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

[prelest]

She watches as he nods, searching his expression. With some of the anxiety gone, it's clear enough that he's exhausted. Looks fit to drop, really.

"Is your ritual finished?" she asks. She doesn't want to cut it short, but it's probably important to usher him off to bed before he swoons.

[altusimperius]

Nodding again, Benedict moves to stand, a little worried he won't actually make it down the stairs to his bed. If he were in the other tower the hookah room would make do, but that's an awful lot of stairs for his current state.

"Thank you," he mumbles, beginning to shuffle toward the stairwell. He'll make it.

[prelest]

"All right," she says, catching him by the arm, "you're not walking off on your own. You're going to end up slithering down the stairs like a wet noodle. And bashing your noodle against some stones while you're at it. Here." She loops her arm through his. "Lean on me."

[altusimperius]

He'd protest, he hates to be manhandled (in a nonsexy way and by women, at least), but Benedict is too tired to do much other than relent to Nina's gentle insistence. It's not such a bad thing, not always.