with the sheer exertion of trying to move. Her battle paint, white with black around her eyes and the suggestion of some monstrous skull in the lines, is smeared and more nightmarish now than it was at the beginning.

"No," she rasps out, somewhat unnecessarily. No they aren't okay, no to dealing with a qunari, no to all of it.

MOD PLOT ↠ BLAZING LIKE STAR-SHINE

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crawls back in here so late pls forgive