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

[inkindled]

"No. I mean, no, 'course--come in--"

He sidesteps, and in that same movement, stoops to scoop up Biter. The little cat had been on a beeline to investigate their visitor or perhaps attempt her escape. Held fast, she wriggles against Matthias as he clutches her close to his chest--and soon she's worked herself into a headlock position, her green eyes bulging madly and her stripey arms locked aloft.

"Sorry about her." The cat. Matthias bites at his lip, annoyed with himself. "I mean, not only about her. About--it. It all. You can sit, if you like."

The rumpled bed. The single chair, angled precisely, free of clutter and standing empty. Once Tsenka is in the door, Matthias kicks it closed as gently as he can, and dumps Biter on the floor.

[delphian]

Tsenka doesn't take up much of the space in this not unfamiliar room; tall for an elf still means a few inches shy of Matthias, slight and wiry, the weary, haunted look of someone too tired to sleep. The cat summons a faint smile from her (maybe a mental note to incorporate new mannerisms into the Senior Enchanter), but it doesn't linger as she sits down at the end of his bed, after only a slight pause.

Better or worse than making him sit on his bed like an apprentice about to be scolded? Hard to say. She's made the call, anyway, Marcus's heavy staff across her knees, she's not going to get up and make him swap.

“Marcus,” she starts,

it isn't an easy conversation to start.

(At least there was hardly anyone to tell about her; everyone who needed to know had been there, had seen for themselves the story the Venatori left to be told. In a way, considerate of her not to have loved anyone who wasn't in the dirt beside her that night. Add this to the price freedom extracts.)

“His pretty bookends, they're seeing to the arrangements of his affairs, the pair of them. I thought I'd take some of the burden from them, so it's for me to give this to you.” The staff, indicated with a tilt of her hands. “You've his blessing to alter it or not, as you see fit, as suits you. Only he meant for you to have it.”

[inkindled]

The staff.

It's what he was looking at, the second it was brought into view. As she's speaking, he's stood staring at the staff, feeling his pulse from behind his eyes, a strange inside-out feeling. When she says the name--Marcus--his face crumples, and darkens, but he goes on looking at the staff. Better fixed to that than trying to meet her eyes. There's no hiding how he feels but he's got to try.

Because--after all--there's been dozens, and dozens, people he knew well and people he nearly didn't, but he was there all the same when they went--great and small and everything in between, laid out on pyres or crushed in muddy fields. And now, here is Marcus' staff, laid out with finality, a line drawn at the bottom of a page.

"You don't--" He swallows, hard. Tries to marshal his voice into a normal even tone, not the wobbly way he'd started out. "You don't--want to keep it? He was your," your, some word should go here, and Matthias makes a sharp little shrug to fill in that space.

[delphian]

“Being as he was the best of brothers,” probably doesn't qualify for the conditional say something nice about me in his will when she delivers it with such brittle dryness, “he's bequeathed me an errand to run in having his armour reworked for me.”

And that's—

not something she's going to rush to do, if she's honest. It's one thing to take armour from the corpse of a stranger — a thing she's done more than once — and another to face the damage done to the armour he wore to die in and see it hammered into something for her shape and needs.

Softer, kinder, “He was very clear in his wishes.”

[inkindled]

Matthias nods, at the second bit. The first bit is a response to him, certainly, but not entirely for him, in the way you speak about someone what's gone, to someone--and at the same time, not. Or that's how Matthias thinks of it anyways, having said similar. There's layers in words like that. Things you're thinking, things you don't know you're thinking, like shapes under dark water.

He stands a moment longer, still looking at the staff. It looks very impressive and very ordinary at the same time. That final line. Marcus would've been holding it when he died. Matthias can't imagine him dropping his staff.

"It's--funny. Things, I mean. How they're only things. Like--" He makes that little shrug again. "When there aren't people there to hold them or fill them or anything--the right people--and that's what they're meant for. Then you see them differently, how they were only-- only things."

[delphian]

Julius would know where the staff was; Julius had carried it back to Kirkwall, must have taken it from Marcus's hand or from the ground. He had offered to answer any questions she had, to tell her anything she wished about those moments,

Tsenka doesn't know if he was holding it. If he dropped it. How long Julius stood or sat or screamed. Only that when they left she had a brother, and when they returned, she didn't, and what else does she need to know about it.

“Aye,” she says, after a moment. “It's us as imbue meaning.”

In living and doing; in remembering, after.

“Imagine that's why he wasn't too attached to expecting you to make no changes.”

There's something hopeful in that, if she allows herself to think on it, even in the way he left her the armour that his body was cut out of. You will carry on, it says. You will need things. You will change.

[inkindled]

"Yeah," husky agreement--but the staff is perfect, he is thinking, as he stands there looking at it still laid across Tsenka's lap. She is right. But why would he change it when it's perfect?

The staff he'd had before, it was nothing. It had broken, snapped in half during the battle. It was after that battle that Marcus had taken him aside and told him off, for acting stupid, for throwing magic about--told Matthias that he would help him. And if anyone ever tried to say that Marcus Rowntree wasn't good, Matthias would fight them over that. He would tell them that he was, that he was very good and fought hard and cared very much. And there isn't much better that might be said about someone than that--but he would try to say more, try to describe how it felt, to have Marcus' attention and approval and to feel, even briefly, even a little bit, worthy of it at all. And he knows, just looking at it, that holding the staff will be, maybe, the smallest echo of that feeling. Like touching a fingerprint that hasn't yet faded.

He blinks hard, shakes out his hands, quick and brisk, until they feel steady and sure and like they aren't going to shake. Pulls in a breath.

"I'll take it. I never inherited anything before. Not properly. Just-- picked things up here and there." Tsenka will understand that, he knows it.