faderift | points the faith in higher things,

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points the faith in higher things,

WHO: Herian Amsel & open.
WHAT: the party don't start 'til she walks in. (Introducing Herian & her recruitment to the Inquisiton.)
WHEN: mid-July & onwards.
WHERE: Halamshiral & surrounds, maybe some Skyhold later?
NOTES: Prose/brackets are both fine!
Open starters in the main post (more to be added), closed starters in the comments, if we've discussed any plans feel free to barge in with a wildcard or prod me via pm or pp @karmacharging and I'll whip something up. If you'd like some information on this problem child, here is her info post.
WARNINGS: Herian's background includes themes of violence, torture and death, as well as discrimination and her own post traumatic stress disorder. While she will not in general be vocal about some of her own prejudices (against apostates, Dalish and nobles as some examples) it is very likely to come up in narrative and could come up in dialogue depending on interactions. Here is an opt out post if you'd rather certain things be avoided, or if you'd like to opt out of interactions with her in general.

Arriving with the Inquisition ( open. )
Herian Amsel exists in shades of winter, even when the world around her is dusty from heat. Her hair is dark, the black of a tree stripped of leaves and colour and grasping at a grey, unsympathetic sky, her eyes a pale, blue that people might foolishly attribute to ice in a fit of romanticism. For all that she appears to carry winter with her, summer has rolled relentlessly through a country already bearing the scorchmarks of war, making the people and the landscape seem to blur together. It is the dirt, she expects, the clouds of dust that have rolled over them on their journey. Even the grass feels dry and brittle. The closer they have drawn to the estate of Duc Hugues Pelletier, the more she has wondered just what difference there will be between the state of the gardens and the grass the common folk can wander on outside. It seems comical, if not downright insane that she be leading a group of elven refugees to the estate of an Orlesian noble for sanctuary, but she promised them she would bring them to the Inquisiton, and if the Inquisition is in Halamshiral then the group will have access to better food and medicine and more protection than she can afford them if she were to escort them to Skyhold as their sole guard.

Option A.
Herian is on foot, leading a palomino stallion with an elven woman on his back, pregnant and exhausted. Mage as she might be, Herian carries no staff. Instead a sword hangs by her side, and something like twenty refugees follow behind her.

"Inquisition," she starts, and her accent is defiantly and perhaps unexpectedly Starkhaven. "These refugees seek sanctuary amongst your number, and to lend their hands to your cause. To where shall I lead them?"

Option B.
Still on foot, Herian accompanies a smaller number of elves, now, heading towards the makeshift Medical Tents. The pregnant woman from before is with her, Herian leading her so that the woman can rest a hand on her forearm, Herian move slowly and patiently.

"This way. The mages here work under the Inquisiton banner, so if your need is dire then they are well qualified to bring you aid. You need not spend any time in the presence of those that set you ill at ease." Her voice is soft, and she has not yet looked up to the person standing nearby. "Can I have the names of your elven healers, for my friends?"

Other Increasingly Ridiculous Prompts ( open. )
Option C.
There is something singularly satisfying about the burn of muscles after exertion. Usually it comes in the form of training, practicing forms over and over for hours on end. Today, though, Herian is chopping wood, ensuring that those she accompanied who are still tired or injured need not worry should they have need, or perhaps so she can be useful to the Inquisition in some form.

Largely she does it because she likes to work, and the steady routine of grabbing up the heavy slabs of wood and breaking them apart with an axe is steadying. Not quite the meditation technique that she was taught in the Spire, but it sets her in the right frame of mind all the same. Her breath, her mind, and the regular thud and splinter make her feel better. Sweat rolls down her back, the thin material of her shirt sticks to her skin, and the tangled mess of her hair seems wilder even than before.

.... Although it is after noon and she's doing it non-stop for a long time in the summer sun, so perhaps an intervention would be wise.

Wildcard me, bro.

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"For once." Her voice cracks and she foregoes composure entirely, pulling Herian in close. Hugging her like she never had before because distance, because decorum, because one does not bond so deeply with their students. They are a known constant in life until they step up one day to become your peer.

And so it was until all those constants were shattered and shredded and gone.

But she is here, she is whole, she is raw and angry and holding so tightly to her own poise a part of Adelaide is shamed. The rest is merely relieved that this life- this one more life, was spared the Spire. "I want five pages on why a Civil War of many kinds is no excuse for returning late."

She doesn't, not really. But she must say something as she holds fast to this terrible, wonderful girl.

People do not, as a general rule, hug Herian. Sometimes the refugees she helps do. Sometimes friends, when such things have a chance to be forged. This is different from all those things. She was probably too proud and too likely to roll her eyes and too focused on reaching her goals to hug in the Spire.

There is an embrace she cannot easily compare others too. They have not shared one of its like before. She knows not if they will ever share such a one again, and Herian feels all broken glass and warped metal. She is the remains of the Spire; she is something hollowed out.

For all that, for all the long moment of shock and hesitation, her arms wrap around the Enchanter, and her fingers press into Adelaide's back, something between reassurance that she is solid, real, and a desperate grip that she has not allowed herself in years.

There'll be a paragraph dedicated to— and a vague insult about Orlais or nobles or both, there. Herian abandons the script and holds on all the tighter. "I'm sorry."

Quiet, rasped, and inescapable.

Too cold, too sharp, a storm in fair skin held fast by a framework of ice and civil intent. They are both of them broken by that night. Had parts of their souls and lives carved away like so much chaff from wheat and yet they stand with their cracked edges setting neatly against each others without cutting.

The rest of the world may scrape raw and pour salt on wounds but here like this? They are spared such pain.

"You are forgiven." Adelaide takes a slow breath, hand tangling in Herian's wild hair. "You are alive and that-"

That makes up for the tardiness. The broken promise. Late, so late, so late and thought to be lost but here and doing as she swore she would. Tending to those that needed aide as best she could. "That is all that matters. You are alive and you are here."

The hair. Oh, the hair. Once a point of such pride, all dark waves, oiled and healthy and somehow always smelling of something amazing. Sandlewood, maybe, and vanilla, and an edge of lemon. Something refreshing and warm, both. Now it is a tangled, wild mess, and she is not greatly mindful of it. Vanity has been abandoned, for the most part.

"For now." To the being here, not the prior, though that is equally true. "I brought a group of elves here. They are not the only ones needing aid to reach the Inquisition."

Not quite strangled out of her, but it feels it. Herian's arms tighten around Adelaide, the memory of the Dalish, of chevaliers with bloody swords and burning villages, fields razed. "It's good to see you."

She makes note- distantly- to amend this tangled mass somehow. Later. Right now there is a solid pulse and a life she can once again slot in her schedule as present.

Which of course means the earlier complaints are true.

"It is good to see you as well." Even if she's spent longer with her eyes closed and pressed into Herian's wild hair and/or shoulder than she has looking at her. "The days have been far too calm."

Her life bereft of regular migraines. Well. Herian migraines at the very least.

At that, at least, Herian can scoff something close to a laugh. "Forgive me, that I find that hard to believe."

A breath that is far too similar to a shudder for her own liking, and Herian squares the shoulders, changes back into the Knight Enchanter even within the embrace. Steady, controlled, strong. Always strong.

Gently, Herian eases back. She has sharp lines where she used to carry whimsy. What would have been a playfully interrogative look is a careful study, now, peeling away what she sees now and contrasting it to what she knew.

"How find you this Inquisition?" Disappointing? Inspiring?

"You are right to do so." It feels a little like peeling a bandage off a seeping wound. Sticky and reluctant but necessary for the healing process to get on properly. Adelaide's hands return to Herian's shoulders as she scrapes together some manner of composure.

Not quite the Enchanter, but not the Councilor either.

Something simpler. The Healer, perhaps, all weary resignation and overworked sarcasm.

"Adequate." Which in the language of the Spire is high praise indeed. "We are doing good work, here, for people that have need of aid. For mages that need somewhere to go to learn safely."

"Adequate." A breath of quiet incredulity. "I promised that I would keep the men and women I bought here safe." Something in that sounds more raw that she'd ever allow n the presence of a stranger, a creature too rarely afforded light and air, all the hungrier when it surfaces.

"How can I keep such a vow and leave them hence when Dalish roam the ranks? When-- when apostates wander so brazenly?" Herian knows not what answer she desires. "How can such a place be adequate, let alone safe?"

"And they shall be." What has happened that she would even question-

Ah. The Dalish. "They are but a handful and...highly irregular from what I know of them. Intensely so. I might go so far as to call them friendly."

Which is strange enough considering what they are told of Dalish- what Herian herself has experienced. The latter, though- "The circles are gone, Herian. We are all apostates now."

"Friendly." Her chest hurts with the sound of it. "Convenient, isn't it? That they might muster friendliness when there is something to be won them. That they have a liason, they hold influence here." Who let this come to pass? Who allowed them to gain such purchase? They were like strangling vines, parasitic, set to leech all the life from those they caught in their grasp.

Her hands do not ball into fists. They stay at her sides, but there is a shake that that starts in her fingertips, and forces her to press the flats of her palms flush to her sides to still.

"I am no apostate. I am a Knight Enchanter. I am loyal to the Circles and the Chantry. Knights serve. That is who I am, not some-- some self-obsessed rebel." Her voice feels as though it might tear with the effort of it, as though the words must be peeled, dry and fragile, from her throat.

"The world is ending." They are fighting against and impossible foe with magic they hardly understand, the bulk of their fate in the hands of those not even from this side of the veil.

What else is there to call it but an apocalypse?

"The world is ending and they live here as much as you and I. Should we falter, should we fail? They will bleed and die with the rest of us." Is that not reason enough? "There are no circles to be loyal to, Herian. They have been dissolved. The Chantry is in shambles."

She has a moment to be grateful Herian was not at Andoral's reach. There is little question, now, of where she would have stood among the bloodshed there. "Am I self-obsessed? Do I seem less to be standing away from that which nearly killed us both?"

Her expression is far more controlled than what it once was. Oh, Herian in the Spire was defiant and in that defiance came a measure of haughty evenness, more for the sake of being headstrong than because she thought it seemly. Sometimes it was purely because someone thought she couldn't. Herian in the Aftermath held control close to her chest, treasured it as she controlled little else. The Enchanter had been right - without control her powers would never truly be her own, but something she was at war with.

"And is this better? We need them back. If there hadn't been-- apostates and Kirkwall, the Spire would never have fallen." The tremour and spasm in her hands stretches up to her wrists, threatens to claim her forearms, and she clenched her fingers into the cloth of her robes. "Dishonour nearly killed us. Not... not the Circles."

Herian shakes her head. "You are a Spirit Healer. I can think of few vocations less selfish." The Enchanter is wilfully misunderstanding her.

Edited 2016-07-21 10:41 (UTC)

"We have no way of knowing that. What was, was. What is, is. We are only able to shape what is to come with an understanding of what failed in the past so we might avoid those failings in the future." It isn't repeating herself if it is paraphrasing a longer lecture.

They have been apart long enough for it to count.

"The lack of consistency, of just treatment from Circle to Circle played as much into this as anything else. The Chantry failed us. In Andoral's reach we failed one another. We cannot afford to do so here." So long as she still breathes? She will not allow such a thing to come to pass. More than enough have suffered. More than enough have died. "We need this. It is incomplete and we are still learning the best way to see to one another's hurts- but we are offering an unprecedented exchange of knowledge among mages. We are better able to serve the people of the Inquisition and for the Inquisition. Whatever is to come afterward remains to be seen. But this? It works, Herian. I would not throw my name behind it otherwise."

She has interrogated it from as many angles as she can muster, but the frameworks she clings to compromise her ability to assess and to test.

"And the hurts the Dalish inflict? They are forgotten?"

Herian exhales slowly, eases her hands. The shaking is not gone, but it stilled enough. She watched Adelaide carefully, the kind of scrutinising look that comes with hunger. Two years together has she wandered, and then she comes to the Inquisition and finds... this? For a moment her mouth always wavers, before she wets her lips, stretches and shakes the pain from her shoulders and her neck.

"If the exchange is tainted with dishonour, what good is it? What promise can it hold?" Her tone, despite herself, is all hurt.

She stops, partway to taking a breath to continue, and stops short, visibly drawing herself up. "I apologise. The Code forbids the cause of wanton offence. Better I hold my tongue than wound one dear to me when we are so freshly reunited."

Adelaide manages, somehow, to stop herself from saying something so crass, pointless, and foolish as 'not all Dalish'- for that would help no one and is the least useful statement for the time being.

"...They keep to themselves more often than not, or the garden in Skyhold. Occasionally they do wander but as they are here and act as members of the Inquisition, they are subject to the same laws that bind the rest of us to live civilly with one another. Acting out, causing harm, causing hurt? And they are punished just as any other member of the Inquisition. They are subject to the administration of the Advisors." It is a tentative peace she can tell, that holds Herian. "If they cause offence, they answer for it."

That is a better prospect than Dalish in the wild, accountable to no one but themselves. It is not better. It is not perfect. It will not ease the wounds that Herian carries about day in, day out.

Gently, as much as she is able to gentle her voice, she offers. "I am not offended, Ri-Ri. Concerned for you and those you have brought, but not offended. As a Councilor it is my duty to take all complaints into consideration as they are brought to me. Asking you to trust me about this- I know it is a stretch and I know it is not easy. But I ask it all the same. You need not be more than civil should you encounter the Dalish here, but I will ask of you as I have asked of Korrin regarding the templars. Keep your distance. If they do not permit you to do so, inform me and I will have words."

"One of their number came to the refugees. You may receive word of me from her, and from two others, of our meetings. They were eager to assert the influence the People," the disdain in that one word is a stark contrast to the evenness forced upon the rest, "hold here."

Her lip curls a moment, before she smooths it away and her gaze drops, and she reminds herself the slow inhale and exhale that always helps settle herself, that she has helped weave more subtly into how she moves. "I will not be the one to lash out at them. You can count upon me, and upon my honour."

A knight causes no wanton offence. A knight upholds law and peace. A knight grants succour to those that have need of it, eschews cruelty and dishonesty. A knight--

A knight must be above such selfish emotion. She draws herself taller, more rigid, though it feels so difficult in the face of that nickname. "To you my trust is granted without hesitation, both as Enchanter and Councillor. So long as I stay here, I will do all I am able to ensure the peace of this place, but if they lay hands upon myself or my people then I will act as duty demands."

Edited (more stuff happened in a thread ahhh sorry) 2016-07-23 01:32 (UTC)

"As much as anyone else within the Inquisition. We have concerns, we take them to the Advisors." Or to the organization that speaks for them as the Council does for the mages. But this-

This is where the familiar script becomes unfamiliar. The anger is there, no doubt. The frustration, the pain. But instead of grumbling and ranting, black joking and needing to be reigned in with a touch and a word- Herian does so herself. Herians peaks of honor not as a guideline, but in the same way Adelaide speaks of precision.

Of discipline.

Not a rule, but a law. Not a cloak one puts upon their shoulders when it is needed to be set aside, but a thread woven into the very fiber of her being. Gently, Adelaide rests her hands upon Herian's, eyes dark, lips pressed thin. "As would be your right. I do not think it shall come to that but I have been wrong before."

She thought the storm would pass at the Spire. She'd hoped.

"To think the Dalish any less than vipers,"

It is foolishness. Remiss. It is reckless and dangerous and it is a danger not only to Adelaide's own self but to everyone within this Inquisition, and all this it claims to want to protect. How can an organisation want to protect, when it is so blind? The words lack heat, though. They are more akin to pristine, undisturbed snow, and are utterly out of synch with how she feels. Herian is still mastering it, but she has become much acquainted with acting contrary to her own feelings.

She carries on with little more than pause to breath, "is to invite despair and discord. Well might they ally to this cause to save this world, but that does not render them worthy of trust." If any emotion tinges her words is it a deep, relentless pain, but even that is wrapped up carefully. This Inquisition cannot reforge them, they are not metal to be melted down and remade. They are sickness and poison.

Herian has been wrong before, as well. And unfortunately, so had her father.

"There are those that say the same of the templars. Of mages. Of Spirit Healers after what Anders did in Kirkwall." Perspective. "And they would be right to be wary. Just as you are right to be wary of the Dalish here."

There is no undoing what had been done to Herian's family, no removing her scars, her horrors. Some things cannot be cured but this frustration, this anger? Is more recent. The idea that she'd run into more on the road and been attacked-

It is not so strange a thought for all that it is disconcerting.

"I have yet to find anything malicious in the eyes of the Dalish here. They are few and seem...odd compared to what I know of those in the world. I do not know why or how, only that I have learned to trust at least one of them, just as I have learned to trust a Knight Commander. These things I did not expect when I came here." All she'd expected was work and sanctuary. Not these bonds she has forged. "They are here. There is little we can do but mind them or avoid them, Herian."

"The likes of Anders are but one reason why people might say the same of mages. Simply making example of it does not make it inherently wrong." As Adelaide spoke it, wariness is not without basis. And yet there is something more severe in how Herian speaks it, a brutal kind of certainty: "Spirit healers are not the peril. Of all of us you have the most noble purpose. It is shameful what he has inflicted upon your work."

Tension edges up her back, her spine stiffening vertebrae by vertebrae, and it would be noticeable in her posture if she did not already carry herself so upright, shoulders back and everything about her seeming less flesh and more marble, or some other more roughly hewn stone. She was no noble, to be considered a fine statue. She was the severity of cliffs that watched over ships and stern, unforgiving coral and rocks lurking beneath the water, that the unworthy and unwatching might be cast upon her.

"Mind and avoid. Those are not the actions of a knight. A knight does not willingly blind themselves." She says it very evenly, flatly, even as her heart hammers harder in her chest and her lungs feel raw for having been denied air, and she part wishes that she may double over for the wrenching in her gut. She feels many things acutely, but forces herself to stand as a knight must. Ever ready and attentive.

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points the faith in higher things,

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