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

[overharrowed]

It gives him a moment of pause, though only one. "If you think we'll do the mission good," he said. "I'll speak with her."

In another time, he'd have a fairly confident prediction of her reaction to the suggestion. Currently, he can't claim any sort of certainty. On the other hand, he can't think staying in the Gallows is helping anything just at present.

"If it would help," he adds, "I can prepare some notes on animals infected with red lyrium specifically before we go. I believe," hardly a pause, "Ser Niehaus had collated some of that information, and her notes were generally quite neat. Stark may have more, beyond what was Sashamiri-specific. But then, I wouldn't delay you if you plan to depart too soon to make that practical."

[katabasis]

"I would advise you gather whatever papers you think most important, red lyrium related or otherwise, and see them brought along. I suspect we may be away from the Gallows for some time, and it would be best to carry what this fight may require with us."

Here, Flint's attention rises from the page to look straight at Julius. There's something like expectation in the point of his attention, waiting to judge a reaction he anticipates will come.

So not an ordinary mission to Estwatch, then.

[overharrowed]

Julius has been doing his best to avoid pausing, not only in this conversation but in his life more broadly. Now here is again, this pause very slightly longer than the previous one.

"My understanding is that for a trip of this length, Mme de Cedoux would need at least one more shardbearer to avoid growing uncomfortable or ill." Not something he thinks Flint has missed, so much as a thing that he's not going to present the idea to Petrana without addressing. Now that they're having a slightly different conversation, Julius is no less practical; if he has any emotional reaction to the shift, it's not evident. But the practicalities have somewhat changed. If they're going to have the conversation, he'd rather actually have it.