player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

[cozen]

WHO: Anyone who didn't die here.
WHAT: A sad week.
WHEN: Approx Solas 21-30
WHERE: Granitefell, the Gallows, wherever else you want.
NOTES: A second log for this plot. Additional posts/logs will cover the time travel/fix-it components—this one is for the time period where no one knows that's a possibility.

Those who fly out to Granitefell arrive a few hours after dawn to find a smoldering gravesite and fewer than twenty living souls, Riftwatch's five included. The survivors have done what they can in the intervening hours, but there's still work to be done to tend to wounds, move the bodies—especially the delicate ones—and help the remaining villagers, mostly children, build pyres to see to their own dead before they're relocated somewhere safer. Somewhere with roofs that aren't collapsed or still lightly burning.

Carts to carry Riftwatch's dead won't arrive for some time afterward, and bringing them back takes just as long. It's a few days before they're returned to the Gallows, preserved from decay as best everyone could manage but nonetheless in poor shape from the battle. Pyres are an Andrastian tradition for a reason—to prevent possession—but burials and mummification aren't so unheard of that anyone will be barred from seeing to their loved ones as they see fit.

Before, during, and after any funerary rites, there are absences. Empty beds, empty offices, voices missing from the crystals, pancakes missing from Sundays. Belongings that need to be sorted and letters that need to be written. And, perhaps most pressingly, work that still needs to be done, including the work left behind by those who can no longer follow through on their own projects or tie up their own loose ends, as the world and its war keep moving steadily onward as if nothing happened at all.

Comments

[overharrowed]

"I hope so." Even now, he still isn't sure whether bringing them back was better, on balance. For everyone who finds it helpful, he worries that for others, they've made things worse. But it's done now, and he doesn't see much to be gained in second-guessing it. Nor does he devalue the work Derrica and Strange have done, honoring everyone they've lost.

"If nothing else ... people might have clung to denial, if they could. Probably best, that no one had the option." The false hope could have done a different sort of damage, and it stuck with him, how many people had reacted to him on the sending crystals with flat rejection. Even his own mind had said no, in the moment. He can hardly blame anyone else.

[tender]

"It would have been cruel," she murmurs. Agreement. "To leave them with hope when you knew differently."

Derrica has lived years of her life with that kind of uncertainty. Not hope, but a lack of knowing that she carried with her out of Dairsmuid. How can she ever know who was burned to ash and left amid the rubble of the tower? It was denied to her. She will never know for certain if all are dead. And if some are not, she may never find them.

To sentence those who work alongside them here to such a fate—

No. It would be a terrible kind of misery to weigh them down with.

"I know it doesn't seem it now. But I think it was the best you could have done. All of you."

Five. Five of them, alone among the carnage, when the griffins had arrived.

[overharrowed]

"I know it's worse when people are missing," he said, quietly. There probably isn't a Circle mage in Thedas who can fail to know that, in one way or another. "There's nothing that makes it better, but it does matter. That we try not to make it worse. I think."

He'd had the thought, in the past few days, that at least it's not like when rifters vanish. At least death, even in its unfairness (and, here, in its magnitude), is something there are rituals for.

"Has Strange said anything, about traditions from where he's from? Things they might want to do in addition to what we would?" It's a gesture, mustering this much curiosity. Not disingenuous, exactly, but it takes effort that it wouldn't normally.

[tender]

"We have spoken a little. But not all of the rifters share the same worlds."

And no one had asked.

"It feels wrong to burn them," is something Derrica can say to Julius, unchecked. "Without knowing for certain it's what they would want."

The Chantry is presumptuous. It consumes. It imposes. She has seen it before.

It feels like a failing to permit their own people, these men and women who came so far and died away from their families and loved ones, to be abandoned to rituals that might have meant nothing to them.

[overharrowed]

"I see what you mean." Even among the natives, feelings on Andraste certainly varied. He has the thought that they should do a survey, to have preferences on file, but he can't voice the thought right now. The idea of doing it in the coming days, or even weeks, feels crushing.

"I think the best we can do is ask those who were closest to them," he suggests instead, quietly. "Even if we're judging in relative terms, we've all lived together. Even if they never discussed their exact wishes, people may have a sense."

A pause, then: "Though non-Thedosian customs ... we may need to be careful about how much the Kirkwall population hears, depending on what the customs are." He doesn't think anyone would object to, say, releasing the corpses into the ocean. But treatment in a way that could leave a possess-able body might create PR problems if word got out.

[tender]

"Kirkwall might find Rivaini customs off-putting."

But the point stands. Rifters are still considered demons by some, are only barely removed from that danger by the stingy grace of the Chantry. Julius would know; Derrica understands how hard he he worked to see those negotiations through.

"Whatever needs to be done, we'll keep it from their eyes," she acquiesces. "I don't think it should be a public affair anyway."

Not in the least because their fallen deserve the discretion, and those who would mourn them and see them to their final rest deserved the privacy in which to complete their rituals.

[overharrowed]

"I think that's fair. With the war, I'm not sure there'd be enough time for us to wait for any natives' family to arrive regardless."

They are almost certainly going to hear about that choice from the Duc de Coucy, but what is he going to do? Stop funding them? That's probably a given anyway. He feels, perhaps, a bit more of a pang thinking of the Rowntrees and how they might want to come if they could. But it isn't practical.

"What do you do, in Rivain? I confess, I didn't attend any funerals in my brief time there."