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.
portalling: ᴍᴜʟᴛɪᴠᴇʀsᴇ ᴏf ᴍᴀᴅɴᴇss. (+ Aʀᴍᴀɴɪ) (pic#15781062)

[personal profile] portalling 2023-09-30 10:01 pm (UTC)(link)
He doesn’t blame her for being sharp.

“I will be,” Strange says. It’s the truth, said frank and forthright. “It’s a question which has been buzzing around in my skull for a while now. Moreso after I had to—”

Now it’s Strange’s turn for his words to peter out, the rest of the sentence dangling unfinished, unable to find the right way to explain it. After I had to what. After I had to clean their wounds and pick out debris and warped metal and mangled flesh and try to make them look presentable. After I had to think about where all this dead meat was going, and how useless a healer-doctor-surgeon is when it’s already too late.

He clears his throat.

“Derrica and I treated the bodies,” is what he finally settles on. “I had a lot of time to think. And it occurred to me that not everyone will have had a lawyer or official paperwork written up, and that people do have preferences for what happens to them afterward. Differing cultural practices, differing religious views. I might not have the same beliefs myself, but as a healer, I can try to have them respected.”