open; Give me a field, give me a big sky

[foxsays]

WHO: Araceli, Morrigan, Asher and you
WHAT: Catch-all for Bloomingtide
WHEN: Bloomingtide (post-5th Bloomingtide for Araceli)
WHERE: Skyhold
NOTES: A proper catch-up for all three characters below with specific starters and some open headers, if you'd like something specific feel free to hit me up! If you'd like a backdated thing for Araceli or Morrigan, let me know and I'll sort that too, I know I've been gone for a fair bit sorry!
Araceli's threads will all be post 5th Bloomingtide when she gets back from her mission in Antiva!
For some ooc details on Morrigan things, please see here, a rookery post will go up shortly for research helpers!
Warnings for talk of violence, blood and language in Asher's threads.

Comments

[arcaneadvisor]

"You may need to explain it slowly, and carefully, and with small words. He is not the sharpest of blades in the armoury though since I last knew him I am glad to say he has improved. Though I dread to think how he might have become more dull." It's hard work to suppress the shudder of dread she feels but Alistair? Worse than he was? The second glorious coming of Cailan? Too dreadful to imagine. "Still, he is trying, more than some of them, of all the Wardens he is perhaps the least objectional and useless, though that hardly says much."

(Well he's trying very hard with her and Kieran so she's grudgingly fond.)

"The same reason she is here in Skyhold: to rise ever higher. Within one Circle one can rise to the rank of First Enchanter and that is all, but there has always been a position within the Imperial Court for a mage to entertain. Vivienne has spent her life playing the Game, including saddling herself with the Duke de Ghislain, likely to advance her own position within it. Some people will do anything to advance themselves, even to the point that they are no longer themselves, I fortunately do not count myself among them."

Her smirk has an edge of triumph, wickedly sharp. She knows exactly what she did when she came to the court, when she was unveiled at Celene's side, when she thumbed her nose at their culture, their tradition, at every little thing Vivienne used to her advantage to get to where she was.

"Court is a dreadful place, I was lucky to get just as much out of the bargain. More than she ever did, I can guarantee that."

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle's experience of the Wardens to comment upon is - limited. Anders had been her healer when she first arrived, for all her ignorance as to precisely who he is, and Alistair had bargained for her silence; she hasn't gone out of her way to better acquaint herself. In theory, the Wardens are...necessary? And all of that. In practise, they're secretive and they're bad news and there's so much bad news, isn't there? Does she really have to go digging for more?

Probably. Sooner or later. She never cares for not knowing things. But there are other pressing concerns, and they can wait.

"To be still your own creature in the imperial court is no small feat," she observes, not taking any great pains to hide the hint of admiration in her voice. "Quite a victory, I think. Maker knows," with a more rueful sigh, "I've never got as much out of that life as my mother wished." Admitting a vulnerability or preempting one? Perception is ever-shifting, and Gwenaëlle shifts with it; she'd rather Morrigan didn't think her a fool who can't see her own weaknesses, even if there are times pretending to be ignorant of them lets her get away with more than she otherwise might.

[arcaneadvisor]

Sometimes it's easy to forget that to so many, the Fifth Blight is only a story, a thing they read about. A Blight that didn't even seem like a Blight because it was defeated so quickly, so easily, with so little cost compared to all the rest; instead of making it a greater tale they simply shrug it off, and that it was Ferelden doesn't help. There's not Varric Tethras and his ridiculous stories for them like there was for that Champion of Kirkwall, a book people have tried to make her read but she has lived a tale, and anyway, she knows how they should be told properly, how to set the mood, the tone.

She saw Ostagar, and she saw two Wardens as young men painfully alone and snatched from death by her mother, them and a dog and a sullen ugly silence. What to make of it that so many return but he does not…

"I cared little for what my mother wished but my mother is an old bat who talks too much, though I suppose since my arrival in court and in Skyhold there have been folk dusting off the old legends, of Flemeth and her many daughters." At least now she can say it more casually to those who weren't there, with a smirk and roll of the eye, the look that says there is no love lost and there is not because there was none to begin with. "Were you close to your mother?" Her voice softens when she asks it, and her smile is more fond; the other questions can wait, along with the advice that she might better utilise than another she has given it to, a question she asked Cousland ten years ago but it feels a little closer to her heart now that she understands it from the other side. "Mothers do their best to prepare their child for the world they must enter, and one false step in Orlais might send anyone into the path of a bard."

[elegiaque]

Every answer she could give that question feels like a lie. Were they close? Past tense, obviously, because Annegret Vauquelin is some years dead now for all the long shadow she still casts over her husband and daughter. Or present tense, because Guenievre still lives, lives where her elder daughters don't, grieves them in her quiet and her still hands. The elegant way she holds herself, patient as a slowly eroding rock, a statue to something Gwenaëlle will never understand.

The most honest answer, however you slice it, is, "No," after a pause, taking a purely coincidentally timed drink of wine. "But I admired her very much. She did her best for me, I know."

Annegret teaching her, guiding her, disciplining her; Guenievre's hands on the soft rounded tips of her ears when she was too young to remember more than how it felt and the warm smell of cooked apples, pinching, imagining.

[arcaneadvisor]

"You will forgive my curiosity, it was a trait of mine that my own mother did not care for." At least she can speak of it with just the right touch of derision, as if Flemeth had the capacity to care for anything beyond a body and talents she had wanted to take for her own at the first opportunity. "Though I am given to understanding that there are rules regarding raising children in Orlais though I never bothered to wrap my head around it, all the fuss over not setting fire to this chevalier, and not encasing this baroness in ice. A wonder anyone gets through the day."

Enough to maybe break the tension, if there's any, because mothers are after all such tricky things.

"It shows, not everyone would have been able to settle themselves so quickly when so much in their lives changed in such short order. You write confidently, and compared to some I would rather hear the truth of things as far as they can be told, unlike some who prefer preposterous fiction and revel in it. Tales should be told correctly. By those who have the ability to dream."

Meaning literally everyone that isn't a dwarf or a qunari because Sten's stories were just...bleak.

[elegiaque]

Mothers are very tricky things, especially when you've - as Gwenaëlle does - an overabundance of them, confusing the issue and teaching you contradictory things that can't be lived with all at once. So she doesn't, mostly. She's supposed to be this one thing and so that's what she is, and it's -

Fine. It's fine, it's always fine, she's fine. Everything is just as it should be, and she laughs, quick and genuine, at Morrigan's well-timed jest. Looks at her wine, and thinks, I don't miss her until it feels so true that it doesn't matter she doesn't tell herself which of them she means.

"It's easier to tell a tale when it's ended," she observes, leaning back in her seat - it's hard to slouch in a corset and she doesn't, really, but she makes herself a bit more comfortable. "But I have an aversion to doing things the easy way, I've been told, and I...it's going to matter, one day, that someone spoke."

It matters now.