"Events easily forgotten when so many have been lost, and when such words are all too easily twisted." There are lots of mages in Skyhold, but she cannot imagine that it holds nearly as many mages as there once were. How ill-equipped so many of them must be to survive, and she allows the mask to crack, to let the sorrow show when she has to force her jaw to clench, her bottom lip not to wobble when it wishes to. Her eyes are full of sympathy when she looks to Adelaide though, a pain that isn't hers but Araceli has only ever known freedom and she wants that for them, and though she's a rifter, she has tools they do not simply by not being a mage.
So she listens. Readies herself for what she will hear the way she does when she looks over the edge of a building or the mast of a ship, letting herself fall without bracing. She will accept what comes as her unmarked hand (not because she is afraid to reach out but she wants a hand that doesn't mark them as different, wants a hand that is rough from handling her rapiers and lockpicks and from climbing, that always carries the scent of her hair oils and Korrin's horn balm) reaches for Adelaide's if she wants it. It is never a weakness to reach out and to offer to help another with a burden.
They must have lost many along the way. Those who wished to take their chances. Others who were not strong enough after a life cooped up, or too afraid to keep going, too traumatised perhaps; how many of them now have scars no one can see at all, when people open their mouths to say whatever ignorant thought flies into their head, without thinking that they too are people, that they have suffered. She checks her anger, feels it simmer low in her belly where it will boil over later into angry cursing and swearing, things kicked and thrown, the tears she will dissolve into when she is alone but for Korrin and Lux.
"Her voice rings out and blood follows." Araceli's voice is dangerously soft, choked nearly - by rage or grief, even she can't be sure which has a tighter grip on her at present. "You had all voted, the majority - slim, but still a majority won, and then rally beneath her banner. To see more blood after all that?"
Adelaide did not use her voice. She notes that. Yes, she was healing but well, that isn't something Araceli will forget, it is something she will tuck away to keep safe when she has need of it later because she mentions a code of ethics that she will have to come to but Vivienne is what matters, Vivienne and Loyalists and how much blood must there be, how much blood do they all need. She shakes her head, swallowing the bile scorching her throat, flexing the sudden ache in her fingers.
"Thank you for telling me that, I could not have been easy to relive such a day but...well, if Vivienne did then her recounting would have been very different, and no one else sitting upon the Council would have been present for it. Her voice could have rung out to stop more bloodshed too; think what it might have meant then - we Loyalists will not fight our fellows, we will seek another way. Or to have calmed them, to have risen above it all. She has shown her hand." Perhaps she already had if she had a reputation for being merciless, and from Araceli's readings about the Orlesian court, for a mage to have risen so very high she must certainly have. "Perhaps she hoped that her Loyalists would be fervent enough to be victorious and that she would have fewer opposing voices left at the end of it."
Leandra would despise her. Leandra would have all the guard destroy every single thing she held dear for all the world to see and leave her with nothing as they calmly walked away. Araceli cannot do that (not yet, perhaps not ever) and her blood boils at the thought--
"There would have been so many children, so many not even my age, and I am not yet one-and-twenty," a whisper, one that she can't help, staring at Adelaide for a long moment before she shakes her head again - what else can you say in the face of what she has been told?
no subject
So she listens. Readies herself for what she will hear the way she does when she looks over the edge of a building or the mast of a ship, letting herself fall without bracing. She will accept what comes as her unmarked hand (not because she is afraid to reach out but she wants a hand that doesn't mark them as different, wants a hand that is rough from handling her rapiers and lockpicks and from climbing, that always carries the scent of her hair oils and Korrin's horn balm) reaches for Adelaide's if she wants it. It is never a weakness to reach out and to offer to help another with a burden.
They must have lost many along the way. Those who wished to take their chances. Others who were not strong enough after a life cooped up, or too afraid to keep going, too traumatised perhaps; how many of them now have scars no one can see at all, when people open their mouths to say whatever ignorant thought flies into their head, without thinking that they too are people, that they have suffered. She checks her anger, feels it simmer low in her belly where it will boil over later into angry cursing and swearing, things kicked and thrown, the tears she will dissolve into when she is alone but for Korrin and Lux.
"Her voice rings out and blood follows." Araceli's voice is dangerously soft, choked nearly - by rage or grief, even she can't be sure which has a tighter grip on her at present. "You had all voted, the majority - slim, but still a majority won, and then rally beneath her banner. To see more blood after all that?"
Adelaide did not use her voice. She notes that. Yes, she was healing but well, that isn't something Araceli will forget, it is something she will tuck away to keep safe when she has need of it later because she mentions a code of ethics that she will have to come to but Vivienne is what matters, Vivienne and Loyalists and how much blood must there be, how much blood do they all need. She shakes her head, swallowing the bile scorching her throat, flexing the sudden ache in her fingers.
"Thank you for telling me that, I could not have been easy to relive such a day but...well, if Vivienne did then her recounting would have been very different, and no one else sitting upon the Council would have been present for it. Her voice could have rung out to stop more bloodshed too; think what it might have meant then - we Loyalists will not fight our fellows, we will seek another way. Or to have calmed them, to have risen above it all. She has shown her hand." Perhaps she already had if she had a reputation for being merciless, and from Araceli's readings about the Orlesian court, for a mage to have risen so very high she must certainly have. "Perhaps she hoped that her Loyalists would be fervent enough to be victorious and that she would have fewer opposing voices left at the end of it."
Leandra would despise her. Leandra would have all the guard destroy every single thing she held dear for all the world to see and leave her with nothing as they calmly walked away. Araceli cannot do that (not yet, perhaps not ever) and her blood boils at the thought--
"There would have been so many children, so many not even my age, and I am not yet one-and-twenty," a whisper, one that she can't help, staring at Adelaide for a long moment before she shakes her head again - what else can you say in the face of what she has been told?