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]

"Of course."

But all those coats in the water, a bitter protest... She looks at them again, then at her hands. Some of the skin on her fingers is growing red and shiny, blistering from where the heat licked her; anger and pain.

"Who did they belong to?"

[ipseite]

A fair question.

There are only so many people it could be, surely. Sixteen. Less than that, narrowed down by those who'd fit these coats. Those who'd actually wear them. Hard to imagine Ellis in them. That strapping young rifter girl would have looked terribly smart.

“Captain Rowntree,” she says, and there's an edge in it, the effort that it takes answering the question straightforwardly and without any cruelty to a man no longer here to complain of it or of her ill-treatment of his coats or, for that matter, Gela. “He has no further need of them. Neither do we.”

Julius may feel differently, but the thing is done.

[sprent]

This will never be something you can apply practicality to. It doesn't matter that somebody else could use the coats in the river, even want them. This is raw, angry grief at work. Gela didn't know that Marcus had somebody who would miss him like this; she feels very terrible then, because, for a moment, she had found a small relief in realising she wouldn't ever have to reckon with the huge lie she'd told him. Not if he wasn't coming back.

"Okay." That's all she needs to say. "Then I'll leave you to it."