CLOSED: My How the Turns Tables

[katabasis]

WHO: Ellis, Richard v1.0, Glimmer, Abby, Edgard, Vanya, Richard v2.0, Fenris
WHAT: Riftwatch agents raid a Venatori survey encampment with the intent to capture a researcher or two in the hopes that they'll be able to glean information regarding Corypheus' plans for the Gates.
WHEN: Now-ish; whenever that makes sense.
WHERE: Northwest of Starkhaven, the Free Marches
NOTES: OOC information is available HERE at the sign-ups post. The objective/points pool spreadsheet with relevant instructions is located HERE and should be open to editing. Please include any necessary content warnings in your subject lines.

THE BRIEF
In addition to a mercilessly succinct in-person briefing, a copy of the following orders are also filed:

For Immediate Dispatch,

Selected members of Forces and Project Sashamiri are to proceed by griffon-back to the last known location of the Venatori survey group. Rough coordinates provided, may be readily corroborated by Fenris and Abby. You are to seek out their current position, and assess from a reasonable vantage the details and current state of their work.

Once your evaluation is complete, you are to make your way into the camp and there capture as many Venatori scholars (or similar) as you're able. Destruction of Venatori forces, equipment, and interests is preferable where possible.* Should it prove tactically advantageous, those with anchors are permitted to open rifts and are given license to leave them unsealed should closing them in relative security be implausible.

*In the margin, in Julius’s handwriting: In the case of any notes or diagrams, acquisition would be even better, but of course if there’s any doubt of success, destruction is a viable secondary option.

Captured Venatori agents are to be pressed for information relating to the Gates, including but not limited to: Corypheus' intentions, their number, their function, how they are activated, and suspected locations. Once their intelligence has been exhausted, you are given leave to tend to any captives in such a way as you believe befits their continued value to Riftwatch or her allies.

-J. Flint

If you do open any rifts and notice any odd phenomenon, please do try to remember to jot down any useful observations when you get a chance. Likewise, if you see any strange artifacts and are not able to retrieve them, notes (or sketches?) of them would be very much appreciated. Good luck.

- Julius

THE RAID
The targeted Venatori encampment is pitched in a scrubby, lightly wooded area above a ravine located Northwest of Starkhaven. The camp, which consists of the usual pitched tents and pack animal picket lines, seems to be the base of operations for an minor excavation effort occuring in the ravine itself. Careful observation, stealthy investigation, or the general chaos of the melee may reveal the following details:

• The camp sits alongside around a roughly built dam which is currently serving to divert the flow of a very minor tributary of the Minanter from the ravine into a muddy man-made spillway. This seems to have been done in order to lower the water level in the ravine and allow the researchers access to a small ruin there.
  
• Based on the state of the work in the ravine and the activity of the camp, it seems the researchers are primarily focused on recovering artifacts from the dig site. The spillway channel is being used to sift through materials brought up from the ravine. Trays of cleaned material are arranged on portable work tables under canopies, and a small collection of either field researchers or enslaved labor (hard to say which) are studiously picking through them.
  
• The camp's inhabitants consist primarily of Tevinter researchers (which may or may not be mages), some nondescript labor force (which may or may not be enslaved), and a subset of well-armed Tevinter soldiers (which also may or may not be mages and/or enslaved). There are enough people around that a straightforward assault into and out of the camp seems unlikely, but they're scattered enough between the various points of interest that diversions or stealth may be fruitful.
  
• During the day, the camp's inhabitants are scattered between their various work stations. At night, everyone beds down in their various tents or on bed rolls around low fires excepting the soldiers, who keep a watch rotation over the camp, and two bored sentries armed with signal horns posted at the ravine dig.
  
• The draft animals on the perimeter picket line consist mostly of stocky mules, fuzzy Free Marches horses, and two beefy druffalo. A fancy dracolisk is picketed separately within the camp itself.

Now comes the hard part.

Comments

illegal threads.

[heorte]

abby.

[heorte]

The sounds of fighting, even tapering off into frenetic, clanging retreat, finds them on the darkened outskirts of the Venatori camp where Abby has set Ellis down.

It's not quiet, but it is removed enough from the close pressure of combat and blood-spattered earth and the heat of fire that Ellis can find some traction. He can claw back into himself, forcibly wrestle with the scraped-raw mess of his reaction. The lingering impression of Richard's fingers around his wrists is enough to keep Ellis' hands from returning to his own throat in the moment, and instead laboriously wrench his breathing back under control. Compress everything, wind it in and in and in until he can shunt it off and away from himself where the events of this stretch of time can exist at some remove in his awareness.

The straps on his armor have been cut. Ellis' shirt is soaked in blood. He turns it in his hands, considering whether or not to put it on. Here too is a distant awareness of his own bared skin, the rattling after-shocks of the day's events, how far outside his control both have ranged. Ink-lines of tattoo on his chest, old scars spidering along one side, over ribs, down his waist. Dirt and dried blood clinging to his shoulders. Breath still labored, if steadier now.

"What happened?" is ragged, scraped out a little hoarsely in spite of how incongruously measured Ellis' tone is. 

[armd]

"You were on the ground," Abby starts. She is sitting beside him, and not out of solidarity (though that is a happy bonus). The fighting and blood letting have finally caught up with her, and she's taking the chance to rest here with Ellis instead of heading back into the fray. Too out of it to feel any guilt; she's got her own hurts besides (though none so bad as the throat of her companion was). Sweat is slick on her brow and her voice is far away across the field. "Vanya did something that broke the magic, but it wasn't quick enough. They drove a sword in your throat."

The blood, thumping in her ears, is it the same blood that is now in his body? Abby looks at him and her gaze slips over the tattoo, brow furrowing in distant curiousity. Something to ask about later.

All that blood and dirt on him. Doesn't she have something? Water? An old scrap of fabric?

Where is her pack? She took Ellis and went. Pressing her palms over her knees, she continues. "You drowned in your blood. I think you were dead for five minutes. And Dickerson did something, he cut my arms, some kind of magic. Something illegal."

He hadn't used that word, but it's not hard to put two and two together. Abby doesn't care. Ellis is alive, and so why wouldn't they have done it? And who would they bother to tell. Only four people know.

forgive my extreme delay

[heorte]

Here, something to latch onto.

Something illegal shows to him a weak point. A danger. A vulnerability bared to Abby and to Vanya Orlov on Ellis' behalf, that cannot be knitted back together now that Ellis is alive and drawing breath.

And far off, anger like a gathering storm, darkening at the distant edges of his mind where the memory of these things Abby described have receded.

Briefly, there is a clear memory of his own fingers clawing at his throat. Silas catching hold of him by his wrists to stop him. The recollection drags his fingers back up to his throat, mapping slowly across the new scar he finds there.

"You agreed to it?" is the first thing, a question that is only a beginning point. A methodical working through these pieces of information.

[armd]

"Yeah."

- Well, "I didn't know what he was going to do." And it all happened so fast. A blood-slick slur in her mind. She gathers herself, thinking (she isn't mad, her face just sits that way: brow furrowed, jaw clenched). "But I would have said yes even if I did."

It was a tiny price to pay. She shows him the fresh cuts scoring the backs of her elbows, two thin twins. They've stopped bleeding, and will require something sturdier than the messy one-two stitch applied with haste, but once they're healed they'll blend in seamlessly with the rest of her skin. She is covered in scars. Nobody will ever know that this happened.

[heorte]

Ellis will know this has happened.

(And so will Vanya Orlov. That is something Ellis will need to address.)

He is not quite connected to his body. There is a sense of fracture coloring every aspect of this conversation. When Ellis' callous-rough fingers meet the delicate, blood-striped skin of Abby's inner arm, it might as well be someone else entirely inspecting those minor cuts. Ellis hardly registers the contact being made even as he satisfies himself that these marks are shallow, will heal well in due time.

"You shouldn't have had to do that."

But that's a conversation to be had with Richard Dickerson, who would know better what Ellis meant by such a thing.

"I'm very sorry," is very direct. It was Richard's spell, but it was in service of Ellis, who had made a mistake. All other tangled parts of this don't matter, not really. "And I've no right to ask anything more, but I need you to swear to me that you'll never speak of this again. Not to anyone."

[armd]

Having the cuts examined, realised by the touch of rough finger-tips, is an odd relief. Dickerson put them there without asking, allowed them to weep down her arms even after Ellis had come back into himself; Abby could have been the only one who remembered they existed at all, except for Ellis, who touches them now. She watches him do it. He has a very strange expression on his face, but Abby probably does too.

"Okay. But I did." Nobody present would consider the alternative. Abby doesn't understand what Ellis is trying to tell her. A question is forming in the furrow of her brow. "You don't have to apologise for dying on the field either," she continues, bewildered. "Seriously. It could have been any of us."

(And yet- she doubts that Richard Dickerson would have thrown himself across the battle just to bring her back to life.)

She hasn't answered his request yet, by design. After a moment of running her tongue across her teeth she says, "Why?" Which feels like a fair question to her, if she is to keep this numb, and foreign event entirely to herself from now on. It's hard to articulate why it feels like a bad idea outside of the word no.

[heorte]

Why seems to catch Ellis off-guard. (What precedes it is brushed away. Yes, he has to apologize.)

Whether it is because he had expected his word to be enough, or for the reasoning behind his request to be so clear as to preclude explanation—

Regardless, there is a moment of study. Ellis, who is only half-rooted in this moment, observing her. Realigning some measurement in his mind, even as his thoughts shudder between now and then, back and forth between what came before and what came after. (What came to pass on the sand in the Western Approach, at his own hand.)

"Why?" is repeated back to her, perhaps giving her opportunity to rephrase.

It hadn't occurred to him that he might receive this response. But there is no sign that Ellis' expectation of acquiescence has faltered.

[armd]

She understands the illegal nature of the magic just fine. If you report this to anyone we might be imprisoned, was more than clear cut, and Abby isn't thinking about that. She wouldn't tell anybody who might have the wherewithal to lock them up for this; unfairness tugs at her, a needle through skin. They were saving his fucking life.

"Can't I- talk to somebody about it?"

Talk talk. Processing. You know.

Her mind has settled onto Loki as she considers it, but- he's so interested in magic, and he might try to find Ellis later and ask him questions, so perhaps not. Surely somebody, though. Surely she doesn't have to sit alone in her room with this later, remembering.

[heorte]

"No."

Is there a gentler way to approach this?

Perhaps.

Yes.

Maybe if Ellis didn't still feel flayed, the tangled, snarled wreck of emotion forcibly shunted aside—

It's the only way. The mission proceeds.

"I'm sorry," is quiet too, tacked on as his eyes search her face. No, Ellis doesn't fully understand the full scope of her question. What's driving it.

[armd]

Abby looks back at him, and she's clearly wrestling something by the hard set of her jaw. She understands what he's trying to do here: lock everything down, for the protection of everyone involved. She is included in that but Abby feels uncomfortable anyway, not quite seen.

"Sure," she relents. Methodically, she inches her sleeves back down over her elbows, and does her best to shrug off any unease, because it's not important right now. Ellis looks like he could shiver out of himself at any moment, so Abby reaches out and touches his knee in tiny reminder: you're here.

He could very well be in shock, she realises. "What do you need?"

[heorte]

Yes.

He is here.

Here, observing Abby's hand at his knee. Aware of the pressure and weight of it without registering her touch beyond having seen her put out her hand.

"Nothing."

What else could he say? Ellis hardly knows, even under the best of circumstances.

"I need to get back into my armor."

[armd]

"No, you don't."

And not just because she's not even sure she could get it on him considering the straps have been sliced at the breastplate. Fuck, it'd probably be a sensory goddamn nightmare for him, to get trapped inside something so heavy. "I'm getting you back to the others; I'll come back for it."

Apparently you can say what you need, but you may or may not actually get it.

richard.

[heorte]

The conversation doesn't come immediately. There is work to be done. An accounting of what they've laid claim to, hostages to secure, and within hours, they are on the road again. Ellis has other things to hold his attention.

It's not until the last stretch, a day's flight outside of Kirkwall, that Ellis takes advantage of the late night quiet to set himself down alongside Dick Dickerson by the fire.

Ellis has wound himself back into his skin. The scar at his throat still sticks out, livid where it peeks out from behind the tug of his collar. His eyes are on the fire rather than Silas. The quiet between them stretches, settling, while Ellis turns the impulse to speak over and over before settling on—

"Abby explained to me what happened. What was done."

And Silas is welcome to clarify, if he believes that's necessary. Before they go any further.

[nonvenomous]

Mr. Atheris is well-suited for late watches. He could, in theory, vanish at any moment, but he is reliable and focused and he can see in the dark.

He’s working when Ellis joins him: mending a tunic across one knee without benefit of needle or thread, closing a slit through the side with slow passes of his thumb across cut fibers. He whispers here and there, tugging at dark-dyed linen to test the cloth. It’s tacky at his fingertips, the cloy of old blood sickly-sweet near the warmth of the fire.

The silence continues to stretch after Ellis has spoken. Silas is mid-spell or mid-thought.

He hasn’t looked up.

“My warning about discretion was well-heeded.”

[heorte]

"It will be."

Steadily.

"I have spoken to her. And to Vanya Orlov. Nothing will be said of it."

If Ellis has any doubts as to whether Abby and Vanya will keep their word, it doesn't show.

However—

"I needed to know."

But Abby could only impart so much. Yes, she can tell him what happened. Only Silas can explain why it occurred. Perhaps he even anticipates the question before Ellis winds his way to it; where else might this conversation be going?

[nonvenomous]

It’s noble to believe the best of others.

Ellis doesn’t show doubt. Silas glances to check, clean and casual as the pass of a hand over woodwork in search of raised nails. It’d be difficult to say whether he harbors doubts of his own if not for the catch of his inspection in the firelight, the way it lingers before he goes back to his work.

Alright.

There’s nothing anxious in his mending. It’s easy spellwork laid in by easy hands, some stiffness at this late hour through the thumb he’s dislocated to slip a cuff on more than one occasion.

Good talk.

[heorte]

Yes. A good talk.

They might leave it there. The essentials settled, more or less. Silas attending to his work, and Ellis' attention meant for whatever might lurch out of them in the dark. The chances of it are better now than they were last year, with Imperial forces so close.

They need speak of nothing else.

Ellis spends a long few minutes considering that option, observing the work of Richard's hands. Sitting quietly in the firelight.

"Why did you do it?" falls from his mouth anyway.

Anger is far off, slow to catch and smolder, but even so, Ellis is aware of it. Has been. Knows its presence in his body as sure as he knows this new scar at his throat, the taste of blood that lingers in his mouth.

Why?

[nonvenomous]

There’s a pause in his work, the stillness of one cur gauging the posture of another out of the corner of his eye. A fresh scar is folded in over the back of his wrist, puckered and scabbed black in stitches that pull tight when he flexes his hand.

Green light diffuses cool through the cloth at his palm; he’s turned it inside out to better examine his progress.

“Why do you think?”

[heorte]

"I'm asking you."

Stubborn over the demand. Unwilling to guess.

Ellis so rarely digs his heels in, but this feels warranted. Silas knows more than most about Ellis, about what his unlikely longevity means.

[nonvenomous]

In that case:

“You have more to do here.”

No trace of the slit in the flank of his shirt remains. So, he is free to look back over at Ellis as he feeds the cloth back through his hands in search of a split in the cuff, nothing sly in the bones of his face. Working by the light of the fire and at his most reasonable, it’s easier to see how he might have passed as a priest.

“Riftwatch needs Wardens.”

[heorte]

At his side, Ellis is very still. There is prickling heat gathering at the back of his neck, pressure tightening in his chest. His breath remains steady, deliberately so, as Ellis lets those words settle between them. Closes one hand over the bent fingers of the other where they loop around his knees, where his knuckles whiten in contrast to the flush at his nape.

Watches Richard's hands and the flicker of firelight on his face and holds still and waits until the thrashing, scream of a thing in his chest quiets.

"Is that for you to decide? When I am done?"

[nonvenomous]

His glance holds, caught on hard lines and bleached knuckles while his own hands fall idle, the tunic slack between them. It’s a quiet night outside of their conversation, crickets, wind, the tongue and snap of the fire.

He’s road-weary, scruffed bony around the tear in his ear, crow’s feet weathered in sharp. There are still chips of blood dark under his nails.

“Is it for you to decide when I am?”

[heorte]

"I do not play at being the Maker."

Is it not the province of something higher than both of them, to wrench a man free from his own death? Is it not something different than risking a life, gifting someone death in a tin cup? (Is this punishment, for what he has not yet done?)

A dull, old ache builds in his closed fist, masked behind his palm. Every pain is familiar and new at the same time. He still feels a breath away from clawing out of his own body. (The scar at his neck pulses raw even now.) He is so angry that is scorches like a sunburn on his skin. If he moves he is uncertain of what shape that will take, so he remains, tightly contained. Observing Silas' hands, his own blood there. Not lifting eyes to his face.

[nonvenomous]

Silas is comfortable in silence, Ellis’ anger like static crackling at his side, hairs prickling in warning up the backs of his arms to the roll of his sleeves. Held before the fire as it is, his stinking tunic has soaked in the warmth, uncomfortably hot in his hands.

While Ellis won’t look at him, the empty holes for lacing beneath the collar have become a source of some interest, something for him to pluck at.

“Would you have had me leave the Provost to his death in the mud?”