Let No Soul Hunger For Justice: And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going

[justice_is_blond]

WHO: Adelaide, Anders, Bethany, Cole, Cyril, Isabela, Kain, Leliana, Maria, Merrill, Nathaniel, Velanna
WHAT: It's the final countdown, the fifth ritual attempt to defeat Justice.
WHEN: Justinian 19th
WHERE: About 30 minutes outside of Skyhold
NOTES: Violence, death of a character. There's no tag order, plotting post is here.

The clearing is worse for wear. There's burn marks, spots where the earth has been torn apart, and some of the ruins are a little more ruined.

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[justice_is_blond]

There's a silence as he looks at his hands and listens, folding his fingers together and watching how his knuckles bend. His voice is quiet when he speaks.

"In those moments I've not had a spark. I've had the very spirit I'm trying to remove from my head. He would not accept stopping. Three times I've wanted desperately to be done, and three times he's kept moving forward." Anders exhales, still looking at his hands. "If the Maker did not turn his back on us, why the Circles? The Rites of Annulment? Tranquility? Or perhaps he's simply turned his back on the mages the way our families do us. Many of us."

He straightens a little and looks outward, past the clearing. Tired is the best way to describe his tone of voice - tired and a little sad. Today might be his last. There's little point in not talking. "Perhaps it is easier to believe he is gone because no one wants to believe something higher hates all of their people. I'd prefer to think he ignores prayer and suffering rather than that he simply ignores mage prayers and suffering."

[fightingale]

"These are not easy questions to answer, nor are they ones I can let rest easily," she admits, after a long pause. She is not immediately certain how to respond to Anders' confession. "I can only think that magic is a gift from the Maker, that mages have continued to be born with their connection to the Fade because it is something sacred in and of itself. The Maker granted us free will, and we have seen that the Chant itself it shaped by man - the Canticle of Shartan chosen for exclusion, each verse committed to ink by living hands, not divine. I think that Circles and all those atrocities are the creations of man seeking to control and to manipulate, if not outright abuse. The Maker cannot control His creation - that is not what he wished for us."

Her gaze drops, unhappy. "But men are not so benevolent as our Maker. There are those who make sport in the suffering of others." Even now, a decade and more beyond it, Harwen Raleigh's voice echoes clear in her head. "They have their fun bending others to their mercy, or lack of it."

It is not a full answer, she has more to say, but she is aware she has said much and that Anders might wish to make a response of his own before she launches into more of her own words. In some ways she truly is changed from the girl of the Fifth Blight, who talked without end.

[justice_is_blond]

Magic is a gift. It's something he does believe, despite how people treat it, despite how his father had treated him.

"And so the Maker sits idly and watches, rather than ignoring. Is that... better? That people are cruel in his name and their own is a better option than intervening and controlling when things go too awry?"

Something made them. Andraste was real. The old gods were real. Are, for two yet. There are greater powers involved that aren't as mortal as others, but Anders doesn't know that there can be any faith in them. He doesn't even know if he wants faith. Except the moment that thought crosses his mind he realizes it's a lie. He does. He'd wants to believe in aliens in something greater that can protect people, because he doesn't think every group will ever be fully treated as equal. The mages, the Dalish, the rifters, they all need to be treated as people, but he doesn't think all three can gain that no matter how hard they try. Power comes from oppression, and so many people want power.

"I don't... I don't want this to feel accusatory. It's not meant to be. You're not the Chantry, or the Templars, or the Chevalier, and I don't expect you to have all the answers. You may have some, though. You've believed in the Maker being near for quite some time, by the sounds of it."

[fightingale]

"I don't believe that. How is He to intervene and to control? How do we know what form His actions would take? Believing that the Maker could ignore so much suffering..." She trails off. In death Your will is written, words of the Chant that haunted her, that shook her to her very depths as she considered them.

Anders words are conciliatory, at least, and Leliana tries to weigh her own with silence. "I wonder if He made our world for us, and endeavours to have faith in us as we do in Him. There have been times, with all that has happened, all the horrors that I have seen and those that I have only heard of... I wondered, for a time after the Conclave, if death is all that faith brings us. If that is the only true certainty that lies before us."

Leliana shakes her head. "It cannot be, though. My heart tells me, as it has since first I came to the Maker, that He and His Bride love us dearly, and that we are all cherished. No matter where we come from, who we are or what we have done, He loves us and treasures us. I wonder if it is we who need to learn to love one another better, rather than expecting him to smite our enemies down."

Her smile, however, is sad. "Fine words for a Spymaster, no?" A mistress of death and shadows and secrets. Until such time as love will save them, all she has are certainties, and how she can secure them, how she can eliminate threats.

[justice_is_blond]

He looks at her smile and then past her, eyes focused on a distant tree, mulling over her words. They work even for if the Maker truly has left them.

"They... are, actually." Now his gaze refocuses, and his expression is thoughtful. "If a spymaster is caught up in hatred and anger, her, their goal and focus will be muddled. If people need to die, far better that it be out of love and a desire to help than the alternative. But too much love, a blind love, would be just as dangerous."

Anders shifts in his seat, heat tilting a little. "There's less of a place for fear when love is allowed to bloom. Less of a place for conflict, distrust, pain. It still happens. It will always still happen. There is no way to entirely eradicate the ills in our world. But love can lessen them. And that doesn't even require belief; it should be universal through human and Dalish alike, Dwarves and qunari who have left the qun."

Another breath. "I don't know if I believe that I'm loved, that we're all loved, by the Maker and Andraste. I can believe that people can love if they give it a chance."

[fightingale]

For a long while Leliana is silent. It is hardly unusual for her; she enjoys silences. Sometimes she enjoys them simply because they are a reprieve from the burdens of speaking and listening to other people speak, sometimes because of what she can learn from them, and other times they are simply another kind of sound. They are a space to absorb. As she steps over an uneven path of hard dirt and insistent, twisting roots and half buried stones, Leliana keeps her gaze ahead and simply keeps watching and listening.

Interesting words. "Any manner of blindness could be considered so," she agrees. The suggestion of a loss of thinking, of reason - it was terrifying, in a way. Blindness even from a lack of information was horrifying to her, the knowledge of how suddenly a situation could escalate, what the absence of understanding could mean. She remembers how suddenly Halamshiral unfolded, and if she were not herself she would shudder.

"Believing in other people is just as important. If the Chantry could be such that people believed in the merit of the people and their goodness and kindness rather than having its will forced upon them, I think it would be much improved. The good it could do-- the Chantry as it is does not, I think, inspire love of each other, nor of the Maker. And it is as you say - if we cannot love one another, how are we to believe the Maker capable of loving us?"

[justice_is_blond]

It's a very good question. Justice doesn't see matters as that complicated, love shouldn't matter, but there's definitely greys to it from where Anders is sitting.

"A Chantry that operated on love would find much of its power lost, and many who have power have no desire to see it gone even if it's perpetuated by injustice." Which is... not entirely him speaking, and also runs a little counter to what she's saying.

"Apologies. Our experiences have not exactly lead us to have a great deal of belief in the goodness of others. I believe in people serving their own self-interests. If the Chantry can change dramatically, point out that the health and success of those around you serves to help you as well, that keeping groups down drags down the whole, then that could change matters entirely. Community, that's what is needed. Love can come from there, because love requires an understanding of others that most simply don't have due to divisions."

It's a lot of words, and while he believes them he also knows how difficult of a path it would be for the Chantry to change that much. For people to change that much. Could he love Templars? So many had hurt him and people he'd cared about, still cares about. Anders exhales. He wants to see a better future, but he don't know that he will.

"It may take a whole other generation under that sort of Chantry before people can more easily love each other. There are a great many deep scars, and a great many personal agendas, and those who gained power through the Circles will still seek ways to return to them. And of course all of this becomes hypothetical as it requires someone who cares to take the position of Divine."