Fade Rift Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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faderift2025-05-18 07:08 pm
faderifting) wrote in faderift2025-05-18 07:08 pm
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.
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.
no subject
First, she falls. It happens suddenly, so she’s loose with it — there’s no warning, no time to tense, she just falls. And then there’s something like a small thunderclap, a spark of light like a prism where Gwenaëlle is and where she immediately is not, gone,
but not far. The first thing she can see, falling, is above her, so the first fucking thing just happens again. She barely has time to process that she is falling from somewhere the fuck else when the new angle means she crashes through broken wood and exposed nails, and worse than the fact she’s screaming is the way she stops. Her back hits the ground and that’s agony, too, but it knocks the wind out of her and she has nothing left to scream with.
no subject
There's a flash when you see it stretch before you: The places you could catch yourself, everywhere you didn't. When someone else falls —
His boot plunges, ankle caught in a splinter, and Cedric knows he's fine; knows the step won't break before her own reaches him. Wood snaps. A crack of light and noise,
(Of more than that)
A final thump. Something burn the back of his eye, an afterimage in the dark barn, as he goes scrambling down the ladder to reach her. Jaw smacks a rung. The familiar taste of copper, mingled with some other sense. Light, and noise, and more than that. More than that.
He's over her, fingers stretching for eyelids, ready to measure pupils and the angle of her neck and if he's done this plenty you still never want it to be here and now. To be her.
"Nael," Urgent, thick on his tongue, Na-elle. "Don't move. Look at me."
The fear on his brow works itself toward something else, something guarded. The way you look at someone hurt bad. Hurtling from the dracolisk: If you’re alive, I’m gonna kill you.
no subject
it is exactly that. Her chin lifts as she struggles and fails to right herself in a way that might just be the shock of the fall itself, and she groans, dragging her gaze to meet his eyes, and maybe the fear in them is because she knows how unlucky a fall like that might be.
That could be it.
“I can’t—” breathe, but she can’t say that, he can’t undo her armour—
no subject
"Hey, easy. I got it," Her chin rises and falls and Maker, but she looks scared. His face looks like nothing at all. "Stay down. I got it."
I'm right here. He lays a hand to her forehead, gentle as any. Firm. You've got to keep them still. People get stupid when they're scared, so you keep them steady. Keep them where you can see. She could break her own neck for the struggle, it's easy to do.
(You know when you're falling. You know before you ever really know.)
He works at the ties. Times like these, Cedric can feel himself pull back; toward that cold empty place where it won't matter who she is. Won't matter that she's family.
But he can't. It isn't empty any more. There's her, and there's him, and the shinging memory of that crack and between them the first strap pulls free.
no subject
The strap loosens and she breathes in a gasp. It feels like choking, and she struggles in the tangle of it for his wrist, manages to grip his forearm, “Stephen,” she tries, “ça doit être Stephen, où est-il,” and she cannot think about the unkindness it is to be looking past him in this moment, the urgency of the way she tries to press her shoulders into the ground when she’s too bruised and shocked to stop him from helping her.
He’s right here. It’d be a comfort, except that she can feel a smear of blood between her wings and her back and she had felt so fucking smart, telling Abby, showing Abby, like it was ever going to be the damned infirmary where it mattered most.
It was never going to be the infirmary that was the problem.
no subject
"Je le trouverai," He will. He'll fetch him, but right now she's panicking, she's gonna make it worse. Struggling makes it worse. "But you gotta breathe."
All the guilt in the world can't stop momentum, not behind twenty years of training. He doesn't move her hand from his. He doesn't need to, he's always been stronger. Sometimes you have to do the ugly thing. You do it for them.
(It's the way that he'll remember her, for a long time after this: Wringing his arm, all animal horror — picture scored deep as that parallelogram in sky. He'll wake with bile in his throat, and he'll wake thinking,
How much she looked like the first one, then. That first girl, when he was seventeen and his sword was fresh, and they all pretended not to see him cry.
He'll remember it, later. It doesn't stop him now. Because he knows, already; a little bit, he knows. He knows exactly what he's going to find.)
"I'm sorry,"
Cedric says, and he opens the corset.
no subject
“Je foutions pas d’abomination —”
now that she can breathe in enough, she is distantly aware that it feels an awful fucking lot like she’s broken her ribs. She has the passing, hysterical thought that it may be the least of her problems.
More clearer and this time in trade, “I am not an abomination, Cedric Carsus, get a fucking healer—”
The thing is, she wants it so badly. Her wings twitch, and she blurs at the edges, a prism of woman and light, the panic at the edges of blurring, too, a sensation she doesn’t understand beyond that it cannot mean anything good for her right now.
no subject
She hadn't wings a year ago. A year ago, she ran across the sand, and she hadn't wings; and she's hidden this. The fingers in her hair shift, fumbling about the back, feeling for a break. For some absurd proof —
The cleanest way to kill a man is through the base of the skull. Demons fight harder. You have to destroy the vessel, render it unusable. An Abomination might survive its own severed brain, rip through him, and this barn and then out to all the people that she loves.
That she loved.
Calculus in his eyes. He's stalling: An Abomination might take that fall and stand again, but not under lyrium. In a minute, maybe less, he'll know. One way or the other, he'll know.
Cedric doesn't reach for the knife. He lays her head down. He folds his hand over hers,
And he waits.
no subject
Nothing happens, except: pain and fear mingle, wetting her eyes, and she struggles audibly against panicked breathing and the very real possibility, not knowing how badly she’s injured, that she will puncture a lung if she doesn’t get it under control before someone helps her and when she drowns in her own blood
(again)
it won’t fucking matter whether or not he believed her, except that he can say anything he likes about how she died.
Nothing happens, except the way her hand shifts toward his chest, instinctive, and tears roll from the corners of amber eye and gold, soaking into her hair, fingers curling under themselves hard enough to press half-moons into her palm.
Nothing happens, except that she whispers, “Please, get Stephen, please get him, s’il te plaît, please, Cedric—”
no subject
Is Judex somewhere above? Must be, even here, in this strange between. She's wounded. Terrified, heaving under him, and it'd be cruel to call Strange for this. To try and save something already gone.
He dared the fire that consumed the Prophet, and with one swift strike,
She gapes and pleads, and he watches the water curl from about that false eye. Seconds stretch. A minute — Mercy is swift. Cedric is terribly, terribly slow.
Lyrium ebbs, light flickers, verdant and strange and suffusing her fingers; his. When he at last breaks her gaze, it's to tuck chin to his own neck, murmuring into the crystal. Reluctant to break contact. To let go,
"Doctor," And he pierced her heart. "We're gonna need you."
no subject
Gwenaëlle’s, at a further distance from the crystal, comes a terrified, urgent wail: “Stephen, I need you right now, please hurry, please with your cloak—”
in a raw, wet voice he has not heard from her before.
no subject
The voice which comes back to them is flat and strained, immediate: “Coming. Where are you?”
It’s as businesslike as Stephen can manage, not letting his voice betray him at the sound of Gwenaëlle’s keening noise in the background, an electric jolt straight to his heart. There is a lot happening in Yvoire, but he drops everything in order to answer the call and come meet them. He takes Cedric’s direction to point him towards that crumbling barn on the edge of town, the topography of the landscape all fucked, rocks protruding and the shape of the buildings warped.
And the figure that approaches them is, in those last few yards as he enters the barn, a crimson blur; something ripples from his Fade-touched cloak to bring him closer faster, ever more magic, the Fade is thick in the air and has been the whole time they’ve been in accursed Yvoire.
The doctor appears suddenly too-quick by their side and his face has shuttered, his mouth thin, but it’s not letting as much of that concern and terror land as it ought to. His expression has gone waxen, the professional warring with the horrifically personal.
He doesn’t see anything immediately obvious, she’s not impaled on some rusty spike, so perhaps things are okay —
But then he realises with cold dread that her corset’s undone, her wings are out, fuck —
He moves toward them and takes a knee beside Gwenaëlle and, unblinking at the sight of those gauzy dragonfly wings, he looks straight to Cedric and asks, “What happened?”
no subject
Simple as any. His eyes cut to the broken ceiling, the better not to look at Strange, pale and unsurprised. Cedric pulls off her, draws back,
(Never went in for pinning bugs. Too macabre. Like playing at mummies, limbs stretched and pretending there's a person in there.)
"Stepped through the Fade," That blur of cloak. "Don't got control of it."
And all that implies.
no subject
She did, but like he says: she wasn’t in control of it. She reaches for Stephen as he draws closer and Cedric draws away, hands clawing, anxious, clammy. It is a vulnerability she has become unaccustomed to, which is a strange thing to realise in the moment of breathing out that she is not, in fact going to die after all—
probably—
“My ribs,” she says, instead. “I landed— hard.”
Unlacing her had been the right thing to do, likely. It doesn’t feel better for it.
no subject
“Take a deep breath, in and out,” he says, and listens. Testing, confirming: rib fracture. He lowers his head and tells her to breathe again, and he listens again, anxious for the sound of rattling air or wet burbling bloody breath. As long as the lung doesn’t collapse.
“I think you’ve a broken rib. Don’t over-exert yourself and you’ll be fine, but we need to transport you back to camp.”
The doctor is very clearly focusing on the injury part of this equation, his blinders on, and it almost seems as if he’d missed or ignored Cedric’s statement in the way he stubbornly bulls right past it.
He hadn’t missed it, though. Stepped through the Fade. One large ? question mark pressed to the metaphorical report, his reaction on that particular point more floundering: That can’t be. I don’t know what to do about that. It’s irrelevant.
no subject
the difficulty she has in slowing her breathing to do as he asks. Strained but not gurgling. Conscious of Cedric even as he withdraws with all the alertness she applies to — to a threat.
When she says, “He made it still,” it is much quieter, between the two of them. Silence is a Templar gift. It shouldn’t do anything to her. It’s never done anything to her, before today.