[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

after.

[justashotaway]

Having spent the morning helping the City Guard with their work, Laura makes the stunningly poor choice (she thinks, in retrospect) of staying in Kirkwall to eat lunch at a tavern she's decided she likes. They serve meat and bread and a few bites' worth of vegetables, and she can sit near a wall and watch people come and go. It's quiet, and it feels normal--beyond the quasi-normalcy of existing in the Gallows, she's just one more hungry face with a coin at the ready.

Of course, then she comes home and that cloak of normalcy vanishes. There's rubble, there's injured people--something's happened, and there's no sense of what. People are busy, and she's about to start helping (the mission at hand is clearly more important than find out who broke a wall) when she sees movement from the corner of her eye. A sooty hand running through curly hair, or touching a face, or--oh. She rushes over, crouching down beside him.

"Matthias!" He's been crying. That's the first, most startling thing Laura notices. She reaches for his other hand but stops short of touching it, staring wide-eyed down at the burnt flesh.

[inkindled]

"It's okay." Matthias starts tucking the hand away, folding it stiffly closer to his chest. He doesn't dare touch the fabric. The skin is starting to leather, wet pink edged white that is turning hard and cracked. It is still raw. So is he. His throat hurts and his leg hurts and his hand is starting to hurt, and there's the heat of the burn on his face but there's the heat of being caught like this, do better, Matthias.

He grabs for her hand with his other hand, dirty and damp from tears and sweat and whatever else. Winds his fingers tight around hers. She is okay, she looks good. Fine. She wasn't hurt. When the whole thing went to shit, she wasn't hurt. She could keep safe.

Matthias swallows, hard. "It's okay. It's okay. I'm--okay. It was bad," his voice cracks, a little betrayal, he snuffles his face into his shoulder a moment, half-turning from her. "It was. I'm okay."

[justashotaway]

It was bad. It looks bad--she's seen him survive more than a single person before, and he was never this upset. The occasional worried faces he made in the jungle never seemed to mean anything she could discern.

She tries to think, what would I want Matthias to do for me? He's already doing something she would do, hiding someplace and waiting for things to come back to normal. He's gripping her hand like all the strength he has left is in her fingers, and she would do that, too.

So, taking care not to disturb the leg he's got stretched out, or his burnt hand, or anything else that might be injured, she sits down properly beside him. Her legs stretch out, too, and she wraps an arm around his shoulders, drawing him near.

She would want Matthias to sit very near, she's decided, and to let go if she said to, but to make some attempt to hold on. He smells like smoke and singed hair when she brings her face near to his. "You are okay."

[inkindled]

Matthias folds against her, as instant as if someone had pulled a cord and collapsed him. Her arm is around his shoulder and he fits into her, leans into her, expels all of his breath. His bad hand he keeps tucked close to him, to keep it out of sight. He can smell it, burnt meat. He closes his eyes.

"It was," he says, thickly, "a mage. He was eating with everyone. He was angry about--something, about Riftwatch. I tried to talk to him, and he just, turned, became an-- an Abomination, I saw it, and he, they killed him--they had to, I know they did, it's not-- it's not right, still isn't right, I wanted to help him. I would have helped him."

Could have, with more time, if he had known. And done what? Not even Harrowed himself, barely in control, focused when he can be, but sometimes-- His breath shakes when he pulls it in and he squeezes his eyes tighter. His hand throbs with his heartbeat.

[justashotaway]

Laura tries not to smell his hand, or his hair, or the singed cloth of his shirt. All of it together says danger, more than anything else; some predator's sense says this is a weakened thing she's holding, and that is untrue. Surviving has not made Matthias weak, only injured. Eventually, he will smell like himself again. Until then, she'll do her best not to be aware of what her nose tells her.

Instead, she focuses on the sound of what he says, the way he breathes, the feeling of his hair beneath her chin. He wants what she would want, and somehow, that brings a sort of comfort to her, too. It's hard to tell if it's the fact that they're similar, that she's helped somehow, or if it's just the knowledge that he's safe beside her.

"An abomination is...a broken mage?" She has a sense of what it means, a vague, untethered idea, but she doesn't know how to say it.

[inkindled]

He nods, slightly, without pulling away from her.

"You get possessed. You're in the Fade, and so's the demon, but it--it has your body, it moves you about. Like a puppet. And it goes mad, and it turns, and-- Sometimes it's taken you. Sometimes you let go. If you haven't any choice. I thought, if there was a battle, if I was the last one. No one ever said we had to, it was never an order, but we talked about it. It would be like gaatlok. Like a glyph. I could kill so many of them. But I could never, I don't want to--and I never had to, I always made it."

Talking. Too much talking. Matthias swallows, his raw throat tight.

"I could have helped him. Someone could have. It didn't have to-- to be that way."

[justashotaway]

She wonders if that's what happened when Reis threw bombs that made her disappear and wake up covered in blood--some kind of visit to the Fade that she hadn't had the magic to comprehend, something else taking over her body and killing. But she has been to the Fade now. She knows what it looks like, and she always saw nothing. Her face is pinched into a miserable little frown, somewhere behind his head, and Matthias is talking of doing that to himself on purpose.

"How?" she asks, for want of anything else to say. She doesn't know enough about magic to know what would have fixed this. And she's come to a point where she needs to say something, or she'll be in danger of pulling Matthias into a tighter embrace. He has been injured; she'll only cause him more harm. But the hand gripping his, through all the sweat and soot, squeezes.

[inkindled]

"I," he starts, and his breath hitches, "don't know, but I could have done something. Talked to him before he did it, told him-- I don't know, but it can't keep happening."

He turns his face, presses it against her shoulder. It hurts, vaguely, a twinge where the raw burned skin touches against cloth. There's something grounding about that pain. And it is not as good as the squeeze of her hand, which is the most grounding thing of all, and Matthias squeezes back, holds on.

"I want to leave," he says. "I don't--want to be here. Or I do. I don't know. If I leave, I'll-- I don't want to be that. I know I could be. I don't want to be."

[justashotaway]

"Don't go." Or does he mean I don't want to sit here, I want to go someplace else? Laura isn't sure, but her first assumption--the one that makes her lungs burn with something besides smoke and dust--is I want to leave Riftwatch. "You are not a broken mage. You are not like that."

He isn't like other mages at all, by her mark. He's curious without cruelty; his confidence is tempered by kindness. Her free hand finds its way into his hair, fingers endlessly smoothing down the curls at the back of his head.

[inkindled]

He crumples against her, pressing even closer without concern for how it presses against his raw skin, twists his burned leg, bumps his hand against his chest. Too tired to cry, wrung out and hurt and tired.

He stays like that for a very long time. Too long, probably. She must be tired, he thinks, somewhere at the back in his head, she must be tired of sitting here, but if there is anyone who he can be quiet with, it's Laura. So maybe she isn't tired. Her hand against the back of his head, a light weight that feels like getting pulled backwards out of the water.

Eventually, he breathes out, once, huge. Still doesn't pull away.

"Sorry."