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]

"A soldier at first," she says. "And then a spy."

Though she wonders if he's put himself out of a job. The creaking of his back and the stack of paperwork before him don't exactly match up with what you'd expect from an espionage agent. When's the last time, she wonders, that he was out there, running a mission? Blending in with the local populace? But maybe that's just age.

"Were you a spy before the war?" she asks, though she suspects she knows the answer. "Or did the times drive you to it?"

[cozen]

A small shake of his head.

"Before."

His disinterest in talking about it is not his usual—not too-good manners or fear that someone doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't want to think about himself and his life, because his life leads to right here.

He moves away from the desk, shifts his armful of paperwork.

"I'm going down," he says, in case it weren't obvious. His smile is barely a smile, one corner of his mouth twitching higher. "If you would like to cheer me up a little bit," a very little bit, "you can walk with me. Tell me—were you a good soldier? Or was it too much tromping around in the countryside?"

[prelest]

Nina would like very much to cheer him up a little bit. So she offers him a little smile and says, "I'll walk with you. And even help you carry your papers. In a very ladylike way, of course."

(She wonders if he's usually so closed-mouthed. Probably not. Being secretive and evasive about your life builds more curiosity, after all. So a good spy generally doesn't keep secrets as much as they tell lies.)

"And too much tromping around the countryside," she says agreeably as she holds out her arms. "I wasn't really a soldier soldier for terribly long - the civil war ended not too long after I passed out of school and into the army - so there was only a little bit of tromping. But after that, we went out searching for other Grisha to give sanctuary, and tromping galore. Too much tromping. Waking up every morning with an aching back from sleeping on the ground." She has a very pretty pout - which fades as she admits, "It is nice to fall asleep looking at the stars, though."

[cozen]

One arm's worth of documents go into hers. The rest he keeps, with his hand free to open the door ahead of them as he leads the way down to the staircase. He waits for her to go through ahead of him—good manners, and an easy way to make sure he's keeping her on the side of his good ear.

"No one will stop you from putting a hammock out in the gardens," he says. "One of the elves used to sleep in the trees."

Extremely elven of him, Bastien might say, if the elves who always come first to his mind weren't those of Val Royeaux. Not a lot of trees in the overcrowded alienage there, save the one important one.

It is, anyway, only an a side. Civil war, sanctuary—

"What are Grisha?"

[prelest]

"Practitioners of the Small Science," she answers, because she likes that so much better than this point of comparison - "Rather like your mages." Not that there's anything wrong with sharing kinship with mages, of course. It's simply that the inaccuracy rankles. If it were just, wave your hand, woo-woo, magic, then she wouldn't have had to spend so many years hunched over cadavers in anatomy lab.

"We can control the elements, or materials, or we can do healing and the like." Control the body came rather close to slipping from her mouth, but she knows that's the wrong way to describe it here. She really has to practice saying only the things that are pleasant to hear. "Which some people see as unnatural and evil. Hence: sanctuary."