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

[favoriteanalyst]

The funny part is he might not even disagree, necessarily. He does think the Rifters are blessed, chosen. It's just not a thought he shares often. Because something something heretical and sounds crazy. He would never presume someone else would think the same, at this rate.

He hesitates with his own food when it comes to the question. Pokes at his plate a little. "I think I'd be fine leaving mine where they lay, after the burning. But...I don't know. Now that I've been here, and with all this? Starting to think I should think a little more on my afterlife affairs. If--someone wants to scoop a bit of me up for safe keeping, for instance."

He doesn't think he wants anyone to take a trip to Ostwick, much less to the Tower there, for a little ash-spreading. That might be kept close, tight to the chest, and then one day he'll die.

"I've never made a will. Gotta fix that. Templar affairs got handled by the Chantry, and I didn't have a whole lot to my name after I left."

[cozen]

Bastien has a will. Arrangements, instructions. (He doesn't fully believe in prophecy, when he thinks about it head-on, but nonetheless: he'd thought it would be him.)

It all needs changing now. If he can be bothered.

"You knew Barrow," he is reminded by the mention of Templar affairs. Of course, everyone knew Barrow; even sort of quiet and unassuming, they're not a large group anymore, and he was not exactly stealthy. "Do you know—did he have requests? Is someone handling that for him?"

[favoriteanalyst]

"I--don't know." There's so much left unknown. If there was a will, Mobius doesn't know anything about it. "There's family, I know that, and given the lean of his faith, I can only presume a pyre. I think the Seeker was close to him?"

He scrubs his face, appetite waning. "Maybe everyone needs to pick a couple people to handle the affairs in case of a sudden and unfortunate departure from the mortal plane."