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

[grindset]

A glance tells him she understands, beyond the words, beyond the story. That it must be the same for her, for everyone who arrived here through a rift, is no comfort at all—and that's fine. He wasn't looking for comfort.

"I don't know why I'm telling you this," he says, to that space that looks like a horizon, where the black sea relents to a star-filled sky. That thin seam between the material and the imagined. Pure possibility.

His words fall to a whisper. "It doesn't matter now."

[notathreat]

Ellie hates that her throat feels tight. She's been in this place before, and it took years to claw herself out. It took Riftwatch. It took Clarisse. A part of her despairs at ever being all right, because what's the point in being alive if you're alone?

"It matters," Ellie whispers hoarsely.

She can't tell him that it'll be all right. That there will be brighter days. That it will matter tomorrow, or ten years from now. They may not live to see the new year, or even the morning.

But it matters, right here. Right now.

"For what it's worth, I'm glad you told me."