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.
favoriteanalyst: (keep running for the sink)

[personal profile] favoriteanalyst 2023-08-13 06:36 pm (UTC)(link)
"No, but it helps with specialization. A healer studying medicines. Or a horticulturalist studying plants."

Not really the point, maybe, but. It doesn't make him feel less like he doesn't know enough. Trying to scratch an itch and unable to reach it.

"Reading just about anything I could get my hands on is one of the best ways I ever learned anything about anything. I can't really speak Orlesian worth a damn, but I can read passably. I was learning about abstract mathematical principles when I was a kid. When the Chantry was teaching me all it could, I looked for texts going deeper into the Chant, was open to what one might call alternative viewpoints. And some things you just learn by doing, picking it up as you go. You don't have to become anything to study a thing. But then you get me. Approximate knowledge of a lot of things. And not really enough."
grindset: (15499871)

[personal profile] grindset 2023-08-18 03:46 am (UTC)(link)
"It's never enough."

A simple phrase of kaleidoscopic meaning; he's turning a page as he says it. Now he runs his hand down the next one, feeling for the delicate change in texture between bare paper and the medium it wears. There's no meaning behind this but that he enjoys it... theoretically, anyway. Enjoyment as a concept is not high among his mind's melancholic priorities at present.

"Someone once told me, 'Once you stop learning, you stop living.'" Another page whispering as it turns. "I never understood why anyone would want to stop."