faderift | [OPEN] FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE: PART ONE

[OPEN] FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE: PART ONE

WHO: Everyone and anyone
WHAT: An abomination redecorates the Gallows.
WHEN: Early August
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Part One of FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE. Will include some violence, some general chaos, and some light murderin'.

There is a man in a worn traveling cloak. He is dark haired, with sharp features dominated by a dark horizontal scar near his hairline, and later someone will describe him as having been soft spoken when he asked for directions.

But something in the Gallows' dining hall, with its unreliable population for the midday meal, must catch under his skin; he's found his voice again by the time he steps up onto one of the benches.

"Is this all of you?"

Someone nearby tells him to get his boots off the furniture, so the man climbs higher onto the table and is louder the second time: "Is this really all you are? A few people in a tower on an island?"

Heads are coming up. As his voice rises, he produces an envelope from his pocket.

"Do you think this is funny? Playing at being something, and telling people you can make a difference to them? You were supposed to be helping, but you're all just sitting here! Don't touch me"—to someone encouraging him to get off the fucking table—"You were meant to be helping us. You promised you would, and I told her I believed you!"

Hands are reaching for him. No, really, get off the table. You can explain what's wrong once you're down; you're with friends— The man jerks his arm free, snarling, "Don't touch me! You're nothing!" A stronger hand finds him then and begins pulling him struggling down. With a wrenched cry of, "Livia!" the man slips from the table.

A column of fire pours upward out of him like molten heat from a crack in the earth. It bursts so high that it scorches a circle on the dining hall ceiling, and burns so suddenly hot that it sends those nearest to him recoiling backward as their clothes catch. The fire licks again in random directions, in chaotic fits and starts of light and heat, and the thing that rises up again in the mage's place isn't really a man at all.

The rage abomination will ravage its way through the dining hall and prodigious Gallows kitchens, then out into the courtyard beyond leaving considerable destruction in its wake until finally brought down by Leander. In the charred aftermath, the following can be recovered from among the mage's belongings: a leather corded bracelet with a green bead woven in it (too small for anything but the smallest wrist), a functioning phylactery, and a letter from "Riftwatch" which implies a history of correspondence and familiarly refers to the recipient by name, 'Felix.' An investigation of Riftwatch's files will reveal the log of having received a message from a similar Felix, No Lastname six months earlier. The message itself is nowhere to be found among the Gallows records.

The recovered letter assures Felix that all will be well, and includes instructions to wait in the woods above the crossroads of a small Wildervale village.

'Help will be on its way. Good luck, and safe travels.'

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A visitor.

Her short pause is for surveying the destruction - upturned tables and scattered benches, upturned and scattered people. Scorched marks and burst window panes and the smell of ash.

She touches Julius' elbow.

"Sit for a moment. Let me see your leg."

"It's nothing urgent," he says, but he does move to sit on a nearby (upright) bench. "I took an ax to it at Ghislain, I thought it was well healed, but I suppose I haven't been jumping off a lot of tables since then."

Sitting still isn't a step he relishes, but he suspects arguing with her would take longer than just letting her look.

A fair assessment. She is matter of fact about kneeling down in her sooty clothes and hitching up the edge of his robes to get a look at the limb in question. She'll have to peel herself up off the ground after - standing is sometimes disagreeable these days -, but no matter.

"An axe at Ghislain? I had no idea you were such a war hero, Enchanter," somehow manages to be the simulacrum of light, though she is undeniably distracted. "I suspect our healers will want anyone badly injured shifted out of here. I'll see about finding a group slightly more fit for carrying than either of us."

"If by 'hero' you mean 'successfully didn't die in a battle despite the enemy's best attempt,' then I was a hero long before Ghislain." It's only as light as hers was.

"I saw Sawbones early on; if she made it out relatively in one piece I suspect she has similar ideas about organizing. I was going to look for anyone who'd landed somewhere out of the way to point help in their direction." Before she'd ungraciously made him sit down.

Most war heroes, she suspects, are cut of a similar cloth. But these are conversations for different times.

"I'll see who might be collected from the ferry slip to help then. If they haven't come running up in this direction already." Satisfied with her examination, she withdraws her hands from him. "I might recommend propping it up somewhere the moment you're able. And I know of an excellent salve if the joint proves bothersome tomorrow."

For a moment, Fitcher lingers there on the hall's floor rather than scratching directly back onto her feet. She lets her eye travel around them, sooty hand absently touching at her hairline and leaving a dark track.

"What a mess."

He runs a hand back through his hair, which doesn't significantly neaten it.

"I haven't heard anything like a reliable count of the casualties yet," he says, muted. "I expect it will take a bit of time to determine who isn't accounted for. If he went through anyone in a less spectacular fashion before he got in here." Julius suspects not; no one would have tried to bar him in the middle of the day, (seemingly) calm and on his own. But the man had clearly been agitated before everything went to hell, and it's not outside the realm of possibility he might have taken a smaller, pettier revenge on someone if the opportunity arose.

Her reply is a low, meditative hm a she surveys the room, tipping her face up to regard the black mark scorched wide on the ceiling above them. They'll need scaffolding to the scrubbing up there, she thinks distantly.

Something in the mundane quality of the thought strikes her then, plucking her back to herself and drawing her attention back to Julius. She'd missed it before. How ridiculous—

"You said he had a grievance? Do we know what kind?"

"It wasn't a lengthy speech before..." A gesture, to encompass the aftermath. "But he said something about a promise to help. A promise seemingly broken, I'd venture. Someone else he convinced to believe that promise." He thinks a moment, reaching for something that he hadn't had any context for. "...Livia. A name he said, before it all went badly."

She pauses. It's such a small thing there in the midst of so much destruction, a very natural hesitation as if combing backward through a catalogue of memories and finding--

"I don't recall the name from any of the paperwork I've processed through the Scouting office." Lie. "But I suppose it is possible it might have passed under some other hand, or by way of another office. There may be some mention in the records." True.

With a great effort of an old knee against a stone floor, Fitcher moves to stand.

"I'd like to know," he says, frankly, watching her rise. "And I'm sure I won't be the only one. He made sure everyone in the room heard him, before he..." A vague but illustrative upward motion of the hand, suggesting the column of flame that created that circle on the ceiling.

She glances back up again toward the horrible black mark.

"If it were me, I think I'd have chosen to be very specific about my grievances before going up like a harvest bonfire so that there could be no doubt what as to what I'd done and why. But I suppose," she says, offering him her hand back to his feet. "One doesn't always choose the specifics of these things.

"No." He might leave it there, but after a moment, he says, "That looked like a rage abomination. Those tend to be ... spur of the moment failures, rather than the long road to, say, pride. He could have come here intending to try to take us out with him, of course. But it's just as likely he came here intending to try to find some sort of satisfaction and, finding none..." Well, what happened next was somewhat self-evident.

Her sigh is small thing, a finger's width of frustration. In every direction it is a sad and wasteful business.

"Let us in the meantime hope this Livia person is far from here, and enjoying much better circumstances." For everyone's sake, she thinks, and it is a true sentiment regardless of her own investment in the subject.

Fitcher tips her head to Julius, studies briefly how he carries his weight, and the nods as if she's decided something.

"Right, well. Nothing to be accomplished by standing here, Enchanter. I'm to fetch willing hands. I might press you for a guarantee that you do no heavy lifting, but I doubt I'll have it."

He smiles crookedly. "Will you accept a promise to help carefully, in its stead?"

Fitcher's skeptical hum is punctuated with a sidelong look. Sounds like bullshit, Enchanter.

"A face like that—you usually get away with it, don't you?" She taps the side of her nose (thoughtlessly, leaving a dark sooty fingerprint there). "I'll accept it this once. But don't expect that smile to work on an old woman a second time."

That gets a small laugh, tired but genuine, from him. "Noted. If you fetch enough willing hands, maybe I'll be chased away regardless."

"Now that almost seems like a possibility."

With a decisive dusting of her skirts, she—hesitates. It's a narrow thing, a beat in which she might say Be well, or Mind the leg, or some other incidental well wish which means next to nothing in a ruined roomed like this one.

She shrugs. Flashes him a narrow smile. "Best of luck with the lifting, Julius."

And then, stepping wide to avoid a scattering of scorched splinters, she goes.

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[OPEN] FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE: PART ONE

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