faderift | MOD PLOT: A Night Without Moon and Stars

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MOD PLOT: A Night Without Moon and Stars

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.

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Astrid tries to remember what the Crossroads feels-felt like, severed from what she’s experiencing right now: “Maybe? Just. Worse.”

Passing through the Crossroads might’ve made her a little dizzy, a little headachy, but this was a migraine beyond that. Maybe because they’d been here longer? She couldn’t tell. Normally the eluvian trips were short.

And whether or not she can move is also a maybe, but it’s not that her legs can’t work; it’s just that she feels like shit. After you hork, you want to be able to crawl back into bed in a dark room, not sitting vulnerable out in the field, with fucking spirits and demons seething somewhere past the perimeter. Fuck.

She clutches at Talin’s shoulder and then starts to lever herself back up. She doesn’t know where they’re meant to move to, but she’ll try to move wherever he leads her.

She doesn’t catch the endearment now, but she’ll wonder about it later, once her head’s clearer. She doesn’t look into it too deeply just yet; affection came easy with the Avvar, when the same word for boyfriend was kjæreste was dearest.

It's as good a theory as he's got—the Crossroads is close to the Beyond, they're in the Beyond now, or near enough that the distinction doesn't really matter. If it's the location that's making her sick, they have to get her out.

(it occurs to him, distantly, that he's been fighting his own headache for the better part of the day, but the thought is dismissed as quickly as it arrived. the crossroads doesn't bother elves, so the beyond wouldn't either; obviously his headache is unrelated.)

Of course they'd have the Void-cursed luck to be dealing with this on top of a roof—even with the ground closer than it should be, their footing on the sloped tile is unstable, liable to send them both tumbling if they're not careful. Talin leads Astrid off the roof with slow, careful steps, trusting her to follow or to speak up if she can't. When they finally reach the edge of the house, he drops to the ground first and spends a few moments looking around for anything he can push to the side of the house to make it easier for Astrid to climb down. There's plenty of debris around, but not much that'd be easy to move, and he doesn't want to leave her alone for long enough to go find anything—Talin turns to look up at Astrid, expression apologetic.

"I'm not tall enough to help you down," damn the Veil, couldn't just take the People's immortality, had to take their height, too, "but I'll make sure you don't fall on your face."

Astrid stands at the edge of the roof. She would be teetering, maybe, except that she’s good with her balance and she’s clutching at the chimneystack to hold her up as she gazes down at him.

Some small humour breaks through.

“Not gonna catch me in your arms?” she asks, teasing, faint. They’re practically the same height, she’s lean but the Avvar are built solid with supposed once-dwarven ancestry, and Talin’s strong but quite literally got an elfin build. Though they both wish, she probably can’t land perfectly in his arms like some dainty damsel.

He's not going to deny her a laugh, though it's not as full-throated as it might have been otherwise. It'd be funnier in another situation, but even then, not as much as she'd probably meant it to be–it's not a sore spot, necessarily, that they're pretty much of a size to each other, but it can be... uncomfortable. A reminder, like her ears or her discomfort in the Crossroads, of the differences between them, when he focuses so much more on their similarities.

"If you want us both to fall on our asses, I'm willing to give it a shot," he says gamely, and holds his arms out. It's not so far a jump either of them would be terribly hurt by the fall, so if that's what she wants...

Astrid shakes her head, thinking for a second.

“No, just— the first one. So I don’t fall on my face.”

And with that, she musters up the last of her energy to push through the clammy exhaustion, the nausea in the back of her throat, that steady pounding throb in her skull, the vise tightening. She picks out her path — she was usually good with her footing, used to slipsliding up and down mountains without dislodging an avalanche — and slides down the angled rooftop, one boot kicking off another pile of rock to intercept and break her fall, and then she’s staggering on the ground and her momentum crashing her into Talin to slow her down. Not to literally catch her, but: arrest that clumsy scurrying-sliding descent, more ungainly than she’s used to.

Back on the ground and once she’s come to a full stop, she buries her face in the side of his arm. “Sorry this is the worst timing,” she mumbles into his shirt.

To say he watches her with his heart in his throat is an exaggeration–but it's not entirely inaccurate, either. If she slips, if she can't control her descent, if if if.

He needn't have worried, of course; even ill, Astrid is Avvar, surer on uneven footing than he is on his best day. Between her expertise and his determination not to let her fall and crack her head, they both keep their feet when she crashes into him, coming to a swaying stop, and Talin takes a moment to check that both of them really are alright.

(And also, maybe, that Astrid isn't going to throw up again after the jostling of that ungainly descent. He couldn't blame her if she did, obviously, he'd just prefer to have the forewarning to face her away from him.)

"Hey, none of that, now. Tel'abelas," he softly chides, stroking a soothing hand through her hair. "You didn't do it on purpose."

A short pause–

"And if you did, it'd be a little funny. A small bit."

“I am going to vomit on you,” Astrid proclaims flatly; but it’s a hollow threat, a joke, a dig back in return.

Evidently she’s at least strong enough on her feet to still joke. It’s hard to get her to ever stop. But the landscape is throbbing around her, pulsing in time with her heartbeat, woozy. That can’t be right. Lady, she hates the Fade sometimes.

“What does tel’abelas mean?” she asks, even as she loops an arm around his and they start hobbling their way back to camp, away from the demon-infested outskirts of Yvoire. They’ve often swapped vocabulary, trading little pieces of Avvar and elvhen, remnants of home. And then, from a few minutes earlier, a dazed kind of curiosity: “What does vhenan mean?”

Talin stiffens, his step stutters–just for a moment, before he recovers and matches his steps to Astrid's again. He'd said vhenan without thinking, and certainly hadn't thought about how to explain himself. He doesn't even know if he really meant it–it's not like Astrid calling him babe, or even kjæreste.

It feels as perilous a word as Fen'Harel, he realizes, as damning and ruinous. Bela...

Tel'abelas is easy. He can explain that.

"Well," he says slowly, and steps them carefully around a misplaced chimney, "it can depend. Elvhen is all about, y'know, the situation you're in, who you're talking to, how you say it. Trade is straightforward, you say what you mean. Elvhen is more like... poetry.

"So abelas means sorrow, but ir abelas is 'I'm sorry'–I have sorrow. Tel'abelas, tel negates what comes after. It can be 'don't be sorry', 'don't apologize', or it can be 'you're not sorry'."

They're close enough to camp now that they've passed other agents, everyone wandering about Yvoire on their own business. Maybe he can draw this out, put off explaining vhenan for a few days, at least–

"Like I said, depends on who's saying it, to who, how'd they say it, what happened first."

Luckily for him, that unnatural migraine (she’d never really suffered these before, she’d annoyed her wife with how she never got headaches) is slowing Astrid’s thoughts to a crawl, so she can only barely follow the answer to the question she’d asked. Talin says negate and she loses her train of thought a little. Maybe this wasn’t the best time to ask for a grammar lesson after all.

“Okay. So, this context: ‘don’t be sorry for almost vomiting on my head’.”

As they get closer to camp and closer to other agents, however, the sharpest edge of the pain starts to dull, so she can see a little better and her footsteps are less of a feeble shuffle; maybe it’s gotten better with time. Or maybe there was something in that stupid chimney she’d been sitting on.

"Right," he confirms, but even that doesn't quite fit, "'s no need to be sorry. You're ill, it happens."

Caring for her isn't a hardship. He wants to be here.

Vhenan.

Astrid's steps have steadied some with their proximity to camp, but Talin still hasn't let go of her arm. He steers them to the infirmary tents and sits her down on a cot at the outer edges, close enough for help to reach her quickly if necessary, but further from the smells and sounds of field medicine. He crouches in front of the cot, looking her over, assessing. The Healer has taught him the most basic signs to look for in people, which is easier to remember when his heart isn't near to tumbling off a roof.

"You're looking better," he says, and smiles ruefully, "and I figure that means I've only got a few minutes before you start trying to wander around again. But if you can stay put a bit, I'll bring you some mint to chew on, and some water. Food, too, if there's anything easy enough. Can you wait for me?"

“Always,” she says absentmindedly, parking herself on the cot, knees automatically folding and tucking away beneath her. Weirdly, by the time they’ve now reached the tents, she feels—

totally fine and normal, as if it were merely a passing fleeting sickness, abruptly cleansed without her even realising what made the difference. But it wasn’t the vomiting that did it, either, because she’d still felt fucked-up until they’d gotten further away. Maybe it had been something out there on the outskirts.

Astrid continues to puzzle over it while he’s away. One of the frazzled-looking healers (there are bigger problems to deal with, still-living people half-swallowed into the landscape, others injured from fighting with demons) gives her a quick once-over and then a dismissive “Take an anti-emetic, you’re fine,” before bustling off.

By the time Talin returns, Astrid’s still on the cot but working on sharpening her knives. She’s never been good at being idle.

“You never answered my question,” she says.

Turns out, there's not much in camp that's suitable for an upset stomach, and mint may have been a bit optimistic of a promise. Still, between excellent negotiation skills and some strategically deployed puppy eyes, Talin isn't empty-handed when he returns to Astrid's side.

"Well, I owe a few favors now," he says, "but I think this is pretty good for the circumstances."

He passes over the canteen and the brush first, for her to clean the film of vomit from her teeth, and her comment almost passes him by.

Almost.

"It's hard to answer," he says, matter-of-fact. Much as he doesn't really want to have this conversation yet, he won't do either of them the insult of pretending he doesn't know which question she means.

Astrid brightens at the gift he’d salvaged and brought back, and murmurs thanks before she starts brushing her teeth. It buys him a little more time, too, while she meticulously scrubs, then rinses out her mouth, swallows some more from the canteen. She wishes she had some aromatic bark to chew on, but this is good; makes her feel fresher, a little more alert and alive.

“You’ve never been shy about linguistics lessons before.”

He shrugs, not quite casual, not quite trying to be, but,

"You haven't asked about such a difficult word before."

That's true, at least, though it's difficult for reasons that have little to do with the usual vagaries of context and intent. He could say it's an endearment and Astrid wouldn't push him for any more than that, true enough, but the thought sits as ill as not explaining at all. There are enough half-truths between them, and the language is sacred enough to him, he'd prefer to give it whole to her where he can.

He's got a hunk of ginger root in hand. It's neither aromatic bark nor mint, and would be better in a tea than chewed outright besides, but Talin offers it to her all the same.

"It's an endearment," he confesses, finally. "A serious one. Got some things to think through before I say any more. 's that alright?"

All of elvhen is fucking difficult and complicated; she can never remember which one’s which for lethallin versus lethallan, and so much of the language is shaped by intent and allusion and poetry. Avvar, on the other hand, is so blunt and straightforward, describing things as they are. (It sounds dwarven, sometimes.)

And she knows that Talin’s— often hard to read, that smiling friendly exterior belying something else. He reminds her of Lake Calenhad. He might claim otherwise, but there’s so much lurking beneath his surface, flickers of shadows below while she’s an open book— but she’s in no hurry to push him too hard. What they have right now is nice. Don’t shake the mountain, don’t dislodge the stone which might send the avalanche plummeting —

So she simply takes the ginger, gratitude dimpling. “Yeah, alright,” she says, and blows him a kiss. Her head still feels too thin and wrung-out today to think about it properly anyhow.

Next time.

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MOD PLOT: A Night Without Moon and Stars

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maybe 🎀?