[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

[unshut]

How abruptly he is the opposite of alone. In this narrow alcove almost entirely hidden behind they overturned table, they are all crowded in over the hot ash remains of a fire that had been burning mere moments ago. The stones are still warm and one of the girls near the back is crying and doing her best to be silent about it.

"Quiet now," Fitcher whispers. Maybe those are her fingers tangled in the back of his clothes. "It will pass us."

She sounds so certain.

(It does very little good not to be.)

[untiltheyarent]

Fifi is looking past him with her poker, her gaze fixed in a sort of determination that yields only from one quite accustomed to minor disasters and applying her presence of mind to a major one.
She lets Fitcher do the talking, choosing instead to scan their sightline incessantly.

[sumptus]

If it doesn't, there are enough of them, a few might get away. Maybe that's what they're counting on. The woman who speaks, she might make it. The elf who seems so well in control of herself.

Probably not the crying girl. Better not to think about her.

Not him, either, if he doesn't get ahold of himself. Caius stills again, pressing the back of his skull to a bump in the stone, wishing it were cool instead of swelteringly hot. If the demon comes any closer, his head feels like it might split in half.

(If it comes any closer, it'll be for him. A better man would run. Lead it away. Caius wants to live, and doesn't move a muscle.)

[unshut]

How are they to measure time in this strange half dark like this while somewhere very close, something is tearing its way in some uncertain direction. There are muted pops and cracks, then the sudden fantastic burst of something closer. A ripple passes through the fireplace as half its occupants jump at the sound.

Fitcher silently beckons Fifi to sink back from the narrow slip of space between the edge of the table and the cook hearth's wall.

(It will pass. It will pass. It will pass.)