cozen: (Default)
Bastien ([personal profile] cozen) wrote in [community profile] faderift2023-07-23 06:55 pm

player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

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.
heartstumbles: (And I'm all wrong)

[personal profile] heartstumbles 2023-08-13 08:19 am (UTC)(link)
Peter lets out a long, low breath as she rubs his back, unconsciously leaning back into her touch. His eyes ache from crying, as does his chest. He wishes he could fall asleep and wake up to find out this is all just one bad dream, one long, especially detailed nightmare, and that they didn't just suffer so many casualties and losses like this.

But he knows that life doesn't work like that, especially the worst parts of life.

He sighs; takes another breath and exhales again.

He nods as Ellie speaks, fully agreeing. She sounds different to Peter, but he can't disagree. "They will," he agrees, and for a moment, he remembers someone else getting what they deserve. He remembers pulling back his fist and slamming it into Norman Osborn's face, again, again, and again. He remembers that rage, white hot and potent, and the way it almost consumed him. He feels those same flames lick at the edge of his vision now.

"We'll make sure they will."