[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

[luaithre]

"I'm sorry."

It feels borderline like speaking to Petrana, or any other Rifter. Casting sympathy into something from an entire other world. Marcus can see why him crouched over the corpse of something as violently destructive as an abomination, still smoking and flaming in places, might evoke that memory.

"How would you have honoured them, if you could?"

He wipes his hands, eyes steered down at the motion. They are covered in soot. He thinks the rest of him must be too.

[okayimin]

Her expression quirks slightly when she looks up at him. It's not really a smile, more of a ghost of the Deep Roads. Grim humor in the face of the inevitable.

"Oh, they'd already had their funerals," she says. She pulls a clean handkerchief out of her pocket and holds it out to him. A normal sized one that looks comically large in her small hand. "There's no living warriors in the Legion, not really. They're just waiting for their deaths to catch up to them."

[luaithre]

The gulf widens all the more, but this time in a way that kind of mirrors her not-smile. Marcus nods his understanding -- or the acknowledgment that stands in for that.

[okayimin]

It's better that he doesn't understand. Better that another mind not fall to the lengthening shadows of the Blight, the slow, relentless surge of Darkspawn through the Deep Roads. The acknowledgment is enough. She pushes out a breath and when she speaks again, it's with a little of her usual crispness.

"But as I said, our poor sod here ain't Legion. He didn't think he was on a death march, so I reckon nobody's done his last rites. I'm not sanctioned for it, but I might be able to call a favor from one of the Lowtown Sisters." If he doesn't take the handkerchief, she'll press it into his hands firmly. "After we get this mess squared. And speaking of, lemme take a look at you. I still got words to have with the nug fucked Duster who broke bed rest orders."

[luaithre]

The handkerchief winds up in his hands, and Marcus tightens his fingers around it before going about the task of cleaning up what little he can. He stands -- he would have already stood by now, talking to someone, but Sara's stature encourages otherwise when he's already down there.

He brings the scrap of fabric up to wipe his face, looks at what comes away. Just sweat-mingled soot. He hit the ground hard at least at one stage, but if he's injured, they've yet to sing their presence.

"I wasn't hit badly," he says, offering back the cloth. "And I don't know that the Chantry has last rites to give for Abominations."

It's not rhetorical. He truly doesn't know.

[okayimin]

"I'll make that call, if you please," she says, taking back the handkerchief and pocketing it without much thought. She's all business now, attempting to hustle him away from the body and over to something to sit on so she can get her look in, "We got too many of you stoic types running about for my taste. And who says we're giving rites to an Abomination."

Her head tips up in a stern challenge, expecting obedience from the surface at large, "Our man Felix is the one who died. Demons want last rites, they'll have to sort that out on their side."

[luaithre]

Marcus allows it. He allows it because if he can squint past the haze of his own mood and self, he can sense her agitation, the same that churned up these sharp edges of her past. In short: perhaps a distraction, something easy to control, would do her well enough, and that's an easy sort of kindness to dispense.

That, and he wouldn't mind sitting down.

Which he does, flicking the tail of his coat out of the way and minimally wincing against the sheer exhaustion in his bones. "I agree," he says. "That would be good of you to arrange."

[okayimin]

"Nothin' to do with good," she says, crossly beginning her examination, "It's the proper thing to do." And she is not gentle in her ministrations, but she's quick and she's through, getting him bandaged and cleaned the best she can with what she has before stepping back.

"Well enough," is her pronouncement, "The others will have to see to you if you've got any trouble with that magic business, but go get some rest before someone finds work for you."