faderift | MOD PLOT ↠ WAKING AND SLUMBERING

WHO: Everyone, give or take
WHAT: Nightmares, abominations, Satinalia, and sand.
WHEN: Firstfall 1, throughout the month
WHERE: The Silent Plains
NOTES: OOC post. Use content warnings in your subject lines as needed.

The fall of Starkhaven and death of Sebastian Vael rallied the Exalted March to push into Tevinter territory and, invigorated by vengeance, raze the border city of Trevis. Since then, the March has moved past Caiman Brea (which surrendered) before stalling out at the edge of the Silent Plains to the east of the captured cities. It's been bogged down partly by the usual combination of time, weariness, and politics—mostly some squabbling over Nevarran forces diverting to try to retake Perendale and whether the Orlesian forces will be heading after to try to free it themselves–but also by a plague of nightmares that's decimating morale and causing an alarming number of mages to erupt into demonic violence. (Not that many, but any number is alarming given the devastation an abomination can cause.) In an attempt to move safely out of range of escape attempts while they regroup and address these issues, the March has pushed east and made camp at a small oasis just within the edge of the desert, which shields them from approach but also presents its own challenges.

It's not a particularly pleasant region in which to be stalled. There's water, courtesy of the spindly tributary of the Minanter that Trevis, Caiman Brea, and Nessum all survive upon; there's low, scrubby plant life, stunted olive and palm trees and dry patchy grasses. And that's about it. Even this meager vegetation fades away rapidly into desert—first dark bedrock bared by incessant winds, just a thin layer of dusty sand whipped back and forth across it. The road is little more than a faint line of wear across the stone, but the ruins of a dwarven trade outpost spike up alongside it like dark fingers, and it's here that Riftwatch will meet its guides, a pair of Orlesian siblings from the Western Approach and their pack of camels.

The exchange of mounts may seem like overkill at first given how close the camp is, but the sand grows rapidly deeper as you go east, rising up suddenly into dunes tall enough to hide a dragon (more on that later). The camp isn't more than an hour or so into the desert but there is no road here, the Orlesians, or possibly the camels themselves, navigating by instinct and landmarks alone. One rides at the head of the train and the other at the back, chivvying stragglers and dragging a camel hair broom to assist the wind in wiping away their tracks. The sun is brutal, beating down on heads and backs as they ride east in the afternoon, its glare off the pale golden sands in their eyes, the haze of heat rising off them playing tricks on the mind. They may glimpse the false oasis of a mirage several times before the real thing abruptly appears: they ride over a dune like any other and there at its base is the camp, arrayed around a crescent-shaped pool edged with palms. They arrive at sunset, just in time to enjoy a half hour or so of pleasant breezes and brilliant skies before the sun drops behind the sands and the temperature plummets.

I. CAMP

There's no need for Riftwatch to make its own camp. The Exalted March has a cluster of empty tents waiting for them when they arrive. They're barracks-sized, made to house upwards of a dozen people, outfitted with rows of narrow cots and wooden floors made of planks lashed together with rope. Riftwatch is assigned three of them for sleeping and a fourth for setting up tables and work spaces, arranged like spokes around the hub of a large fire pit. Riftwatch is invited to share in whatever grey-brown slop comes out of the nearest enormous pot each night, but if anyone is enterprising enough to hunt or forage, they might come up with something to roast or stew on their own.

The tents' arrangement affords Riftwatch a very small amount of privacy, but they're otherwise in the middle of the Exalted March's expansive sea of tents, unable to exit in any direction without rubbing elbows with the soldiers. Mostly humans, though there are suface dwarves and city elves among them, the latter largely support staff, though a few have taken to fighting alongside the soldiers they serve over the last few years. All are at least culturally Andrastian, but they're otherwise fairly varied. Around a single fire you might find a zealous Nevarran who hopes to help vanquish Tevinter and bring the Chant to the dark souls of its wayward people, a Tantervalian who barely knows their Apotheosis from their Threnodies but is here for vengeance for their lost city and friends, a barely-adult Orlesian villager who signed on because it sounded more rewarding than mucking out stables, and a spitting mercenary who's only following the Chantry's money.

What they all have most in common, right now, is exhaustion–the kind that comes with frayed nerves, trouble thinking clearly, and an unusually high probability of starting to shout or cry over minor inconveniences. While the Free Marches dealt with nightmares for months without most people becoming so affected, on Riftwatch's first night in the camp, they'll find the nightmares are worse than what they ever experienced in the Gallows: vivid, specific, twisted, and difficult to shake when they wake up panicked in the middle of the night. Anyone who wanders out of the tent into the cold dark will find at least a few soldiers from nearby tents have done the same, stalking around like sleep-deprived undead or sitting and staring into the fires with vacant expressions.

In recent weeks, this steady stream of nightmares has had a predictable side-effect: a small outbreak of abominations among the mage army that had been accompanying the Exalted March, several with death tolls in the teens before they were killed or driven away by the Divine's loyal Templars. As a precaution, the mage army has since sent all mages too young to have been harrowed and any who were identified as vulnerable back to Orlais, with the rest residing instead to the west of the main camp rather than integrated within it. Templars camped along the rim of the main camp to provide a barrier should there be any further incidents.

Riftwatch's mages aren't subject to this division–a condition of their help–but they'll find the camp a less friendly environment than they may have grown used to in recent years, as many of the soldiers either survived a recent mage-borne horror or know at least one person who died in the outbreak and are understandably wary of having more mages in their midst, and strangers at that.

II. SATINALIA

Riftwatch's arrival comes the day before Satinalia. That it's neither the ideal setting nor the ideal mood for a celebration is apparent as soon as they set foot in the camp. But Captain Thevot Gaffey joins Riftwatch at their camp fire early on the first morning looking frayed and cold and glassy-eyed with exhaustion or perhaps just misery, and he drops some heavy hints that he and some of the other brass would be extremely grateful if Riftwatch contributed some of its better-rested energy to helping the soldiers have a nice evening, especially as the expected shipment of less gruel-y food has failed to materialize.

So consider this task number one: assisting the minority of Exalted Marchers who are straining to keep everyone else's spirits up in conjuring a good time out of nearly nothing. Organize games and dances, convince officers to give up bottles from their personal stashes, share whatever Riftwatch brought, or lean into the mood and try to lead a few soldiers into a more relaxing card game or fireside storytelling session. Anything to try to convince a bunch of cranky, overtired, frightened soldiers that things aren't really so bad at least for a few hours.

III. FIELD WORK

Of course the primary reason Riftwatch has been brought to the Silent Plains is to solve the problem of the nightmares. But there's a long list of other problems that the Exalted Marchers could use their help with while they're in the area, especially with their own forces so run-down at the moment.

While they stay in camp they'll be expected to pitch in with the mundane tasks that keep a camp running: helping tend the camels and other mounts, repairing equipment, re-staking tents, hauling water, tending to ill and injured and such, so long as it does not interfere with Riftwatch's primary assignment of resolving the nightmare issue. As soon as they've settled in, they'll all be assigned to assist with hunting parties and patrols, circling the perimeter to keep watch for any suspicious movement or dangerous wildlife. The camp has encountered the usual desert fauna: hyenas and quillbacks that prowl the river's edge, gurns and phoenixes among the sands. Each poses their dangers, but can provide needed supplies as well, and the March isn't in a position to be picky. Supply runs by camel or mule to the few near-ish settlements, either on the outskirts of the desert or other oases, are in much demand, but the journeys have to be discreet and round-about; as new faces, Riftwatch may be asked to help with these as well.

A few weeks ago, a party encountered a group of dragonlings and dispatched them, only to find scouts ambushed by a full-sized dragon the next day, bellowing fire and sprays of sand powerful enough to strip flesh. It has attacked several supply deliveries and hunting parties since, and there have been reports of sightings nearing the camp. Anyone venturing out into the dunes will be warned to be on their guard. Qualified members of Riftwatch may be recruited to travel along to help protect these groups and to help hunt the dragon down. There are plenty of smaller dragonlings with weaker sand-breathing powers prowling the area, and there may be more than one encounter with the dragon before it is killed.

Patrols and hunting parties will also be asked to keep a lookout for signs of elven surveillance, and, if Riftwatch is amenable, to make an effort to find the elves that have been watching the camp and make contact with them to discover their allegiances, which at first were presumed to be neutral until a supply caravan was attacked last week. (Anyone may be tasked with the search for the elves' encampment, but to make contact please sign up.)

While a few of the recent spate of abominations were killed in the camp, a small number escaped into the desert and need to be tracked down before they cause further harm. (If they can be. Abominations roaming the countryside for years without being caught is not an unheard of phenomenon, and the risk that they eventually make it to a village or trade caravan is too high to leave them to the whims of the desert.) Riftwatch is enlisted to join in the hunt, either in groups of their own or as part of larger parties of Exalted Marchers, mages, and Templars trying to follow the abominations' trail through the desert.

It's not an easy task, in a landscape where sand is quickly blown over most evidence of something passing through a given area. Finding them is so much more difficult than fighting them that even people who are not exactly equipped for combat against a powerful magic-wielding demonic being may be enlisted to help anyway if they have skills useful for tracking. With some aerial scouting from griffons, tips from passing travelers, and the discovery of a few small massacres where the abominations have run into merchants or scouting parties or wild animals and left scorched or bloody scenes in their wake, it will be possible to track some of them down in the desert–and then to take them down, as that's the only known cure.

Everyone traveling through the desert will also have to contend with the natural dangers of the environment: navigation is difficult and getting lost easy; water must be carefully rationed away from camp; and sandstorms may spring up with little warning, though most blow through in a matter of minutes. Most, but not all. Midway through their stay a storm rises on the horizon, large and dark enough to give them about an hour's warning before it arrives, just enough to batten down the hatches—if they're near any. The storm whips enough sand into the air to blot out the sun in mid-afternoon, flinging it about with blinding ferocity for the rest of the day and into the night, forcing the camp to take stock and dig out from some new drifts come morning.

IV. A COMPLICATION

Every mission or patrol that takes Riftwatch into the desert comes with an added problem: venture any further north than the main camp, and people begin to find that their nightmares aren't waiting for them to fall asleep anymore. After a mile, images and sounds begin bleeding into the world, at first distant blink-and-you-miss-it brief, just a mirage, maybe, then closer and lingering as parties move further afield. Though they're pulled from your nightmares, they aren't private hallucinations; whole groups see the same visions at once. A hoard of darkspawn crests a dune and rushes a party with weapons that pass through them harmlessly. Enormous spiders click their mandibles in the dark. People you hoped to never see again walk amongst the party for a mile or more at a time, looking solid and sounding real but leaving no footprints behind them.

The visions vanish on their own after a while, or sooner if silenced by a Templar or dispelled by a mage, and none of them can hurt anyone–not here, not yet. But they keep coming, and they keep growing stronger the further north anyone goes in search of rogue abominations or dinner, or, obviously, the source of the nightmares. Those traveling alongside members of the Exalted March, a good number of them superstitious and all of less used to this sort of nonsense, will have the added task of keeping them calm. At least the first time or two before they, too, get used to it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[That sounds right, he thinks, going by what little he's known of Matthias. An endearing young man. Curious. Thoughtful.

As for the rest, this heavy story so lightly told, Viktor takes a moment to consider it. Drugged and sold, then forced to trade away an eye, then the dragon—let alone whatever other tribulations of which he might not even be aware—]

And still you go out there.

( it isn't as if she can't imagine why he might say it. she'd been attached to this company for years before she'd been willing to be part of it; had been unarmed, terrified, convinced that she would die (the way she did—) if she relented even a little.

a great deal has changed in the better part of a decade. )

I don't know if we'll win, ( eventually. ) But I decided I didn't want to die not having bothered trying to stop it from happening.

[Gwenaëlle can't know how poignantly this strikes, nor the complexity of what stirs up around it; she can't see how Viktor's face changes as her answer cuts through him, changes again as it collides with the backbone beneath.

At length, in quiet recitation,]

The surest way to fail is not to try.

My aunt was the Commander when I joined Forces— it wasn't because I wanted to fight, it was ... I knew she wouldn't make me. I mean, she made me, she insisted on training me for combat when I'd never held a blade in my fucking life, she made me justify every opinion I've ever held, but she wasn't going to send me to march off to my death. She'd let me be in Forces and sit in an office in my skirts writing, it was only.

( somewhere, sewing satinalia masks out of old shirts and cord, gwenaëlle shrugs to herself. )

The surest way to fail. Exactly. And she taught me too much and too well.

[Too well, perhaps, to be kept as a last resort. For a moment he thinks of Barrow, the trebuchet lesson in the rain—then the smell of overripe fruit—]

And now... what of your writing?

Notoriety sells, so I've a nest egg for when all this ends. The writing I did for the Inquisition was—

( she sucks her teeth, makes a faint sound of distaste. )

Not for me, not my own. Not something I'm especially proud of, and I don't miss doing it. My own work I publish less frequently than I did before, but movement through nations being what it is, that's got little to do with how much time I spend outside the Gallows.

But you've given it up as a way to contribute to the, to the war effort, in favour of the field.

[—to confirm, with the hope that she'll correct him otherwise.]

What? No, of course not.

[He measures this sigh down to near silence to keep it off the crystal. Disproportionate relief, perhaps, and yet,]

I'm glad to hear it.

( gwenaëlle is for a moment uncharacteristically without response; puzzling her way through and not sure what conclusion to draw. why should it matter to him, and so much?

not bad. just strange. )

I have plans for a book, after all this, so there's that. But I'm a poet, mostly, and— I don't know, I don't know what the point would be to any of this if there wasn't still that.

( like she would be less alive, so why fight, anyway. )

Purpose can be found anywhere...

[These are his emotional support sporadic houseboat improvements.]

...in theory.

[A little nod to the struggle; a refusal to condone, even obliquely, choosing to exercise one's motives through bloodshed. (It isn't only her he's thinking of.)]

But I understand what you mean. We're—I hesitate to say fortunate, but— it's a favourable coincidence that the work being done here is comparable to our own field of research.

Before a rift tore my carriage apart, all I did was write poetry, buy new dresses and try to avoid getting married.

( it's a little wry. )

I didn't — make sense here. As quickly as you.

Yes... well.

[Quieter,] We have the Provost to thank for that.

( for a lot of things. she thinks, briefly, of handing each other the exact same gift, that satinalia— )

How so?

( is an invitation, not a challenge. )

Were it not for his character, I may not have been amenable to... to a sensical arrangement.

( a doubtful hum, )

Maybe. But you're not an imbecile and our options are limited.

( he makes too good an impression for her to easily imagine some kind of stubborn determination to run dick-first into the spike pit. )

[She can look to the other half of his partnership for that—

Anyway, this little breath he lets out, it's not not a laugh.]

He did imply those as standards of the Diplomacy division, actually...

Diplomacy does the important and mostly thankless work to make sure the rest of us don't get strung up for ours, and the day we don't have anyone competent in their division is the day we're all fucked.

( it's not that gwenaëlle never says anything nice about anyone, it's just that she tends to say it like this; unexpected, sincere, sort of aggressive. i admire you, bitch. i ain't never gonna stop admiring you ... bitch.

granted, )

The fact of their job being necessary is annoying and stupid, and I'd rather slit my wrists than do it, and the fact I've been asked to help more than once does suggest a certain degree of naked desperation, but so does literally everything about Riftwatch. We are desperate. I think it's sort of impressive what we manage to do with that.

It is impressive.

[Agreement with a hint of verbal editing; his typically low-key ego won't permit sort of to quantify what they most recently achieved in desperation, regardless of how lightly it's meant.]

A determined person can accomplish a lot with very little. That's where the true spirit of ingenuity lives.

MOD PLOT ↠ WAKING AND SLUMBERING

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