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

[sprent]

"Yes. On three?"

Together, they lift her. Gela is grateful to Nina for choosing to walk backwards, it means she has an additional reason to keep from looking down. Somebody has to look where they're going as they make their way toward the second cart.

The first is full.

"Thank you," she adds, faintly. "I think we're nearly done."

Please. Please, let it be nearly done.

[prelest]

"Yeah," Nina huffs. The strain of the effort is almost a relief. When your back is aching, your heart hurts a little less.

She looks beyond Gela, once they've lifted that body into the cart, and sees what's next. It's - a couple of kids, dead kids - "You've earned a break," Nina says, forcing a smile onto her face and turning her gaze to Gela. "Go get some water." (Because Gela looks like this next grim delivery might shatter her.)

[sprent]

"We can't all keep having breaks," Gela argues, but with very little power behind it. She's tired, strung-out. Can tell that some of the things she's seen today will not leave her again easily. She looks at Nina properly then and seems to finally recognise her (as in, not at all). She can't believe she came out here at all. Isn't she quite new?

"... It isn't always like this."

Smoking battlefields, dead bodies.

[prelest]

"You all would have already lost your minds if it were." Her voice is gentle, her smile sad. To smile at all here, when everything is like this, is nearly an agony. How horrible it all is. But how much worse must it be for Gela? To look at these bodies and know the faces?

"Come on." Nina holds out her hand to Gela. "We can both go."

[sprent]

Gela nods and takes it; the kindness brings tears to her eyes immediately. She has to lift her other hand to her face and wipe them quickly away, turning her head (not that Nina wouldn't have already noticed it happening). She releases a short, wobbling breath.

"Thank you. I'm sorry, but I don't remember your name."