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

[katabasis]

In the coming days, the Walrus crew will indeed come to scavenge John Silver's person from this grim makeshift morgue. There are right to be done, and keepsakes to sew into the lining of his jacket. There has already been some contentious debate over the exact stretch of sailcloth to be committed to the man's funeral preparations.

But not tonight. At this late hour, Flint had come because he'd been reminded of a ghost's silent study—being watched between books in the library's shelves—and he'd required some relief from the itching certainty that if he didn't take a few minutes to observe John Silver's corpse, the next time a spirit chose a shape to needle him with that it might be a different one. Superstition or no, if there is something to be done to keep the denizens of the Fade from putting their hooks into John's figure, then he may as well see it done.

(They should burn him rather than bury him at sea, he has been thinking since dispatching the wagons. John Silver never fucking cared for the water. They should have burned him in Granitefell and spared him the crowded passage.)

Suffice to say, he isn't considering the possibility of crossing paths with anyone as he makes his exit. More reason to give Derrica a curt nod and be on his way. Simple.

He does that. Nods. Says, "Evening." Draws short of passing her in stride. "Have there been many others in yet?"