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: (Before the dreams I wanted)

[personal profile] heartstumbles 2023-08-21 02:41 pm (UTC)(link)
Peter nods. There's something comforting in the idea of never being too old to make dumb mistakes, he thinks. In all honesty, he assumes he's got a whole lot of dumb mistakes ahead of him, both here and back home. If he ever makes it back home, that is.

Mobius tells him that he was raised by the Chantry and Peter empathizes with him, hearing that. From what he can tell, the Chantry here shares a lot of similarities with the Catholic church back home, and he imagines that being raised by the Chantry is as harsh as being raised in a Catholic orphanage, maybe even more so, given that a lot of the people raised by the Chantry here seem to become soldiers for the Chantry.

"I can't imagine it was easy, being raised by the Chantry," he offers. "But I'm glad you were able to find family there. And here, now. I think all families are complicated and messy, no matter what people tell themselves. It's holding people close and people getting on your nerves but you still love them anyway."

He pauses, shakes his head. "And when you lose them it always hurts like someone's taken a dagger to your chest and started carving."