faderift | OPEN LOG: Establishing a Base in Kirkwall

OPEN LOG: Establishing a Base in Kirkwall

WHO: Many People
WHAT: Cleaning up Kirkwall
WHEN: Cloudreach 1-21
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: This log post is for characters who go early to Kirkwall to assist in preparing it for the rest of those assigned there. We strongly encourage IC discussion of things left to character discretion—someone should definitely do a crystal post to discuss what to do with the personal belongings left behind in the Gallows or what new form the statues should take!

Kirkwall once lived on the edge of the Tevinter Imperium and was home to nearly a million slaves. Stolen from elven lands or shipped from across the sea, all slaves fed the Imperium's unquenchable thirst for expansion. They worked in massive quarries and sweltering foundries that produced stone and steel for the Empire.

The city's complicated past is not easy to forget, history having earmarked many corners of the stone city. A ship approaching the harbor spots the city's namesake: an imposing black wall. It is visible for miles, and carved into the cliff side are a pantheon of vile guardians representing the Old Gods. Over the years, the Chantry has effaced many of these profane sentinels, but it will take many more years to erase them all.

Also carved into the cliff is a channel that permits ships into the city's interior. Flanking the channel are two massive bronze statues—the Twins of Kirkwall. The statues have a practical use. Kirkwall sits next to the narrowest point of the Waking Sea, and a massive chain net can be erected between the statues and the lighthouse, closing off the only narrow navigable lane. This stranglehold on sea traffic is jealously guarded by the ever-changing rulers of the city as the net trolls taxes, tolls, and extortions in from the sea.

—From In Pursuit of Knowledge: The Travels of a Chantry Scholar, by Brother Genitivi

Establishing a presence in Kirkwall is a delicate matter. First, there's Provisional Viscount Bran Cavin—a man so used to batting back friendly offers of entirely harmless occupation of the battered city-state that his first three responses to the Inquisition's leadership appeared to be slightly personalized form letters. Proving that the Inquisition is here to work and not to conquer will be a process. The first step in that process is the second reason the move is delicate: the only building the Provisional Viscount is willing to part with is the Gallows, left quarantined and unoccupied since Knight-Commander Meredith Stannard's famous crystallization into red lyrium in the courtyard. The Gallows have since overgrown with red lyrium. If anyone is going to live and work there, there's a lot of work to do.

↠ Cloudreach 1-3: The Journey There
↠ Cloudreach 3-4: Arrival
↠ Cloudreach 4-14: Haunted
↠ Cloudreach 14-21: Spring Cleaning

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Growing up in Kirkwall means you grow up knowing that you live in a place that's extra. Yngvi's used to shrugging off plenty that would have some of the rest of the Boneflayers staring at him and Gunnar on long marches to wherever they were going, over pints in a tavern or round a campfire. Clomping along looking for some of the crew he'd been 'asked' (translation: told to round up and put to work thanks to that good old dwarven lyrium resistance) to get sorted, he doesn't immediately react to a shout.

Look, if you did that in Kirkwall you'd strain something. Give yourself a nervous twitch. So he listens for a while and taps his fingers along the wall as some of his nugs snuffle around because nugs literally don't give a shit, just watch, they'll crawl all over that red lyrium without batting their beady black soulless eyes.

The shouts don't stop and he knows that voice enough to make his way there even if he still hangs back a little way away to conduct some serious pocket inventory. "Serah? Some funny business going on in there?" He calls out in his most serious Kirkwall tones.

Christine considers herself a calm, collected individual. She has to be so she can deal with fresh injuries on the spot while the patient is panicking, in pain, or both. But she just can't stay calm right now. Not while alone, trapped behind a door in a place where the Veil is thin and mages were treated worst than cattle. She lets out a sob, staff raised to fire a spell, but when she hears a voice, she rushes to the door.

"Yngvi? Please, can you unlock the door from that side? I am trapped!" Her voice is far from the way it normally sounds around him. She's scared, as if the ghost of Meredith will rise up behind her at any moment.

"How d'you get yourself trapped?" Yngvi's giving her the benefit of the doubt that she did it herself because he doesn't think people would go trapping her. She's too nice. And he wasn't about. He was busy shouting at dwarves in a way that others wouldn't understand was actually nuanced discussion but looked like a rammy. Muttering under his breath he starts searching his pockets, turfing a nug out in the process to land with a disgruntled squeak. "You only have yourself to blame Rump Roast, told you that you're making your own way in the world now."

Is that what parenting is like? No, no it's not, the ratio is off there are more parents to children in the Carta.

Rifling through his pockets, Yngvi stops to peer at the door in consideration given where they are. Dwarven resistance is a thing that he doesn't think about much because people start talking about dwarves to him and wow he doesn't care but he'll ask. "Is the door doing magic stuff before I go touching it up?"

In response to that, Christine lashes out and kicks the door. She has boots on, so she can do that without breaking a toe. But she's frustrated at the spirits for doing this to her and it can't be hidden away right now. This is a side of herself that she never wanted to show. She puts others above herself because they need someone to take care of them, and she's the best one to do it. But now she's stuck here at the mercy of spirits.

"Spirits haunt this place! They closed the door and locked it." And Christine is someone who understands spirits better now. These ones have been influenced by all the terrible things that happened here, so she can only partially blame them. The rest falls on the Templars that were here.

It takes effort not to just yell at him to get on with it. Her hands ball up into fists and she sucks in a breath. "No, I do not think. They merely locked it." Because of course the doors have locks on the outside so the Templars could lock in the mages. Of course.

"Can you not act like my great aunt Bertha after six gins?" Yngvi hollers at the door and thus at Christine because this is going to go easier if he's not distracted in the quest for his lockpicks. She has seen the state of his fingers previously, she must know or have the impression that he is a dwarf in possession of numerous sharp and pointy things in the pockets region that aren't nug teeth thinking that fingers are a thing to be nibbled on.

A second or two of jingling and cursing later and he has the lockpicks. "Right, good, something at least but it still feels weirder than it did before. Not that you'd know. You weren't here." Now they're all here or going to be. He's here. But he's not going to lose bits of himself as he approaches the lock and starts working away at it, slow and gentle. You can never tell here if anyone left a trap in the door just to be safe and it's Yngvi's hands and the moneymaker on the line right now.

"What were you doing that you didn't notice a spirit coming up behind you?" He asks, all the better to keep her distracted because she does sound pretty upset for something Yngvi would do to a person (has done to a person but not recently) and it just highlights the uselessness of all that mage 'education' if they can't get themselves out a room without a big hullabaloo.

Christine narrows her eyes at the door, betting he doesn't even have a great aunt Bertha. Or he only does when it's convenient to a story. She at least knows that much about him, but he's so crafty that she falls for his stories anyway.

"There is too much here," she says, crossing her arms over her chest and warily looking about the room. "The Veil is thin, red lyrium is everywhere, and the city is still recovering from the explosion." She doesn't know where Anders is now, but she's sure the Wardens will drag him along as if he's such a precious commodity instead of a mass murderer. Typical, really. That said, there are a few among the Wardens she likes well enough. She will simply never understand why they choose not to punish their own for his heinous crime. She will never understand those who choose to be friends with such a selfish man, who set his desire to be a martyr over the lives of the mages in this Circle. The thought makes her shudder. He wanted them to be lambs going to the slaughter so he could rile up mages elsewhere. With one action, he undid all the hard work Fiona and her allies had been doing to allow mages to govern themselves. And the spirits here watched those mages pay the price for Anders's idiocy. The spirits are probably mimicking the events they witnessed at that time. They see a mage in a room, so they lock her in.

"Setting down a cleansing rune," she replies, since talking means she's distracted from the thoughts in her head of what might happen next if she's left in this room. "Though it is not as if spirits have footsteps anyway."

You don't know his life!

"Everyone's an infant about lyrium until someone's browbeating a dwarf because that dwarf has to know other dwarves that'll know how to deal with lyrium. Because why would the dwarf be offended, he's just a dwarf, and why would dwarves not want to deal with the red stuff that turns you into a screaming red spike, they're just dwarves, s'all they're good for, throw them at everything we don't want to deal with, who cares." And breathe. Breathe, Yngvi, breathe. It's not like he could say it'd be different if elves had some sort of lyrium resistance but maybe they'd pause for slightly longer because humans have this whole weird thing with elves. And mages. He doesn't know. All this is mumbled into the door and isn't exactly intelligible because Yngvi's face is partly mashed up against it since he's trusting Christine on the door front. He's just salty.

Extra salty. And he wants Asher but that's not exactly news anyway.

Louder then, for Christine's benefit as he fiddles with the lock properly, he ploughs onward. "Kirkwall had lots of explosions. Lots more after that bloody upjumped doglord decided to show up here and didn't go back to where they came from after Ferelden got sorted. I know when all that happened but Kirkwall has explosions. So. You need to make your peace with that bit. And you get used to a lot of stuff like the uncle that drinks too much and says things you'd find awful at a dinner table, the sort of awful where you'd try to slide under the table to escape? 'In my day we rode the casteless like brontos through the streets' that sort of shite." Wait, that's too specific, she won't get that properly, she's an Orlesian mage would she even know a casteless properly? "Or that but about elves. Carrying them through the high quarter. In front of everyone. Including the servants. And the merchants. Loudly. Swilling port down himself. Dripping off his moustache."

Lapsing into silence for a long time because these locks have seen some fiddling in their time either from mages who made an attempt on the other side or spirits doing something or templars jamming keys in during fits of temper or spell damage or everything that went down, it's taking a bit but he makes a noise of success when the lock finally starts to give. "Yeah that's right you little shit, one of us probably made you. Anyway, thought you were all spirit-y like Aura? Spirit friend you fart out in need? You need to go file a complaint with the authorities there, I'll send on the paperwork, we've got those forms my friend."

Because you never tell the truth about your life, Yngvi!

On the other side, Christine moves to lean aside the wall beside the door, arms still crossed as if she has a chill. She can catch Yngvi saying the word dwarf numerous times, but the rest of what he's saying is muttered so fast she takes it she isn't meant to hear and he is talking to himself. Which doesn't surprise her in the least. Surely he talks to himself when alone, because his mouth never seems to stop when he's out amongst people.

She smiles faintly at his story, and whether it's true or not, she can commiserate with him there. "My uncle is awful enough. I am not allowed in his house." Because she is a dreaded mage and no one in his town can know he's related to such a terrifying thing.

When it sounds like he's making progress, her body shifts towards the door a bit more, her heart pounding in excitement at her imminent release. "Do you really wish to know? She is overwhelmed with all the spirits here, and all they have witnessed. It is like... trying to walk through thick mud without getting sucked further down. She needs time to sort through it all, and properly closing the Veil here will help, I think. Some of those spirits may move on, or the weaker ones will fade away. And then things will be clearer for her."

It's there, in places, betwee the lines. You just need to pay attention to find it.

"I wasn't allowed in m'lady's house either." Just saying, it's only an obstacle if you allow it to be an obstacle. Christine's a free woman now and well, she's got more sway than he does for going off and doing things if she wanted to, less to lose in a way as well. Yngvi might not have far too fall but the falling would hurt. He imagines an awful lot of knives would be involved in it.

Listening to Christine talk is probably what Asher would do and that's something Yngvi asks himself more than most would be comfortable with because he does know the general consensus regarding him. "Can't she talk to them though?" The lock trembles, his shoulder pops loudly when he shifts to get the angle right because the doors were built with other people in mind when it came to this sort of thing. "Is the Veil ever going to close a--"

Oh hey, hi Christine let him just fall arse over tit into this room but please answer his questions because he would like to know there's possibly something riding on this in Carta land thanks.

Ah, but Yngvi is tiny and master of the combat roll. He can just roll on out of a house he isn't welcome in. Christine isn't near as wily.

"I think she can, but there are so many and they are like talking to children until they are able to understand--" Oh, hello Yngvi, how are you? Christine is fine. No longer on the verge of a panic attack now, so that's a plus. She moves forward and holds out a hand to help him up. Yes, she knows there's a fifty percent chance his hand is filthy, or bloody, or has a nug attached by its teeth. She will be washing thoroughly later.

"Thank you, Yngvi."

Excuse you, those combat rolls belong to Gwenaëlle Vauquelin above all others, they aren't to be used lightly.

"Children understand more than you think." At least in Kirkwall they do. Or the bits of Kirkwall Yngvi grew up in. He can't really say when it comes to Christine specifically when he doesn't know her so well but there are people that lead comfortable lives and people who lead wealthy lives and their children don't need to know or understand a great many things that Yngvi knew before he could even read or write.

Also that hand has been clearing corpses, he gets corpse duty a lot since he arrived in Kirkwall with a keg he generously offered to repurpose as a wagon.

"Feeling better now with the sweet air of freedom filling your lungs?" He means it sincerely because for her, having that door open is a sort of freedom but...it's Kirkwall. It's not really freedom, is it?

Sadly, Christine doesn't know much about children, but she hopes to someday. She wants her own, but the world is such a mess right now. It would be foolish for anyone -- especially a mage -- to bring a child into this war, for however long it lasts. She doesn't know if the Chantry's rules still apply and mages' children are taken away if they're found out.

"Much better." Though she does move out fully into the hallway, just in case.

"What do they have you doing for clean up today?"

"Reckon we need to add 'fixing the doors' to the list," Yngvi leans past Christine as he speaks to retrieve his lockpicks, removing some chalk from his pocket to mark the door. Not the simple X of a spot cleared out but an odd little symbol that makes sense to a passing dwarf who should see it done. "Get folk some keys. Need my beauty sleep, can't get summoned from my bed at odd hours because someone needs a dwarf to be fiddling with the locks, imagine what I'd look like?"

The joke's funny because when does Yngvi sleep?

"More bodies. I keep telling them that it's a feature, they keep saying 'clear them out' but a lot of them are a lot older than that whole mess. Don't know what we'll be stirring up poking around places here that haven't been had a good poke in decades." That's not meant to sound dirty. Or is it?

Christine merely gives Yngvi a look, with one brow arched because she doubts he goes to bed with rag curlers in his hair.

"Bodies," she repeats quietly, a shudder running through her. And older than the rebellion? Were they mages and Tranquil the Templars had killed and then stuffed away to be forgotten?

"Where are you taking the bodies? Is there a funeral pyre?"

It's the tears of deshyrs who know that the surface dwarves are infinitely more successful than they'll ever be but who can never admit it, great for the skin, keeps his hair the envy of Orlesian debutantes across the empire. Expensive stuff but the Carta finds a way. Tricky to apply it, tends to try running screaming at the mere suggestion of a surfacer who doesn't miss or care for Orzammar or the Stone.

"Kirkwall's old bones. All of Kirkwall's bones. I reckon it's why it looks like it does, I mean, you start in one bit and the bottom and when it got too full of bodies and the smell was bad they built over it and then that bit went the same way then they did that again. Maybe they'll have a High-Hightown?" Just his working theory but he's been so many places through the tunnels and passages that make up the labyrinth that is the city state that he's used to it. It's only what they might have on them that's the surprise.

Looking up at Christine, he tips his head to the side. Considers the question. The possibilities. "I'm taking them away, I was going to make a tasteful memorial. What is it with the burning, how do you all know they want to be burned anyway? Most of this place was on fire, s'what I've been told by the family."

Somehow, despite the danger in the world right now, the past has a way of always surpassing the present for awfulness. Wars were bloodier, massacres a daily occurrence, and no one seemed to bat an eye at all the death surrounding them. Does that make this a more civilized age, or simply a time where people have grown too soft towards the harsh realities of life and death? Christine is certainly soft-hearted in this regard. Practicality says things of this nature are inevitable, but her heart wishes it wasn't so. All those bones. She hopes someone valued each person; loved each person. Because there end suggests someone didn't value them very much at all.

"I was merely guessing, but the tradition is not just Andrastian. It is a way to ensure there is nothing left for spirits to possess." Though honestly, she's not sure if spirits can possess bones. Maybe they can fling the bones around, but it's not like a corpse that can swing a sword, is it? "There are spirits enough here as it is, however, and they are making a great deal of disturbances without needing those old bones."

Her eyes take in the stone walls as she moves towards the outside. She needs to get some air. "Fires spread easily in cities with tightly packed housing."

There isn't time to value that many people, not where Yngvi comes from. People are an investment and they're always piss poor ones for the first years until they can start to do a few things. Mages have never seemed like the best bet for the Chantry, maybe that's why Kirkwall had so many Tranquil when folk always wanted enchanting done and you don't pay Tranquil. (Ticks a lot of folk off, delicate balance to keep people sweet with lyrium and all the rest.)

"Christine, it's Kirkwall. You'll get used to everything. There was blood magic everywhere here, no one bats an eye about that sort of thing. Reckon it was why Asher came here because he thought it'd go all Avvar eventually. The spirits would relax, stretch out, figure out what they were about and things'd be grand y'know?" By the way he is literally quoting drunk young Asher back when Yngvi first met him when Yngvi was even smaller and shrimpier. "You leave those old bones alone, go anywhere in the bits of the city people think you're not meant to see and you'll stop seeing them."

Or Yngvi did. But he grew up backwards to most, didn't get to see up top until he was grown, as he says.

"Fires almost every day in Kirkwall." Yngvi's voice is muffled while he shrugs out of his coat, fanning himself with the untucked bottom half of his shirt. "Hightown's spread out but more and more people came in. Lots more buildings than I remember now, must've rebuilt and crammed more in after me and Gunnar took off with Asher as lads."

Yngvi, that is unfair. Don't bring up Asher because she is already in a delicate enough mental state and now she's going to be even worse off remembering her friend that should be here so she can hear these words from his own lips.

"We are not very welcome in the city as a whole yet," she says. Yes, they're allowed to shop and take in the, err, sights, but nothing more. And even when the Viscount loosens that restriction, she doesn't know where she would even go. This place makes Redcliffe feel homey.

"I am sure the nobles complained about having less space." Not that Marcher nobles are as cutthroat as her own people in that class. They can't be; because no one plays the Game like those who invented it. Her gaze shifts to the dwarf and an eyebrow lifts in question. "You are overheated? Are you feeling unwell?" Leave it to the healer to immediately think someone might be sick.

Asher literally lived here. They all did. There's an awful lot of pain here for Yngvi but is he getting upset about it? (Yes. Yes he is he just does upset differently, less tears and more the facade stretched thin as he snaps and realises the jokes are too close to the bone.)

"Oh don't be boring and tell me you care about all that bollocks. You, me, a night on the lash. I'm from here. What, they going to say I can't show a friend the places I lived and worked near all my life because I'm the poor bastard that decided to freeze his balls off in Skyhold so others wouldn't have to?" Come at him Inquisition and/or Kirkwall, he'll take on all comers, he's ready to go, cutting his promos, he'll take you all on.

In the midst of blowing a long raspberry because nobles, wow he does not care, he only registers her words when he's attractively scratching his chest. (Please note the tattoo right on the tit of 'I am the war', why yes he likes the poetry of certain Orlesian poets, he is a dwarf of great culture.) "Relax would? Been working on all sorts all day, 'm sweaty. Think I got cobwebs on my nips, thought that only happened to dowagers. They get haunted after a certain age."

"Would a night spent out with you end with the two of us in a jail cell?" she asks dryly, because there's no way that seeing the sights with him wouldn't end with them in a great deal of trouble over something Yngvi said or did.

She wonders if Yngvi could be considered attractive to anyone. Maybe the blind. And deaf. Though Yngvi would probably find some way to piss those people off too. Look, Christine may have banged Asher, but at least he'd bathed before she'd touch him. And he'd liked her bossing him around. Yngvi is like a miniature, dirtier Asher that Christine has no desire to know what he's like in bed.

"Then the fresh air will do us both some good," she replies, leading him towards the main doors of the tower that lead outside. She's just going to ignore the dowager comment, because that's a terrible mental image.

"You know that I could get you arrested right now for slander." He keeps the heat he might put in his voice, which would still be a joke because it's him, out because y'know, just got her out of a locked room and she was a right state. "Why d'you assume that, I'm a legitimate businessman and it's the merchant's guild or Templars getting angry about a deal or whinging mages who don't like what was in the letters who landed me in there."

(Lies. Lies lies lies. With some truth. Which is why he can say it easy as you please like he always does when he knows different ways in and out of her for all sorts of reasons.)

Also he has absolutely had people, don't be rude, he is a handsome boy with a heart of gold under all that dirt but generally? More important concerns win the day for him. As they should for everyone.

"Just let me-" Scooting off, he returns with a nug stuffed under one arm, blinking at Christine from this sudden new view of the world. "Don't trust half the folk here with my nugs, thinking they're dinner. Isn't that right Nug Wellington? Right, away we go."

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OPEN LOG: Establishing a Base in Kirkwall

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