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Entry tags:
- ! open,
- ! player plot,
- bastien,
- benedict quintus artemaeus,
- derrica,
- ellie,
- fifi mariette,
- florent vascarelle,
- gela,
- james flint,
- julius,
- loxley,
- matthias,
- mobius,
- petrana de cedoux,
- redvers keen,
- stephen strange,
- tsenka abendroth,
- vanya orlov,
- viktor,
- wysteria de foncé,
- yseult,
- { peter parker },
- { tony stark }
player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2
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.
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.
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.
no subject
But it's nice to have a bit of company. Right now it's strange to live in the Gallows, having known many of the people who died, but not especially well. She is upset to have lost them all so suddenly and in this way, heartbroken, but perhaps not enough. Or not at much as the people who loved them? She is so sad about Clarisse, but not like Ellie is. She will miss Jude in a way she can't express. These are difficult feelings.
Gela doesn't like to think about it much. She just tries to help where she can.
Slowly, she flattens out the piece of parchment she balled into her fists. She should, at least, try use the other side of it first.
She explains, "My brother and I, we write each other often. We gossip." And now... she finds she has no idea what to say to him.
no subject
(And then, behind that: is it possible to write it in such a way that wouldn't embolden their enemies if it were intercepted?)
"That's lovely," is the first, simplest thing to be said. Softly, with real feeling behind it. Some part of her is envious of this thing Gela has: family, living and rooted in the world, capable of receiving and sending letters.
When Derrica prompts: "What kinds of things do you tell him?" it is only to try and imitate, to find any scrap of a thing that exists apart from linen-wrapped bodies and too-quiet halls.
no subject
"He likes animals," she offers, and realises something then. "I could tell him about Barrow's cats."
She's searching for a neutral subject. She doesn't even have to say that she's looking after them because Barrow cannot any longer, she could simply describe the cats and that would be enough. She adds, "I don't know their names, though." Which seems like a misgiving.