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.
overharrowed: (all I know that I’ve learned)

[personal profile] overharrowed 2023-08-30 06:55 pm (UTC)(link)
"There's what, ten of us left in the division?" Nine, probably; Bastien is transparently on his way out the door. Compared to Forces, they are practically flush. It's not an especially comforting thought. "Perhaps we could rotate through in the interim. Just to maintain until a new permanent head steps up. I'll mention it in my next meeting with Commander Flint. It's not a bad idea."

If nothing else, they'd see who had a facility with the work. (Who could stand stepping into Byerly's shoes while knowing why the post was vacant, too.)

"You may be relatively new," he adds, "but I think at this point, willingness to work is likely a more pertinent qualification." They're going to be filling a lot of posts in the coming weeks, and if Riftwatch is to continue, those selections are likely to be compromises in a variety of ways.