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

[prelest]

"Oh," says Nina, startled, looking up from her grim work of moving a body to the cart. And she takes in the woman in front of her. She doesn't know her, but can tell that she is either a native of Thedas or a Rifter who's been here long enough to pick up the ways of moving and dressing that are distinctly Thedosian. And so it's not hard to guess that she's probably lost people here.

Which is no reason not to accept her kindness. Sometimes the best thing to do, when you're hurting, is find a way to help, and so to refuse this thoughtfulness and to turn it around and try to take care of her might actually do more harm than good. And besides - she does want a break from this. Just a bit.

So she takes the cloth and wipes her face first. When she looks at it, it's turned dark with grime and sweat and spots of blood. Not hers, of course. Even now, after the battle is over, it's impossible not to get bloody.

"Thank you," she says, and wipes her hands clean. And then she offers, "I'm Nina."

[tender]

This is a terrible way to meet someone.

Derrica has been thinking of the new rifter, Peter, who is so very young to have observed something so terrible. But this woman is new too, and perhaps inured to the tasks put to her. There is something mournful in that too, she thinks. What a miserable thing it must be to be brought somewhere and find familiar kinds of suffering.

"I'm Derrica," she answers, all things quietly contained. "Thank you for coming with us."

A simple offering of gratitude. It's no small thing, choosing to be here.

Every time she looks around the field, she is reminded of how few they are now. How many of their number has been lost, and how much harder everyone will have to work to make up for it. How hard that will be, in the midst of the kind of grief that they'll have to weather.

"Is there anything you need? I know it isn't easy work."

[prelest]

Nina shakes her head, half to indicate she doesn't need anything, half to agree: it's not easy work. But - "Back where I was before, we were in a situation that was a bit like what you mages are in here. We had to look out for each other. And we had to learn to fight. It's not easy, but it's not new."

She looks at Derrica, then, and nods to her in acknowledgment. She doesn't know much about her, but she knows Derrica is a mage, so she can guess that this is not new to her, either.

Then she looks back to the field. She doesn't turn her eyes away from the bloody brutality, even as it twists her heart. "When I agreed to come," she says, "I'd hoped I'd be able to do more healing."