[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

[heorte]

"Just some bruises, I think," he tells her, easing himself down beside her.

It doesn't feel like something to celebrate. He hadn't been close enough, and hadn't been able to get close enough at any point. It leaves him with a few minor burns and scrapes, but others are far worse off.

Maybe he could have changed that. It's impossible to know, but the flicker of regret is hard to oust when he can't stop thinking of better strategies, better responses. That's the trouble with surprise attacks, Ellis has found, though it's been a long while since he's been on the receiving end of one.

"Are you alright?"

A different question that "are you injured," as far as Ellis is concerned.

[okayimin]

Sawbones nods and her face twists briefly at his question.

"Thought I was in the Deep Roads," she says, voice dull, "Kept looking for Dusters who bled out under my hands, expecting them to be there to help with this mess." She lets her head fall back, staring up at the scorched ceiling. "Haven't done that in a long time."

[heorte]

What she describes is not unfamiliar. After the Blight, there had been a stretch of time when Ellis had weathered something similar. Being plunged back into the midst of the Blight, his life being torn down in front of his eyes, it sounds something like what is describing.

He doesn't ask her what she'd seen in the Deep Roads. He can guess. He had survived enough of it himself.

Slowly, he reaches over to put a hand on her shoulder. Comforting? He hopes.

"I know what that is like. I have seen it happen to some I traveled with."

Casually excising himself from the equation.

"I'm sorry."

[okayimin]

She doesn't really know how to feel about the hand on her shoulder. It's grounding at least. None of the Legion had hands that big.

" 's the nature of the work," she says, a little flat, "Old Sawbones always said not to fool myself into thinking I could save every Duster they rolled out on the table. And it's a blasted miracle we didn't lose half the current company over the last few months."

[heorte]

"I learned that same lesson."

All Wardens did, one way or another. But between them, how often had Wardens made decisions and reconciled themselves to the loss? How much shared ground is there between those decisions and the aftermath, likely similar to Sara tended to?

"Plenty of us are alive because of you," Ellis reminds her. "Us and Kirkwall as well."

Ellis has a neat little scar, sewn up in the wake of Nevarra's fall by her hands. He hasn't forgotten it.

[okayimin]

She looks up at him, a ghost of a smile turning the corners of her mouth up. The Deep Roads still hang over her, brimstone and blood scented, but she's here too, with this surfacer she's stitched and who'll live to see her table another day.

"That is something," she says, "And there's always the midwifing. Half a dozen babies will be born in Kirkwall for every burn we've suffered today, mark my words." Death is consistent and inevitable, but so is life. And that's something as well.

[heorte]

"It's a bit more than something."

Even if Ellis can't think too directly about babies, about the whole messy breadth of life happening outside of his scope these days. He could be noble and says that all he does as a Warden is to further the kind of quiet, happy lives other people were living, but that's not true. It's something that happens because of what he does, and it may happen because of his death, but that's not why he's pursued it.

"You take care of us all," is what Ellis says, instead of trying to draw any connective line between them. "That matters."