faithlikeaseed | [IC/OOC] Fade Rift Inbox & Contact

[There's a name if Myr's ever heard one. He tucks it away, declines from commenting.] Right, Mistress Draco. Then you've seen combat enough you think you could put our young Tevinter guest under if he begins acting up? Preferably before he hurts anyone.

Edited 2018-02-02 00:51 (UTC)

( ...only when he nearly laughs does she catch that, making an aggrieved sound at herself, but then: )

He called rifters "dreams made flesh", that the alterations aren't corruption but assimilation. That they belong here now, I supposed.

[...Oh.

Oh, shit.]

So--

[Noise from the other end as he finds somewhere to sit down, to absorb that.]

--So they could be spirits after all. Or something like, but not what they once were. Sweet Andraste singing, that--...that makes sense. I don't like it, [it means he may well have been wrong about them this whole time, and there's disturbing implications to that,] but it makes sense.

...Fuck, but it complicates things--our sick rifter's plague belongs here now, too.

Whatever it was before, it's something that makes sense to Thedas now. On the bright side, oughtn't that mean we can cure it? Without anything foreign from another world.

( imagine how fucked they'd be if the cure was unavoidably as alien as the cause. )

[extremely.] If it can be cured--that poor bastard said it didn't have one. Or he didn't know of it.

Though one man's word on it isn't fate. If his gods would help him, the Maker will surely aid us. [But He doesn't reward complacency, so--]

...Don't suppose we can lure you into research with the rest of us, is there?

In his- world. Where it was something different. It's already changed, and what does a sick artist know about healing his disease?

( there's a long pause. )

Or a healthy poet, for that matter. What would you want me to do?

( it isn't no. )

Nari is there, as usual, with the baskets of the morning's fresh bread, the tureen of soup, bowls that knock woodenly against each other as the Dalish woman struggles with the load. Today her steps are different, the sound of the bowls exaggerated by the heavy uneven falls of her feet.

"Did you hear-- of course you did. I--" There's something deeply shaken in her voice that wasn't there the day before, the air fair vibrating with nerves when she comes close enough to place a bowl down within Myr's reach. "There's soup. It's--" Metallic noises as the tureen lid opens, "Some kind of vegetable. Myr is there--have you found anything new?" Nari asks this as if the mage's work had, in the intervening minutes since Solas's report had rung through the crystals, miraculously yielded some information less dire than a death sentence.

That's so. Given a rifter's magic is clipped when she's brought to Thedas, it doesn't seem so strange a plague might be made less awful, too.

The symptoms aren't quite the same, nor moving so fast--none of them is sweating blood yet.

[That's reason to be hopeful.]

Keep asking good questions--remind us of what we might be overlooking, or when we've gotten bogged down in something unproductive. You've heard us going on over the crystals. [There's a hell of a lot of trivia getting put out as useful information; someone needs to cut through the noise.]

( thoughtfully- )

I could do that.

( and she does have a vested interest in it. )

It's only because there'd been no one present in person Myr could maintain his calm. A handy thing, the crystals--he only needed to focus on how still he held, what his voice sounded like, without worrying what his face might give away or what someone might read in how tensely he held himself.

Whatever thin composure he'd been able to muster for that fled once the conversation was over; he sits hunched over the table he'd been seated at, face buried in his crossed arms and the remains of spellwork scattered around him. He's slow to lift his head as Nari arrives, slower to respond: "I can't say that I have."

He hasn't tears to shed any longer, but it doesn't quite keep the sound of them from his voice. Maker, why this. Why now.

We'll be glad to have you.

[although--]

Though Warden Anders has embedded himself in the whole thing, fair warning.

( The pause is brief. )

Well, I could ask you good questions.

Why this, why now was a popular thought--although Nahariel was almost too tired to ask herself that anymore.

Silence, and then the sound of soup being ladled, the crisp sound of crusty bread being pulled apart and placed on the desk next to him. "...I think it's root vegetables," she says of the soup. The desolation in her voice is incongruous with the subject matter. Despite the delivery being finished, she lingers, and then "I don't suppose it's too much to hope it's contagious?" She says it like a black joke, but there's an odd honesty in there as well.

Oh yes, absolutely. [And would she relish it a little? Probably. Tevinter mages drove her up the wall, after all. Stupid majority of blood magic.] I take it I just follow him around, stare holes in the back of the skull, then drop him if he causes trouble?

[He can't blame her in the least.]

Then I'll come off all the better for it.

[Not in his nature to try and show a fellow researcher up, but--]

Anything else you think we might've missed?

Have you studied the differences between the symptoms in the Templars and the rifters? Is there anyone else experiencing anything—what's the same, what's different? What do they have in common and what don't they?

What don't they share with those of us who haven't gotten sick, despite—

( you're imagining this awkward pause, shut up )

—contact?

( e x t e n s i v e contact )

Maybe that's worth looking at: those of us still in good health. Why?

"Whatever it is, it's food. Thank you." Though Myr hasn't much appetite for it; grief has a funny way of making things like eating seem trivial. Not worth the effort.

"I don't suppose it's too much to hope it's contagious?"

Even so. He stifles a noise between a laugh and a sob, reaching out for the bread not to eat it but to tear at it mindlessly to crumbs with his fingers. "I'm afraid," he replies softly, "we'd both have it by now, if it were.

"This isn't--it doesn't have to be their fate. We've not done everything we can. They aren't so far along--that they're beyond help." He says it in defiance of Simon hiding under the covers against the awful noise and light of the outside world, of Cade lost and drifting in memory, of ice-cold hands and tremors and unceasing thirst.

They aren't beyond hope. Knowing that this disease did kill didn't mean it would.

The crust comes off the top of the bread like a scab from a wound as he pries at it.

There's a wooden creak as Nari sits in one of the unoccupied chairs nearby. We'd both have it and their fate he said--she hadn't been so transparent in her concerns, had she? It didn't matter, she didn't have the strength left to care. This now, right after... Myr had known Sina. Myr would--

And suddenly, she was holding Sina's hand desperately, her beloved clansister wracked with agonized coughing as a pitiless and inexorable force that none of them understood tore her slowly away. Then Cade shuddering with fever in a corner, damp with unnatural sweat, lost to the world and gripped in the claws of something terrible that lived inside him. And her; outside, always outside, always watching, her efforts futile. Meaningless.

Myr would know. "It's too much," she says simply.

Yes, and keep mum if he tries to rile you--though I'll say he's less likely to cause trouble than he is to try and leave if he thinks he's got the chance. And--you should know someone's made an attempt on his life before; you'll be his guard in more ways than one, if Scoutmaster Ashara thinks you're up to the task. [He knows better than to make this decision on his own.]

Myr does know--

The long hours in the infirmary listening to Sina's strained breathing, knowing with every gasp and cough a little more of his friend's light went out; how their once-lively conversations had become more and more one-sided, until it was simply him telling her of the doings of the bees and the forest, hoping she could still hear him the while. (He'd had the chance to say everything he'd wanted to before she was gone. Would he have it again?)

He sets the tattered bit of bread back on the plate, dusts crumbs from his fingers, stretches a hand out in the direction of her voice. "It is," he agrees, "after everything else--it's too much. It isn't fair."

Life isn't, he knows, but knowing with his head doesn't keep the cry of his heart out of his voice. It isn't fair, to have their prayers answered only for Simon to die.

[He takes a moment to put his answers to those questions in order, to think; he's let himself be sloppy in the past out of exhaustion--]

Not as deeply as we might--it's hard with them spread out, as it is. The templars are stricken with it like they've missed their lyrium doses, but the symptoms come down much sooner than they ought. [Is there anyone else, she asks, and he thinks of the mages who've reported fatigue and falling spells. But that started before all of this and it's spread to Skyhold...] There's that fellow Fenris as well; something's wrong with his brands.

It's lyrium in the blood that makes a templar, and-- Being a creature of the Fade, [oh, how he dislikes the idea, but voicing it makes it firmer in his head,] that makes a rifter. Lyrium's tied to magic and the Fade, but if it were just that, we mages would have it, too.

Maybe all we'd need to come down with it is a massive dose of lyrium--though I'd not ask anyone to try that on a theory.

[A brief pause. Then:] Lady, has your family a symbol they're known by? [There's a reason for the question, really.]

A mermaid, ( in the thoughtful tone of someone considering the rest of what he's said, still, answering the last first. ) The family crest; she holds a sword in her right hand and a harp in her left. My grandparents selected it, when the title became a Vauquelin one; I have a locket that bears it.

So the illness hasn't spread out of Kirkwall. All the known rifters

( troubling thought there might be unknown rifters, but can't be entirely discounted )

are here, but not all the Templars are. All of the Templars in the Gallows have it, but we haven't any cases of former Templars in Kirkwall not attached to the Inquisition, and none outside of Kirkwall, so there is something that they, specifically, have in common here, something that they were all exposed to, through...obviously the rifter with the blood plague, but they didn't all see him, did they?

[It's a vivid-enough description he can use it; the details of it are surely wrong, but it will do for a locus to store the memories of this conversation beneath. Third floor of the tower, around clockwise from the stairs, inner room--]

That's something I don't know to say as whether they had--but it'd seem safer to assume they didn't. Some of them had to be elsewhere when he was brought in, and he's-- [...He finds himself struggling with his own memory--rare feeling!--to retrieve something he'd noticed about the rifter. It slips his grasp.] --mm, don't remember. But might be worth asking them all if they did see him.

Or maybe they simply had to be close enough when he was brought here--close enough to the places where the Veil's already weak.

So we know: Templars and rifters. And Fenris, whatever the fuck he is. And we know "blood plague", and what it came from.

( A person, a rifter, the name escapes her. )

But for all of our arguing over whether or not it's contagious, we haven't actually established how any of them became ill, have we?

His heartcry is heard, resonating with Nari's own like two plucked strings of the same pitch and she reaches out to take Myr's offered hand with a grip that's almost too tight, repeating his voicing of it: "It isn't fair."

She remembers saying the same, the pain in her throat as the words ripped out of it as she'd wept angrily in Korrin's arms, and suddenly she's wondering whether or not anyone's held Myr. Simon, maybe. She'd seen something strung tenderly between them on one of her visits to the room the two Templar shared, and the resonance grew. She didn't know the mage near well enough for the gesture, but grief--this grief--was a shared bedfellow, and Nari was beginning to understand the fleeting chance of connection, the finite nature of their lives. So she stood, and after a brief hesitation released his hand to instead bend and pull him into a tight embrace.

Then, softer this time, "It isn't fair."

Edited 2018-02-04 14:55 (UTC)

[IC/OOC] Fade Rift Inbox & Contact

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library, post Solas's message

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