faderift | open | beach party, blight themed

Entry tags:

open | beach party, blight themed

WHO: Anyone, and introducing Antoine and Evka.
WHAT: Darkspawn! Bonfire! Character intros!
WHEN: Late summer.
WHERE: The Wounded Coast.
NOTES: This is a new character intro, but it's also an open mingle if you would like to use it to do your own stuff without Antoine and Evka.

As it happens: Riftwatch is home to Kirkwall's only near-enough-to-permanent resident Grey Wardens. When travelers report an incursion of darkspawn on the roads into the city, then, the City Guard doesn't exactly punt — a few short-straw drawers are available to help — but it does send a messenger to the Gallows' front gate with a clear expectation that darkspawn fall firmly within the boundaries of Riftwatch's problem.

At least the weather is nice. One of the cooler days, wind chasing away the sea's humidity and passing clouds across the sun an intervals that provide bouts of shade but don't threaten rain. The darkspawn are less active in the daylight; a small band might try something opportunistic along the winding roads of the Wounded Coast, but the real task is to stop them where they're emerging underground. The source can be tracked to a winding cave, its mouth scattered with the possessions and gutted corpses of smugglers who tried to flee the first scouting party of shrieks.

That's also where Riftwatch will find two Grey Wardens. New ones. Pretty nice ones, too. Not the mean and/or shady kind of Warden they already have.

But that's the last good news for a while, as the sun sets and the darkspawn in the Deep Roads beneath the cave make a renewed push for the surface, hurlocks and genlocks scrabbling through the crevices in the dark like deepstalkers while the shrieks who emerged before them circle back to attack from behind. They're well-coordinated and have the potential to turn numerous, but the narrowness of their entry point keeps them bottlenecked to a manageable but endless stream. Stopping them for good may involve an explosion or two.

By the time it's done and the blighted bodies have been gathered to burn, it's late enough that there's little point in trying to travel back to the city in the dark rather than building another, less disgusting fire on the beach and waiting a few hours for sunrise.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I. Welcome to the beach party (we've got Darkspawn)

When the Riftwatch response arrives, the non-shady Wardens (an elf and a dwarf) have killed several shrieks. While the dwarf makes sure they haven't missed any, the elf is piling the bodies. Based on the formation, it seems likely he intends to burn them. Given the Wounded Coast's weather, it might take some doing.

Upon hearing people approach, the elf Warden rises to his feet. His Orlesian accent is unmistakable as he calls out, "Evka, we have company." Remarkably, he seems to mean it in a way where he's pleased about it, rather than identifying the newcomers as the sort of company that merits drawing weapons. This impression is supported by his raising his hand in an undeniable greeting.

II. Wardens after dark

Despite his initial demeanor, Antoine does know how to handle himself in a fight, taking down Darkspawn with rapid shots from his longbow and shouting instructions or warnings to the people near to him. Given Riftwatch, agents may or may not find it startling when he starts throwing small bombs. At least his aim is good.

In a lull, he says to whoever is nearest, "It is likely they will make at least one or two more pushes. There are still quite a few down there, and I think they are regrouping before they try again." He is focused but not flustered, adding, "We could try to cave in the entrance, but I suspect they would find another place nearby to get out, and maybe not one we can cover so well."

III. Wildcard

[For post-battle beach hangouts or other ideas. If you'd like to discuss bespoke starters OOCly, grab me on plurk or discord!]

She knows him, so she knows that tone. But their opinions on who does and does not warrant a friendly welcome have diverged frequently enough that there's nonetheless wariness in her gaze and her stance when she turns back from the crest of the dune beyond him to see this company for herself.

Armed company. But the good kind of armed? She'll decide after she's wiped the sweat out of her eyes. Summer and seaside are on their own wonderful things she's been delighted to experience, this last decade, but neither improves the process of pummeling shrieks.

She swings the heavy head of her hammer down into the sand at her feet to free her hands — that confident, for the moment, in their safety, though being able to sense the darkspawn is only so helpful when there's a mass of them beneath her feet, keeping her on an edge she can't step back from.

"I think that's all of them," she says — all of them above ground — for the benefit of both Antoine and their approaching help/highwayman. "For now."

"Well, well."

Riding up on her rangy black gelding, Teren arrives just as the last darkspawn is cut down, an unusually curious glint in her wider eye to see the site already occupied by Wardens.

"Seems we've had our work done for us," she remarks, slipping out of the saddle and approaching the pair, looming comically over both of them; she can't remember if they've met before, but it's not unlikely, with how organically groups of Wardens join and separate.
"Teren von Skraedder. I'm with Riftwatch."

"Ah yes," Antoine says, brightening. "We were heading for you. Well, for Riftwatch." If they've met, it's been long enough he doesn't assume she'd remember their names; he adds, "I am Warden Antoine, and this is Warden Evka." In roughly the tone of and this is the Queen of Ferelden, for all he doesn't linger over it.

"As she says, we think this is all for now. We heard they've been coming out of the caves regularly, so we are probably not so lucky that it is all of them. A break, though, at least."

Whether Teren's status as a fellow Warden earns her this debriefing or Antoine he would just give this much information to anyone who turned up is deeply unclear.

Edited 2025-09-03 23:20 (UTC)

"They didn't seem organized," Evka would not add for anyone who wasn't a Warden.

She means they didn't seem organized the way darkspawn sometimes can be these days. The way they are when they're being directed by an Archdemon during a Blight, or by a blighted magister during a protracted apocalyptic war of a different kind, to move with a goal more abstract than hurting whatever is in front of them at the moment. It's not an organized offensive. Just a leak.

She doesn't recognize Teren, herself, and these days she's less inclined to extend automatic trust to any Warden they come across. But Riftwatch helps. Riftwatch relaxes her posture a fraction. She comes down the hill to stand beside Antoine, the distance between her shoulder and his — well, his elbow — small enough to make it clear they're close comrades, if not enough to make people start hearing imagined wedding bells.

"You still might have to break a sweat today if you don't want to have to come back out tomorrow."

"Suits me fine," Teren decides, scanning over the scene once more and-- of course she notices their combined posture, but declines to comment on it-- people get up to all sorts of things on their long deployments.

"What's been the worst of it? Any big ones?" She sounds vaguely hopeful.

"Nothing too big, that we've seen. Though I suppose without direction, that's not unusual, especially in daylight." Which is a remarkably optimistic-sounding way to say probably we will after sunset, but hey. "But we heard they've been a persistent problem in the area. We were hoping to buy the locals a longer reprieve."

Which is to say, it's very nice to meet you and all, but they aren't leaving just yet.

"Where are they coming from?"

Rowena certainly hadn't come here for a battle, but when the shouts had started, and people had started dispersing from the bonfire to answer it, she'd gotten up with them, following the smaller group out to both investigate (she'd not yet seen darkspawn) and lend her magic to it.

"Deeper below." He sounds confident, though grim. "It is not being underground that is unusual, for them, it is emerging to the surface. Something is calling them up and out."

The explanation doesn't keep him from steadily picking them off with quick, sure-aimed arrows. He moves to another vantage point, trusting she'll follow. "Given how many there are, I would not be surprised if they were reproducing somewhere nearby. But we would have to go into the caves to be certain, and I do not think that is wise at their current numbers." Probably a mild understatement.

Mean-and-shady slithers from the rock.

"There's an ogre down there." Muck sloughs about his shoulders as Strand twists. Wriggles. Something pops in its socket: One arm's through, half a torso. "But they won't get the tunnel wide enough."

That's optimistic. The shore is riddled with passages, wormy as a rind. Or some other, cheerier comparison — which from their brief introductions, it's doubtful he'll provide.

"Grab a hand, will you?"

One more yank to knock him loose. The others might have made more sense for this venture, but if Strand can make it through, so can a determined genlock.

Edited 2025-09-03 05:55 (UTC)

"Ah good, my favorite kind of ogres are trapped underground for the present." He grabs the hand as requested and gives a yank. He would say, truthfully, that he isn't the strong one between himself and Evka; still, he's perhaps a bit surprising, ropy muscle beneath the Warden's uniform.

"What sort of numbers are we looking at, could you tell?" It's very possible he couldn't, but Anotine can't help asking anyway. Maybe they'll get lucky and they're just mopping up the end of a larger horde. Hope springs eternal, etc.

From nearby, a lovely, low-toned Nevarran voice:

“Toss him back down there and make him check,” is unwholesomely cheerful. Athénaïs’s orb hovers above her hand as she approaches, sizing up the hole — not immediately coming close enough that Strand can get a clear look at her from where he is. “I can do you a little localised earthquake to stop it up, hypothetically.”

It is unclear whether she means before or after getting him out.

(It’s also an imprecise description of what she would do, exactly; beating the shit out of the earth with force magic is a bit more accurate, but ‘localised earthquake’ communicates roughly the same thing and sounds cooler — scarier! — to people who didn’t study alongside her in the Necropolis. Or happen to be underneath the earth she wants to do a bunch of works to.)

Antoine looks back at Athénaïs as she approaches, still holding Strand's hand (and thus not immediately taking the invitation to drop him back down the hole). "It is a good offer," he says, frank, "and I admit I've had a similar thought, though I would use explosives rather than magic. But I am afraid, given the geography, that they'd just come out somewhere even less convenient. At least this entrance is a good chokepoint, non?"

As satisfying as trapping a bunch of Darkspawn would be on the merits.

When he glances back at Strand, his gaze lingers a bit, like a man trying to remember the name of a song he's hearing a snatch of. But then he shakes his head. "It is lucky, though, that you did not seem to stir them up. For you especially, I think."

His knuckles clench before she's got two syllables.

Ribs press, joints square, and at once he's stuck fast. If Antoine knows the string of Ander that follows, it's for a sign against evil.

(She knows it. He used to say it over horses, dice; when they were hard up for coin, and playing at magic was safer than the real thing.)

"Two dozen, three. If you drop this cave on them," Ground out even, deliberate. He is dangling out a pit of monsters, and she could crush him for an egg, and he is in control of this situation. He is. "You'll bury anyone who ran back in."

The shore is wormy as a rind. Not every tunnel leads to Darkspawn: If any of those smugglers were clever enough to hole up, to hide?

She might bury him, but not a lone survivor. Strand grunts, forces an exhale. Sand skitters loose. He hauls on Antoine —

It's not enough.

Edited 2025-09-05 06:39 (UTC)

"Manageable," is a response to the estimate, of course, rather than these hypothetical buried civilians, delivered with a grim sort of breeziness as Evka comes up alongside and past Athénaïs, looking up at her with passing curiosity on the way. Not so far up as she usually has to look, among surfacers, so that's nice.

Of course everyone would rather not manage three dozen darkspawn face to face. But sometimes that's what it comes down to. And then you manage.

She's deemed an adjacent tunnel solid and hole-free enough that no one needs to worry about it right now. As for this hole —

"But this is a less drastic way to plug it up." Just behind Antoine, now, she puts her fist on her hip and spends a moment pretending that capping off holes with humans is a workable strategy and darkspawn wouldn't yank Strand down by the ankles like a ragdoll without worrying what parts of him it tore off.

Is there a split second moment where a stranger’s willingness to instantly join in on terrorising a man currently wholly at her mercy and warding off evil about it draws a twinge of remorse out of Athénaïs?

— nah. Can’t be. Indigestion.

“Is he stuck?” she asks, less to Strand — warding off evil, so probably not in a mood to be reasonable with her — than to Antoine, currently engaged in fishing him out. Probably. “Because I can help with that, too, if he’s not going to be a little bitch about it.”

She looms into view behind Antoine’s other shoulder.

“Are you stuck stuck?”

"No," Says the little bitch, "You'll need another cork."

You get out of a hole the way you got in. The only ways to stick, to stick stick, are misfortune. Gravity. If you fit once, you can fit again, so long as you stay calm. Stay easy and fluid and relaxed —

So yeah, he's stuck.

Athénaïs looms. Close, closer. That'll do: Quick as a snake, he drops Antoine to seize a fistful of her hair and yank. Either they're both going down, or neither is.

"I heard there was an ogre," comes Teren's voice as she approaches from deeper in, only to pause and purse her lips as she assesses the sight before her.

"Should I come back." is anyone on this expedition not fucking

The ogre, for the moment, is less concerning than whether Strand and/or Athénaïs is going down into the caves. Momentarily startled by both the loss of Strand's grip and what the man grabs instead, he reaches out to catch Strand's bicep, hoping to keep the both of them from going down farther than ground level.

"Evka," he says, a little less light than usual for him, though it's more strained than stern. "A little help, please." Not because he doubts she'd get there eventually, but because he wants the newcomers to know they're not just going to abandon them to work out ... whatever this is. At least not before neither of them is stuck in a hole. Once they're both on the surface, they're (mostly) free to pick at each other.

That's — well. All right.

Evka shoots Teren a fleeting glance, but the question does seem rhetorical. Antoine's beckoning much less so. The possibility someone drags her husband into their hole if the antics get sufficiently childish does occur to her, so there is a touch of hustle in the way she swings her hammer around to rest it on the ground and shuffles around the edge of the problem, where she might grab Strand by the forearm and relieve some of the force on Athénaïs's scalp.

"Hey," comes out sounding halfway between a mild-mannered greeting and an admonishing prelude to settle down. No one is falling through the damn hole.

Say this for the dungheap that was Minrathous: at least Cassian’s never had to deal with Blight-adjacent problems before. That’s a new one.

He’s been keeping the sortie company, helping out with the occasional careful archery shot at the darkspawn who get past the line whenever they push; he’s slow and methodical in his aiming from afar like this, but tends to land the hit when he does finally let go of the string. He also keeps staring and paying close attention whenever the elf heaves another small bomb towards the mass; already absently thinking in the back of his mind that their suppliers could do with some of those, for likely more ambiguous uses.

“So if not caving in the entrance, what then?” Cassian asks. He’s seen the distinctive blue-and-grey armour; he’ll defer to the expert.

Antoine nods, still looking at the entrance thoughtfully. "I think we will do best to try to draw as many as we can up this way. The cave serves as a bottleneck, which should mean that we will have to rely on endurance but they are unlikely to be able to get behind us."

Unless they have enough strategy to also come up from a second exit farther away. A few years ago, he'd have said that sort of approach was impossible for Darkspawn. Recently, he's more inclined to say unlikely, but at least it's still unlikely enough that he doesn't think they need to build their primary plan around it.

"It will help," he adds, glancing back at Cassian, "that we had some aid arrive. Evka and I had planned to deal with this ourselves, but it's a bigger infestation than we thought when the locals asked us for help with it. Warden endurance is good, but it is not infinite, after all. So thank you."

Cassian’s shoulder tips into a shrug, demurring. Altruistic protection for the city, sure, but it’s in their own self-interest too. “If darkspawn were to overrun the Wounded Coast and take Kirkwall, nobody would be happy. Us in Riftwatch least of all,” he points out, a little wry.

There had been just the slightest pause before he acknowledged it. It still feels a little stilted: in his heart, we and us still means the Shadow Dragons. It still takes some mental reorientation to remind himself of it, where he is, who he’s with.

“I think we’re the lucky ones, though. Not a lot of spare Wardens to go around these days.”

Antoine's smile falters for just a moment at the reminder of just why Wardens are thin on the ground in the Free Marches. Just a moment, though, before he moves past it and the smile steadies.

"We were heading for you, actually. We've been largely north of here, but ... well, I suppose exactly why will wait for us to get back to Kirkwall, no? But it seems we arrived in good time for this particular problem." It's a messy problem, but it is one that he and Evka are well-equipped for.

He brightens and adds, "I also hear you have griffons! That is not why we are here, but I admit, it was an added attraction for me. Creatures of legend, in the flesh."

“We should put them on the recruitment posters,” Cassian says, an attempt at dry humour, but there’s a kind of childlike warmth glinting beneath his words too, a brightness in his gaze.

He admits, rueful: “I couldn’t believe it when I saw them, too. It didn’t feel real. Like something out of the stories. They’re really something.”

"It is not a bad idea," he says, brightening, of the posters. "I think it could not hurt, at least. Have you ridden one yourself? It seems like it would be thrilling."

He hasn't forgotten what they were working on, of course. But he'll feel it if a significant number of Darkspawn head their way. There is time to ask griffon questions for now.

“Not yet,” Cassian says, thoughtful, and that yet contains multitudes. Why hasn’t he learned yet? There’s no reason not to. Mistakes have been made.

“I still need to take some riding lessons, but you know how it goes: the work piles up, you’re away for a while, you keep forgetting to get around to it, then you regret wasting time. Maybe you and I can start together, if you’re headed our way. Are you planning to join?”

His voice is warm and amiable; his own unconscious automatic attempt at the appealing marketing, the welcoming gesture.

(They need recruits. They could always do with more Wardens, with those useful senses of theirs.)

"I am not averse, though it will depend." On whether Riftwatch is open to Wardens, under the circumstances (which he doesn't take as a given). Whether he thinks he can help. Whether Evka wants to join.

"But at a minimum, we will ... consult, yes? I think we have some common problems." Not all of them are the Blight, but that one significantly. With an easy smile, Antoine adds, "If we do join, though, I will absolutely learn with you. I could not miss the opportunity. Though I suppose you have no way to know if it will disagree with you until you try — flying. I do not usually become seasick, but I imagine it is an imperfect comparison."

“I suspect the movement’s more like a horse with some extra verticality. More, uh, turbulent.” Cassian already knows he’s good on horseback: good reflexes, quick at maneuvering, dipping and diving and getting across hostile terrain. He might be terrible at the woods himself, but get him an animal to drive and he’s decent.

Their earlier time had been consumed with the fight, with pushing back the darkspawn, but it seems there’s still a bit of breathing room before the next advance: no hand-thrown explosions from the elf just yet. And they’ve pledged to take classes together, so he realises some introductions are probably in order:

“I’m Cassian, by the way. Scouting.”

"Antoine." Cassian cannot know it yet, but later it will probably be a bit funny that Antoine said Evka's name before his own, as if everyone somehow knows Evka.

"I am usually good with heights, mostly. Though I suppose a tower or a tree is something different from an animal. Once Evka and I were trying to lay a trap for a troll, and it was windy enough that the tree did a little feel like it was trying to shake me off, but I imagine that is not the same." His good cheer makes it a bit difficult to tell whether he's joking.

Thedas is so fucked-up on an everyday basis, Cassian’s simply going to cheerfully assume it’s true. Plus, troll-trapping is a fun story.

“Evka’s the other Grey Warden? The dwarf?” Your…? is the dangling unspoken question; a gap in the sentence, a space to be filled.

Edited (forgot 2 select an icon) 2025-11-12 02:19 (UTC)

"My wife, yes." Less proprietary and more can you believe my luck, in tone. "We have been traveling together since I first joined the Wardens, sometimes with others, sometimes us two. We were out on the road for what happened at Adamant."

He assumes that's the next question, for someone with even a passing familiarity with the state of the Gray Wardens at present.

"So we have stayed on the road, yes? Doing what we can to help."

“Is there really no…” This is fraught territory, most likely, but Cassian finds the question starting to circle in the back of his mind; now that he’s meeting his first Grey Warden in the flesh, he’s considering, for the first time, the reality of what happened to them.

Imagining if the Shadow Dragons were to splinter (and sometimes it seemed but a matter of time, if more banal and less dramatic than magical corruption: they were always so compartmentalised, splintering into sects, different revolutionary groups disagreeing with which way to handle their rebellion). What if he was out in the cold someday, no safe haven, all organisational structure sundered? Shitty place for them to be.

“Has it just been the two of you by yourselves? No fallback somewhere to regroup?”

Contingency plans; safety nets.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

open | beach party, blight themed

ota (threadjacking encouraged as desired)

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scouting pre-dark, threadjacking welcome

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no tagging order, we die like men (jk I got permission for chaos)

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