faderift | CLOSED: My How the Turns Tables

Entry tags:

CLOSED: My How the Turns Tables

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.”

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?"

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?”

"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.

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?”

Edited 2022-11-05 20:50 (UTC)

The silence in the wake of it says no, but this is a different thing. Maybe different only for the fact that Tony has not made the bargains Ellis has, never laid out the conditions of his death to be met one of two ways.

Maybe Richard does not know the shape of it, but he has a piece of that truth. They have not spoken of it since, but Ellis doesn't think Silas Atheris is a man given to forgeting.

His grip shifts; not enough to alleviate the rictus of his hold, but maybe enough to alter the quality of the pain it creates.

"Would you tell him too that he was not finished? That you required more of him?"

This stretch of quiet is longer, contemplative of dark dye and clean stitching. It wasn’t a cheap shirt. The one he’s wearing now is a near exact duplicate beneath his jerkin.

“Your existence is suffering and what I’ve done to you is evil.”

There’s little to distinguish truth from lie in his tone or delivery, save that he is sometimes slower to settle his coils around the former. He has one brow plucked up at his own handiwork, a bitter taste prickled at the back of his jaw.

“There is nothing I can say to you to change that.”

"Do you believe that?"

He has difficulty with these things Silas is offering to him. It is hard to know whether this is meant honestly, or if it what he believe Ellis wants to hear. Maybe he is meant to be placated by these statements, offered up to him without preamble or hesitation.

They do little to quell the burn of anger in his chest. Richard knows him. Perhaps he knows best what would have checked Ellis at some earlier point. It is hard to say if this would have worked then. They had scratched less at each other. Ellis had never been so angry. It might be that he should walk away now, before something's said that can't be taken back.

Eyeshine hazes gold behind Dick’s look aside, flickering with the firelight.

“You do.”

A low, dismissive scoff of a sound in return.

Is that what he believes? Ellis has been turning it over, slowly, methodically, in the days of travel that carry them farther and farther from that blood-soaked patch of dirt Abby had lifted him from.

It would be easier, if all his feelings could be winnowed down so compactly.

"This is all you intend to say to me," is not really a question. Ellis' voice is quiet, accent thicker for anger or exhaustion or grief or the mingling of all things. (It is a kind of grief, to realize what has been wrenched from him and live with the knowledge of it.) He would like something else; there must be something else Richard can give him.

"A guess at what I believe and your edict as to my utility?"

The lock of Silas’ eyes lingers, dim lights set deep in their sockets, the rest of him shabby and matte in a wash of firelight and shadow. The shine winks out when he stands, with a hanging pop to one knee and his voice stressed to a hush to keep it from any of their fellow campers playing possum.

“I’m in a perpetual state of pleading cases to you I cannot win. What I say to you is of little consequence.”

He flops his tunic into the fire, where it stifles some of the burning with a damp hiss. There’s no anger to the gesture and it only confuses the flames, already struggling to lap up over the cloth.

A brush of his hands down his front and he is moving to limp long-legged past, abandoning his watch for Ellis to take.

“I understood what I was doing.”

Ellis could simply let him go.

I understood what I was doing. beats somewhere in the back of his head.

He has the sense of the damage wrought between them. He's unclear as to whether sitting around this fire will alleviate any part of it. Whether it's Richard's intention to do so. Whether Ellis wants that.

He reaches up to catch hold of Silas regardless, grip like a vise, to stall his passing. Jaw tight, eyes forward still.

It isn't in his nature to hold fast to anything. It will take little to shake him off, once this narrow slip of time in which Ellis tries to dredge up something to say aloud before Richard does just that.

He flinches like a snake where he’s caught, twisting hard at the wrist and stock still everywhere else, an answering spell threatened in the particular crook of his fingers. No stitches, on that side. Nothing to rupture.

Resistance is as short-lived as it is sharp.

Loosely held or no, he’s stopped, listening. Waiting for a tell-tale surge of movement that might end in a lunge for his throat.

The flinch of movement rippling through Richard is observed. Measured. Ellis doesn't flinch in return.

Whether it is because he fundamentally believes Richard would not do him harm, or because that stated reason, Silas imparting: Riftwatch needs Wardens is enough of a ward against whatever violence had lived in the bend of his fingers.

"Sit down."

Ellis' throat hurts. He is tired. This anger simmering in his body has nowhere to go; it will turn inward and he will carry it alongside the rest.

His thumb rests over Silas' pulse where it beats in his wrist, no downward tug to accompany the words.

Edited (html crimes) 2022-11-11 23:11 (UTC)

Frustration clenched in his chest vents itself into a huff of hot air into the night, the bones in his wrist twisted all to wrought iron. His eyes are on his horse, or roundabouts where she must be tied. He could be back on the road in a matter of minutes with no one but Ellis the wiser.

The only people he might have to speak to would be highway robbers.

He pulls away. He considers it.

He returns to his log.

It’s a slow, roundabout affair, an old dog commanded back to his bed. Stiff, and sore, and unhappy about having been so easily cowed, the stink of burning cloth mingled with gore thick in the smoke that shifts his way.

Edited 2022-11-11 23:58 (UTC)

Silas settles. Ellis is quiet through the process, having looked back to the fire once it was clear that Silas' intention to flee had shifted. The blood-drenched cloth has turned the smoke a pungent black.

It is an auspicious choice. The smell is familiar. Ellis even knows how long it will take to burn itself out and shift to clean ash again.

He says nothing for such a long time. Richard could be forgiven for assuming that Ellis intends to say nothing at all, content with having drawn Silas back from his escape attempt. Except, by and by—

"You, more than most anyone else, know me."

This is a different kind of familiarity Ellis invokes. He is known, yes. But there are things held carefully back, even from Wysteria and Tony. Maybe they see the shape and shadow of them, but Richard can put name to them.

Not all. But enough.

"I have waited for a long time for that moment in the camp. It was honest. It came to me fairly. And it was kinder than I might have hoped for."

How many Wardens die deep in the earth, in dead air at the plague-soaked points of darkspawn claws or weaponry?

"I may not come by it a second time."

It is a dispassionate recitation, anger banked and boxed and put aside. If it still burns, the only evidence of it is in the flush that still stains the nape of his neck.

Silas is listening.

Before Ellis has spoken, even, to rustled movement and hissing breath.

There’s nothing else for him to do, crouched in a dead spider crumple of knees and elbows, warmed by the fire’s glow without darkness to cloak in or work to occupy his hands. Glowing edges chew at the cloth he cast into the fire, slow to bloom through all the damp. He eventually pinches his nails at the knot of a loose stitch, hardened into place by the scab dried around it.

He doesn’t have to see anger to sense it, pressed flat as he is between the fire and the sole of Ellis’ boot.

“It’s a selfish thing to welcome an easy death while the rest of your world is rotting at the seams.”

"Kinder. Not easy. There aren't easy deaths."

Having seen the ugliest ways a person might die, been on the administering end, burned the bodies, Ellis has found so little difference in that last moment. There is only the speed with which suffering might be ended, but even that moment of release—

How long had he been on the ground? An eternity and mere seconds all at once.

"It's done," is a dismissal. The opportunity afforded him is gone. It cannot be called back to him. (He has the memory of hands over his, slick with blood, keeping his fingers from the new seam at his throat.) "I'll do my duty, as long as I'm living."

That's the bargain, after all. He can do nothing else but honor it, no matter how much time had passed since he'd first struck it.

"Was that your only concern? My utility?"

Mr. Dickerson’s memory of the event is still finely-tuned, distilled by adrenaline and overlaid by the slippery panic of his familiar in the thick of it. Abby’s eyes gone wide, a sodium flash of anger through his core at Vanya’s nearness. Pure.

Scrubbing the evidence off his hands with sand afterwards.

His nails need more work, he sees now, as he twists at that knot. Overdue for a trim. One of the last things he’ll do before they return. He lets silence unspool for a while, weighing his options, writhing nowhere while the wedge of his head stifles underfoot.

“You know that it wasn’t or you wouldn’t keep asking.”

There the scab tugs free of its seam, and he presses it down again.

“You could be happy here, were you open to it. Records show Wardens can be cleansed. There are people in Riftwatch who love you without condition.”

The flash-fire of anger shocks him. Ellis feels how fast all that fury comes back, the way it becomes something black and choking at the back of his throat. It consumes the earlier sentiment. (He doesn't know, but he will not ask again. Not tonight, at least.) It would consume more, if he let it.

But he is older now, less likely to permit those feelings to explode outward. The hot flame of them licks at his rib cage instead, burns up the oxygen in his lungs. It is too much all at once, and so Ellis says nothing. Contains all parts of it, boxing it away until it can be shunted to one-side.

There is a long, tense break (ha ha) in conversation where the words sit. Ellis implored him to stay, and is so bound by his own request to maintain his space by the fire. His body hurts still, more so as he goes rigid with affront and remains so.

"You are a rifter, and you do not grasp what you are suggesting." is a very kind place to put this misunderstanding, to Ellis' mind. It is a misunderstanding, because otherwise—

Embers crawling through black fibers, flecks of light dribbling through the rack of logs below. The marks in his face were all laid in by time or by violence, remnant displeasure buttoned down beneath a bristle at his chops.

There’s the scab to gum back into its socket, fresh blood under his nails to scrape out into the meat of his palm.

The longer Silas is kept here in silence, the easier it is for him to leave without leaving, evidence of raw upset baked out of hunched shoulders and curled hands like the damp from his slow-burning shirt. What remains is a feeling that is in itself familiar, buzzy, cold in his gut.

He glances to Ellis and back down again, whatever response turned over, measured, and abandoned in that space.

Maybe this is self-reflection. Anything is possible in fiction.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

CLOSED: My How the Turns Tables

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

are you there god(rock) it's me eppy

no subject