player plot: the battle for starkhaven.

[luaithre]

WHO: All
WHAT: Riftwatch and the rebel mages come to the aid of Starkhaven
WHEN: Last week of Wintermarch
WHERE: Starkhaven and outlying territories
NOTES: Open to all, with instructions/suggestions below for what your character can do, dependent on skillset and division. Violences within.



The news has been the same for seemingly endless months: the Tevinter Imperium stays encamped, entrenched, at the doorstep of Starkhaven. The Free Marches city is long besieged, strangled and dying, and its proud stone walls that keep Corypheus' forces out also entomb its own citizens as supply dwindles fast over the winter.

The Exalted March has not come. The scattered militias and militaries of the surrounding territories have not rushed to its aid. Riftwatch has done all it can with the personnel it has, sabotaging enemy movement, collecting information, supplying villages and redirecting refugees, but it seems as though all it can do for Starkhaven is stand vigil to its collapse.

That is, until some hasty conversations were had.

A trio of Riftwatch agents approached Grand Enchanter Fiona, ad hoc leader of the rebel mage forces currently under the Inquisition's banner, with a question: what would it take, for the rebel mages to lend aid to Prince Sebastian Vael?

23 Wintermarch: Stoneweale Fort

Closed: The Division Heads, Derrica, Fenris, Julius, Marcus Rowntree, Petrana de Cedoux

It rains for the entirety of the ensuing negotiations, ice wet winter striking the impassive walls of Stoneweale Fort and the tents erected within its walls. The fort stands south of Starkhaven at the edges of Tevinter's influence, and contains the entirety of Prince Sebastian's available forces and, newly, Grand Enchanter Fiona, several rain-swept griffons, and a collection of Riftwatch agents.

Not all of them take up space in the war room (for instance, the griffons don't need to be there), but those that do bear witness to a deal being struck:

Prince Sebastian speaks plainly: the situation is beyond dire. They are at the precipice of surrender, and between himself and his commanders, they've been preparing for a last-ditch effort to save as many of his subjects as he can spare. By directing his forces in a (likely suicidal) full-scale attack against the enemy, he has hope that this will distract them for long enough so that a select few of his soldiers can fell the far gate and evacuate as many citizens as they can. He welcomes any assistance the mages could offer.

Fiona, understanding the lethality of what Prince Sebastian and his men are going to attempt, first states that the rebel mages can be mustered to assist in this evacuation by destroying the wall and shepherding Starkhaven's people to safety. She also pledges to personally join the Prince and his men in their attack on the main force.

It's with gratitude that Prince Sebastian accepts her offer.

And there is little time to prepare.

23-29 Wintermarch: The Minanter River

In the coming days, Riftwatch redirects its focus towards the preparation of Starkhaven's last stand. The movement of a small army of mages from the Orlesian frontline to deep into the heart of the Free Marches is the kind of logistical effort that one would hope to have plenty of time to organise, particularly in the interest of evading the Imperium's notice for as long as possible, but time is a luxury, and there are few of those available these days.

To ensure a swift and relatively stealthy travel time, the rebel mages are broken up into still sizeable detachments – they ride on horseback, or travel on merchant vessels that have been acquisitioned for the war effort, quietly coursing down the Minanter. They camp in thatches of forest or huddle within long emptied warehouses in semi-abandoned trading settlements.

Riftwatch agents of any combat capability join them, ride with them, and stay in contact through crystals to ensure coordination.

In the sky, griffon riders are tasked with keeping close monitor of any Tevinter detachments that might push close to the small army of mages moving in from the west. The going is often lonely, long hours, solo flying with reportage over the crystal network, before gathering together in small camps to feed their mounts, themselves, and sleep in hastily erected tents that protect them from the winter-time rain.

When necessary, members of Forces and Scouting will be deployed to run interference and push back and redirect Tevene scouts or soldiers and Venatori. Sometimes, larger groups of Imperial forces threaten to intercede, in which event, Riftwatch agents may find themselves working together with rebel mages to not only prevent the enemy from interfering with their people, but killing them so as to ensure there is no reporting back of a sudden influx of mage activity.

Members of Research may find themselves based at Stoneweale Fort. After some convincing, Prince Sebastian allows his various commanders to coordinate with Riftwatch to identify locations and pressure points within Starkhaven and its defences for the purposes of sabotage in preparation for Tevinter's taking. Now is the time to plan, analyse maps, prepare explosives or enchantments, and try not to look too excited about it.

Meanwhile, those within Diplomacy, if not hovering helpfully around Stoneweale Fort, are sent to make ready for Starkhaven refugees by speaking to villages further south, negotiating for supplies and accommodations, rallying any militia that are willing to assist in their protection. It's all a little thin on the ground, but if there was ever a time to cash in some of Riftwatch's local goodwill, it's now.

30 Wintermarch: Starkhaven

The wall

A horn sounds out, long and mournful. Voices and horse hooves and sword clashing and magic casting beneath the stormy sky is reduced to a dull roar as Prince Sebastian, accompanied by Grand Enchanter Fiona, leads his forces in a frontal assault against the overwhelming Imperial presence at his gates.

As a result, the far gate has been left undefended.

Slaughtering the remaining unit of Tevinter soldiers guarding it is borderline perfunctory, but there is much still to do. The majority of the rebel mages (less those volunteers who have joined Fiona in Sebastian's host), along with any mages of Riftwatch who choose to join them, gather en masse upon the stone bridge and the shallows of the river – a small army of men and women in robes or in armor, but all holding a staff to mark them for what they are. As they begin to draw from the Fade, the air takes on the scent of bitter-storm, energy crackling and prickling across exposed skin, ruffling hair and clothing in unseen winds.

Stone cracks and wood splinters under gouts of raw magic and white-hot bolts of summoned lightning, slamming in unison against walls that have remained previously unbroken all this time. Beneath them, the ground rumbles and shivers, and debris spills where cracks form and open and widen from the base of proud walls to the ramparts.

A small group within the rebel mage forces then move together in coordination, and the stone wall before them all at once comes apart. Giant broken slabs of stone and support lift into the air as if in an explosion slowed in time, drifting away from one another as magic carries it in shimmering green-tinged telekinetic influence.

The ground shakes, again, as pieces of Starkhaven's walls land safely, if heavily, on the mud-thick river on either side, leaving a yawning opening where once were sealed closed gates of oak and iron.

On the other side, where rain beats down the rising dust, gathered citizens of Starkhaven, frightened and war-worn, stare out at an army of mages.

The sky

In the sky, over the chaos, Riftwatch uses the distraction of battle to send swift-flying griffons over the walls and into the city proper to enact acts of sabotage to Starkhaven's infrastructure. Below them, civilians flood the streets, pressing in a constant stream of bodies towards the crumbled wall. Up here, the sounds of a raging battle drift clearer from the front.

Everyone in the sky knows where they are going and what they are doing, under strict orders to avoid any harm coming to civilians. Either as a passenger or on their own, members of Scouting (and some non-Scouting mages) carry with them precise instructions from Research and the means to enact them in the form of alchemical explosives and enchanted grenade-like items that will detonate in bursts of raw Fade magic (or their own magical ability). Common targets include: the defensive weaponry and ballistae posted up on the ramparts, the chains that man the major gates of the city, certain storehouses and administrative buildings indicated on maps. Likewise, there are wealthy estates to pillage and deprive Tevinter of any coin they might find there.

But soon the city will be overrun, and those on griffonback may find themselves under assault of arrows and magic as they make their escape.

The retreat

On the ground, floods of Starkhaven citizens, soon to be refugees, flow through the crumbled wall, staggering across the bridge and through the shallows of the river that surrounds the city, helped along by mages and Riftwatch alike. It is a lengthy and exhausting process as hundreds of ordinary people, wide-eyed and terrified, are herded out of the valley and onto solid ground, streaming south for where villages have been fortified and prepared to receive them.

Then, the sound of cavalry.

Racing across the rocky plain, under Imperial banner, a horde of dracolisk and their riders come galloping at a furious pace towards civilians, mages, Riftwatch alike. Their presence does not speak well for the main battle, but they arrive all the same. Reptilian screeches and hisses pierce the rumble of thunder above, and frightened cries from the refugees begin to sound out as panic grips them, turning to run in panicked stampede at the sight of Imperial soldiers upon their poison-spitting mounts.

It was enough of a likelihood that the Forces members who have been deployed to ensure the security of the evacuation are prepared to move with the rebel mages to meet them. The battle is quick, bloody, magic crackling through the air in time with clashes of shield and flying arrows. Searing poison sprays across skin and armor and flame ripples across scaly hide as a brutal skirmish ensues.

But the battle breaks when the worth of continued harassment weighed against the potential cost. By order of Itaeus Ferra, astride his own beast, the dracolisk cavalry withdraws, tiding back towards Starkhaven, now lost to the forces of Corypheus.

31 Wintermarch: Southwards and Vallomire

Men, women, children march through the cold and into the night, but blessedly, the rain eases itself to an icy misting of constant damp instead of the driving downpour from earlier that day.

It becomes clear that among the refugees, there had been those prepared for this journey. Temporary campsites, guarded by mages and Riftwatch alike, strike up so that all may take a few hours of rest. There is some food passed around, if not very much, and as the sun rises on a new day, the procession resumes, if no less wearily.

Eventually, all arrive at the half-abandoned township of Vallomire, chosen for its largely empty barnhouses and warehouses on the shores of a distributary from the Minanter. It is not large enough or manned enough to permanently house so many of Starkhaven's people, but it will do for the next few days of recovery and rest.

There is food, gathered in from as many corners as was willing to part with it, and warm blankets, and, just as important, a reduced sense of impending doom amongst those that had lived under its shadow for so long.

Spirits are not high, but they are tired. Mournful, but alive. As the day lurches into the evening, as the rain finally withdraws and bonfires are lit, and mages and ordinary citizens of the Free Marches mingle in this moment of necessity, news finally trickles in from Starkhaven.

It is as feared: the city has been claimed by the Tevinter Imperium. Much of Starkhaven's military has been destroyed, giving their lives to buy this opportunity for escape. And, in murmurs that spread from campfire to campfire, two names in particular are spoken in low, reverent tones: Prince Sebastian Vael, and Grand Enchanter Fiona, have fallen.

Stories of prince and mage charging side-by-side into a wave of enemy soldiers, fighting back-to-back against overwhelming odds after all their fellows had fallen, rising again and again from the mud to continue the fight, to hold back the inevitable tide until the city was emptied. Toasts are raised and tears shed for the saviors of Starkhaven—its people, if not its stones.

Smoke rises in the north, a black mark in the sky, as the sun begins to set.

Comments

[katabasis]

There is something like a field command office in the process of being simultaneously both strung together and overwhelmed in one of the empty warehouses—erected with the hasty kind of efficiency demanded by war time diplomats and men and women pretending at being clerks so that people like Riftwatch's division heads can fall off the battlefield and into the reassuring luxury of semantics and paperwork virtually without interruption.

And eventually, he will make his way back there. But having compiled the watch rota and roused exhausted riders for the only griffon still deemed fit to fly in order to send eyes back along the Minanter to be certain of their security against any scrapped together counter attack, the frenetic adrenaline of the whole arrangement finally seeps free of him. Threatened by the prospect of falling asleep in the chair scrounged out of some kitchen or petty harbormaster's office, Flint has extricated himself from the temptation in favor of—

Materializing out of the dark. Dressed all in black, he's traded the heavy leather pauldron (scuffed now from balancing the beastly enchanted rifle against his shoulder) with a more recognizably sweeping dark coat—dry and shockingly clean by dint of having spent the entirety of the more violent moments of these past few days folded into a pack. He cuts a strangely untouched figure there in the firelight, a world of grace afforded by the luxury of a clean layer. Nevermind the muddy boots and their scarred leather covers, or the lengthening shadow of his beard, or the dirt and grease under his fingernails as Flint steps in over the soggy log of a make-do bench to acquaint himself with the edge of the fire's warmth.

If they've traded more than a dozen words since that day in the Forces office, they have not been either warm or particularly given the impression that Flint was surrendering them by choice. But here:

"Rowntree," sounds very like 'you look like the void spat you out.'

His hand twitches toward the case, expectation so clear that there's little need to voice it. Pass that here.

[luaithre]

It had been disorienting, to emerge from sodden-heavy recovery and whatever minor grippe-like ailment had decided to besiege him while he was down, to find the world clicking on with its usual efficiency. Guard watches and scouting errands and labours enacted, patterns that he had been a part of just the other day and is now loosened from, a pedantic counting of hours scuttled into only dimly knowing what time it is or how much of it has passed.

Marcus doesn't startle when Flint appears from nearly nothing, but tenses. Not very perceptibly, a stilling of his hand and an angled look up that doesn't draw him completely from his forward slouch. Flint says his name, and that coil of defense loosens when he detects the tone of it.

Still, he replies. "Commander." You look nearly presentable.

Looks at the hand, opts to give it what it wants after a thoughtful pause. A market-bought item, the case, likely not very sellable anymore with the crude flame-shape scratched into its surface. The cigarette inside is long, wrapped in dry brown leaf.

Hands empty, Marcus spends fidget-energy on turning the braided signet ring on his finger, the nicest thing he is currently wearing.

[katabasis]

The scratched in flame icon warrants a skeptical look (from the man who owns a shirt with skeletons embroidered at its collar; not that he's wearing it now). Or maybe the mere shape of the metal tin and the effects of the last few days is what elicits a brief consideration of childishness—that fucking case Leander had refused to return to Artemaeus. The brief, petty urge to pocket this one and see whether Marcus Rowntree remains the sort of man who can be baited even in the hour.

But he says nothing of the case, instead popping its little catch to retrieve the long cigarette. Flint bends. A hot shard of an ember is scraped deftly up from its bed onto the tin's edge. From it the cigarette is lit as deftly as may be possible without drawing fire directly from the Fade; a flick of the wrist sends the smoldering coal back to its birthplace.

Straightening, he takes only a few starting pulls before the slim cigarette is set back inside the open book of the case and the whole smoldering arrangement is passed back down to Marcus.

[luaithre]

With maybe a hint of possessiveness for the item he'd relinquished, Marcus watches as Flint goes about these actions. A look askance tracking the path of the coal flicked back into the fire, and by the time his attention returns, there's a sharper edge that's worked its way through the misery that sort of communicates: this fucking guy.

But the case is returned, the smoking cigarette inside of it. Marcus takes it back, retrieves the cigarette and pins its cold end between his teeth as he rubs the remaining traces of ember and soot from the corner of the case with his thumb. The bright end flares on a breath in, luxuriating in a lungful of dry smoke as he does so. Smoke released again slowly through teeth, his nose, as he closes the case, pockets it.

He won't get another of these until they make it back to Kirkwall, or he reunites with Petrana and her own supply, if she has it, or he runs into someone here with the same habit.

Collecting the cigarette back into his fingers, he looks at it. Looks back up at Flint. Offers it.

[katabasis]

This is not a shared habit. It's merely one which he's grown accustomed to facilitating. He might decline the gesture without second thought. Instead, the offered cigarette is plucked out from between Marcus's fingers and subjected to shallow pull bordering either on the polite or the perfunctory, pale exhaled smoke mingling readily with the haze drifting up from the fire and over Flint's head.

"Keep it," he says when surrendering the cigarette back, instead turning the sweat matted fur lining of his coat's neck up. He has already ignored the impulse to mitigate the chill of the night air by scavenging Vallomire for a warming drink. It is possible to restrain the related urge to exploit Marcus's offering past the point of usefulness in a similar fashion.

[luaithre]

Marcus takes the cigarette back, and wonders if Flint ever does anything purposelessly.

A real question, rather than idle musing. The past week has been a blur of activity, of long hours of hard riding or walking, of constant rain and mud, or the chilly firelit interiors of Stoneweale, which is no doubt currently swarmed with Tevinter military. Occupying thoughts such as whether he ought to do more to ensure that the Grand Enchanter isn't truly marching to her death, as large as that, through to noting what repairs he'd have to make on Monster's tack.

But in the fugue of it, of matters great and small, he'd noticed Flint's disposition—which is remarkable considering how their interactions are normally. That relating to him some news had been that slightly more tense than the usual, that any attempt at anything less than of vital importance seemed to evaporate on contact.

Here he is now, though. And Marcus is tired, sad, ill.

"I hear losses were minimal," he says, words chasing smoke. He is looking at Flint, despite the natural human-eye attraction for fire, and the angle. "For the mages among our number."

[katabasis]

"Vael and Fiona put the Imperium's forces to work," is deferral of credit more than it is indictment. Had that arm of the assault collapsed sooner, they'd have been forced to deal with more than just a detachment of cavalry at the far gate. The mathematics of that—

Is of diminishing importance with each passing minute. Nevermind the dominant position it had taken in the arrangement of the field and the structure of the day, to say nothing of the pall cast over his thoughts these last days. The farther removed they become from sloshing through the Minanter's shallows while Tevinter banners course down to them, the more figurative and dismissible the unrealized risk of the thing becomes.

Marcus is looking at him. Flint is looking back.

"I'm curious as to whether how many will see any sense in returning to the Inquisition after this."

[luaithre]

The sinking down of Marcus' focus is thoughtful, taking his time and span of seconds to sift through the ambient knowledge he's gathered over the week to form a conclusion. Some amount of filtering from his own wishes, desires. How to phrase it.

"Many will," he lands on. See sense. There is an edge of dissatisfaction to him as he says so, turning cigarette around in his fingers, as someone who never joined the Inquisition's banner himself. But there's been no whispers of a true break from those banners, no shape of an alternative looming in conversations that imagine past this point.

He taps ash between his feet, looks back at the other man. "It's shelter, for the moment. And the Inquisition will give it."

But maybe that's all it will be, now. Shelter, for the moment.

[katabasis]

Flint makes a low, rumbling sound in reply and for a moment it seems as if that must be the extent of his opinion on the subject—a pin stuck in the whole prospect until a more real part of it begins to materialize and matter.

"You would prefer they didn't?"

It's a direct question. A lever designed to pry up a stone.

[luaithre]

There's a direct answer for it, but Marcus takes a second to say it.

"Aye," back towards the fire.

Could leave it there. His preference for slipping the leash for good is philosophically sound. But he had also sat across from Flint and made the case that the mage rebellion could more wholly unseat Tevinter from its siege, and while the Grand Enchanter would likely have been willing to try, if the Prince had thought the effort had merit,

well, suffice to say, nothing is as simple as he would personally like it to be.

"But my greater preference is they stay united, for the time," as he eases an itch at his brow with a knuckle, cigarette angled safely away. "Without a banner and a mission, it might all come apart."

[katabasis]

Is it gratifying to stand there in that nebulously warm space between Rowntree and the fire and recognize the legitimacy of that statement? That yes, here is the loose thread; given the right pressure, how quickly it might all unravel. The picture of it needs very little imagination to conjure the details. They are the ones that had sprung most readily to mind there in the division office sat across from Marcus and Derrica a few scant days ago.

Not, specifically, the undoing of this thing Marcus means tonight. Rather something else that's already been broken into fragments, and is at present held together only because the hand about them is closed so tightly. There are conditions on which the setting down and reassembly of those pieces has become reliant. He has been thinking these past days as to whether that scaffolding is capable of holding should all of this go radically more poorly than it has proved to.

Instead—here they are, painfully aware of the fragility of circumstance and what might easily slip through the fingers given cause. Given lack of one. These are in some sense ideal circumstances onto which to apply leverage, all for the price of a Grand Enchanter and a prince and the men and woman who had been willing to follow them.

Yes, he thinks. The rate of that exchange should satisfy him.

"She was a formidable woman," he says instead of some more obvious platitude. That he is sorry to have watched the city go; that her death wasn't for nothing, or how there may yet be some opportunity to salvage Starkhaven. What could that rock possibly matter to Rowntree? "I can't think of many things more difficult than motivating a body to commit itself to a fight when they've been at it for ten years already and the future beyond it remains so abstract."

[luaithre]

It's unexpected, the way he feels his throat close.

For Fiona's death, for what she represented, for the abstraction that is their future, for the euphoria of having fought alongside those he'd fought alongside years ago and for having failed to do it very well because it has, yes, been years, years of this. For the barest notion at something so important frittering away, and for his part in it in trade for a chance at progress, and how they won't know if it was worth it until it becomes so.

So Marcus says nothing at first, an unseen internal grinding of rust covered parts to stay his composure. He is tired, and that's all, lifting his cigarette to breathe from and letting it out in a flutter of smoke, chin tucked down.

"No," he agrees, finally, tone a little rougher and thicker for his effort. Some measure of accepting what feels like an offer of condolences. "Neither can I."

Ashes his cigarette.

"But she trusted something would stay, when she offered her allegiance to Vael," once he's sure the cobwebs are cleared. "We ought to trust her instinct again."

[katabasis]

It is cold and wet and muddy, and about them the darkness is punctuated by fires very like this one with bodies huddled close around them, and the glint of light rendering the melancholy structures lurking nearby into nearly visible smudges. Here, Flint studies something in the shape of Marcus' hand or the cigarette between his fingers for a long measure before he raises his attention to mark the set of the man's brow and the haggard sick bed pallor clinging in spite of the firelight.

(He does looks like shit.)

"It's not unheard of that the appearance of some weakness or a visible loss produces sympathy from strange corners. In my experience," he says, the line of his eye wandering past Marcus and out into the darkness. "It's usually recognizing that and making use of it that presents the most difficulty."

Or something like that. He sniffs, and returns his attention to inside the ring of firelight. Anyway.

"Does Julius know you're wandering, or would he want me to make some mention of the fact that there are perfectly good fires to be found indoors?"

[luaithre]

The first thing Flint says sort of washes by, as if it were simple platitude, and Marcus is more occupied with the feeling of smoke unspooling off his cigarette and the way there's the fidget-instinct to make it twist and dance through a simple nudge of will. He does not, here, and finds something comfortable instead in letting it ride and disperse in the occasional tug of wind as it likes.

But there's a small little pause in the rhythm of this conversation, such as it is, where Marcus reevaluates the sentiment put to him. The oddness of it, the way this had all been about such a show of strength, in his mind, and how it has always been that. The value in something else, in the display of weakness. That maybe there's a world in which such a thing doesn't invite an immediate swift kick, anymore.

He doesn't trust his voice immediately, so it's good when Flint does not expect him to echo something back. Instead—

It's a laugh, almost, dry-edged and brief and quiet. Fond. Takes a deeper breath, tips his head in acknowledgement of the likeliness of this latter thing, glancing back towards Flint, finally.

"Just wanted to be outside for a bit," he says, which is different to only getting fresh air. Tips his hand, indicating the cigarette between fingers. "I'll finish this first."