open; Dry your smoke-stung eyes

[foxsays]

WHO: Araceli Bonaventura; open
WHAT: Post-Rivain catch-up, gifts for friends, general open in and around Skyhold things
WHEN: August (timey-wimey if needed)
WHERE: Skyhold
NOTES: High likelihood of Dairsmuid being discussed so annulments etc. Will update if/when needed. If you'd like a starter let me know but feel free to make your own!

Comments

[ungovernable]

It is not a loss, she tells herself; what they did have is something she can carry with her, something his absence doesn't undo. His absence, though, is harder than she'd imagined it would be - Dorian is too near for her to call herself lonely, but Benevenuta is a stranger to such intimate grief and the Inquisition is not a soft place to learn the lesson.

"Very timely," she agrees, ushering Araceli properly into the room and - upon only a moment's consideration - closing the door behind her. The Warden camp might have been a more private location, ultimately, but this will serve. Dorian's reputation (unfair as it often is) is almost as effective a barrier to the casual interruption, what with him being a terrifying Tevinter Magister and the like.

(A mage, she always corrects, an Altus. It is his father who serves as a Magister. How much good these corrections do is anyone's guess.)

"I would be very interested, for instance, to hear that tale in your own words."

[foxsays]

"The beginning then?" Ever since coming back someone has wanted the story it seems but that's the hazard of always being what she's been since arriving. Quick to laugh, quicker to smile, and she hasn't played them all false purposefully, this is what she is but people talk to a girl like that far sooner withouth too many questions than they do to others. All these months and the frantic message is the first time the mask had slipped off that much to so many.

Not that she's annoyed in truth, not precisely, and if the situation had been less dire who knows, she still might have done the same to secure aid because Araceli has friends and Araceli smiles, and Araceli is never upset, people come running for the crying girl. Thieves learn that skill very quickly as a good distraction for guards and marks.

"I had been studying the culture in Rivain since there's very little about it here, and if there is a place in Thedas with beliefs close to my home? Then it would be Rivain. I spoke with the crew of the ship often; they had questions about the Inquisition, and we are not blessed with so many friends, and I am a captain's daughter, I know how sailors talk. Same as how I know how people in the docks and taverns talk.

"A few approached me during my time studying, asked my opinions about mages. It was not subtle." A ghost of a smile crosses her face, bless them they had tried so very hard. "One of the times they came to speak with me they brought me the journal of First Enchanter Rivella, smuggled out of Dairsmuid during the Annulment. I...I had heard a little of such things, but to sit and read that? Aintza, ah, she's a Seer, the leader of the group that came to Skyhold has it now. They invited me to their camp outside of Dairsmuid where they were in hiding, naturally since I was alone and Skyhold was too far away to send for aid immediately without seeing it with my own eyes, I went."

[ungovernable]

The story itself is a secondary thing; interesting, but easily enough gleaned from reports, from speaking with those who have come to the Inquisition. As it is her duty to do, and as she will and has done, an active member of the Council. (It is her grief that has been the 'distraction', duty that must matter more; there is work to do, and she wouldn't be herself if she weren't prepared to do it.)

What Benevenuta wants to hear is how Araceli tells it. How she presents it, and herself. What she thinks to share, what twist she puts upon her words - what goes unsaid, what she takes for granted, what she does not see observed and what she clearly knows will strike a chord.

Benevenuta does her the credit of assuming she will know how to strike a chord.

"Of course," she says, not needing to pause to see the space between breaths that her words are expected to fill. "I understand you to have been much struck."

[foxsays]

"The camp was worse than the Inquisition camps. Little better than the Fallow Mire camp, and that was honly from the lack of corpses and rain. Not one of them had slept a full night in...well, they declined to tell me exactly how long, either from whenever word came of the Annulment itself, or whenever they had escaped to their camp. First Enchanter Rivella's last journal entry was dated two years ago; that nothing had been done?" Her jaw tightens a tiny fraction, her fingers curl; too raw for her to easily put the mask on. "They had sent word to other Circles though given the current state of affairs in the rest of Thedas - that mages turned on their fellows too - then perhaps I was naive to be surprised."

It will not happen again. It will never happen again.

"The message on the sending crystal was the best I could do after I contacted Sister Nightingale; she has the most experience in such matters, and she authorised my excursion to Rivain in the first place. I was not in a position to turn away aid, or experience. Though...I am sure there will be talk. No matter who I took there will be talk. All of this for Rivaini mages will invite a great deal of talking.

"Leaving the camp to meet everyone in Dairsmuid to bring them there was a risk, but they had successfully evaded Templars thus far, and I am used to knowing when I am watched. We were not so close to anywhere that the Chant is held dear that they would have found refuge, nor were they under any sort of order still. So I went. Waited for everyone to arrive, a boat took us and we found the camp in disarray. An ambush by the Templars, mercifully they had taken only the mages at that time, and none were seriously injured: they would finish what they had started in Dairsmuid. Such devotion."

Around her friends, even around those with her on the mission she had been so careful not to let this side of her slip. Either because they didn't know her and she is so aware of how you might only ever make a first impression once, or because they did know her, and she didn't want them to worry. Even since coming back she has been smiling. Trying her best. I am better, it is better, they are safe, all is well, but there is something very freeing in making this sort of admission to Lady Thevenet, in the shark-like quality of the smile she shows that is very unlike her. But she is on a mission, and this is part of it, and she is telling the story of it so someone should hear how it truly was.