faderift | OPEN: Cloudreach Event

WHO: Anyone at Skyhold
WHAT: Cloudreach showers bring weird shit.
WHEN: Cloudreach 15 onward
WHERE: Skyhold
NOTES: For information about the illness, its effects, and its cure, please make sure to also read the OOC Post.

This high in the mountains, snowstorms are to be expected. But this one is large and lingering, hanging over the valley and the fortress for days. In Skyhold, with its eternal spring, the snow becomes rain before it hits the ground, leaving inhabitants and visitors to wade through puddles and mud in the courtyards. In the valley, snow and ice accumulate under cloud cover—and worse, when the clouds finally thin, a whole winter's accumulation of snow begins to melt in the sunlight.

Within a day, the ground is sodden and mucky enough to give the survivors of the Fallow Mire (or Ferelden in general) unpleasant flashbacks, and those who live in tents are issued additional hastily-constructed wooden pallets to raise their floors above the mud. It is worse outside the fortress: streams and rivers have overflowed their banks, rapids run twice as fast as normal, and flash flooding has made even road travel treacherous.

On Cloudreach 17 a mudslide buries the pass into Skyhold from the west, and on the 19th a sheet of snow loosened from a mountainside collapses into the shadowed passage from the east. An Inquisition supply caravan is caught in the latter, scattering wagons and goods across the hillside and leaving a dozen people and horses in need of rescue and medical care.

Healers may find themselves stretched thin, as in addition to the usual rash of blisters and sniffles that come from days of rain and flooding, an illness begins to sweep through Skyhold's ranks from around the 16th onward. It's marked first by climbing fever, then by flashes at the edges of vision—green light and jagged formations that aren't there, beings of light and shadow gathering around people or clustering in corners—and distant voices, coherent for brief moments if you're quiet and still and not trying too hard to listen.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"But you're not a mage."

He sounds more confused than anything else — confused as to why she thinks she ought to be something other than what she is.

"I'm aware."

She says it dryly, focusing on her hands. "It's different for the Dalish than it is for the humans, for the city elves. We don't stick our mages in Circles. They're our leaders, the ones who are charged with keeping the clan safe and guarding our knowledge. If I had been a mage, I would be one of those leaders."

It's about more than being a leader, though. More than the responsibility.

"Mother looks past me. Sorrel is the same size, but I feel so small. Go with the Hunters, I have nothing to show you."

Whether it's something the Keeper actually said, or a meaning that laid underneath her words, Cole can't say. He only knows Beleth heard it, all the same.

The ache is old, as old as Beleth is. As old as her name is. She feels it like an old wound, dull and constant, but ultimately able to be shoved aside and ignored. It's harder to ignore when she's so close, when she can reach out and touch and hear spirits. And then Cole's words pierce it through, the pain more sudden and sharp than it had ever been. Feelings Beleth didn't talk about--allude to, maybe, allowing people to see the result, but never the cause.

Her eyes are tearing up before she even has a chance to try to stop them. Pathetic. She doesn't say anything to Cole for a few moments, working on trying to keep back the tears with her scarf. Embarrassing and pathetic. No wonder her mother didn't want her, nor her father, nor anyone else, for that matter. The self-loathing that bubbled in the back of her mind, constant but always contained, barely contained, threatened to rise up and spill over. Who got this upset over a few sentences?

She focuses on that. It's just a few words, and yet you're nearly crying. Who does that? Who gets so easily worked up? Sad, pathetic people with sad, pathetic lives.

"My mother is the Keeper," Beleth whispered, voice muffled in the scarf. "She has to train the First and Second. I was neither, so I didn't get trained. She has to focus on what's best for the clan. It's not her fault I'm not a mage."

She was crying. He'd hit upon an old hurt, so close to the surface now, and snapped it open. He hadn't meant to.

"It's not your fault, either." He stood, walking closer to where she sat.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make it worse. Is it not enough to be who you are?" Maybe she wouldn't believe it, but he saw the parts of her that were worth something. For example: "Small, paper-wrapped packages, thoughtful fingers stringing the feathers. Gifts given without knowing the face."

"I should have been better." She murmured it into her scarf, then closes her eyes tight. "I guess--I couldn't really control that I wasn't a mage, but I still could have been better." She takes slow, even breaths, counting them out in her head, until she feels calm enough to straighten up, and pull the scarf down. She's okay, it's okay. She's overreacting.

"It's not enough. Not when I can do better. I know I can, I just need to. Do it. I mean--I just got all twisted up just by you saying something." She takes another slow breath. And right in the middle of the garden, too. Embarrassing. "I'm sorry for getting so upset like that."

Just do better. It was a slippery idea, wriggling from his grasp, unable to be contained by itself. He wondered if she even knew what it meant.

He settled into the wet grass next to her.

"How do you 'do better?'"

Edited 2016-05-12 15:13 (UTC)

His questions is a valid one, one that warrants mulling over, and Beleth does just that. "Probably not bursting into tears in the middle of the gardens just because someone said something that struck a nerve, for one. That would be a good start. Being...calmer. Being less anxious about everything, being smarter. More independent." She lists it out slowly, thoughtfully.

"I know I can achieve it. I mean--I know when I've failed, that means that I can manage to...not fail. Probably." She hesitates, then slips onto the ground next to Cole. "Maybe...be more like you? I think that you're smart. And you're very kind."

"I just want to help." It's as simple as that, for him. And it feels wrong, somehow, for her to think she needs to be more like him. In the next moment, not knowing what else to say, he moves a little closer, using the brim of his hat to shield her from the patter of the rain.

"I wasn't always like me." That's it. That's why. She shouldn't think that he just came into being like this, that he didn't have to learn. "Before I knew what I was... I did bad things. I was wrong, and I didn't know it. Ghost in the shadows, dagger in the dark... but I didn't know I was wrong until someone showed me I could be right. I don't want it to happen again, but it isn't bad that I didn't know before. I just didn't."

The refuge from the rain is welcome, and Beleth leans against Cole's shoulder as she listens to him, humming slightly. Turning to him, she offers a smile. "No one was always like how they are now. I don't think that it changes anything about what I said. You said yourself, that it isn't bad that you didn't know and you did things that were bad before you knew it." She's not sure exactly what it is that he did--Cole is as cryptic as ever. Killing people who were hurting others? Maybe she shouldn't ask.

"What's important is that you stopped after you learned. That's admirable. So my assessment remains the same."

Perhaps it isn't such a bad thing, wanting to be better. He only wishes she didn't feel so sad about it.

"Are you better than you used to be?" If she was something else before, too, then that's something to be proud of.

She stops at that question, and she thinks on it for a time. Eyes turn to her hands as she dwells on that question, thinking about when she first came to Skyhold. Her first instinct is to say no, she's not, she might be even worse. She's lost her path, she loses her sense of identity, allows the outside world to effect her more and more--

--But, she remembers her friends, she remembers the way that Zevran hugs her, that Alistair laughs with her, that Korrin encourages her. She remembers the things that she's seen, that she's learned. All the people that worried about her when she was hurt, all the people who danced with her, and the people who were even now taking care of her, concerned when she wasn't well.

"...I guess I am."

Then there's nothing more he needs to say, for now. He can let her sit with that thought, let it sink in. She's better. Maybe there's more she can do, but she's somewhere beyond where she started. That's something.

So he lets her rest against his shoulder as long as she needs to, looking up at the space where the spirits were floating, listening to the rain spatter against the brim of his hat.

OPEN: Cloudreach Event

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