faderift | MOD EVENT: WINTERMARCH WINTER MARCH

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MOD EVENT: WINTERMARCH WINTER MARCH

WHO: Anyone & Everyone
WHAT: Winter adventures as Riftwatch heads up into the Vinmark Mountains to do some work for (Provisional) Viscount Bran of Kirkwall
WHEN: Throughout Wintermarch and early Guardian
WHERE: Vinmark Mountains
NOTES: OOC post

Still-Provisional Viscount Bran has received a number of requests for aid from communities in the Vinmark mountains outside Kirkwall. He wants to keep them happy so that they continue to pay taxes to Kirkwall and don't become problematically independent or allied with some other state. But he also doesn't want to deal with this shit, and the City Guard isn't really equipped to go tromp around the mountains in the winter. So he has asked Riftwatch to deal with this, casting it as a shared danger (if any communities were to break away, they'd be more vulnerable to enemy collaboration, or hampering travel through the passes, and things like that) but if necessary will imply that Riftwatch's refusal would weigh unfavorably against the decision to allow them to remain in the Gallows for free.

This work isn't done at the exclusion of all else--other normal (and especially high-priority) work continues. Any work that isn't especially time-sensitive may be postponed, and otherwise agents will simply have to forfeit their free time and fit this work in on top of their other responsibilities. Something for people to complain about while they're tromping through the snow.

It's not a long trip back and forth to the Gallows, so people can come and go if they want, but Bran has also agreed to allow Riftwatch the use of the Viscount's hunting lodge, a rustic mountain retreat traditionally used for hunting parties, which happens to be in a roughly central location. As Viscount Bran is both Provisional and profoundly not the sort of man who holds hunting parties, the lodge has gone unused for some years now, and Riftwatch is bringing in its own supplies and a skeleton support staff to man the place for the duration. Those traveling up in the first group will have to help escort supply wagons through snowy, muddy mountain roads, unloading casks and crates into the cellar, and pitch in cleaning, making minor repairs, and generally getting the building set up after a decade of neglect.

The lodge is organized around a central hall with a massive fireplace, and a small library and study that will be used as offices shared between those visiting. Up the grand wood stair is a mezzanine level that looks down on the hall and leads to three corridors, each with a couple rooms. Rooms will be shared by groups of 2-4 people, the exception being the two suites generally reserved for the viscount and his wife, which will now be assigned to whichever of the Division Heads are in residence (and if there are more than two at a time, then to whichever Division Heads win a coin toss or something). Each room has basic furnishings, heavy and rustic, and its own fireplace. Bathing facilities are communal, provided by natural hot springs pools. While these are outdoors, there is a roof, and there is also a small springhouse alongside for changing, as well as a separate sauna.

The stables contain a number of sleighs in varying states of repair, which can be signed out for use. They're often the best way to get around this area in winter, and can be pulled by a team of Vinmark Goats, a big-horned shaggy breed of unusually massive mountain goats that are often used in place of ponies in this part of the world. The Viscount had a herd of them, which has since run more or less wild on his land and will need to be rounded back up for use.

There are a few communities with different problems, spread out some ways apart through the mountains:

ICE RIFT: The village of Erith has been plagued by shades and despair demons, which can be traced to a rift that has opened under the thick mid-winter ice of the frozen lake just outside town. Trying to get at it from above would mean cutting into the ice and fighting off demons while underwater and very likely freezing to death in minutes. So instead they'll need to traverse the ice caves beneath the lake to reach it, which will be complicated by the nature of shades, which leech off the energy of the livings' psyche, causing confusion, fatigue, and fear.
SNOWMONSTERS: Cragfield has been cut off by an infestation of what's only been described as "snowmonsters," that have been harrying travelers around the village or anyone who strays too far from the edge of town. They will prove to be some unknown variation of giant, even more aggressive, though a bit smaller and nearly covered in white hair. They have some resistance to magic, especially ice magic, and one seems capable of using ice magic, if crudely. They can be tracked through the forest and picked off a few at a time, or traced back to one of their lairs, usually in a cave or tucked into a rock formation.
THE GRIPPE: Galssop has sent an urgent request for healers to help combat a particularly virulent strain of the illness many in Kirkwall are suffering. Most of the town has fallen victim to it, including their only healer, leaving the rest without care. Complicating matters, reaching the town in winter (especially while transporting supplies) requires traveling up the frozen Wye river, using skates and iceboats. The villagers there will be wary of magical healing, and Bran as urged trying to use non-magical means of healing first if possible, though he and the sick will ultimately come round to the necessity of using some magic rather than see dozens die.
THE GRINCH: Lerwick's trouble is a young man who recently inherited Touraigle, the fortress above the village, and who firmly believes that Lerwick is also his inheritance. When the Mayor of Lerwick refused to enforce Lord Bertrand's taxes, the lord's guards ransacked the town, helping themselves to most of its winter stores, among other things. Riftwatch diplomats have been asked to help entreat the lord to be reasonable and return what he took. But the road up to the castle has been blocked by a combination of overzealous defenses and weather, forcing all visitors to climb a treacherous hill of downed trees covered in ice and the occasional, possibly-frozen (if they're lucky), booby trap.

In addition to these specific issues, Rift Watchers can expect to encounter the usual Vinmark winter hazards: unpredictable weather, hungry animals, bad roads, scarcities, and so forth. Once news of their presence in the mountains gets around, they may be asked to take on similar small problems for others, like dealing with wildlife issues, helping search for a missing child, rescuing a hunting party trapped by a minor avalanche, etc. There are also basic chores to keep the lodge running that will always need extra hands, like chopping firewood, hunting down dinner, safeguarding supplies on their way to and from Kirkwall, and so on.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Perhaps it ought to warm him a different way to hear it, that he's good at something virtuous, something seen as objectively good—and it will, but the sting of irritation must first subside. His placeholder reply: a sort of heh, like humility bundled in effort, while really it's a dismissal so he may examine his own reaction in silence.

Not too much silence. She'll need distraction on the way.

"I thought of it ahead of time. On the way to the lodge." Adrenaline is subsiding, lungs beginning to burn; he'll need a long rest, too. "What I might do on the ice, in a blizzard, in case of avalanche. To reduce the chance," pausing to breathe, "of being caught off guard."

"Clever," Derrica puffs back. Her grip on his waist is growing painfully tight. It hurts her a little to hang on. Leander bundled her up so quickly that her arms are pins and needles, burning as her body struggles to realign itself.

"Matthias taught me a little fire magic," she tells him, faint pride in her voice. "But I didn't...I wasn't really learning it with this in mind. I didn't think it'd be like this."

Unspoken: miserable. But there was plenty she just hadn't been able to prepare for. Derrica hadn't had any grasp of it to try and anticipate something like falling through ice or getting caught in an avalanche.

At least with Leander laboring to get them to safety, he won't have time to be cold? Derrica isn't sure how any of this works. She knows a little about how to detect hypothermia, and not much else.

"Do you remember swimming?" She asks abruptly. "Do you remember the pond near the tower in Rivain?"

Like what, he doesn't ask, rejecting the unkind impulse to pick at what she's saying. Immediately, he reminds himself, it isn't her fault: full sentence, intentional inner monologue. Not the fall through the ice—that was entirely her fault, and she's correct to feel foolish—but his own internal state, his inability to be distracted from it even by so grave a situation. But then, to him it isn't grave at all, that's got to be the issue—

"...Yes."

Nuisance thoughts dissolve into hot sun and cool breeze, green all around, noise of children in play and the elders calling over them. A world so unlike the one he'd inhabited before.

"I always thought pond was too weak a word for it." How dreamlike it was, the shape of it eroded into stone, the colour bright and rich as dye, the surreal clarity. (The ice beneath their feet is clear, too, in places.) "It never felt quite real. Living there."

For a moment there's nothing but the scrape-scrape-scrape of their skates on the ice. Derrica understands what Leander is alluding to. Sometimes her entire past feels like a dream. Was she ever so happy? Had she ever felt so safe?

"I understand."

Maybe she wouldn't have understood had Leander told her that when they had first known each other, but she understood now. She'd traveled enough and spoken to enough mages now to know how surreal Dairsmuid had been.

"When it's warm, I want to find a pond." If it's ever warm. "Do you remember how to swim?"

This train of conversation is a little bit hilarious, considering that she'd just been dunked in frozen water. But it's been on her mind since she'd spoken to Marcus. She can speak to Leander about it now, unraveling this memory between them as Leander propels them forward.

Her arm around his waist; his hand finds hers, gloved, his gloveless, and stays there. A reward for connecting, unconsciously given by most, deliberate from him. (It isn't her fault.) Winter creeps between the fibres of his muscles, pinches him pale and ruddy, but should it attempt to penetrate his will before they reach the settlement, he will respectfully decline. To Leander, pain is a guest, and as such he treats it hospitably.

"Of course I do." She may catch his brief smile for the irony. His face is stiffening in the cold, his ears bright pink. "There ought to be something suitable outside the city. I haven't looked, but someone will know." Lips parted for breath, and in search of the shape of a word, too. At length, "You ought to know, by then I might not be here."

She almost stumbles.

They can't stop moving. She understands the major concerns in the abstract: if she stops, she might not be able to start again. Leander has given her almost all his outerwear, and she can't drag him to a halt. But the steady scrape of her skates is interrupted by that admission.

"What?" Then, amended— "What do you mean?"

She nearly staggers him, too, so the first few words come out sharper—

"Easy, now. Stay on your feet, we're nearly there." Nearly being a relative measure, more for hope than precision, but still. "I may leave the company in the coming months. It's not something I want to discuss—"

at all

"—out here."

The urge to dig her heels in and press him about the possibility now is diverted only by their present situation: she's wrapped up in his warm outer layers, freezing from the waist down, and he's lacking any protection from the cold.

So Derrica bites back her questions. They make it to the village. They're shown to the small cottage that has apparently been set aside for whatever healer Riftwatch cared to send. There are hunters departing to fetch the supplies Derrica dropped, likely frozen solid by now, and they'll be able to get to work in the morning, there's food, there are blankets, dry clothes, please rest, so on and so forth, right up until the moment Leander closes the door on their small welcoming committee.

Crouched by the hearth, Derrica's erratic attempts to produce flame finally take. Is it partly her own frozen fingers or the novelty of the spell itself?

"Can you hand me that tunic?" Derrica asks after a moment. The shivering is good, she knows, but she's tired of it. Her entire body aches, and her hair is half-frozen and Leander might be leaving. Navigating it all is overwhelming.

In the same instant his hand leaves the door, Leander's politely pressed—apologetic, humble, grateful—smile disappears, leaving behind the truth of exhaustion. Discomfort. Adrenaline long gone, reality catching up to his muscles, his cold-stiffened fingers, his lungs, a few dry coughs while he delivers the tunic at an arm's length.

His boots are off, his vest next. He climbs onto the bed, unfolding one of the extra blankets, and curls up in a quivering nest closest to the wall to watch from afar the little fire she's made.

"Let's never do this again."

"No, let's not."

Ice crystals skitter across the floor as Derrica finally shucks off her woolen leggings. She considers leaving everything for the morning, but reluctantly wrestles the sodden, half-frozen fabric to lay across the floor in front of the fire.

She hesitates before putting another log onto the fire and coaxing another burst of flame forth from between her palms. Her sputtering efforts are producing some small improvements, but it will still take some time for the heat to permeate the entire cottage.

"Leander, I'm sorry."

Derrica imparts this as she crosses the room to perch on the edge of the bed. Simplicity seems the best way to cover the multitude of things she'd like to apologize for, before they broach the minor revelation he'd shared as they'd struggled towards the village.

Perhaps he ought to be the one taking care of the fire, helping Derrica out of her frosted clothes and easing her down to rest—someone else might see it through. She's not a child. He doesn't feel like moving, even to get into bed properly. This here will do. Trousers and all.

She's speaking, she's sitting like he's the one who nearly drowned, presenting him with the obligation of an emotional exchange. He couldn't be more fatigued. Probably she couldn't be, either, and yet she persists...

"I know." From the bunched-up blanket snakes his hand, palm up. "So am I."

(He isn't. But it's what you say.)

Her icy fingers find his palm, trace lightly across it before lacing through his to clasp Leander's hand. She wants to draw the blanket and thick fur up over them both and go to sleep. The ice in her hair is melting as warmth radiates from the fireplace. She looks down at their interlocked fingers.

"Are you really thinking of leaving?"

Maybe she could have pretended she didn't hear it. But he'd spoken those words aloud, and Derrica doesn't know what to do with that knowledge now.

After a long quiet, he stirs, plucking at the fur beneath their hands, between two of his fingers—the most he can do without letting go.

"Warm yourself." He ought to do the same. In the bed, not on it. In a minute, maybe. When it seems right to answer, his voice smooth and low, "I've been considering it for a while... rejoining the Inquisition, maybe, or heading back northeast." She'll want more than that. "It's becoming harder to stay." And yet more, probably, but he'll wait to see how deeply she wants to pry.

When Derrica gets into the bed, she drags the coverlets with her. Fur and wool tugged up over them both as she curls in beside him. She is not warm, so she doesn't fit herself in tightly against him, just tucks one cold hand back into his.

"Because of him? Ilias?"

She says his name very quietly. It's the way she'd once invoked spirits, as if speaking his name aloud will bring him here.

Decision made, then. Leander straightens his legs to make room, slowly pushes and kicks down his own blanket to decrease the layers between Derrica and himself. Easier to warm up this way. Even easier with no clothing between them—a passing thought that he dismisses.

"Yes."

The name alone pinches him, makes a fist around his guts and squeezes tenderly—his own answer, more so—but the resentment remains private, his features smooth. A certain absence in his eyes. His voice, a toneless murmur.

"I thought it would be easier." Seeing him with someone else. Exercising his patience. Being good. "I do want him to be happy... to make him happy."

Her hand tightens around Leander's. Leander's voice betrays nothing, but Derrica can understand the pain that he must be carrying. If she were in his position, if she were so close but held at bay by what had passed in the stretch of time she'd been absent—

"He cares for you," Derrica says softly. "I know he does."

But caring isn't the same. It doesn't yield the kind of reunion that Leander must wish for.

"Would it be easier to be apart from him? Alone?"

In stillness, Leander considers. Would it be easier? Yes. No. Inevitability would follow him like a shadow, his thoughts would always come back. Intent slowly taking shape, creeping for weeks now, like veins approaching the heart of an idea—its virulent blood—a strange answer to an innocent question, better kept to himself.

Finally, movement: his fingers, between hers, gently flex and relax again.

"He cares for everyone." Idle strokes of his thumb, across the ridge of her knuckle, over and over. "And I've been replaced." Knuckle, fingernail, feeling at it like a knife's edge. "You're similar that way—caring for everyone, more deeply than most."

"No. It's different."

If there is any similarity between her and Ilias, then her assertion must be true. If her assessment of Ilias in the bath, the involuntary twitch of pain and the familiar scar gouged into his chest, then it is impossible that Leander has been replaced and whatever affection there has been supplanted. Derrica hooks a chilly ankle around Leander's, quietly insistent.

"Some people they—"

The description doesn't come to her neatly. Everything that comes to mind sounds like a wound.

"They mean so much. They're part of you," she asserts, thoughts straying to people who have been dead and gone for years; she still feels their absence. She watches him a moment. "But that's not enough?"

A momentary spike of repulsion, struck up by the soft knocking of ankles, at once identified as petty reflex and summarily dismissed.

"It ought to be." Of course it isn't. She'd never suggest it if she knew. "I know it's different. He's the only one," he pauses, searches a thought, finally lets go a huff of recognition. "He's the only one. We made each other. I'm as much him as he is me." A whisper of purest truth. He wonders if Derrica knows how privileged she is to hear it. "But I'm only a ghost to him now."

What Leander tells her feels precious, though Derrica cannot know the extent of it. It is rare because Leander tells her it as if he is baring bones, showing her some fundamental part of himself.

"You're a ghost if you go."

Her grip on his hand tightens.

"Stay. Make something else."

Please.

There is nothing else.

"I'm your ghost, too—you look at me and see the Circle, and you think of her." Lips press, barely a smile. "It isn't your fault. But perhaps you ought to hear your own advice."

"I see you."

But is there any way to see him without seeing their past? She presses a palm to his chest, over his heart.

"I think of you. The only person here who knows who everything of me."

Then, quieter—

"She's dead." Her voice wavers very slightly, but her jaw is set. The pain of this invocation is stymied and suppressed. "There's nothing else we can ever make, or ever be to each other. But you don't have to be a ghost to Ilias."

Another point of contact, bringing herself closer, pleading with her limbs. If only she knew how unfeeling it is, the writhing thing nestled in meat and bone beneath her hand. How miserly it can be. And if she saw what she claims to see, would she still lie here? He won't try to warn her away—you don't really know me, I'm dangerous, ugh, what a painfully vapid assertion—but neither will he unfold the truth for her: that it was Ilias who made him a ghost.

"I'm sorry," he says, timed with a squeeze of his hand in return—at last. "For her. And for you, and for bringing this up today, of all the miserable days." Through his shirt, his chest is warm under her palm; he nudges one cold foot against another. "How about this. I promise... well. I can't promise I won't suddenly disappear, because the world is unpredictable at best—but I'll do my best not to."

"It's okay. Just..."

It's a good promise. She cannot ask more of him than his best, even if her instinct is to draw something more binding from him. If he asks her to let him go, she isn't sure she could do it. It's hard, letting go of someone who feels like home. Leander's heart beat steadily under her palm, reassuring. Derrica breathes out.

"Remember that you're part of me too."

Leander smiles, and breathes a smile's soft sound. The tangle of lives intertwined—what could be more binding than that? (A vow, forever. An exchange of blood.)

To dislodge the wandering thought, his face nudges closer, and softly he whispers, "How could I forget that?" And, with a further reach of neck and shoulder, touches his lips to her cheek. Noses brush as he lingers to murmur, "Are you warm now?"

MOD EVENT: WINTERMARCH WINTER MARCH

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