faderift | [OPEN] FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE: PART ONE

[OPEN] FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE: PART ONE

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.'

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Petrana lays a hand on Julius's shoulder, briefly, squeezing—it is becoming habit to have an extra cup on hand in their quarters, so there is one ready to be charged when she reaches the expanse of her desk, a heady red wine that had seemed immediately needful when Julius had returned.

(That she had had a little of, before then, when Dumas's exhortation to the fragile and useless had seemed quite sensible and there had been nothing else for it.)

Marcus looks a little as if he might not get back up again if he sits down, but she repeats, “Sit,” firmly, regardless.

Marcus sits, movements only stiff in as much as he is physically tired. He will accept the wine too as he nods to Julius, in a way that seems to both acknowledge the thing he's saying as well as return it. Him as well.

"There was a Templar," he says, and it kind of just occurs to him now to say it in the moment. As if looking for something else to focus on than what they could be focusing on. Still. It's salient enough. "Among those that responded. A Riftwatch man, Barrow. Did either of you know about him?"

"I've heard the name, but I don't think we've met. I vaguely thought he was a mercenary, though I can't say I had enough information to have committed to that with any certainty before now." Julius glances to Petrana. "You?"

“I had thought Coupe our last Templar,” with a shake of her head, sinking back down onto the edge of their bed once both men are settled (or as near enough to it—something that would pass for it, that will do). On a better day, she might say something wry about adding it to her grievances with the woman that she had not been made aware—

it is not amusing, today.

“Barrow. Was he of use?”

Marcus doesn't truly think they'd keep it from him, not if he looked at such a notion under the bright light of clarity, but he still seems to nod a little to himself as both deny knowing. Maybe they would. Maybe it just wouldn't come up. It would be wounding, which is strange to think about.

He rotates the wine glass between his hands in a methodical flex and fidget of fingers.

"Aye," he says, and then he drinks his wine. The whole cup, thereabouts, in a smooth gulp, as if it were cheap ale and not a fine vintage kept in a private room. More sardonic; "Of course he was."

"Would you rather he hadn't been?" It's tired, but it's an honest question, as far as it goes. He's honestly not sure what Marcus would have a lone Templar do, other than "not exist anywhere near him," presumably. Julius isn't trying to defend a man who's effectively a stranger so much as probe the exact nature of Marcus' tone. He can make guesses, but he's tired and he'd rather not.

“I would have preferred to discover him another way,” Petrana observes, touching the locket at her throat absently, an old anxious habit. “Had we our druthers.”

It seems an ill-timed surprise.

It's not a question that Marcus rises to. It sounds, to his ears, like rhetoric, and like reprimand, and he knows that has little to do with Julius and everything to do with everything else. His attention had turned downcast to the floor when Julius asks and likewise stays there, giving Petrana ample opportunity to offer her commentary. Commentary that seems to give articulation to some as yet unidentified tension, and so he nods once. That.

And says, "He used a sort of bolstering magic on us," and draws his focus up to both of them, "restorative, but more than that. Faith. Confidence."

Julius takes Marcus' lack of an answer for rebuke and is reluctant to engage a second time on the matter. Instead of doing so directly, he just asks: "Was this in the hall, or after it got outside?"

That's an excellent question, but—

“I don't know that I was aware of that as something a Templar could do.”

"After," Marcus answers. "Outside. In the last moments."

He finishes the coin-sized remains of wine in his glass and sets it aside.

"I'd seen it before, without knowing what it was," he adds. "I'd not felt its effects. It's a powerful thing, to be compelled to feel invincible. Righteous, mindlessly."

Dislike simmers bitter beneath his otherwise weary tone of voice.

"I've not experienced it myself, but I can imagine." He's careful now, not on edge so much as prone to feel a bit of an intruder in his own room, when it takes so much energy to not be misunderstood and he's so little to spare.

“A powerful tool,” Petrana says, and by her tone it's plain enough that what she means is weapon. What is human doubt and conscience if it can be burned away by righteousness at the will of another? Clearly—not an indefinite effect. And not an altering one, precisely, but

bolstering. Reinforcing. She imagines the use to which it might be turned, purposefully or more insidiously. She doesn't doubt they both do, too.

After a moment, “I was only here, as it happened. Some spoke of it on the crystals; some was. Audible.”

Marcus is not generally ignorant to caution, wariness, annoyance, the many myriads of negatively charged emotions that he is very capable of inducing. It's just that most times, he tends to ignore it in favour of some higher purpose, or some certainty that momentary awkwardness and discomfort can be bypassed.

He has not finessed that tonight, and perhaps he was never going to be capable of doing so. Marcus glances between the two of them and finishes the small bit of wine he has left, leaning then to put it back on the table. Petrana's deft change of subject.

"Thank you for the wine," absolutely slots nowhere smooth into the conversation as it stands now. That's fine. "And the ear. I'm sure you're both weary." Knees creak slightly as he goes to stand.

"You needn't..." Normally, Julius would stand too, but he's been pretending his leg doesn't hurt all evening, and he's paying for it now. "I'm sure neither of us wishes to chase you out." He glances at Petrana, unusually at a bit of a loss.

Her concern is obvious, and she does rise—it would be difficult to dispute that they are weary, certainly, Julius almost certainly should not rise (or not for longer than it takes him to collapse back into their bed) again this evening, and for both that reason and the simple fact of her worried exhaustion she is, herself, at something of a loss.

“Are you well enough?” she asks, immediately uncertain as to how she intends to solve that problem if he says no. What had seemed plain to her when he walked in was the air of a man who ought not be alone, and given that they had pushed together the only other bed in this room to make one larger she has no place to offer him; it leaves her without obvious solutions to his instinct to withdraw, and bothered by it. “You are always welcome.”

He might have foreseen that, their concern, but there is little to do for it, to assuage it. Petrana stands and Marcus hovers a hand up as if to bid her to return to her seat, a glance from one to the other following.

"I'm well enough to know I need rest," he says to her, even going so far as to reach out to pick up her hand to squeeze assurance across her knuckles, but dips his head to Julius. "As does this one."

It is easy to predict what kinds of overtures would be welcome, as much as Petrana de Cedoux gives most an impression of intricate manners, of invisible boundary, of the rituals of etiquette. Strangely, it is the other Southern Circle mage man in the room that Marcus has yet to anticipate well, but he doesn't let that stop him from passing him by with the touch of his palm over Julius's shoulder as he gets for the door, designed to communicate some form of assurance, but that is surely up to the other man to divine.

The hand on his shoulder does make Julius feel a bit less as if he's failed some obscure test he wasn't aware he was taking, but the result is more confusion than reassurance. For a man who usually has a ready command of social situations, he finds himself a bit genuinely unsure what just happened. It's a sensation that's not entirely foreign, in situations involving their guest.

He doesn't stand.

"I hope you find it," he says instead, meaning rest. "It's been a very long day." It sounds a bit inane even to Julius' own ears, but on the other hand ... it isn't untrue.

The decision to relent is not much of one, given the lack of clear alternatives before her, but nevertheless it is something that looks like a decision, curling the fingers of the hand that Marcus had lifted beneath her palm and resting that small fist upon Julius's arm as she stops short of coming all the way to the door after him.

(That she would see fit to properly usher any other guest in their room out, that it would be appropriate to close the door behind them herself, does not immediately press through the numerous other things on her mind as he leaves as if it is a room from which he is naturally able to come and go.)

“Goodnight, Marcus,” she settles upon. “I'm glad to have seen you whole.”

He certainly does not need or expect to be ushered out, opening the door for himself and stepping through it. The expectation is he should stop and look back and nod to them, and so he does that. Yes, it has been a long day. Yes, he is glad to see them whole too. Yes, good night.

Marcus quietly shuts the door behind him, and considers his next move. There is his room, awaiting him. It is hard to say whether exhaustion would mercifully take him, or keep him in suspense.

Best not to risk that. His steps in the hallway are quiet, but they take him away from his room.

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[OPEN] FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE: PART ONE

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