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

[deuselfmachina]

If Florent clocks something of a diversion, a topic shift, it doesn't reflect back at Bastien in big watery eyes or the way his focus is interested and earnest about the thing he has to say instead.

"That would be very heroic of you," Florent agrees, no hesitation for playing along. "And if anyone could."

He looks back out at the broad hallway, the light coming in through its narrow windows, high up near the tall ceiling. "Why did you come here?" is not rhetorical.

[cozen]

Bastien nods—yes very heroic, yes he could achieve it—but is relieved not to need to carry the joke any further or find a new subject himself.

"It was after they invaded Orlais. I wanted to help. I wanted to not be so bored all the time. And I wanted to matter," comes easily, because he has already done the self-examination required to arrive at that slightly embarrassing truth, "not too much, you know. But a little bit."

As he answers he looks at Florent, follows his gaze up to the windows, and looks down at his own hand, the one not still dangling around the other side of Florent's shoulders.

"I was not leaving behind fame and feting."