( closed ) No longer I can justify the bloodshed in his name

[fightingale]

WHO: Leliana & various closed threads (for now - open stuff later)
WHAT: Wicked Grace night goes horribly wrong and Leliana is kind of dying
WHEN: forward dated to the night of the 22nd, post-assassination attempt
WHERE: Leliana's creepy Rookery chamber place
NOTES:
1. Pretentious images in the main post and starters in the comments because I'm a bit ridiculous.

2. Content warning for attempted murder/violence/poison/all that implies.

3. Party style threading is welcome and encouraged, it might make it a bit easier to discuss side matters after the initial discovery.

4. This will probably open up for including other threads and stuff that can be forward dated, but initially just closed.

5. There will be some terrible poetry in here and I'm not even sorry; it is only one in a series that will be left around Skyhold and will be posted later. Belle, Jansen & Libby are beautiful humans for enduring my rambles.

Comments

discovering the body; closed to josie, dorian, zevran & leliana.

[fightingale]

aka. We Just Wanted To Play Wicked Grace
aka. Sorry, Josie
aka. It Was Probably The Nugs

Feel free to post individual starters as a sub-comment to this for that initial scene!

Threading altogether for the initial discovering by Josie and the arrival of the others will work best and Leliana will be able to respond some...what... but for side conversations with each other or one on one interactions with Leliana or whatever else you'd like to do then feel free to have your own starter, yes yes.

The last people seen to descend from the Rookery departed some time ago. Two attendents, moving with a calm sort of slowness down the steps, one of them holding a bundle of papers - a delivery, probably. One hour ago, perhaps two, it is hard to know sometimes when one is mired in work, as so many in the library below the Rookery tend to be.

It is the twenty-second day of Justinian, and Leliana has burns that are making her skin that pull and make her skin feel too tight when she moves or does something a bit brash like stretch or hold her posture upright. The burns are all hidden below chainmail and leathers, and like the rest of her scars and marks that means they don't count. They are invisible, and she is slightly removed from human when she seems to be made of armour rather than flesh.

The scene itself seems very calm. A room, table with a single stack of cards on it (Wicked Grace, a specialised edition with nug theme that probably cost more money than is reasonable), candles burning around the room and on the table, a leaf of parchment on the table that seems rather unremarkable at first glance, and otherwise the room is sparse, practical. One door leads back to the Rookery stairwell, another to Leliana's bedroom, equally sparse. At a first glance, the hosting chamber is unremarkable, until a closer look reveals a chair askew, the carpet pushed off centre, the table and chairs not arranged as meticulously as seems to fit the careful organisation of everything else. And then, then a look beyond the chair and towards her chambers reveals the Left Hand of the Divine on the floor, silver cup on the floor with the remains of something in it that will smell stronger with each passing minute - what had once been scentless has now been left to react too long, acrid and earthy and strangely sweet all together, that makes the air taste of rotting leaves.

Leliana faces the ceiling, eyes flickering just barely, though her body is strangely twisted. Thick grey-black coils of scar tissue wind up her neck and mar her throat, some reaching up past the collar of her self-imposed uniform and starting to wrap under the soft flesh leading to her chin and jaw, and her hand reaches towards the cup grasping it and holding it upright despite the state of the rest of her.

Upon closer inspection, the parchment on the table has a poem written in a careful hand;

A viper,
Cold, slithering,
Hand awash with red.

The Bloodied Hand
Crimson, sanguine
And overreaching

Red of the sacred
Washed away by the tide
The whipping waters of her corruption

Honourable cliffs endangered by her
Only to be saved by a delicate bloom

Grasped for power and fell upon
A vine of asphyxiation
In her Cursed Descent

Cast upon the thorns of the Faithful
The brambles of the True
Shredded upon Virtue.

The Corruption of her grasp will be pried loose
The Roses will Bloom
Kissed by the Radiance of His Will.


More copies of this can be discovered in the library on the way up. In fact, they can be discovered scattered throughout Skyhold, hundreds of copies of the thing, as well as two other poems.

[theproperglove]

Josephine notices that something is wrong the moment she steps foot into the room. Leliana is many things (fierce, frustrating, passionate) but she is certainly not careless.

She tries to tell herself it is nothing to worry about, that what they have motion is wearing them all down and it would be short-sighted to believe that Leliana, for all her strength, could be immune from their stress.

Nevertheless, her fear eats away at her and settles upon her chest in the shape of trepidation.

Josephine sets down the wine and nibbles she'd brought with her on the nearest available flat service, and scans her surroundings for any sign of Leliana's whereabouts.

The door to her chambers is open.

"Leliana?" Josephine calls out, just in case Leliana is in the middle of something, does not wish to be interrupted. Yet even as she's calling, she's walking, towards the room --

-- and that's when she sees the body on the floor.

It takes a moment for her mind to process what she's seeing: the body; Leliana's body; Leliana.

Once it does, however, it's as though everything happens at once. Without thinking, she's knelt down by her friend's side, almost touching but refraining at the last moment, in case whatever has afflicted Leliana can affect her as well. Her mouth is moving without her knowing and it is only once she has said it once, twice, thrice, that she realises she is shrieking Leliana's name.

It's only then that she notices the blinking. The blinking! How had she missed that before? She could weep, almost does, but not before whispering, "Oh, thank the Maker you're alive."

[liberalum]

Dorian has brought wine for the occasion, which isn't exactly an act of generousity, considering its one of many he's outright stolen from the Inquisition's cellar. He also completely expects Josie to complain charmingly at him about it, and he expects to be able to deflect even more charmingly. Ruffling Ruffles' ruffles is, all the time, good sport.

But his mind turns from that, very quickly, when the shrieking starts.

He arrives swiftly, heralded by a heavy-footed dash up the stairs, into the chamber, then towards the other open door. He's wielding Orlesian wine and not his staff, but that doesn't stop a crackle of electricity from dancing across the backs of both his knuckles in preparation to electrocute whatever's making Josephine wail so.

"Josephine?"

Magic crackles, dies. In a rush, Dorian puts the bottle down, a noisy thump of glass to wood.

[ombranera]

Spend a little time with people his own age, get away from the baby, play cards, drink. Things he has needed desperately for some time and only just now managed to wrangle- he'd been looking forward to the evening quite a bit. Dressed for the occasion, took time to sand off the rough edges left by sleeplessness and child rearing to be more of his old self again. It felt right to be thus and he had a spring in his step that'd been absent as he made his way to the room-

Where Dorian is sprinting in, magic in hand-

Where Josephine shrieks Leliana's name-

Zevran follows swift and silent, slipping daggers from his sleeves between one moment and the next, tucked into the shadows until it is plain there is no present danger-

"Touch nothing." Breathing, blinking- life remains but for how long? He smells no blood, sees no true signs of struggle, no wires, no traps, no needle like bolts she might have pulled from her skin to spare herself a poison.

[fightingale]

A moment after Zevran arrives, a woman enters. Her uniform marks her as one of Leliana's scouts - an elf, with blonde hair that might be very long if it were not tied back, and green eyes that are startling in how they interrogate with a look, moreso than anything to do with their colour. Bonheur, Leliana calls her. Whether or not that is her name is immaterial.

"He's right." Very quiet, as she holds her distance - do not disturb the room, do not disturb any evidence. Zevran is a known and trusted ally, despite somewhat recent events. The same can be said of the other two. Her hands did not need to find their way to her knives, it seems, and her grip eases.

"Ombra Nera," she starts, "I will notify the Advisors and Knight-Captain Hill, and leave this room in your hands." Although her gaze lingers on the Ambassador, and her gaze flickers to Dorian. "Perhaps she needs assistance."

Leliana, for her part, remains still. Her eyes are unfocused, and her hand squeezes around the cup in hand, willing them to look to it, willing herself to be able to speak, to help.

[theproperglove]

Josephine does not need telling twice, and gives herself enough space to shuffle several spaces backwards as though to lower her likelihood of disturbing the evidence. All the while, she doesn't take her eyes off Leliana's face.

Quietly, she speaks without turning her head. "Is there anything you can do for her, Dorian?"