OPEN ↠ FALSE GODS, GREAT DEMONS (OPEN LOG 1)

[faderifting]

WHO: Living Residents of the Horrible Future
WHAT: Ah ha ha ha stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
WHEN: ALTERNATE FUTURE, 1-15 Cloudreach 9:48
WHERE: Anywhere, but especially Orzammar
NOTES: This is the first open log for False Gods, Great Demons. Anything that happened prior to Cloudreach 9:48 should go on the flashback meme. Most members of the TTT and their friends in Kirkwall will be arriving in Orzammar on approximately Cloudreach 7. In the meantime, feel free to make your own adventures. If you want to blow up an bridge, assassinate an NPC of your own invention, steal supplies, or anything else--it's all yours, go for it!

SOUTHERN THEDAS is a wasteland. The Blight crawling across the Orleian countryside and into Ferelden leaves nothing alive in its wake, scarring the land like an insatiable fire until no birds sing and the only things that grows is the Red Lyrium that speckles cliff sides and crawls up dying trees until they look like rows of jagged bloody teeth. And where it's still green, where people can still survive, the atmosphere is nearly as stifling. Every city and settlement is watched over by a Venatori or trustworthy collaborator. Those who don't keep their heads down and their dissent a whisper may vanish without warning. They may take their whole families with them. There are flashes of hope--an assassinated lordling here, a village rousing itself to brief and doomed rebellion there--but for every man the Imperium loses, they seem to find two to take his place.

NORTHERN THEDAS is at war. The worst of it doesn't reach west into Tevinter or the Anderfels; the line between the Qunari and the Imperium is drawn straight through Antiva, with Nevarra and Rivain on either side quiet and calm as only lands under martial law can be. The Free Marches vary between complacency and rebellion, but the rebellious ones risk ruin--there are murmurs it won't be long before a whole city is made an example. A steady stream of desperate refugees is fleeing north to the Qun, but plenty are picked off and punished as traitors before they can cross into Qunari-controlled territory. Your best best for a clean escape are the pirates who still hold Llomerynn free from both sides of the conflict.

ORZAMMAR is the only kingdom in Thedas that looks much the same--and Kal-Sharok, but they're not accepting outsiders. The heavy doors at Orzammar's entrance are sealed and guarded, as much against the steady flow of refugees asking for help as against the Venatori. The refugees are turned away. There's no way to know who can be trusted, and even if there were, there's not food enough for people who can't fight. Orzammar Thaig is still the dwarves' home--though with stealing shrinking numbers and poor prospects, King Bhelen has been amenable to allowing casteless surfacers some leeway--but the once-abandoned Ortan Thaig is the Inquisition's. Quietly. The only things stopping a full assault on Orzammar is the Venatori's need for dwarf-mined lyrium and the plausible deniability that the Inquisition's remaining rebel bands are using the Deep Roads with Bhelen's consent.

An hour's walk through caves and deepstalker swarms, Ortan is a city in its own right. A crammed city, one where cots and bunk beds crammed into shared housing are the norm no matter how important someone is and you occasionally have to protect your dinner from a restless, swooping griffon, but one where you can still find a pint of ale or a game of cards if you've time to waste on them. It's just that not many people do. There's the watch to keep; the tunnels that creep further into the deep teem with darkspawn who are held back at barricades, while the hidden, narrow tunnels that lead to the surface are watched at all hours so anyone coming or going can be identified. There are weapons to forge and sharpen. Plans to make. Bands to lead. Maybe you weren't a leader five years ago, but these days, there aren't that many people with more than five years' experience still alive to give orders. Fewer every week.

And so we burned. We raised nations, we waged wars,
We dreamed up false gods, great demons
Who could cross the Veil into the waking world,
Turned our devotion upon them, and forgot you.
Threnodies 1:8

Comments

[rowancrowned]

"This needn't be real," he says. All the dead never lost, all the land never poisoned, and oh-- he stops, suddenly, because they would never—how had they been to one another, five years ago? Less kind, certainly, less tender and without the crucible of the world coming to an end, unlikely to find themselves in the same circumstances that had led to wedding.

He looks away from her, turns his head and focuses instead on the wall of a nearby house? Cave? Whatever the dwarves choose to name the places where they sleep and eat.

“He has vowed that such a thing is possible.”

[elegiaque]

(House. Someone else's; Gwenaëlle doesn't offhand know whose.)

A great deal has happened in five years, and she follows his thought to its conclusion with a resoluteness that would have once surprised her. Says nothing of it; cannot have failed to grasp what it would mean.

"Then I was waiting, after all," she says, very dryly, finally, "just not for you."

If it can be undone, it must be, and that's the only thought she can allow herself to have.

[rowancrowned]

He allows himself a familiarity he won't be allowed ever again, pulling her close until her cheek rests on his shoulder and he can turn his head to kiss her forehead. This does have the benefit of soothing away some of his more errant concerns-- Iluvatar can see all that happens here, surely, as vigilant as the Outsider and less inclined to act under the pretext of free will.

"Yes," he agrees. This is better than they might have dared hoped for, this is-- fixing everything. He supposes the Thranduil of the past will have thoughts that lead him down the path that he was planning to walk before the Outsider returned, but it will be to a gentler world. Maybe it will urge him to be kinder. He kisses the space between Gwenaëlle's brows, and exhales a sigh.

"Do you suppose we might... when this all ceases to be? That we might be kinder to one another." That this might happen again. If he dies now, it matters little, as long as the Outsider succeeds in righting things.

And then, after a beat. "It is good you did not want elflings."

[elegiaque]

The way she exhales against his throat is unsteady, and it -

It doesn't sound like yes. It sounds like I don't want to tell you no. Like it was good, wasn't it, more bitterly - how much harder would this have been. She can give him up, she has to, she's weighed the world against her own heart time and again before and always the world wins, but if there had been children. If she'd ever relented, if she'd been holding some small thing with the shape of his eyes, what would she have been capable of for that child?

What wouldn't she have been.

"Guenievre Baudin was my mother."

...oh.

"She was my mother," she repeats, hushed and urgent where her face is half-hidden by his hair and hers and she doesn't have to see how her words land. "You wouldn't understand. You wouldn't - all of these fucking elves that trusted you, that accepted you, and I couldn't grieve my mother--"

[rowancrowned]

It takes him a moment to turn that name into a face, and then he remembers, all at once, the sharp yank, the waking, the sitting in one of her family’s beds and trying to lure the truth out of her, the bitterness from some event outside of his understanding that had turned her from warming to him to ice cold and refusing his advances, and he—

“You unrepentant bitch. You tell me now, when it means nothing?” He does not quite say 'coward', and how he holds her isn’t exactly meshing with his harsh words—he rocks in his seat, he shifts so she can curl closer and hide her face. He, ever the gentleman, pretends he cannot feel the heat of her tears against his neck.

“Hush now,” he murmurs, rubbing her back. “I have you. I am so sorry, my love. I am so sorry.”

[elegiaque]

Now, when she has his own word he will forget. When the whole world remade will keep her secret, again, and when they return he will know none of it, only that coldness. The way she'd trusted Asher only when he would take the knowledge with him to the lady of the skies, and no further -

She deserves that, she thinks numbly, of his words. They make more sense to her than the softness that follows, even after so long - every time he's said he loves her, every time she's believed it a little more, she is still unready, stiff in his arms at first where she'd tensed to pull away. Relaxing into his grasp is not immediate; the small, wounded sound she makes pressed to his collarbone is not knowingly done.

"You didn't understand," she says, lashes wet and fingers curling in his shirt, and the ache of her mother's loss has been a sluggish bleed inside her for so long she isn't prepared for the rush of it now, for how much the things he didn't know about her still matter. "I couldn't explain it to you."

To live as something that shouldn't exist--

She presses her hand under her eyes, tries to compose herself. Anyone might see.

[rowancrowned]

He is magnanimous, his memory is excellent; he knows just how he may have behaved when offered this truth at the time, half-dead and in pain, and then after, when the Dalish clan was massacred—

(Poorly.)

“Ever?” he asks, and looks up, away from her, makes sure they’re awarded the safety of privacy from prying eyes or curious passer-by, but no, he chose this little nook quite well and they’re afforded the dignity of a quiet place to fight, if nothing else.

He bites back the ‘she loved you’, the meaningless platitudes, everything he might say and considers it against the weight of Gwenaëlle’s grief.

“I am sorry,” he tries again, “—for the loss of your sisters, and your mother, and for the brave stupidity of your father. I do not love you any less or more.”

Patient, eternal, consistent simply because he takes so long to change—it does not matter that he is not these things because she needs him to be, he’s just a stubborn elf against her youthful unstoppable force, and he’s inclined to compassion.

[elegiaque]

Sometimes she thinks the entirety of their marriage has been one fight or another - or the same fight, repackaged a hundred different times, the push and pull of their different agendas, Thranduil immovable and Gwenaëlle unable to be still. Long separations and she can't help but test her claws against his edges when they're together, the changing shape of the silences.

But she loves him; he loves her. They've made that enough for so long, and now, too. Enough now for this, too.

"I had you already without saying," she mutters, her fingers flexing restlessly against his arm, fisting in his sleeve. "What good's ever come of saying?" Alexander held her, that day and a while after; Alexander left, and she'd been left in his wake to wonder if it had mattered more, or if she had only mattered less. "There was so much I couldn't say to you. I was so angry. And you left me--"

everyone, but her, which is not a new hurt or a new argument, not when she'd tumbled into his bed in the midst of it in the first place,

"You came back for me," quieter. She'd let that be more important; she'd let the rest go. For years, yes. Unrepentantly.

https://youtu.be/G44xTr8D_bw?t=18

[rowancrowned]

“You had me blinded,” he insists. “I would speak of Guenièvre Baudin the maidservant and her death differently than I ought to speak of your mother. You have set a trap in the midst of every conversation, every interaction—and how many times would I continue to wander into it without putting the pieces together, Gwenaëlle? You are my wife. There is no room for secrets between us.”

All those times she’d been angry, the sullen silences—he could trace them back to the ghost of her mother, or the truth of her parentage—there is a good deal to unravel here, and he is freed by the circumstances of the Outsider’s revelation not to need to think too deeply about it.

He sighs, a long, slow exhale, and just keeps holding her, allowing her clinging touches, the little ways she tries to anchor herself, fingers like roots in his clothes. “I will always come back for you. Always. Only death will keep me away.”

[elegiaque]

The habit of secrecy is hard to break, taught to her from such a young age - she turns her cheek against his shoulder and presses her chin there, exhales. There are much worse ways to have this argument than nestled close, implicit assurance: this is not the end. The end is coming, but it will be the end of everything, and not her doing.

"I was so angry, when she died." A grief she'd not known any other way to process. "Everything was such a mess, I couldn't tell you why and then you weren't there to tell."

The fact that he'd come back, that they'd married, that she'd had time since to confide--

"I didn't want to dredge the worst of the past if it didn't matter any more. I didn't want to talk about it." Her lips twist-- "I'll never forget, you know, what you said to me on the battlements. About elves being made to kneel. That's what I was to her."

[rowancrowned]

There is a freedom, in having all your choices stripped from you. He wonders if the reversal will be all at once, or he will send the Outsider and the others home and then die here, doubting-- two Thranduils at once, one living as though this never happened and another sent to the Halls of Mandos, petitioning them for action. He would like to pit his will against the Valar. He has no doubt that with the memories he now holds, and a better... appreciation of Galadriel, he might get far.

He is not afraid of pain, but neither does he seek it; he hopes death will be less painful than what he has endured so far.

"You were alone," he acknowledges, keeping her nestled in the relative safety he can provide.

But he can't offer any more than that. She's right, again, he would have handled the revelation poorly, the level of comfort someone like him was able to offer scant and ill-suited to Thedas. She is half-elven but she is not peredhil.

"I do not think she hated you," he says. Thranduil had seen all the things Guenevere had done for her daughter, a line drawn between 'beloved servant' and 'mother'. She had put up with Gwen's tantrums from love, not pay, not hunger.

He can imagine their children. He knows that they will be peredhel, but he lets himself consider the lot of every other marriage like theirs in Thedas, and-

"You were her child first, always."

He does not think of Legolas often anymore. Or-- he does, but he buries it. His son is elsewhere. His son is safe. His son is an elf, and if he was not, there would be distance between them. A lack of understanding, but Legolas would still be his son and beloved for that and that alone. It is all Thranduil would need.

[elegiaque]

Thranduil, riding at Guenievre's side the last day of her life, saw more of what she did for her daughter than did even her daughter - the interest she took in her affairs, the way she had stepped around bidding him watch after the girl when she was gone, the request she had wanted to make of Solas and had known would raise too many questions, questions Thranduil in his own fondness would not ask.

(She had thought the separation to be temporary, when she asked it. They all had.)

Gwenaëlle remembers, sometimes, the immovable patience of Guenievre in Skyhold, holding a brush and waiting for her to relent and sit down and let her hair be plaited for bed when she could more than do it herself--

"He'd have tired of her if I wasn't," she says, bleakly. "She'd never have been sent to Skyhold at all." She might have lived. Any other day, she might say: and for what? but today, today. The world might yet be put to rights, and Guenievre Baudin will still be dead. She will still be gone. It will still have been an awful waste of a woman Gwenaëlle barely knew, whose love for her lived in silences and stillness she didn't know how to read.