[OPEN] FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE: PART ONE

[unshut]

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.'

Comments

Chaos

[doneisdone]

Teren's only defense is that she's mostly below it and able to dodge its swinging arms, but even she has newly singed holes in her leather armor, the flesh searing beneath, which only makes her angrier.

"Fucking! Stop! Moving!" she snarls, punctuating each word with a stab, and it's as she's raising the knife a fourth time that it finally catches her on the side of the head. She at least saw it out of the corner of her eye, quickly enough to turn mostly away, but still her active knife clatters away cross the floor towards Matthias and the rest of her follows, knocking her forehead hard on the stone.

The impact doesn't knock Teren unconscious, but it does disorient her for a moment, and when she picks her head up again she locks eyes with Matthias, her own expression inscrutable. Blood is gushing down the right side of her face from the shallow head wound (they're always so dramatic) and steam rises lightly from the spots on her arms and face that she was struck.

[inkindled]

The knife falls, and Matthias kicks it away.

It makes sense, in the moment. Natural and easy and make half-instinct, maybe more than half. He doesn't regret it. There are a thousand things happening, everyone is screaming, some of the stone is actually on fire where the abomination's great head had scraped. What's one knife? A scuttling noise, an insect. Even when she lifts herself off of the stone floor with blood on her face, Matthias doesn't feel bad. What he does feel is terrible, looking down at her, terrible that she is hurt, terrible like he understands.

He looks down on her a moment too long. Then he offers his hand--the good one, strong and rough and scarred from fire of his own.

[doneisdone]

As he knocks the knife away, Teren's face changes: where wordless fury had been, there is now a glint of terror, uncertainty, the realization that fate has left her in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, with exactly the wrong person.

His intent was irrelevant, her perception only that he kicked the knife out of her reach, putting her on the back foot (so to speak) and having to take an extra moment to claw for another in her belt as she is suddenly wrenched back by the ankle, with a shout cut so short it's barely an expletive, dragged by the abomination into a plume of flame.
She disappears from view for several seconds. When the flames dissipate, she's nowhere to be seen-- though if Matthias has the presence of mind to notice the open door nearby, past which the abomination lumbers, he may draw the right conclusion.
If not, it might seem Teren was obliterated before his eyes.

[inkindled]

Horror chokes Matthias instantly. It's too fast. She's pulled backwards, and he moves forward, like they're joined together by rope and he has no other choice, his hand reaching for her. His stupid leg twists under him as he hits a misstep, he falls on his face, smacks his cheek against the stone floor that is still warm from Teren's body, and from the heat of the abomination.

He writhes away from the fire, pain pulsing in the ugly meat of his leg, stinging sharp in his cheek where he hit the floor. When the flames clear, she's gone, he doesn't see anything but the space where she was. Not immolated, Matthias has done enough to know what gets left behind. But this is an abomination. She is gone from that, not the fire, the rules are different, and he rolls onto his back and stays there a moment, staring up at the ceiling. Then he picks himself up.