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

[prelest]

A rueful little smile lifts one of her cheeks. "I can't say I'm glad anyone else is going through pain, as well," she says. "But it does make it a little more bearable to not suffer alone." But then she hesitates, and says, "Or maybe it makes it worse. I don't know. Maybe it would be nice to just swim in self-pity and have everyone fuss over me because I'm the saddest person in the world."

It'd probably actually be annoying. But the theory of it sounds quite nice, and so she won't think too hard about what the reality would be.

"I heard that some version of us continues on," she says. It's a question; she searches his face for confirmation. "That back home, there's a version of us that's continuing what we were doing."

[portalling]

Whatever Nina’s looking for, the man’s expression doesn’t give immediate confirmation either way, just a kind of glassy contemplation. “That is what I hear,” he says, thinking of Tony, the dreams he’d had of what happened to him in their other world —

“You might dream of your life back home. And then other people from home might arrive later through a rift, and confirm that that’s what happened in the interim. But even then, I’m not certain if that’s conclusive.”

He takes another sip of his wine. With some physical distance from the entrance hall, he finds himself relaxing and he can settle into this topic instead; it might be an existential quandary, but it’s still somehow better than the dead bodies waiting for them. This is preferable. This is more like an academic discussion:

“Where I come from, there’s the concept of the multiverse: an uncountable number of different worlds with different versions of yourself, with differences both small and vast. Your dreams are often glimpses into their lives. I’ve had a few dreams like that, walking in their footsteps. So even if your dream here seems like it’s a glimpse into your own continuing life, what’s to say it’s not one that’s merely very similar? One where you had blueberry pie that morning instead of apple, but everything else was identical. That’s another world. So I still think it’s possible that we can step back into our own shoes if we return, but,”

a tip of a shoulder, a half-shrug,

“It’s not like we can fully confirm or deny either way. We’re here for as long as we’re here.”