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

[sprent]

"Yes. I sorted them; the most important things are at the top."

She didn't want to assume he'd have the time or concentration to go through it all, and so she thought of this, small thing. Slowly, she slinks into a chair by his desk, tucking one leg up underneath of herself.

"I'm not needed anywhere else." He doesn't need to worry about that either. "Everything is quiet, today."

[overharrowed]

He'd almost expected the Venatori to strike now, while they were more than decimated in number and the survivors were all grieving. In a way, it's almost worse that they haven't bothered. The conclusion no longer in doubt, maybe, though even if the organization Riftwatch doesn't last, he expects quite a few of them will go on fighting one way or another.

He doesn't say that, though. Instead, he says, "Thank you," for sorting the reports. "We're going to have to ... Diplomacy is going to need someone else in charge sooner than later, it's not a chair that can sit empty. But we've been lucky nothing dire has come up this week." 'Lucky.' He looks at the first report, but his eyes can't seem to hook onto the words as easily as they should, and it's slower going than he expects. "I suppose were never a big enough organization to talk about deputies or appointing someone to serve as acting head of a division."

[sprent]

Gela watches him for seconds but her attention is steadily drawn away, out of the window. She is having similar thoughts. If Riftwatch doesn’t survive this blow, she is out a new home, and she will have to find another one. The thought is making her feel tired and weepy. Gela supposes she hasn’t just been grieving these individual people, but also Riftwatch life as she had come to know it.

“I don’t want to presume that I could do something like that,” she says slowly, “Because I am still new. But I’d be willing to try… Perhaps we could take turns, until we work something out.”

The thought of sitting in Byerly’s office like that, as if nothing bad happened at all, is slightly disturbing to her. Even though there are jobs to be done.

[overharrowed]

"There's what, ten of us left in the division?" Nine, probably; Bastien is transparently on his way out the door. Compared to Forces, they are practically flush. It's not an especially comforting thought. "Perhaps we could rotate through in the interim. Just to maintain until a new permanent head steps up. I'll mention it in my next meeting with Commander Flint. It's not a bad idea."

If nothing else, they'd see who had a facility with the work. (Who could stand stepping into Byerly's shoes while knowing why the post was vacant, too.)

"You may be relatively new," he adds, "but I think at this point, willingness to work is likely a more pertinent qualification." They're going to be filling a lot of posts in the coming weeks, and if Riftwatch is to continue, those selections are likely to be compromises in a variety of ways.