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

[untiltheyarent]

Yseult's words are met at first with only a look, a little half-smile over Fifi's shoulder as she straightens the pillows-- she always appreciates Yseult's office for its ease-- and it isn't until she's made her way through most of the room, doing all the actual work, that she hesitates before moving toward the door.

"It's not fair," she observes in Orlesian, turned mostly away.

[hassaran]

Yseult looks up at the comment. (She'd begun to reacquaint herself with the papers lately under her head, always careful not to seem to be watching Fifi work.)

"What is?" she replies, her shrug resigned.

[untiltheyarent]

A sigh through her nose, and Fifi mimics the shrug, turning the rest of the way around to fold her hands in front of her.

"One hopes... it will come to be so, someday." Or something fairness-aligned, something that at least can be lived with.

[hassaran]

Yseult's head tilts, more thoughtful than another shrug but no more hopeful. "There will always be good people that die and worse who do not. But maybe fewer when this war is ended. Until the next begins."

[untiltheyarent]

"Until the next begins," Fifi repeats somberly, as though making some sort of grim toast-- she looks back toward the door again, considering taking her leave, but stays a little longer.

"I'm sorry about your husband." A beat, "Mine went in the last war."
She keeps her eyes on Yseult's desk rather than looking at her face, aware of exactly the soft spot she's prodding, not wanting to make it worse than it is.

[hassaran]

Yseult is levering herself to her feet, hands braced on the desktop as she pushes herself straight. She may be preternaturally limber but sleeping hunched over a desk is good for no one.

"I'm sorry for your loss," she replies. It's politely automatic, but she sounds sincere. "What was his name?"

She is heading for the sideboard, where she pours what looks like cold tea from a pitcher into a glass and lifts another to Fifi in silent offer.

[untiltheyarent]

A quiet little smile, and Fifi accepts with a nod.

"Jacques Fournier," she replies, "a clerk, conscripted to fight for the Empress." The sort of person who never stood a chance, whose only purpose was to slow down the enemy for those who could fight.
A pointless death.