[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

[esquive]

The hand is unpleasant to look at. The leg seems bad. They are both attached to an idiot boy prone, Marcoulf thinks, to arguing.

He touches the top of the Matthias's head - a certain gloved hand at some whorl from which his curly hair sprouts from; he's just a boy.

"Look at me," he says - sharp. "You'll be well and it's finished."

[inkindled]

Deep instinct responds to that tone. Matthias looks at him. His face is dirty too. He looks like someone Matthias would have known before this. Not a mage, not a templar. A person. And Matthias feels stupid and small and helpless in a deep down way.

"It's not," he says, "finished," for now it is, but there will be more. "He's just dead." The warmth from the hand on top of his head is a different warmth. It doesn't bake.

[esquive]

He leaves his hand there for a moment, the narrow line of his attention narrowing yet further to search Matthias's face. "Yes. He is," he says, and doesn't know why he's being gentle about it (though the shape of the words is brisk enough and the meaning less so). A shot fired into the dark: "You did nothing wrong."

Maybe he did. How the fuck would he know? But he smooths back Matthias' ash flecked hair and pats him by the shoulder least likely to have been scorched by anything like he is a smaller (or stupider) kind of animal who might answer to such things.

"I'm going to look at what can be done for your leg before it begins to set. Understand me?"

[inkindled]

"Wait--"

His eyes had slipped closed for a moment. He is very stupid, and it is easy, at least in these moments, to gentle him. It takes hardly anything at all. Familiar gestures, left over from a childhood lived between battles, from an expert hand swiping away tears in a dark Circle hallway, from a farmer's broad hand administering a bracing slap on the back while he was miserable with a fever. Get on, get up.

Now Matthias' eyes burst open, disturbing the calm. He makes a wild study of Marcoulf's face as he grabs blindly for his hand, tries to pull it back toward his shoulder.

"Don't, wait. Don't leave. Not yet."

[esquive]

He's too strung thin to startle, and there's been a life made both out of answering when something is asked for and waiting in grim places alongside battered company so he lets his hand be clutched back. He settles it there on the boy's narrow shoulder under the desperation grip of Matthias' fingers, and he waits.

For one second, for two, as the sounds of the courtyard filters around them - a buzz of distant chatter and movement and the odd noises of a broken thing reordering itself. It's sticky warm, and the sky is very blue. It would have been a pleasant day.

"Pay attention to me," he says. "Can you lift your other hand? Like so." Marcoulf demonstrates by crossing his free arm across his chest, his gloved hand nestling up against his collar bone. "If you can't, I'll help you do it."

[inkindled]

One second, two. Matthias evens out his breathing, slowing it from where it had quickened to animal madness. He does not let go of Marcoulf's hand. He looks when he's bidden, following the path of the arm with his rounded eyes, tracing its path backwards again across the empty blue sky.

Slowly, he lifts his other arm. The burnt hand looks unnatural in the summer sunlight. It belongs somewhere else, to someone else. Puffy and stiff, both at once, cracked in the places where the blisters had burst.

Matthias does not stare at it. Instead he tries to do as Marcoulf had. He lifts the hand higher to get the right angle and his arm begins to shake, as thick pain starts to leak down into his wrist. He sets his teeth together and breathes out, harshly, as he starts to bring it to his shoulder.

[esquive]

He touches, lightly and carefully, at that elbow as it bends - guiding the movement with the press of his thumb and little more. "Good," he says. "Very good." Like Matthias is an animal which subsists on praise.

"You must keep it there until a healer can be fetched. Comprenez vous? All right? It will start to feel better, I promise you."

He'd carried his arm just like that all the way from Ghislain.

[inkindled]

Mutely, Matthias nods. The little compliments shine brightly to him, small and meaningless, only words, but he needed them. He keeps his hand in place, not touched to his shoulder but close enough that he feels heat radiating off of it. Or perhaps that's his imagination.

"I didn't want him to die."

He hadn't meant to say anything at all. The words just fall out. Matthias hunches his shoulders, lets go of Marcoulf so he can scrub his good hand over his face. Smears together sweat and soot and tears. It's better that way.

[esquive]

He pats the boy's shoulder, purposefully firm and mindful to have no interaction with the curdled flesh of the burned hand.

"I'm certain no one did," he says, perfunctory and pointedly blind to tears as he shift back but not away, attention turning to Matthias' leg. "Let us hope also that no one else has."

For a moment, his hands hover uncertaintly. Then he strips off his gloves - easy off the right hand and awkwardly from the left, the thumb and forefinger on his right hand clumsy (and the whole of the thing ugly with scarring).

"Chew on your sleeve if this pains you," he instructs, though it might not. Burns can be strange unfeeling things while still running.

Regardless, it will be better to look into separate cloth from flesh now before all scope of feeling returns to the limb. So. He does his best.

[inkindled]

He nods again, this time purposefully mute, in case he says something else dazed and stupid. Thinking, without saying anything, trying to separate himself from his own leg, Matthias looks at the hard blue of the sky. Thinking that what he said can't be true. Many people must have wanted the man to die. What he had become. They wanted that to die. So it's like a children's tale, to say anything else, and Matthias feels a twist of shame. He isn't a child. He knows what's true and what is not.

The feeling in his leg is very distant. Like it belongs to someone else. And the pain is hollow, all the twinge and none of the teeth, and Matthias keeps looking at the sky, the sunshine hot on his raw face, all the action of the yard going on outside of them.

For a minute he thinks that he is outside of his own body, looking down at himself. Marcoulf bent over his leg, his one hand thick with twisting scars like a root. Matthias laid out and staring up at himself, empty in his eyes.

Then he blinks and he's back, and now there is a little more pain, wet, that's what pulled him back, and he sets his teeth but he does not cry out, and he does not put his sleeve into his mouth.

[esquive]

For a time, it's just this—quiet unpleasant and peeling work. And then, just as simply, it is as finished as it can be under his hands. Marcoulf quenches his hands in the dust of the courtyard, then wipes them against the leg of his breeches but doesn't bother again with the gloves.

"There. Now the healers will have something clean to work with." Laying his good hand on Matthias' other shin, he looks at him. "I've seen much worse. But let me go fetch someone to mend you."