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

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

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

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"Husband," Wren agrees, easily enough, though watchful from the corners of her eyes. A husband. And evidently still one of some contention, if Gervais' phrasing was any indication, if the sound is. It can hardly be the scandal of the thing now, can it? There's no public alive left unscandalized. "My congratulations."

Genuine, even if internally she boggles. An elf, a Rifted elf, marrying the daughter of a Comte. Comtesse now — an echo of Gwen’s previous correction —

Perhaps not the time to throw stones. She sketches a few short motions through an empty page. If it looks a lot like three underlined question marks, that's her own business.

"I am previously acquainted with the Outsider." That’s one way of putting it. "He is... singular."

As is that. Of their party, she most trusts him with this. Just not with anything else. Wren looks up again, more properly now, reaches down to collect the teacup. Do copies of the Litany even still exist? How might one pass them on politely? Here, a wedding gift, in case your husband's friends come knocking.

"How long has it been? The marriage?"

"A few years," follows the face she pulls at singular, which Wren can take for the agreement it is; she remembers the Outsider only a little, but vividly. Of the group, he and Wren are the only ones to whom she might put name to face, or...even reliably recall the face, offhand. It'd have been less than that in the time passed if not for Thranduil's attachment, or the stark way a handful of careless words had undone her uncle.

She bites off the end of her thread and sets the shirt aside, moves onto the next thing in her mending pile; threads her needle anew and takes a drink of her tea. It must be familiar-- she doesn't blink at the awful taste.

"In the fashion of his people," a bit more drolly. "Whoever they are."

Yes, this is probably about how people might've envisioned Gwenaëlle as a wife.

A beat, then;

"My uncle seems in better spirits." Eyyyyyy.

Very composed, dignified women in their forties don’t choke on their tea. They just make the very composed, dignified decision to cough down their sleeves around the leaf they’ve just inhaled.

"He is —" Hopefully not taken with the same fashion as Gwen’s elf. "— That is to say, I find I am as well. The value of an overdue discussion."

"I hope it will not impose if I stay a short while longer." Another sip of tea. Another leaf. This one she spits discreetly back into the cup. Yeah, Gervais really picked a winner. "There has been little time for such — conversations — of late."

For anyone, seemingly. It hasn’t exactly escaped her attention that Thranduil is nowhere in sight.

Gwenaëlle glances up at her when she says discussion, eyebrows raising - which is the extent of her colour commentary on that. There doesn't need to be more, when her expression is so- expressive.

"Conversations," she repeats, dry. "That's the truth. Thranduil won't come down here for anything short of the lot of you." And what they represent, and what might be done - and undone. Five years of undoing; Gwenaëlle is resolute in the face of what it would mean giving up. She hadn't even to weigh it against what they'd gain - there is no question of it being the right thing to do.

But it crosses her mind. And this, now; she might never know her uncle. He might never hold his Templar.

They won't die in the dark while Corypheus makes a plaything of Thedas, though.

He does not visit? There’s truth in that hurt, but it’s not the whole of it. You do not go with him?

Wren knows little of the person that Gwen has become, but she knows a deal of being an angry young woman with a cause. Of all the things that one trades for it — and gladly. How bitter it is, when the rock falls for the hard place.

Thranduil will not bend for his love, not for anything short of the lot of you. They aren't a passel of old friends, but a sign: The dead walk. Time snarls. One way or the other, the game is changing, draws close to a close.

And there it is, she thinks. The wound.

"In the Gallows," She draws a slow breath, fishes to the back of the little book. The stack of letters is thin, worn with time and the efforts taken to conceal them. Wren still doesn’t know how Inessa managed it. "A warden gave me these. Bade that I deliver them."

She’s read them, of course. Anything that might help must be documented. But they held only the same old refrain that everything here sings: absence, silence, regret.

"I do not make the offer lightly," Were the positions reversed, would Wren try to send word? No, she thinks. She barely listens to herself as it is. The question still bears asking. "But if there is anything that you would have said, I will do all that I can to see the message preserved."

Edited 2017-03-01 10:22 (UTC)

It's not something to be taken any more lightly than it's offered, and Gwenaëlle slows herself, stops before she can decline without considering. Is there anything...? To the ghosts who'll live all of their lives, what would she say?

Five years ago, the prospect of being Comtesse Vauquelin meant something very different. If she and Thranduil drag painfully at one another now, she isn't sure they were even speaking when Coupe and the others were lost. Her secrets had mattered more, meant different things; his presence in her life had a different weight, and she had not been swift to forgive him for it. Unstoppable force and immovable object -

A Comtesse with a price on her head can become all sorts of things to survive, can take what's hers where she finds it; the only heiress of a Comte in the dangerous waters of Orlais-as-was cannot. What is there to say, of what can't be? It was. But it won't be, she thinks.

"Someone should remember that my father was brave," she says, instead of any of that, and if it's quiet it isn't gentle. Gwenaëlle, perhaps, has never been.

"Damn right." Her eyes shut briefly, the book snaps closed. "He raised you."

How many candles is she going to need to light, before this is over? How many brave, and convinced, and clever people are they going to have to kill? She will not flinch. But someone will remember. Someone has to.

You corner the rabbit, and you begin to see its character. If there is comfort to be had it is in this: The courage, the convictions, they don’t appear from ether. Drawn out, encouraged, shaped by circumstance — but there is yet some nature in them.

— This Gwenaëlle will not be. But someone like her could, as yet.

"He failed me every single day of his life but the last one."

It is an unflinching bit of character assassination. It is said with as much conviction as her assertion that his bravery must not be forgotten; it is, perhaps, why. To be Emeric's daughter has been a thankless task for so many years, and in his death she doesn't pretend that his life was other than it was -

but he loved her, and he loved her as thanklessly as she had always, in spite of herself, loved him. When it mattered, it mattered most. Her gaze drops to her sewing, and if her eyes are wet then Wren seems like the sort of person not rude or awkward enough to notice.

"So it should be remembered," after a slight pause. "What he did. What he was willing to do."

They’d had a conversation, once. A long time ago, and not so very long at all. The Herald. Trevelyan. Two faces within one. She had surely seen ugly moments. Small ones. Selfish. A collection of flaws, occluded by sacrifice.

A peculiar inversion now. Living, Emeric is in no danger of finding his faults obscured. His virtues?

She watches the wall, grants Gwen what little space may be afforded.

"It shall," If only in a burning wick, a snatched line of ink. Emeric Vauquelin, she can imagine it beginning, has ideals. No more insane a suggestion than anything else she need write. "I swear it."

Edited 2017-03-01 11:36 (UTC)

"Thank you."

And that's that - Gwenaëlle doesn't quite have it in her to linger on that any longer. Discussing it even so far is well out of her comfort, and so it's...settled. The message she would have sent will be. Delivered to who? Even if only Wren remembers, that will be - that will have to be enough.

It seems unfair. Wren is going to have to do a great deal of remembering. (Her uncle has never looked so soft around the eyes.)

"Back to the drawing board on marriage," is what she says, eventually. "Though I never planned to, anyway, so there's that."

By the time she does, Wren's gaze has shifted upwards, to the low ceiling beyond. She blinks when she glances back down, recenters upon the conversation.

"A fine trick, if you can manage it." There are dowagers aplenty of Orlais. To her knowledge, markedly fewer noble spinsters. An absence of heirs is a recipe for chaos. "Though you've not struck me as the sort to run for the Chantry."

That being the more usual method.

"How did you intend to beat your suitors back?"

"The same ways as I ever did, probably. Declining seems to work well enough most of the time. My mother nearly trapped me once, but I wriggled out of that one-" on top of Asher Hardie, a fond memory for all he was the first of many losses to follow from Skyhold, "-and she knew as well as I did my lord would never press the issue once she was gone."

Or she might not have pushed it so hard while she still lived.

Gwenaëlle shrugs; "I'm not important enough to force."

Wren lifts her teacup in the imitation of a toast. Wryly:

"To not being terribly important." She sets it down again without drinking. "It took a decade or so for my mother to give up."

Furious with her, unspeaking, and still scrambling for a match. In another light, it might look like love. It never felt it.

"My mother was grimly determined." Both of them, in their way. "But she was also bedridden and she was gone long before Skyhold. Her husband was a great disappointment to her, you'd think she'd understand my reticence--"

Which is said too dryly to be meant in earnest. She and Anne understood one another just fine, except perhaps in the ways that might have mattered more.

"She wanted me to be something I wasn't. I tried, but Maker, I had limits."

If you speak casually enough of a tiger, you can describe your way about its teeth. The blur of stripes, the impression only of a cat.

Wren thinks she can see its shape. Little better does that arm her.

"We all have people to become," Unless you're Benny and above all these scrublords who just can't get their shit together like Mom. "Despite what we would will for ourselves. For each other."

Her huff of air is knowing, but she looks down at her needle, her work. Some conversations are easier to have if you can convince yourself you aren't really having them--

Or just pivot away, before they might become something else. Example:

"I didn't tell him of your death in a particular way," she says, instead, after enough of a pause that it had been apparent that little huff was all the answer she deemed necessary to what they all might become. "When we thought you were dead. I didn't know what it was until it was done."

The needle catches the candlelight; she is as swift with it as her knives, swifter.

"He took it hard."

Of course it’s easier if the tiger doesn’t start fucking running.

Wren taps the edge of the book, an idleness of thought. The redirection is obvious, but it’s not worth it to pursue. This isn’t an interview, and any pain they push past will be forgotten again — neither can she bear to think of this as some ghoulish practice round.

(How often does she get out of conversations that way? Through the other party just giving in?)

"I didn’t intend to tell you." A small admission. The association, her interests in Gwen beyond a few letters to be written — until very recently, a very moot point. If Gwen had wished to enquire, she’d had the Spire as a basis to do so. No, Wren didn’t intend to tell her, and she suspects the girl did not intend to ask. Why should she? Gervais would have been a mystery far-removed from her own life. "Though I doubt it would have prevented the surprise."

She’d not have described him in any close terms. Hello, good to meet you, remember your dead uncle? I would have been the one to do it, if he'd ever stepped from line.

Not an association to breed affection, particularly from an outsider's view. However many decades you live a floor apart, however many months you spend around the same fire, you are two sides removed; in the public eye, and in the cold implacability of fact.

A moment’s hesitation, she’s been working her way up to this decision. Knows that if she says it aloud, she'll remember this too.

"I’m not going to look for him." There's nothing to be gained of it. So much to be lost. “But I hope that one day he still knows you."

Before her gaze rises, Gwenaëlle's head tilts; the wheels turning before she speaks, thoughtful in a way that she isn't always credited with being. (And fair enough - she has a sharp tongue and poor impulse control, her capacity for insight is not the first impression she makes anyone, even people who've read her work before.)

"It's one thing to meet him here, isn't it," she says, taking care with her needle not to stab it through her own thumb. "Something else, hunting him down."

There are kinder ways to say it -

but only one way it would look. How different it would be, on his heels in the shadows. Gwenaëlle is not unsympathetic, for all that.

"We all thought he was dead. My lord died believing that."

(The number of times she managed to call him her father in this conversation is - substantial, already, but she's done.)

"Yes."

Gratitude goes unvoiced, but she feels it in her bones: the small affirmation, that her logic is sound. That she'll be doing the right thing.

She is le limier — he’s murdered two templars. There’s no get-out-of-Rite-free card, even if few would dare touch the survivors; men and women now going on two stolen years of life. And who else might she alert through the search?

To find Gervais is to find one of them dead.

"That was ill-done." My lord. How easy it must be to spin that towards the appearance of flippancy. Her head tips back. "He kept all those damn letters. It wouldn’t have killed him to post one."

Dear brother, don’t look for me? Don’t mourn? Sincerely yours, Anonymous?

Perhaps it would have inspired a search, or perhaps it was only paranoia that stayed his hand. Likely some ugly middle distance of the two. It sits poorly.

Edited 2017-03-03 07:13 (UTC)

"Wouldn't it." Gwenaëlle's bitterness doesn't taste like a criticism; she might wish, a little, that her father had known his younger brother lived. She can't quite bring herself to blame him for keeping himself secret, all things considered. All that she's seen since it began. All that she's seen of him, since.

He'd been there when she hadn't even known she needed him-- she's willing to believe that he would be, again.

(She's read the letters. Read through everything her father said and didn't say; laughed until she wept, until the weeping was awful and she was sick with it. She wishes, sometimes, she'd known the man he was to his brother.)

"I did wish I could tell Lady Leblanc, but I don't know what became of her." He'd mentored her in the Spire; politely ignored the flicker of feelings she'd harbored for him until they subsided. "That's this fucking place all over." The dead, the dying, and the just lost-- the people you no longer bother listening for news of.

"Maker willing, she is far from here."

The prickly healer. She remembers the reputation, knows the association — and yet cannot recall a single conversation between them. Even in such confines, some paths never cross.

But her name had been on the records about Skyhold, upon the mouths of the younger mages. She’d lived long enough to shape the direction of things, needn’t linger here for her impact to be felt.

Leblanc has done her part. Let her be somewhere distant now. Safe, or whatever may be mistaken for it, in days as these.

(There is no such place. The Maker wills none of this ugly, mortal work. This is not a hope for now, but for what might yet be —)

"Somewhere with an actual sun."

Leblanc, Gwenaëlle thinks, is probably dead.

Which is sort of funny, in an awful way, after all of this. (Everything is in an awful way, now, it's just the way of the world, but maybe it doesn't have to be. Maybe these ghosts can keep their promises, and maybe none of this ever happened.) Gregoire, probably, is also dead; she can't quite imagine him surviving so long. To be fair, of course, she wouldn't have pictured herself here as she is, either, so -

Who can know.

"My lord used to read me parts of the letters he wrote," she says, after a while of quiet, neat work. "I never paid much heed."

"I would not have expected you to."

Though she can’t say whether Gervais had. She can't say how much he might have guessed of it, holding the words so precious as he did. If Emeric was a lifeline, Emeric would have known it. But Gwenaëlle? A stranger’s overbearing interest. A false familiarity, pinched cheeks by post.

"They were windows," Paintings, really. A curated view. "And you had others to look upon."

She has, at this point, filled half a page with a shoddy diagram of a river, its paths forking towards some unknown. Wren holds it from herself to regard. Yes, she’s being terribly useful today.

"He’d share stories of you," Wren is — uncomfortable, around children of a certain age, but she’d followed the small sagas with interest. A letter is safe, removed. A letter does not scream for its mother. "From time to time. Few did."

She cannot blame them, and yet.

"It made —" Them? No. She catches herself, "— Us easier around him."

"I never questioned the Circles." A neutral enough observation, her critical expression aimed at her needlework and not the woman who had been of those responsible for enforcing the strictures that defined mage lives. And yet. "When he was in one, at any rate, I didn't. Best place for them."

A little shrug.

"But Morrigan was the first mage I knew well."

And she was a woman - is, Gwenaëlle hopes, prays that no news is good news - who left an impression.

"The Arcane Advisor?"

It’s not as though she knows of another, but it’s still the sort of news worth confirming. What circles she travels in.

Wren puts the journal down. She has questioned the Circles, still does. You can’t live in one and not. Even the coldest heart, the warmest surroundings — there are moments of doubt. You iron them down. You change what you can. You keep your thoughts to yourself.

"I have heard tales —" Exaggerated, doubtless, and yet. "— A force of personality, I am told."

And. Literal force.

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