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.
inkindled: (67)

[personal profile] inkindled 2023-08-16 04:13 am (UTC)(link)
"Yeah," husky agreement--but the staff is perfect, he is thinking, as he stands there looking at it still laid across Tsenka's lap. She is right. But why would he change it when it's perfect?

The staff he'd had before, it was nothing. It had broken, snapped in half during the battle. It was after that battle that Marcus had taken him aside and told him off, for acting stupid, for throwing magic about--told Matthias that he would help him. And if anyone ever tried to say that Marcus Rowntree wasn't good, Matthias would fight them over that. He would tell them that he was, that he was very good and fought hard and cared very much. And there isn't much better that might be said about someone than that--but he would try to say more, try to describe how it felt, to have Marcus' attention and approval and to feel, even briefly, even a little bit, worthy of it at all. And he knows, just looking at it, that holding the staff will be, maybe, the smallest echo of that feeling. Like touching a fingerprint that hasn't yet faded.

He blinks hard, shakes out his hands, quick and brisk, until they feel steady and sure and like they aren't going to shake. Pulls in a breath.

"I'll take it. I never inherited anything before. Not properly. Just-- picked things up here and there." Tsenka will understand that, he knows it.