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]

"Yeah, it's the one where I file everything that could be in any way helpful to something that already happened directly into my brain and then leak it all out in my sleep. Super effective," he says, rubbing at his eyes. The smell of the delicious beverage is enticing, but he doesn't want to burn his tongue right away. The idea of it is a balm, anyway. Just like said filing system. The idea is a balm.

It isn't working, but he likes to think it also isn't hurting, necessarily.

"So what maladaptive coping mechanism have you dug yourself into?"

[grindset]

That smell happens to be of the very same tea Viktor declined to drink so many months ago. (But he did drink it, later, when it was cold.) (Incidentally, that study room's door has since been outfitted with a lock, which he installed without asking.)

Familiar system, he thinks, and turns over the topmost book of a low stack to see the title, glimpsing the one below as he does—common armoury practices, smithing techniques. The topical incoherence of the neighbouring stacks paints a confused picture.

As to himself, in his gentle timbre,

"None so industrious as this." He sets the book down, reaches for another. "What is it you're hoping to achieve here?"

[favoriteanalyst]

Look. If the only person Viktor is potentially hurting is himself, well. It's not necessarily okay, but, whatever, he's claimed his space and it's not fucking with anyone else. Abby could--

Fuck. Shit. Damn it all.

"I don't really specialize in any one thing. Chantry studies, maybe?" With a shrug. And a bare sip of tea. It does jog the memory, the same tea. He holds onto that for a long moment, because it means his mind isn't slipping away just yet. Not with those details, anyway. "Always liked knowing a little bit of everything about everything. Means there's always gaps in my knowledge. And being the bookworm I am, and given how extensive this archive is, I thought I'd bridge some gaps and see if I couldn't glean some heretofore hidden knowledge."

Hence, maladaptive coping mechanisms. At least it's not, also, actively harmful. "Better basic armor in the field. Curatives and treatments for dracolisk poison. ...How other cultures and other religions deal with death. At least that one's slightly more up my alley."

[grindset]

Ah.

Viktor has picked up a light volume of some local pharmacopoeia. This he draws in, cradles open in the spread of his hand, and begins to leaf through.

"A generalist with a specialty," he observes, and then coughs twice, three times, behind tightly pursed lips. Paper whispers. The next page is illustrated with two blank-faced figures, while the herbs they harvest are in greater detail: roots and veins, shapes of leaves, carefully depicted. "You risk diluting yourself this way."

[favoriteanalyst]

He lets Viktor do his own perusal, because frankly, if Mobius reads one more word in the next five minutes, his eyeballs might fall right out of his head. Or at least that's what it feels like.

"Little late for me to start narrowing my focus down to one thing unless I decide to really dedicate myself to Chantry studies. At that point, I should just retire and become a brother in Val Royeaux or something." He pulls the tea in and takes a delicate sip.

"Too empty in here," mumbled into the drink.

In any other situation, that would be a patently absurd statement. He's not the only busybody in the library, though more casual patrons have slowed considerably in visits. Viktor lives here, practically. But the fact remains: Abby's absence feels enormous.

[grindset]

Viktor, who does practically live here, takes no offence, and so it would be even were they not sitting just on the other side of catastrophe—this is hardly the first time he's been taken for granted as part of the scenery—but here they do sit, in a shadow of incalculable size.

And it is too empty.

"Must you become something to study it?"

He's not reading right now, not talking about anything. Whatever hook happens to catch his thoughts. Whatever word or picture stands out to his eye.

[favoriteanalyst]

"No, but it helps with specialization. A healer studying medicines. Or a horticulturalist studying plants."

Not really the point, maybe, but. It doesn't make him feel less like he doesn't know enough. Trying to scratch an itch and unable to reach it.

"Reading just about anything I could get my hands on is one of the best ways I ever learned anything about anything. I can't really speak Orlesian worth a damn, but I can read passably. I was learning about abstract mathematical principles when I was a kid. When the Chantry was teaching me all it could, I looked for texts going deeper into the Chant, was open to what one might call alternative viewpoints. And some things you just learn by doing, picking it up as you go. You don't have to become anything to study a thing. But then you get me. Approximate knowledge of a lot of things. And not really enough."

[grindset]

"It's never enough."

A simple phrase of kaleidoscopic meaning; he's turning a page as he says it. Now he runs his hand down the next one, feeling for the delicate change in texture between bare paper and the medium it wears. There's no meaning behind this but that he enjoys it... theoretically, anyway. Enjoyment as a concept is not high among his mind's melancholic priorities at present.

"Someone once told me, 'Once you stop learning, you stop living.'" Another page whispering as it turns. "I never understood why anyone would want to stop."