[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

[luaithre]

Marcus glances up at the approach of the familiar Chantry sister, and as she nears, she can rest assured he is taking care enough, avoiding where metal buckles will still run hot, and confident in not minding where embers are still burning.

"Not much," he says, speaking far too soon as he locates a satchel half-caught beneath the weight of the body. The acrid stench of smoke and burning flesh has him breathe sharp out through his nose and move backwards, kneeling in place as he sets about opening the satchel, each motion sharp and economic.

A small cylinder of paper, initially, which he offers to Sara to look at. And then some shining thing that Marcus curls into his palm as he does so.

[okayimin]

The voice... isn't Hob's voice. Which makes sense considering Hob died from a Darkspawn's dagger in his throat nearly two weeks before she escaped the Deep Roads. Sawbones blinks at Marcus and frowns at both the paper and the glimpse of the thing she doesn't quite catch.

She takes the paper, unrolls it and reads it. Her frown deepens, "We haven't sent anyone off towards Wildervale recently, have we?"

[luaithre]

The place name startles Marcus -- it's a rare ripple in self-control as he lifts his head to look at her hard for a moment, before he gets a grip. Raw nerved. Wildervale describes a lot of area.

"Not that I've heard," he says. "But I know the area. Is there a name signed?"

[okayimin]

"Just Riftwatch. Bold thing to sign to a letter claiming to be from a gang that can't agree on any one thing for long." Gang, organization, whatever they are. She holds out the letter to him.

"Letter's addressed to a Felix. Tells him to wait at the crossroads of some Wildervale village." And because she's not so out of it to miss an emotion on the face of a man who habitually refuses to emote, "You know the area?"

[luaithre]

Marcus takes the letter, studying it. Someone on a better pay grade than he will have to verify its legitimacy. Still half-kneeling, Marcus looks back at the smoldering remains of the Abomination, as if to mentally assign the name Felix to it, and the man it was.

The Chantry sister asks her question, and Marcus nods. "But I don't know him, or the woman he shouted about," he says.

[okayimin]

"Don't reckon any of us did, except whoever wrote the poor sod. Might not have come to this otherwise." Sawbones looks at the remains of what had been a man only a few hours ago. The letter had told Felix to wait. That help was on the way.

"He didn't wait. He said he believed in us, but he didn't wait where the letter told him to." It's a puzzle, a sad one, but one that brings her a little more into the moment. She looks at Marcus, "What else did you find?"

[luaithre]

"Or he did wait," Marcus says, "and no one came."

Given the betrayal and disappointment wracked into rage, anyway. "There isn't very much," he says. "A little coin, a token. It might be worth our while to return it all to his family, anyway." And do more than that.

That there is also a phylactery is just something he does not mention, more instinctive omission of information than calculated deception.

[okayimin]

She nods, considering his point, "That could have been more than enough to push a desperate man to desperate means."

"The Seneschal ought to have some kind of record if the Duster had been in contact with us, even if shit got in the water. Reckon we got enough spies and bards running around to track 'em down as long as we got that letter." She sighs, moving over to Felix's charred remains. Digging a small rock out of her pocket, she tucks it carefully into the remains of a curled hand.

"Gonna have to figure out what to do with him til we can get him to his kin. He ain't Legion." He hadn't walked in a dead man, you don't leave those bodies behind.

[luaithre]

Marcus looks to the little stone slipped into stiff hand, then glances at Sara Sawbones herself.

And then down at the body.

"On the surface, in these territories, we burn them," he says. "Usually." A beat, and then he asks, "Who was Hob?"

[okayimin]

She quiet for a long moment, still staring down at the body.

"Artificer for the Legion of the Dead. Sharp as shale with the cleverest hands, liked to poke around things he shouldn't. Drove me half mad. Always thought he'd lose his hands first, but..." She trails off. "Genlock got 'im. Blade through the throat. Him, Torgi and Oda went down that fight. We couldn't get their bodies."

[luaithre]

"I'm sorry."

It feels borderline like speaking to Petrana, or any other Rifter. Casting sympathy into something from an entire other world. Marcus can see why him crouched over the corpse of something as violently destructive as an abomination, still smoking and flaming in places, might evoke that memory.

"How would you have honoured them, if you could?"

He wipes his hands, eyes steered down at the motion. They are covered in soot. He thinks the rest of him must be too.

[okayimin]

Her expression quirks slightly when she looks up at him. It's not really a smile, more of a ghost of the Deep Roads. Grim humor in the face of the inevitable.

"Oh, they'd already had their funerals," she says. She pulls a clean handkerchief out of her pocket and holds it out to him. A normal sized one that looks comically large in her small hand. "There's no living warriors in the Legion, not really. They're just waiting for their deaths to catch up to them."

[luaithre]

The gulf widens all the more, but this time in a way that kind of mirrors her not-smile. Marcus nods his understanding -- or the acknowledgment that stands in for that.

[okayimin]

It's better that he doesn't understand. Better that another mind not fall to the lengthening shadows of the Blight, the slow, relentless surge of Darkspawn through the Deep Roads. The acknowledgment is enough. She pushes out a breath and when she speaks again, it's with a little of her usual crispness.

"But as I said, our poor sod here ain't Legion. He didn't think he was on a death march, so I reckon nobody's done his last rites. I'm not sanctioned for it, but I might be able to call a favor from one of the Lowtown Sisters." If he doesn't take the handkerchief, she'll press it into his hands firmly. "After we get this mess squared. And speaking of, lemme take a look at you. I still got words to have with the nug fucked Duster who broke bed rest orders."

[luaithre]

The handkerchief winds up in his hands, and Marcus tightens his fingers around it before going about the task of cleaning up what little he can. He stands -- he would have already stood by now, talking to someone, but Sara's stature encourages otherwise when he's already down there.

He brings the scrap of fabric up to wipe his face, looks at what comes away. Just sweat-mingled soot. He hit the ground hard at least at one stage, but if he's injured, they've yet to sing their presence.

"I wasn't hit badly," he says, offering back the cloth. "And I don't know that the Chantry has last rites to give for Abominations."

It's not rhetorical. He truly doesn't know.

[okayimin]

"I'll make that call, if you please," she says, taking back the handkerchief and pocketing it without much thought. She's all business now, attempting to hustle him away from the body and over to something to sit on so she can get her look in, "We got too many of you stoic types running about for my taste. And who says we're giving rites to an Abomination."

Her head tips up in a stern challenge, expecting obedience from the surface at large, "Our man Felix is the one who died. Demons want last rites, they'll have to sort that out on their side."

[luaithre]

Marcus allows it. He allows it because if he can squint past the haze of his own mood and self, he can sense her agitation, the same that churned up these sharp edges of her past. In short: perhaps a distraction, something easy to control, would do her well enough, and that's an easy sort of kindness to dispense.

That, and he wouldn't mind sitting down.

Which he does, flicking the tail of his coat out of the way and minimally wincing against the sheer exhaustion in his bones. "I agree," he says. "That would be good of you to arrange."

[okayimin]

"Nothin' to do with good," she says, crossly beginning her examination, "It's the proper thing to do." And she is not gentle in her ministrations, but she's quick and she's through, getting him bandaged and cleaned the best she can with what she has before stepping back.

"Well enough," is her pronouncement, "The others will have to see to you if you've got any trouble with that magic business, but go get some rest before someone finds work for you."