[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

[overharrowed]

That makes him pause, looking up. "...oh?"

[wythersake]

"You've seen Ghislain," It's, you know, out there. Geographically. "I imagine someone thought we'd get ideas."

[overharrowed]

He's quiet for a moment, wringing out his rag. "I wasn't there," he said, "when it happened. If it hadn't been for the Blight, I would have been, so it's sort of grimly funny," no, "but I was in Denerim. By the time we got back... I don't know if they called us back before or after they knew they wouldn't do the annulment, I assume after." The templars could have just killed them in Denerim, after all. "But we got back soon enough it wasn't cleaned up, mostly. The Wardens had other things to do, after all, and there just weren't enough survivors to have made much of a dent, so."

He drops the rag in the bucket. "Regardless. I helped clean it up."

[wythersake]

It is sort of funny,

He doesn't smile, but reflex sketches the conversation: Tall men in armor, squatting about, Do you think it'd be more or less mess to do this at home?

"It must be strange," He says, and means lonely. Water drips. "To be the only one who remembers it."

(They'd a surfeit of Ferelden mages — but young, mostly young, weren't they? And he heard how Colin spoke.)

[overharrowed]

"A bit," he allows. (Quite a bit.) "I know how I frustrate people," mostly other mages, "but it's an experience that leaves a mark. This,"

he indicates the mess, the scorch marks and broken tables and blood (though, mercifully and miraculously, no bodies) that mark what had happened,

"was a tragedy. Even as little as we know, he was a man hurt and pushed to the edge, that's clear. No one pushed Uldred. Uldred wasn't afraid. There are temptations freedom isn't going to do away with, and..." A shaky laugh. "Sorry... I'm sorry, you didn't want a lecture. It's just been a long day."

[wythersake]

"They won't grow any shorter from here," He smiles; still as that laugh isn’t. "But you don't need the lecture, either."

As though one had even been given. Julius didn't sound a lecture — a confession, maybe. Doubt, and not the last they’ll hear.

This will polarize: At once proof for those who think mages dangerous; and to those who think the problem manageable. After all, no one died. No one who mattered.

He mops.

"Do you think Uldred would have still done it? Call him any other man, in any other castle."

Poorly-treated, paid by board; an opportunity in sight.

[overharrowed]

Julius sits back. It's a heavy question and deserves a real answer.

"I think a variety of men, mages and otherwise, are perfectly willing to take a shortcut to power. Call him a second son who poisons his elder brother or a bann who makes a play for his neighbor's freeholders with lies and bribes. Uldred may have been a Libertarian, but that wasn't why he did what he did. He wasn't interested in securing a freer, more autonomous life for the rest of us in the abstract. He wanted rewards when Loghain took the crown, and he was willing to attack his fellow mages with blood magic and demons when his attempt to secure them didn't work. It's not saying the restrictions he was under were good or bad in themselves; I'm saying Uldred would have made a play wherever he was and would have lashed out if it failed."