faderift | points the faith in higher things,

Entry tags:

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I'd like that, as long as it's not too much trouble. I'll get gloves... somewhere. But in the meantime I could use the advice of someone who knows what they're doing."

She shrugs, then adds, "I've probably gotten lazy. Where I come from, there's a way to carry images easily, so I can consult them, with greater fidelity than a black and white sketch and an accompanying description."

"My knowledge is not exhaustive, but my aid is yours."

Part of it is self-serving curiosity, admittedly, moreso than anything like the knightly desire to help; there are a number of things Herian is not prepared to simply agree with, not even if it is Councilor LeBlanc who spoke them. That the Dalish are here rankles her, that all mages are apostates is something she refuses, because apostasy was forced on them and she does not think that should define them. Rifters being worthy of trust, of consideration? That she can consider with a little more is.

It probably helps her willingness to offer chances that Cosima is very pretty, but let's not actually acknowledge that, or let it colour their interaction at all, because Herian is quietly throttling the part of her brain that volunteered that information. It is irrelevant.

Her head tilts to the side, curious. "Easier than navigating a book?" She sounds far from incredulous— Herian did not learn to read until she was sent to the Circle. Books are well and good, but less than helpful for those raised as lowly as she. "That must be a wondrous invention indeed. There are many in towns here that suffer for the lack of knowledge available to them. Not all can carry the knowledge of a herbalist in their mind." And, with a note of almost-humour, if gently exaggerated pensiveness can be easily interpreted as such: "Rashvine is friend to no man."

The last observation makes Cosima laugh.

"Yeah, that device was... useful." Cosima sounds rueful. She could write a blog post when she gets back aimed at the people elegiacally describing a time before the Internet. Something pointed to do with identifying poison oak.

"I'd even settle for a way to take better notes. I was lucky to live in a place where paper and ink were cheap. I'm having to reorganize how I approach things here."

"More oft than not only those who can afford ink and paper are qualified to use them," Herian replies, not quite rueful. She thinks a moment, frowning as she tries to organise her thoughts, to think of alternate solutions. It is not as though she's done a terribly large amount of writing since she left the Spire, and even there it wasn't as if they simply let mages horde materials. Everything had to be accounted for.

"Perhaps until an appropriate substitute is devised," she offers, carefully, "I can aid in the acquisition of paper. Councillor LeBlanc was a teacher of mine in the White Spire. If she can still threaten me with essays, it may be I can still make requests for ink and paper." Not a promise, but an offer, at least. She can try.

Annnnd excuse her, she is just going to grab a stick, spear a particular leaf, and nudge it away from the others. "Not noxious," she clarifies, "but if you get the sap on your hands it will take days entire to wash away."

"Gloves," Cosima says with a grin. "Definitely gloves first, then paper. But thank you. I don't mind working to support myself, either, but my skill set is kind of... the things I do at home wouldn't work here." She uses her wrist to push her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. "I guess it's taken me a few weeks to accept I'm not just going back home, so."

She isn't sure why she's telling Herian all this. Probably just because the other woman seems genuinely interested.

"Aye, wise words indeed. You will wield herbs more wildly than most of us in no time at all."

She rests her forearms on her knees, for a moment, trying to think what it could possibly be that Cosima does, before quickly coming to the conclusion that perhaps the reason it wouldn't work here is because there is no comparison. Huh.

Thankfully, knights do not say anything so ineloquent as huh, so she is spared that slight indignity.

"What is it you do? I confess myself intrigued." A beat, and she adds, "and mayhaps a mite bewildered." It did not seem so terrible an admission to make.

Cosima pauses, not because she's reluctant to answer, but because she's trying to think of how best to explain. "Here in Thedas, do you have people who study the natural world? Not healers, but like... people who observe plants and animals and try to figure out how they're related and why they behave like they do?"

Consider her all the more intrigued.

"Of course. Those who study dragons are especially famed amongst academics." A slight face, before she admits, "in some cases because they are sometimes consumed by the subjects of their studies, if you will forgive the my lack of delicacy." There wasn't really a tactful way to talk about people being eaten by dragons, was there? "I am no academic, my... knowledge is not so detailed as some might offer you, but academics study a good many things. There are those dedicated to the study of spirits and magics and the Fade, as well. Some areas of study are more scandalous than others."

Cosima nods, looking pleased. "Right. So my world doesn't have magic, doesn't have the Fade - that we know of, I mean, I got here somehow - but we have come a long way in how we can look at animals. My field of study is basically... hm. So a dog is more like a cat than like a fish, right? But a dog is more like a fish than it's like a tree. If you study how animals develop when they're born, or even when they're still in an egg or inside their mother, you can see the ways in which some animals are more closely related than others and can make theories about how they split off to become different in the first place."

It's simplified, necessarily, but not inaccurate.

Herian turns the thought over in her mind, carefully inspecting it the way one might a polished stone plucked from a river bed, a new and curious thing that demanding fingers be run over it, all angles investigated.

"So, then." A pause, as she tries to deduce if the comparison is foolish, before offering it anyway. "Your field of study might consider how dragons and lizards might be connected, then?"

Something troubles at her, though. "There was an academic at the White Spire, Enchanter Vauquelin." Her expression flickers for a moment, gaze dropping. "He has - had - an interest in the bloodlines of elves and humans and their mixing. Would that be part of it, as well?"

"More the dragon-lizard thing," Cosima says, considering that reaction. "For one thing, we don't have elves where I'm from and we have some pretty scary cautionary tales about people who take too much of an interest in, say, variations in skin color." To put it extremely mildly, but she doesn't really want to get into slavery, genocide and the history of modern eugenics at the moment.

Instead, she says, "I don't want to influence; I want to understand. A problem I'd work on is, um. You'd think a lizard and a snake are more alike the a lizard and a dragon, right? Size is a more important factor than number of limbs. But using tools I have at home, I can compare how they develop. A lizard may be more like a small dragon than it is like a snake with legs, once you have more information."

The point on skin colour leaves her bewildered for a moment, brows furrowing more than she means them too. Not quite guarded enough, it seems, as she chews the inside of her cheek and stores the information away for later contemplation. No elves? It seemed a sorry state for any world, though something in Cosima's tone makes her suspect that it is not necessarily a world that lost or destroyed all their elves. She might suspect that was what the people of Thedas desired, if not for elves being so convenient as slaves or servants or as the ones all others could beat without reprise.

"Our world possesses cautionary tales of its own," she finally replies, and though there's no smile to speak of, no shadow of one, Herian's expression is a little gentler. More understanding, at least.

It isn't so much that Herian was tense, but that there was a certain element of caution in her, fascination and faint edges of concern mixed together. That concern eases away when Cosima says, outright, that she has no desire to influence. Just as the tension was a subtle thing so too is its easing, though not imperceptible.

"I think I understand. It sounds fascinating. Complex," she admits, "but fascinating. How do you better grasp their development? Observation?"

Cosima is quite certain the world she comes from doesn't have a corner on bigotry. She wonders if she wants to know what Thedas' cautionary tales are, just yet. (So far, no one seems to have bated an eye at her confession on the network that she romantically prefers women; she isn't sure if this is because it's common here or because rifters are so odd that nothing they do is worth remarking on.)

"Observation a lot, yeah. We have very powerful ways to magnify things, so we can observer stuff we wouldn't otherwise be able to see. A lot of it has to do with genes, which are sort of the blueprints for a new organism that come from your parents. Some things about you are there before you're even born, but lots of them come from your environment and your experiences. It's sometimes hard to tell which is which just by looking. And sometimes it's a mix, like... how tall you are comes partly from genes, but also has to do with how well-fed you are in childhood."

Blueprint. She is not familiar with the term. "Blueprint is... akin to a design? Or a map, something of that sort?" She is no cartographer, either, though she would be hard pressed to find the person in Thedas who did not understand what a map was for. Herian hopes, at any rate, that for the sake of Thedas its people understand the mechanics of a map.

Herian muses on that, for a moment. She had not necessarily considered, but it seemed a reasonable enough conclusion to draw, when presented so. "I am taller than a good many from alienages. I presumed that such stemmed from being an elf-blooded human, rather than fully elven, but... by your reasoning, then, being taken from the alienage and fed better food was just as like a factor."

She cants her head slightly to the side, trying to remember just how tall the elven mages in the Spire had been, if she had been surprised when first she encountered those from outside the Spire after so many years removed from the alienage.

"Oh, yeah. A blueprint is like a plan for how to build something. A building or a bridge or whatever. It tells the builder how to make the thing the designer had in mind."

She considers Herian's example, and nods. "But yeah. I mean, it's very possibly both? Say you and someone with different parents were fed the same diet - they may never be able to get as tall as you. But if you went hungry a lot as a kid, you might not reach your full potential height, either."

Cosima shrugs a little. "So my field - one of its practical uses - is trying to pinpoint what causes people who are born sick to be that way, so maybe we can develop ways to help them."

"From my understanding, children go hungry no matter how much food they are given." Good humoured, but quiet. It is a more vicious hunger in alienages though, she thinks. The likes of nobles never have that edge of starvation in them.

Herian's mouth twinges a little, the slight edge of a smile. "So you are a healer, then. Of a fashion. You help them better their craft." She rubs her knuckles along her jaw ruefully, two slow, hard swipes as she thinks. "It sounds very complicated."

Far beyond her own understanding. Herian's own healing skills were limited to elfroot is useful and following whatever strict instructions the healers gave her, and bits and pieces of memories that she'd almost sooner forget. Her nose wrinkles as she inhales the scent of another herb before dropping it - unpleasant memories tied to that one.

"Your work is to be admired, I think."

Her smile is warm, a little sheepish but proud all the same. "Thanks. I think so. I mean, I'm more like... if the healer's a knight, I'm the person who figures out how to make them a better sword. Sorry, is that a dumb analogy? I haven't known many knights."

Or... any before coming to Thedas.

"But yeah, I just... don't know what to do with myself here. My work there was based on a foundation you guys don't have and tools that don't exist. Thus the clumsy attempt at plants."

"It is not." A quiet reassurance, that. "Without smiths to forge our blades our sbility to protect is greatly limited."

For a moment Herian turns her gaze to the sky, pensive.

"We are all clumsy in our beginning attempts. Is it the healing element that most concerns you? I'm sure there are ma t fields where you skills would be greatly valued."

Cosima glances up too, thoughtful. "I mean... it's a nice side effect. Helping people. But if I'm honest, I really got into the field because I want to understand the world. You know? Find out things no one else has figured out before."

Which is significantly less noble, but at least has the distinction of being honest.

"Understanding the world keeps people safe in other ways." Which, actually, gives her a thought. "Forgive the presumption, I... have no place or qualification to make recommendations, least of all to a near stranger. For the understanding of our world, those that study magic and the Fade may hold some interest. It is not solely the vocation of mages, but—"

Herian hesitates, frowns, and considers. "Mayhaps understanding your world will help give some understanding to ours. And studying Rifts and magic, even from the perspective of one without ties to it, could be more rewarding a thing for one so curious than plants."

Finally there is a smile. Or, a not-smile, but less on the former and more on the latter than previously witnessed. "This world is more wondrous than it is terrible. You need not resign yourself to something hastily, Lady Cosima."

"Hey, it's not presumptuous at all. It's pretty evident that I'm not much of a botanist," she adds, with a shake of the head. "I mean, I don't know how much people will want my insight, but if they did, I'd love to learn more about the Fade. If nothing else, it's evidently how I got here."

And maybe a way home, one day, if she can figure out how.

"I think they'll want your questions. There are things taken for granted through familiarity."

Ah, she grabs up a blue and white flower, considering it before admitting, "I've no notion what this might do."

Cosima smiles. "It's pretty, which means you probably shouldn't eat it, if your world works anything like mine." Pretty was a more than even chance of being poisonous, generally. "Or it could just be nice," she adds, after a brief pause.

"I must confess," Herian replies, just the faintest suggestion of a smile, "I do not make a point of eating everything I come across." She rolls the stem between thumb and forefinger, making the flower spin slowly, before holding it out to Cosima. "Let us say it is nice. Then, if I present it as a gift, it cannot be considered to have more ominous connotations. Perhaps do not eat it, though, to be quite certain."

Cosima laughs, at that, taking the flower. "I promise, I've progressed past investigating the world the way a 2-year-old does. Though there are, in my defense, some sorts of flowers people eat."

She considers, a moment, then boldly tucks the flower behind her ear. "...if my ear falls off, I have no one to blame but myself," she adds.

points the faith in higher things,

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