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

[notathreat]

Ellie nods. There's so much more she hasn't said, so many things that will make its way into her mind every waking second, rolling through like a fever dream. Clarisse isn't even the only person she misses. She doesn't answer, and because she's shut her eyes, she doesn't see the hand coming.

For once, though, she doesn't flinch. The steady weight of that hand unwinds her. Just a notch. Just enough for a shallow breath, a reprieve of the pressure.

Knowing that Bastien is taking care of her as a way of taking care of himself helps. It helps her resist the urge to corner herself like a wounded animal, to worry at her hurts in silence.

She could say them, probably. But there's a better way.

Ellie lays her hand over Bastien's, very briefly on her shoulder, and gets to her feet. Makes her way to her desk, where she opens one of the nondescript drawers. Pulls out a book, and opens it to a well worn page.

They are there. Small scraps of folded paper. Some are dirty, ink smudged. They are all different colors. Corners, torn. But they all have Clarisse's messy handwriting on them. Smudgy doodles, on some. On more than one there's Ellie's handwriting too- like Clarisse was writing back. Like the two of them were passing notes in class, back and forth during the Gallows workday.

Ellie kept all of them.

She plucks one from the top of the pile, hands it over, and sits back down, looking at the sheaf of paper scraps.

why are frogs always happy? they eat whatever bugs them.

why does it take pirates so long to learn the alphabet? because they spend years at c.