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

[katabasis]

Even so.

"I haven't written to his wife yet," is agreement. It has felt premature, somehow; as if there were any doubt whatsoever. A dozen false starts before laying down the pen and resolving to simply see things in the Gallows made ready first. It's not as if a few weeks will make much difference when it comes to the passage of a letter carried by a secret hand, and by the time all was settled here he might be able to offer her a more substantial form of clarity.

(There is work left to do; one man's death doesn't alter that. There is a way forward from this, if he only can trick himself into focusing on the question of what that looks like instead of staring over his shoulder.)

At the head of the chapel, the Chantry Sister bends to fetches an oil jug up from the stone floor with a soft rasp. Presumably the brazier with Andraste's little flame has already been tended to for she bundles the jug in her arms, sweeps an apologetic and unseeing look across the nave, and then prudently steps to the margins of the pews before hurrying along the margins of the little chapel with her head studiously bowed and eye eye line stubbornly fixed on the ground.

The door nips shut quietly in the Sister's wake, a small blessing.

Flint breathes out heavy. A hand shifts to the back of the pew in front of them as if he means to stand, but instead just braces himself there so he might turn slightly further in her direction. "The shock will pass." Inevitably. "We should try to be ahead of it," is not unkind; he sounds worn by the prospect.

[hassaran]

Yseult feels some dull bristling at the implication that she is suffering from shock. It's been, what—two days? three? Difficult to measure when she hasn't slept beyond dozing in the saddle a few minutes at a stretch. Difficult to care, when it feels like any other amount of time would sound just as plausible. It's been an hour? It's been a month? Sure. Ten minutes, the rest of her life.

She opens her hands where they've been pressed together and rubs at her face, pressure that smears the residue of sweat and grime toward her hairline and then again, briskly. Alright. Sure. This is what she's still here for.

"What do you have in mind?"

[katabasis]

He has seen her a similar kind of tired before—this knifed in, marrow deep quality of weariness. It prickles at the back of the neck, discomforting in the sense that this combination of things elicits a twinging sense memory of helplessness that is only half due to having been on the receiving end of terrible news and the interminable wait which had dogged it.

"Driving them," he says. "What hands remain. Which I doubt will be difficult given the numbers and the work, but we should be mindful that what we burden them with keeps them close. I would rather we not have anyone too far afield when reality sets in, lest they decide to go wandering."

Were they sailors, he would see the entire company crammed onto the nearest ship and set out from the harbor directly.

[hassaran]

She nods. Easy enough to see the logic in it. "Paperwork alone won't keep them. We'll need to find some way to let them feel they're striking a blow back." The question of how they're going to do that now with even fewer hands than before feels like a yoke set across the back of her neck, or maybe new weights hung from the one that was already there.

"Something drastic in Minrathous? Poison their force in Starkhaven?" Her delivery is so flat it's difficult to tell if these are meant as serious suggestions except that she doesn't follow them up with anything else.

[katabasis]

His low hum sounds like agreement if not necessarily endorsement of something drastic in Minrathous, or poisoning wells. She's right. They'll need a short leash in the one hand and a sharp knife to cut a path forward in the other.

"There's news out of Estwatch," he says, because he has the note in his coat pocket and can force the two to connect. "They've had similar troubles with red lyrium as Ostwick. We might consider taking a contingent there and seeing who can be swayed to reinforce our numbers. With the right ships, we could cut up the Minanter to make a bid at driving Tevinter's influence back behind Starkhaven's walls."

[hassaran]

Red lyrium. Ostwick. Starkhaven. Estwatch. Yseult presses fingertips into the ridge of her brow, the base of her nose, and lets those ideas wash through her, simultaneously too large and too small to grasp. She's reminded of training decades ago to work through drink, or drugging, or sleep deprivation, trying to make sense of a simple code when she couldn't even keep three numbers in order, trying to pick a lock when her hands no longer felt part of her body. An impossible distance yawning between her and the world, receding further as she stretched. She takes a deep breath, feels the burn in healing ribs and drops her hands, turns her head to fix her focus on Flint.

"Do you think any of us will make a compelling case for recruitment?" is rhetorical. They can be a tough sell on their best day. "A victory, first. Even small, but something to build on. Then. Do you know anyone in Estwatch?"

sorry for this boring short tag blows dust off my brain

[katabasis]

"Not well," he says, which is true. "But what I do know could see a party safely to the island."

In the moment, he sounds confident enough about this for it to be a matter of facts rather than of delicate semantics. As for the rest—

"A case can be made."