CLOSED: a prayer that will be answered

[byblow]

WHO: Adelaide, Alistair, Anders, Hercules, Kaisa, Lena, Sabine, Teren, Velanna
WHAT: Some safety precautions
WHEN: Solace 1-7
WHERE: The Deep Roads beneath the Western Approach
NOTES: OOC post.

Comments

insomnia.

[byblow]

Sleep is for the weak. Alistair is weak. (Or he has nearly a year of tossing and turning and nightmares to make up for. Or both.) But down here he manages to sleep less like a rock than he has been on the surface, periodically opening his eyes to scan the bedrolls and make sure everyone is present and accounted for, the watch is still being kept, the fire isn't at risk of burning out. And when he wakes up feeling vaguely alert, he heaves himself up and stumbles to sit next to Adelaide, bag in hand.

However mild and respectful his dislike, it is dislike. He isn't here for a friendly chat. But he does start with, "Are you all right?"

[fleurdesel]

"I'm miles underground exposed to the most terrifying illness known to Thedas in the company of men I do not rightly trust on a good day while hoping to find what is, apparently an old god and prevent or at least delay it's waking." While she'd managed to be mostly civil during the first few days- it's slid quickly into being quiet and weary and irate. She has little enough time to herself down here- and that is for the better, being alone means being vulnerable, but it does grate. "And my leg is broken. 'All right' is not precisely the word I would use, Stable boy."

[byblow]

"I never took you for a whiner, Lady LeBlanc."

He knows whiners--he is a whiner--and she is not actually a whiner. Those are all very legitimate complaints, which he might betray, somewhat, by leaning forward to squint at her leg in the wisp's faint blue light.

[fleurdesel]

"And I never took you for a fool-" A beat. "Oh, wait, I have."

Often at that. Down here with what they'd be digging through, with needing to be mobile and needing to have armor and tools on hand it will not break her heart to lose or burn afterward to avoid being blighted, she's dressed simply, the muslin of her robe falling in light folds around the brace she has strapped to her thigh.

"What do you want? I am not much in the mood for telling bedtime stories."

[byblow]

"Orlesian folktales give me nightmares," Alistair says, because otherwise now that she's mentioned it he might have insisted. "All that backstabbing."

But he's opening his pack, fishing out a battered journal—he writes, sometimes. Sort of. The pages he flips through are equal parts messily scrawled lists and notes, sketched maps, and stick figures or cartoonish mabari. The pages he slows for are the denser ones, until he stops on a page filled mostly with numbers and symbols. Mostly. There's also a doodle of a stick figure with scribbled dark hair and something dark across her nose running away from another figure with horns, with a face like :O.

"I don't understand this at all," he says. That isn't true. He understands half of it, give or take, and he definitely knows what it is: instructions for blood magic seals. Not the ones that bound Corypheus, precisely, but some like them, copied out of the archives while he was being nosy.

[fleurdesel]

There's a response on the tip of her tongue for his cheek, something about Betrayal not being the sole property of Orlais when the book comes out. No, Journal. Some of the sketching looks familiar, Alistair's hand- but the rest...

"...This is-" Blood magic. Seals to hold something old and powerful. She had wondered why he'd allowed her to come aside from needing a healer. Wondered what, exactly, they were going to do other than collapse tunnels behind them to make certain that this thing remained asleep. Perhaps she should not have wondered so much. Perhaps she ought to have asked more. "I do not perform blood magic."

[byblow]

"Of course you don't," Alistair says. "Neither do I."

Because he's not a mage, but most of all because no Warden ever would, for anything, how dare, etc. He pulls himself closer by digging his heels in and bending his knees, until he can look at his scribbling alongside her.

"It's how we held Corypheus. Obviously that didn't last forever, but eight ages isn't a bad showing, I think. And we don't need to hold our friend here. He's held. We need to make sure that a Warden can't pass through alone. That should be easier, right?"

[fleurdesel]

"I do not perform blood magic." She says again, slower, as though the words had been too large or too complex for Alistair's understanding the first time. It is unethical, it is by most methods and intentions highly immoral, it is a risk she has never needed to take nor ever wished to take and not something she intends to let herself be pulled into simply because of secretive Warden Bullshit.

[byblow]

"Right," Alistair says, squinting at her. "Me either." But right back to the equations: "At some point they keyed these to a specific person, and we don't need that. We need the wards to know the difference between Warden blood and everything else. Otherwise I'd be talking to Anders or Velanna."

[fleurdesel]

"..." Her eyes narrow but flick back to the page. So long as her involvement remains theoretical she could, perhaps, condone this. Somewhat. "This is why you asked me to join you."

[byblow]

"Mm. I needed a mage who isn't also a Warden and you were at the top of the list," pause for effect, "alphabetically."

He leans back on his arms. He can feel the distant scrabble of darkspawn deeper in the ground, but none moving closer.

"Do you want me to go on for a while about why it's important?"