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

wildcard vignette;

[aberratic]

"...and that's all I could get," Ness concludes her business-like explanation of what she was able to read from the poor elf in the tree. He's silent now, and she can only hope that means he's as sentient as any natural-grown tree, lacking sensation and thought and will. She's too afraid to try to read him again to find out, though.

There's so much going on here that she doesn't understand, references to people she's never heard of and things she has no context for passed between the elf and Gwenaëlle easily. She could ask, of course, Gwenaëlle wouldn't avoid answering her about something to do with their work, but...

Honestly, the idea of talking to Gwenaëlle and her stone wall of apathy is about as appealing as amputating the other arm. Resigning herself to waiting is about as desirable though, stewing in ignorant confusion until she's able to dive into the Archives—to look for information that may very well be above her pay grade, confidential and need-to-know, beyond her ability to discover even if she does manage to make herself be patient—

But she doesn't have to resign herself to that, does she?

There's a brief hesitation, an internal war over this invasion of her superior's privacy... but it's only brief. Gwenaëlle is walking away from her. There are no eyes on her, no one is concerned with what she's doing.

Ness's eyes flash violet, and she slips quietly into Gwenaëlle's thoughts, skimming the surface for anything she can glean.

[elegiaque]

—ank you, Solas, for this timely reminder about my ability to care for the most selfish people on the face of the fucking world—

It’s easier if she does the writing down so she’s doing it, the same way as she’s so far approached everything to do with Ennaris: not rude, not dismissive, but matter of fact and focused on the work without conversational diversion. Compartmentalising comes much more naturally to her than deceit; it is easy, when presented with a higher priority than her own feelings, to set them aside as a problem for tomorrow.

Or — ideally — never.

It doesn’t mean they aren’t there; it means even less that they aren’t perilously close to the surface. In this moment, her aggravation with Solas — that particular personal hurt, not separate to the broader betrayals but distinct amongst them — is so entangled with what’s so recently raw that there’s little to be found in leaning up for a casual eavesdrop that isn’t more about Ennaris herself than him.

One more fucking betrayal, one more person she’d seen as on the same side demonstrably unreliable. Another person she loves, careless — that it’s clumsiness, she thinks, and not cruelty, is too bitter swallowed to be of any comfort.

“You did well,” she says, perfunctorily but meaning it, a thing she wouldn’t bother to say except for thinking that it’s true,

the elf’s dying face lingers in her mind’s eye, consequence. Solas had done good work, too; she’d believed Solas had been her friend, too. (Some part of her, barely quashed, runs parallel, a thought of where he spends the winter that carries more absent-minded worry than strategic value.)

There are consequences to being wrong about that. She rolls up the paper in her hand, offering a close-mouthed smile, and it’s a dismissal.

[aberratic]

It's difficult to separate information about Solas—whoever he is—from Gwenaëlle's thoughts about her. The emotional sting of it all makes it even harder—she's a selfish traitor in the Captain's eyes, carelessly, clumsily unreliable. That Ness expected that someone would see her that way following the amputation makes it no easier to swallow; that it's Gwenaëlle who thinks of her this way makes it all the worse.

This is what she gets for invading someone's privacy like this—it's her just comeuppance for going where she hasn't been invited. She retreats from Gwen's mind, unnoticed, feeling about as low as a slug—

and it's only later, curled up to sleep, brooding over the day, that she realizes all those emotions of Gwen's were based in wounded friendship.