closed: dead end.

[cozen]

WHO: Adasse, Byerly, Inessa, Isaac, Kostos, Matthias, Nathaniel, Six
WHAT: A for Effort.
WHEN: Bloomingtide 21-24.
WHERE: Orlais, Tevinter.
NOTES: There's an OOC post with additional info over here!

I. ORLAIS. The site of the abduction (as it's told to them) is the camp near the ruins, and it certainly looks like something happened there. The ground has been stamped to bits, with horse tracks and footprints both visible; several tents are collapsed or askew; and the supplies and some of the missing party's personal belongings are scattered in the mud. The Baron and his staff saw nothing, heard nothing, from his estate several miles away. They had everyone for dinner and saw them off in the evening, and in the morning, they were gone.

But there is a trail to follow—one that changes, after a few miles, in the number and size of the horses involved, the type of cart wheel, merging with an entirely different trail that came to that point from another direction. Mysterious. But regardless of the cause of that, the trail proceeds northwest around the worst of the front and highest concentration of Orlesian and Inquisition soldiers, then northeast into Tevinter.

II. TEVINTER. Tevinter requires some improvisation, both to cross the border and intermittently along the road that winds through the Silent Plains, when traveling traders bringing supplies to and from the front join them for stretches of the road or to set up camp at night. Neutral Antivan merchants, Free Marcher mercenaries, slaves and the assholes looking to sell them—the story can change, between encounters, but those with anchors need to keep their hands hidden, and the elves probably shouldn't give anyone too much lip.

The good news is that everything requires less in the way of tracking skills. The specific signs of the group they're following disappear under the plains' shifting sands and the heavy traffic along the road, but it isn't a place anyone voluntarily takes the long way through, and along the shortest path to civilization, they'll receive information from the Inquisition instructing them to meet one of its contacts in a trading village just north of the desert.

III. DESPAIR. The contact, Livia, is a slave from Minrathous, trusted both by her Venatori master and by the Nightingale, who she's been feeding information to for years. She meets them in an abandoned farmhouse with a bag of ashes, bones, and belongings, some terrible news, and her genuine regrets—and then she's gone, quickly, before her absence from Minrathous becomes so prolonged she can't explain it away.

It is not what anyone was hoping to bring back, but it's all they have.

Comments

iii - OTA if anyone wants to jump in & cee is chill with it

[wythersake]

The question is whether they should.

Sixteen dead isn't an inconsiderable quantity of those left in Kirkwall, and those left in Kirkwall aren't known for their cool heads and quiet tempers. Messengers get shot.

But he's not about to share that with the group.

"Carefully," The kid won't go in for running, the rest of them won't, and Isaac isn't about to light into the Imperial wilderness alone. Kirkwall's the safest choice. "We've gotten lucky before. They'll want a reason we didn't."

They'll want an enemy. His hand tightens about the beads in a pocket, and maybe it's superstition to think there is one (a reason). Gareth came back. From Ghislain, they came back.

Luck runs out.

100% chill with it and consider this a retroactive OTA everyone get in

[inkindled]

"If we were relying on luck, that's answer enough."

Carefully. Matthias frowns down at his boots. He's not had to do this bit before. His dead were always known to him. At most you'd have to go back and report them, but usually someone would find you first. Usually they were all more or less together, not spread out in the field. And maybe someone might say a prayer, or something like a prayer. Then you went on.

"This can't be the first time this sort of thing has happened. Right?"

[exequy]

“Not like this.”

Not to the—whatever they are, now. Before now they were still separate, still small, still tangled up in one another’s lives. The Inquisition lost far more than sixteen at Ghislain, but not a fifth of its people. Not many soldiers would have known a dozen dead, all at once. And not many of the people in the Gallows are soldiers, or at least they weren’t before now.

“Not for a lot of them.”

And not that Kostos is going to be careful, himself. He does at least currently intend to be. He’s not just telling them, for example, and his sending crystal still hidden under his shirt. He’ll be careful right up until something else feels like a good idea. And until then he’ll continue what he’s doing, on the rickety table in a nook of the dusty old house: sorting carefully though the bag, laying out rings and fingerbones in neat lines and dusting off the ash back into the bag for later transfer into something else. Whatever they can find. It isn’t Livia’s fault, given her haste, but they can’t be given back that way.

[wythersake]

"I don't suggest they hear the full details."

Save those for the report that a lot of them won't read. Maybe it's in poor taste, to be tailoring this now, but they won't get another chance to. Bone and metal click. Wood creaks.

The story can't be given back that way, either.

"Mercenaries. A Venatori mage. Not," A breath in. "An abomination."

However unwise that seems to sweep away.

"That's a reason they don't need."

[inkindled]

"I'll not say any about the abomination."

Well now, wait. Matthias feels the flush of color in his face and tries, gamely, to fight it down. No one asked him to say anything about anything, did they. So why's he acting as if they had, halfway to volunteering himself to bear this message back to people who've had a loss, though they don't know it yet. Just as quickly as those first words had tumbled out of him, he's quick to add, "Not that it'll be me, that'll be saying it, I just think-- anyone who says it ought to keep that bit behind. For now. 'Cause he was a Venatori bastard but that doesn't mean--"

Well, now, what doesn't it mean. That Venatori bastard turned abomination, he might have been what killed Merrill, he might have been what killed the others--so by all means, he ought to be shat on. But it sticks in Matthias, somewhere. A desperate last moment, all burning hot and mad and nothing left of who you used to be. Like a line of black powder, eaten up and then gone.

He's pinker still as he stares with furious concentration at all the remnants of the people who died. Barely more than the contents of a dustpan after you'd swept clean the cookstove.

"If they're not all used to this sort of loss, all at once. Then we keep it short. Right? No more than what's needed to be known for now. 'Cause they'll be reeling from even the shortest bit of news, they'll not be used to it, and giving them more's going to-- They won't even be hearing it. Not really."

[exequy]

Kostos stays silent on the subject of the abomination, other than the noise of teeth and bone fragments and rings against wood, but the silence is assent. The Division Heads will have to know the full story, if they don't already. Everyone else can find out when the grief isn't so fresh, or never. He doesn't care. Ash is caught in the crevices of pendant—he cares about that instead, fervently, and searches the table for a potential splinter the right size to remove it.

"You should do it," is all he says, without any of the reasons: that Matthias comes across as artless but kind, that he's young and probably endearing to people who are into being endeared, that it's obvious how much of a damn he gives.

The tiny piece of wood he pulls loose from the table has a frayed end that resembles a broom, and that's how he uses it.