MOD PLOT: A Night Without Moon and Stars

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone/Everyone
WHAT: Riftwatch investigates a strange occurrence in Western Orlais.
WHEN: Bloomingtide 9:51.
WHERE: Yvoire, on the edge of the Tirashan Forest.
NOTES: OOC post with reward claims. Body horror CW for the main post.

I. YVOIRE

It should have been a straightforward mission. Not a simple one—attempting to help mediate some sort of disagreement between the people of Yvoire and some local elves isn't simple—but straightforward. The sort of thing Riftwatch's diplomacy division has done plenty of times before. From the Hunterhorns base they ride southeast, through the late spring mud to a town on the edge of the Tirashan. Instead of a bit tense, edging toward violence, maybe a little strange in the way remote villages can be, they find the entire town encased in a nearly-translucent, impermeable magical dome. This calls for reinforcements.


II. THE BUBBLE

By the time Riftwatch has arrived en masse, it's been determined that anchors (it will take at least two, working together) can open and close a passage through the barrier the same way they might a rift, allowing teams to enter and explore the area. Inside, they find themselves in the Fade—the sky an unnatural green with no sign of sun or moon, jagged black rocks jutting up from the ground, the air teeming with spirits and demons—but also not. Among the boulders are houses, shops, torn apart by the Fade stone. A barn roof is pierced by a spire of dark stone, a bakery all but flattened. The residents haven't been spared. Some have been crushed by the arriving landscape, others encased within it. Arms reach out from more than one block of dark stone, the crown of a head just visible in an edge, a corpse frozen mid-stride as if charging out of the rock, but caught just too slow to outrun their fate.

The merging landscapes have rearranged some parts of town even more strangely. More than one building has been sliced in pieces, one remaining in place, the others and its contents relocated or vanished. Every book in a library has been severed from its contents, covers slumped in a bookshelf in a bisected library, pages now suspended in a cloud above a pigsty. A pocket of pond water fills an intersection, two drowned bodies floating trapped within it along with the contents of a wheelbarrow and a couple of now-well-fed fish. A copse of trees, uprooted, grow down from a patch of earth that hovers beside the town's small chantry.

As they investigate the fate of Yvoire, Riftwatch will encounter:

• Demons, primarily of the less-powerful varieties but in unusual numbers. They don't manifest in the way demons often do and don't appear to be tied to any particular object or location. They're just here, similar to areas where a rift has been open for a time and demons are already roaming free.
  
• Possessed corpses of the townspeople, some aggressive and violent, others just curiously wandering about the town going through the motions of life.
  
• Spirits, of many different types and degrees of curiosity, communication, and helpfulness
  
• Evidence of explosive magical violence, like a body burned by a flame that seems to originate where they stood, or a person crushed under a bookshelf toppled by the tell-tale blast of Stonefist.
  
• A handful of survivors who have survived by hiding in cellars or other out-of-the-way spots who will report that whatever happened happened the morning before Riftwatch's initial arrival, when suddenly there was a strange sense of pressure and static in the air, as if a storm was arriving, and then everything suddenly flew apart or was crushed and a cloud of spirits and demons appeared everywhere.
  
• At least one survivor will report that some of the elves who have been "stalking" (their word) the village lately were seen sneaking into town before first light, lurking around the chapel as usual.
  
• Some survivors will report family members or neighbors who they had never suspected to be mages suddenly doing magic, often with deadly consequences for themselves and those around them.
  
• And among them, a few people possessed by demons who will present themselves as survivors and do their best to get Riftwatch to help them exit the bubble and be free.
  
• One elf who has been trapped half-inside a tree, his entire right side from ear to toes encased in the thick trunk of a flowering oak that wasn't in this spot yesterday. He is alive, for now.

Fully exploring the area takes time, not only because of the demons but because Riftwatch will find that staying in the bubble indefinitely is unpleasant. Humans and Qunari are affected first, then dwarves, then rifters who have amputated their anchors, and finally elves, but over time anyone may begin to experience headaches, nausea, blurring vision, and feelings of either strange pressure or the equally strange absence of pressure. The exception is anyone with an anchor — they and those in their immediate vicinity will feel fine, and once that becomes apparent, Riftwatch can begin organizing so exploration teams never need to stray very far from someone with an anchor. Even the presence of an anchor, though, won't stop some people from exhibiting the strangest effect of all: the spontaneous development of Fade-touched magic that, unlike the headaches, does not go away when they leave the area.


III. THE ARTIFACT

Yvoire's Chantry is small, the sort of village chapel typically staffed by a single Sister, or maybe a Mother if she's a local. It was a Sister, here—she'll be found dead in a closet along with a number of her parishioners, the apparent victims of a hunger demon. Despite the limited presence of people, the Chantry is a hive of spirit and demon activity, which Riftwatch will have to make its way through in order to investigate.

Once they do, in addition to the deceased inside, Riftwatch will discover another closet that instead of remains contains a patch of stone floor that looks older than the rest, and yet also as if its mortar has been recently loosened. Levering up the large stone tile will reveal a passage into an old basement crypt, shelves of vestments and liturgical supplies covered in cobwebs, niches containing grace goods and dedicatory plaques to prominent members of the chantry past. A path has been tracked through the heavy dust, leading to the far wall, which has been demolished to reveal a different stone wall, this one elven in design. This has been opened like a door, though neither seam nor lock nor hinge is visible, one portion of the wall simply rotated on a non-existent axis to create a passageway.

Inside is a chamber not so very different in design from the chantry crypt: the walls lined with shelves and niches, all of them bare. A strange absence of dust in the room makes it difficult to tell how many were previously full, but several contain stands or racks seemingly designed for display, many in unusual shapes. In the center of the room is a plinth of black marble, the stand in its center still gleaming. There's no ambiguity about the shape it's meant to hold, the spidering fingers plainly designed to contain a sphere.

Set into the wall opposite the door is a frame in the familiar shape of an eluvian mirror, its glass dark and impassable.

Comments

[interroga]

Cassian sizes up the situation, with that feeling of impending violence brewing in the air, everything weighing on a metaphorical crossbow-trigger. He’s felt it so many times before: tension escalating before it snaps in bar brawls, in riots, the city guard descending with batons cracking on skulls. The tension needs cutting before it explodes.

He’s not going to pick a fight. They’re here to do the opposite of picking a fight. So he swoops into the situation, all benign smiling neutrality: “Easy there, men.”

The face of a friend. The face of a shem. With it comes certain privileges, he knows. He looks at Talin (they don’t know each other but the elf sounds so familiar, with that shape to his vowels and consonants Cassian hasn’t heard in years, the language he still dreams in), and he —

Doesn’t dismiss it. Instead he cuts between the men and the elf and diverts, saying smoothly to the latter, “We’ll go find a shovel in one of the houses. C’mon.”

[dirthsal]

Allowing himself to be diverted doesn't come easily. The other agent isn't subtle in his intent, and Talin knows, he knows he should let this happen, he's supposed to be friendly with the shemlen, any antagonizing is counterproductive to his real mission here—still he stands, rooted to the spot with wreckless fury. For a long moment, he stares at the shemlen over the agent's shoulder, and they stare back, smugly daring.

Slowly, with the effort of an aravel wheel rusted into place, he turns. The shemlen laugh behind him, cruelly mocking, and Talin's ear flicks as he keeps walking.

He doesn't say anything to the man behind him. He doesn't expect the man to follow him, much less actually help look for a shovel.

[interroga]

A younger and no less angry Cassian might have kicked off in the same way: feral rage, a brick in his hand, a metal pipe. Might have been just as easy to instigate, insolently flipped off the men on their way out.

But he’s had a few years to crystallise that emotion, hammering it down into something pure and distilled, and so he doesn’t let it ripple across his expression as he turns and follows the elf. Toward one of those empty buildings, half of it torn open by the rock exploding through a wall, all the furniture knocked over and scattered. This used to be someone’s house, and they used to have a garden. Maybe there’s tools out back.

That flick of an ear says a lot about Talin’s ongoing mental state. Cassian took the kettle off the burner but there’s still heat underneath, still on the verge of boiling.

“You’ll want to save that energy for later,” he says, quiet.

[dirthsal]

Stewed in his own resentment as he is, Talin doesn't that the agent has followed him until he speaks up. The fact of his presence gives Talin more pause than the shemlen's words, has him stopped mid-step to cut a wary glance his way.

"What happens later?" he asks, moving again after a long moment. Whatever fury he's still wrestling with, he's at least contained it enough not to lash out at his fellow agent—after all, he gains nothing from antagonizing his supposed allies. It'd be the wrong place to direct his anger, anyway, and that fire turns destructive when unchecked, less potent when allowed to run wild. Remember your goals, the Wolf has preached, but it's always sounded more like remember your enemies to Talin.

The ruins of this shemlen house—this shemlen life—don't much move him. He spares barely a glance for the chaos made of what was once someone's home, diverts instead around the intact side of the house—there will likely be a woodshed, and that seems to be the most likely place to keep tools, if he understands shemlen well enough by now.

[interroga]

“This,” the agent says, gesturing vaguely to everything around them: the town, the darkness beyond its limits, the bubble, the encroaching Fade. The entire fucked-up scenario. “Situation’s not over.”

Don’t kick off too early, Luthen had always told him. The man pitched the long, slow, patient game. Cassian hadn’t always been the best at following the advice, but he’d been purposefully working on it over the last few years.

“And none of it will matter if you get in a brawl with some village idiots and then some demon eats all of you while you’re distracted and wounded.”

[dirthsal]

Well, he's not wrong about that. Talin shrugs, noncommittal verging on ambivalent–he can take care of himself if it comes to a fight against demons and if the shemlen died to them it could only be a sort of natural justice, frankly–but he doesn't verbally disagree, unwilling to argue the point now that it's irrelevant. The woodshed, thankfully untouched by strangeness of the Beyond, does boast a couple tools, though only one shovel.

He turns to look the agent behind him up and down, considering. After a long moment, Talin holds the shovel out.

"There will be another in some other shed, somewhere. I'll meet you by the bodies."

Not that he really thinks he'll be seeing this man again until they're both back in the Gallows... but maybe he'll be pleasantly surprised.

[interroga]

“Got it.”

The man takes the shovel, and they part ways.

And it’s an easy assumption to make: that the shem might ditch the unpleasant task as soon as he can, dump the shovel and disappear back into the night, maybe pretend that he got caught up with some demon or some villager that needed assistance, and no one’d be able to prove otherwise. No one owes Talin anything. Riftwatch has other work here which doesn’t entail paying proper respects to a pile of Dalish dead.

But by the time Talin returns to that small group of bodies carrying that second shovel, he’ll find the human man labouring in the hard earth (rockier than it should be this side of Orlais, but it’s close to what the mines were like around Ferrix). Cassian’s jacket is slung over a nearby fence, hot with physical exertion in the warm late spring night (although who’s to say what spring is like in the Fade?), jumping his bodyweight onto the edge of the shovel’s blade so it’ll cut deeper into the earth.

He digs in silence, obedient as a machine put to a task.

[dirthsal]

He really hadn't expected to be surprised, is the thing of it.

Talin's returned, maybe a quarter of an hour later, maybe less, expecting at best to find the second shovel tossed near the pile of bodies, Cassian perhaps conscientious enough to leave it for him if he didn't end up able to find another after all. But there he is, working in the dirt, in the dark and the heat, and it's such a shock that it's actually got Talin stopped in his tracks, momentarily uncomprehending.

He remembers, though, helping Cedric fertilize gardens in the alienage. The Mourn Watcher, taking the time to ask each corpse how they'd like their remains handled. Maybe it shouldn't be that much of a surprise, then, considering all the elfbloods and bleeding hearts of Riftwatch.

"Don't suppose you saw any saplings nearby," he says eventually, casual like he expected this, not expecting a reply, and drapes his jacket next to Cassian's on the fence. None of the earth here is going to be particularly easy to move, no point spending time looking for something suitable with all the bodies they have to make space for.

Talin stabs his shovel into the ground a short distance from Cassian, close enough to hold a conversation if they wanted to without bumping elbows, and gets to work.

[interroga]

“No, sorry. Just full-grown trees. Smaller ones might’ve gotten caught in the rubble.”

(Cassian hasn’t done this part often. But he remembers—
a stack of bodies felled by the poison in the air, the oldest children in charge of hauling the adult bodies, piling them together. A single tree for all those dead. He wonders if it’s still out there, still growing.)

He eventually pauses after a moment. Surveys their work. “Is there… Does it have to be a tree? Could it be something else, like a rosebush?”

He never learned these things fully. There hadn’t been anyone to ask; whatever he knew was cobbled together, half-remembered.

[dirthsal]

Cassian keeps on surprising him. Talin pauses, leans against his shovel thoughtfully.

"It's traditional," he says, musing, "we tend to wander in places where it's easy to find a seed or a sapling. But the point is... to mark a life with life. To give back to the earth that gave to us while we lived. Any growing thing could satisfy the spirit of it, I s'pose."

It's a more astute question than he'd expect of a shemlen, and Talin turns his thoughtful expression on the agent across from him, hostility and suspicion almost entirely drained from his frame.

"What is your name, friend? I don't think I've seen you in the Gallows before."

[interroga]

"I'm new," he says, by way of explanation. And there's a kind of sheepishness in the set of the man's shoulders as he adds: "This is my first official mission with the organisation. What a place to see first, huh?"

There's a friendly warmth in his voice (a contrast to those hostile villagers, the demeanour carefully-calculated but also genuine on some level; sometimes he can't remember the difference anymore). But he holds out a hand: "Cassian Andor. Scouting."

And there's always that nagging off-balance question whenever he meets an elf. The impulsive urge to explain himself and say I'm one of you, warring against the self-conscious awareness of I know I'm not one of you. He's never sure where to land on it.

So for the most part, he avoids the question where he can.

🎀

[dirthsal]

There's a familiar sense of deliberate camaraderie, unthreatening newness, to Cassian's tone, his body language, his sheepish smile. He has the demeanour of a man ingratiating himself to his audience on purpose, seeking a path under walls built to keep out untrustworthy strangers. Talin knows this tactic; he's used it often enough himself to be able to recognize it by now. To see it on a stranger should, by all rights, make him suspicious.

He extends his hand to take Cassian's and shakes it, smiling with a deliberate warmth of his own. It's calming, to see something familiar reflected in another.

"Talin, of clan Shira'nehn. Also Scouting."

Now, there's many graves to dig, and only two of them to do the work. The work will be grueling... But perhaps less so, he thinks, when shared.