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

[altusimperius]

Another long, slightly awkward pause, and then Benedict replies: "go ahead." It's not like either of them was Andrastian anyway, whether belonging to the northern or the southern Chantry. They wouldn't discriminate, and thus neither shall he.

[favoriteanalyst]

These things are more for the living than the dead anyway. It might not give anyone beyond any peace, but it might help set their own spirits to some form of rest.

It feels at least slightly better than empty nothingness and silence. "The Light shall lead her safely through the paths of this world, and into the next. For she who trusts in the Maker, fire is her water. As the moth sees light and goes toward flame, she should see fire and go towards Light."

[altusimperius]

Benedict weathers it at first, but as the scripture continues, something in his brain switches off and he abruptly finds he can't stand it: the recitation, the hallowedness of it, when they don't even know what happens to Rifters. Where they go.
He lurches to his feet and walks several jolting paces away, pressing a hand over his eyes. He thought he could do it, but he can't listen to this. Maybe he needed the silence. He needed to not think this hard about it.

[favoriteanalyst]

Was that a little much? Maybe it was a little much. Mobius won't apologize for his faith, but: "I'll keep my prayers on the inside, then."

[altusimperius]

"It's fine," Benedict hisses, despite it being very much not fine. He can't articulate why it isn't, so it might as well be, but he can't bear to be around it further. Wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand, he moves toward the stairwell, giving Mobius the space to do his praying so he can go sort himself out.