WHO: Morrigan, open WHAT: Witching around WHEN: Drakonis; present timeline WHERE: Skyhold NOTES: If you'd like a specific starter, grab me on discord. Starters in threads as per usual.
He mouthed the names, quietly committing them to memory.
"I will seek them out," he said with a small nod.
The way her eyes fell to the hand mirror and seemed to struggle to return to meeting his face again was almost as amusing to him as her statement about truth. Because she was so very right.
"Yes. There are three truths all living beings possess," he explained. "The mirror can help discern such things."
The Eluvians being more advanced than the sending crystals was an interesting anecdote - certainly something to ponder.
"Did the Eluvians have other purposes then?"
If the crystals were so primitive in comparison, that seemed a logical conclusion. Otherwise it seemed a lot of effort just to talk over long distances when a simpler method existed. But maybe the elves of long ago lacked a certain pragmatism.
There's a thought that stirs somewhere in her, the cold dark places that she could sink into deep as the swamps of her childhood. She's careful to try to keep the surprise from her face, better than she was before the Blight, before Orlais, but something slips through. The wide eyes before the almost coy smile that comes to cover for it.
"Truths such as the nature of their being? If, for instance, one was possessed? Prior to twisting into an abomination, is that the sort of truth it might reveal?"
Flemeth, always Flemeth and what her mother truly is because not a soul whispers of her unless they want to talk legends with Morrigan herself, or stories of the Blight or the Champion but the things she wants to know. Flemeth isn't truly human after all, Morrigan is sure enough of that but she cannot safely get an answer from her mother even if she ever thought she'd get anything close to one in the first place to make it worth the risk.
"The elven language that remains among the elves is that which is spoken, even among the Dalish there are few who read it. Insufferably vague, poetic in a way. Their magic and works were much the same way." When she's the one telling the tales, she'll be able to figure out if anyone else says something she doesn't want them to. Easier to trace it back and to creep up on them as a giant spider that way. "The ruins of their settlements are in far-flung corners throughout Thedas. No roads to connect them."
That-- well sometimes Morrigan wants to be clever because she does know this but do others connect the dots with details laid out just so?
It was a cold, humorless smile, and though his voice remained calm and even, there was an edge of purpose to it.
He listened attentively as Morrigan explained. True, any language could be vague, poetic and opaque as a thick fog in the right (or, depending on your perspective, wrong) hands. The Medicine Seller did not consider it a day well spent if he wasn't insufferably vague and poetic at some hapless soul at least once.
But the absence of roads between their civilizations gave far more clue to the nature of the Eluvians.
"They are doors," he stated, uncharacteristically abrupt.
"A method to detect or reveal them then? There are some who go about as easily as you or I might yet others...ruined flesh, twisted and misshapen. A thing that haunts the dreams of those who see them."
Not a thing she would expect from a medicine seller, if that is what he is. She has her doubts. A person can be so many things all at once. What heals harms in the right amount, and she knows what Wynne could do as a spirit healer, that Bruce had walked the world as a surgeon to hide that he was a mage.
That he says it so abruptly is-- well there were so few who knew, content to have any small pieces of the past, willing to take her at her word (she the arcane advisor, she the companion to the Hero of Ferelden, she the daughter of Flemeth better known to them as Asha'bellanar) and it's a thing she isn't sure what to do with. Like a cat who finds its fur rubbed the wrong way, attempting to sort it lest someone see it.
"Yes." There's a reluctance to attempt the lie here when they've talked about mirrors, when someone has guessed at it and correctly at that. "No others in Skyhold have come to the correct conclusion alone. Our enemy has attempted to take mine and to have another shattered one repaired after we retrieved a second. Given his particular delusions and aspirations, one can imagine such doors would be useful to him."
The wording is careful. Others in Skyhold know. They simply didn't come to the conclusions in Skyhold. So. Not directly a lie.
"It helps reveal certain truths so that the sword may be drawn," he explained. "There other tools to discern the location of a Mononoke."
He paused, staring up absentmindedly at the roof, still as a statue until he seemed to, at last, return to reality.
"Ah. Forgive me. Abominations."
He wasn't partial to the term if the way he practically hissed the word was any indication.
Still, he was pleased he'd come to the right conclusion. Morrigan answering his prior question with a vague statement about an absence of roads left him with only a few possible ideas, however.
"You gave a good clue. Is one mirror connected to another?"
"We have few such tools. Templars might use a phylactery for a mage if they have their blood, a tool for hunting down escaped Circle mages before the Circles fell. Is it always the sword where you are from?"
The Litany was a rare thing, preventative but then there are other places with their own traditions, their own ways of doing things. Perhaps there are methods the Inquisition might learn from elsewhere and one day Thedas will be the better for it.
Unlikely.
"Tis what many become when one is taught fear - when the demons come, she will have no strength in her to deny them and then she is no longer her own." Arguably that's the abominable part but you'd be hard-pressed to find many souls in Thedas who would agree to such a line of thinking.
Sighing through her nose, she gives her answer flatly. "No." And yes. In a manner of speaking. "No longer. That would be entirely too simple, fortunately and unfortunately for us all."
A change from here where so much is so limited. Says she though she feels entitled given all she has seen, all she has worked with, all she has accomplished thus far in her life. Morrigan, after all, slips her skin and copies the soul of another creature.
"Much depends on the hand that holds it, whether or not it stays sheathed. A sword is a symbol of many a thing, to some a sword is peace, to another tis the end." Everything depends on how you slice it.
"If you are able to know where you are going. There is a truth rarely spoken too, in part since it comes from a Dalish clan, and for it concerns eluvians of how an elf died caught sick from the Blight and was lost. So it goes." By the way, that eluvian is hanging out here too.
Morrigan doesn't always trust what passes for 'understanding' when it comes to some. She's met Templars after all.
"A Blight...A Blight blackens the land enough that the ground itself festers. Beasts are driven mad and some became tainted same as men or elves or dwarves might; wolves become blightwolves, bears turn to bereskarns, spiders into corrupted spiders, hideous twisted creatures. Blights have lasted many decades in the past, they have driven the world to the brink." The memory of the Fifth Blight, however brief it was, turns her voice sharper. It had been a terrible time to see the darkspawn, to smell them, to hear their laughter before they rushed out of wherever they had hidden. "Towards the end the sky itself turns dark to allow the horde to advance more easily by day."
"The Mononoke- the Abominations- such beings do not come into existence by accident. Though it is a spirit that finds them, they are fed by the fates of men."
He doubted he needed to say it directly - they were often born from atrocities committed by people and spurred by those actions into some twisted, grotesque. If one were to put down something that was once a person, those things should be brought to light first.
"Three things must be made known. Katachi. Makoto. Kotowari. The Form, Truth, and Regret."
And yet again, Morrigan had little morsels of information that the Medicine Seller found to be of interest.
"The sun causes them some trouble, hmm? In that case, I may have something you will find useful."
"Are you certain that it is fate? Could it not be chance?" Her face sours, lip curling as a shudder runs down her spine as if she's tempted it herself, tapped along a web to send the spider running out. "I sound like my mother."
If you knew her mother, you'd know how horrific a thought that is.
Morrigan repeats the words slowly and carefully, the unfamiliar sounds odd in her mouth but they're new and she wants to hold them tight, to commit them to memory.
"Regret?" Surprising, it must work very differently where he comes from for. But she hears of something useful and her head tips, not unlike a magpie again (the Korcari Wilds slighted her as a child, truly). "Is that so?"
"Chance belies a lack of intent. Chance is a boulder rolling down a slope."
He smiled that sharp, thin smile of his.
"Fate is the hand that pushed it."
But philosophizing about the nature of chance and fate was much less important than discussing the monstrosities people became when fused with spirits.
He set his medicine pack down on a nearby bench, tugging open the bottom drawer. Morrigan had given him good information - it seemed only fair to give her something useful in exchange.
"Form is the physical state. Truth is the state of mind. Regret is the state of the soul," he explained as he carefully scrawled the formula for his exploding powder. It started off as a simple mix of potash, aluminium powder and sulfur, but there were other additions as well. It had been useful many times in the past in driving off spirits that recoiled for sunlight - perhaps it would have some use against Darkspawn.
He let the ink dry, and then folded the paper, handing it to Morrigan.
"Need it be pushed? The slope erodes over time as it's fate's design or some small thing happens along and, by chance, it has a weight just enough to tip it."
It's so rare that anyone will ever indulge such a thing without getting bored or annoyed, telling her to stop speaking in trivialities or that it's all some witchy nonsense or whatever else they think sounds like it might put her in her place long enough for them to get away.
"Split into three," she murmurs, and it makes a sort of sense when she knows how so many spells work. Even with the clumsy systems of the Chantry there are always spells that work to dull the mind or confuse it, spells that inflict something upon the body itself and others that go far deeper down into the very core of a person. A chance meeting once again that has given rise to something and someone she will keep an eye on closely. Taking the paper, she examines it and smiles with warmth. "You have my thanks. Should you wish to speak privately, most days I can be found in my study not so far from here, the door is often open."
(Because she will have questions but she has the sense not to ask them out here with people flitting about that she doesn't know so well.)
That was, after all, the point of fate. Something brought about by the actions and choices of others.
The invitation to visit her in her office came as somewhat of a surprise. Part of it was probably the fact that he never lingered in a place long enough that anyone would extend such an invitation, so the situation was unusual to him. Even those he'd met more than once considered his presence a harbinger of trouble. And most people were not the sorts to leave their office doors open to the kind of trouble he brought.
"I will look for you there, then."
Gathering up his things, he hefted the wooden case onto his back, and bowed.
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no subject
"I will seek them out," he said with a small nod.
The way her eyes fell to the hand mirror and seemed to struggle to return to meeting his face again was almost as amusing to him as her statement about truth. Because she was so very right.
"Yes. There are three truths all living beings possess," he explained. "The mirror can help discern such things."
The Eluvians being more advanced than the sending crystals was an interesting anecdote - certainly something to ponder.
"Did the Eluvians have other purposes then?"
If the crystals were so primitive in comparison, that seemed a logical conclusion. Otherwise it seemed a lot of effort just to talk over long distances when a simpler method existed. But maybe the elves of long ago lacked a certain pragmatism.
no subject
"Truths such as the nature of their being? If, for instance, one was possessed? Prior to twisting into an abomination, is that the sort of truth it might reveal?"
Flemeth, always Flemeth and what her mother truly is because not a soul whispers of her unless they want to talk legends with Morrigan herself, or stories of the Blight or the Champion but the things she wants to know. Flemeth isn't truly human after all, Morrigan is sure enough of that but she cannot safely get an answer from her mother even if she ever thought she'd get anything close to one in the first place to make it worth the risk.
"The elven language that remains among the elves is that which is spoken, even among the Dalish there are few who read it. Insufferably vague, poetic in a way. Their magic and works were much the same way." When she's the one telling the tales, she'll be able to figure out if anyone else says something she doesn't want them to. Easier to trace it back and to creep up on them as a giant spider that way. "The ruins of their settlements are in far-flung corners throughout Thedas. No roads to connect them."
That-- well sometimes Morrigan wants to be clever because she does know this but do others connect the dots with details laid out just so?
no subject
It was a cold, humorless smile, and though his voice remained calm and even, there was an edge of purpose to it.
He listened attentively as Morrigan explained. True, any language could be vague, poetic and opaque as a thick fog in the right (or, depending on your perspective, wrong) hands. The Medicine Seller did not consider it a day well spent if he wasn't insufferably vague and poetic at some hapless soul at least once.
But the absence of roads between their civilizations gave far more clue to the nature of the Eluvians.
"They are doors," he stated, uncharacteristically abrupt.
no subject
Not a thing she would expect from a medicine seller, if that is what he is. She has her doubts. A person can be so many things all at once. What heals harms in the right amount, and she knows what Wynne could do as a spirit healer, that Bruce had walked the world as a surgeon to hide that he was a mage.
That he says it so abruptly is-- well there were so few who knew, content to have any small pieces of the past, willing to take her at her word (she the arcane advisor, she the companion to the Hero of Ferelden, she the daughter of Flemeth better known to them as Asha'bellanar) and it's a thing she isn't sure what to do with. Like a cat who finds its fur rubbed the wrong way, attempting to sort it lest someone see it.
"Yes." There's a reluctance to attempt the lie here when they've talked about mirrors, when someone has guessed at it and correctly at that. "No others in Skyhold have come to the correct conclusion alone. Our enemy has attempted to take mine and to have another shattered one repaired after we retrieved a second. Given his particular delusions and aspirations, one can imagine such doors would be useful to him."
The wording is careful. Others in Skyhold know. They simply didn't come to the conclusions in Skyhold. So. Not directly a lie.
no subject
He paused, staring up absentmindedly at the roof, still as a statue until he seemed to, at last, return to reality.
"Ah. Forgive me. Abominations."
He wasn't partial to the term if the way he practically hissed the word was any indication.
Still, he was pleased he'd come to the right conclusion. Morrigan answering his prior question with a vague statement about an absence of roads left him with only a few possible ideas, however.
"You gave a good clue. Is one mirror connected to another?"
no subject
The Litany was a rare thing, preventative but then there are other places with their own traditions, their own ways of doing things. Perhaps there are methods the Inquisition might learn from elsewhere and one day Thedas will be the better for it.
Unlikely.
"Tis what many become when one is taught fear - when the demons come, she will have no strength in her to deny them and then she is no longer her own." Arguably that's the abominable part but you'd be hard-pressed to find many souls in Thedas who would agree to such a line of thinking.
Sighing through her nose, she gives her answer flatly. "No." And yes. In a manner of speaking. "No longer. That would be entirely too simple, fortunately and unfortunately for us all."
no subject
He might have remarked about how there are many ways to skin a cat if he didn't find the phrase too ironic to contemplate, and twice as distasteful.
Still, he had a playful side and decided to give Morrigan a bit of a riddle of his own.
"But a sword's purpose is not always to kill."
And at last, some truly interesting information on the force of nature that was Corypheus.
"To possess a quick way around would be a boon to either side."
no subject
A change from here where so much is so limited. Says she though she feels entitled given all she has seen, all she has worked with, all she has accomplished thus far in her life. Morrigan, after all, slips her skin and copies the soul of another creature.
"Much depends on the hand that holds it, whether or not it stays sheathed. A sword is a symbol of many a thing, to some a sword is peace, to another tis the end." Everything depends on how you slice it.
"If you are able to know where you are going. There is a truth rarely spoken too, in part since it comes from a Dalish clan, and for it concerns eluvians of how an elf died caught sick from the Blight and was lost. So it goes." By the way, that eluvian is hanging out here too.
no subject
"Understanding, yes. The three truths must be understood before it can be drawn."
The rule may have seemed arbitrary to some, even impractical, but the Medicine Seller had his reasons.
"The Blight seems to afflict many things if even mirrors can catch it."
no subject
Morrigan doesn't always trust what passes for 'understanding' when it comes to some. She's met Templars after all.
"A Blight...A Blight blackens the land enough that the ground itself festers. Beasts are driven mad and some became tainted same as men or elves or dwarves might; wolves become blightwolves, bears turn to bereskarns, spiders into corrupted spiders, hideous twisted creatures. Blights have lasted many decades in the past, they have driven the world to the brink." The memory of the Fifth Blight, however brief it was, turns her voice sharper. It had been a terrible time to see the darkspawn, to smell them, to hear their laughter before they rushed out of wherever they had hidden. "Towards the end the sky itself turns dark to allow the horde to advance more easily by day."
no subject
He doubted he needed to say it directly - they were often born from atrocities committed by people and spurred by those actions into some twisted, grotesque. If one were to put down something that was once a person, those things should be brought to light first.
"Three things must be made known. Katachi. Makoto. Kotowari. The Form, Truth, and Regret."
And yet again, Morrigan had little morsels of information that the Medicine Seller found to be of interest.
"The sun causes them some trouble, hmm? In that case, I may have something you will find useful."
no subject
If you knew her mother, you'd know how horrific a thought that is.
Morrigan repeats the words slowly and carefully, the unfamiliar sounds odd in her mouth but they're new and she wants to hold them tight, to commit them to memory.
"Regret?" Surprising, it must work very differently where he comes from for. But she hears of something useful and her head tips, not unlike a magpie again (the Korcari Wilds slighted her as a child, truly). "Is that so?"
no subject
He smiled that sharp, thin smile of his.
"Fate is the hand that pushed it."
But philosophizing about the nature of chance and fate was much less important than discussing the monstrosities people became when fused with spirits.
He set his medicine pack down on a nearby bench, tugging open the bottom drawer. Morrigan had given him good information - it seemed only fair to give her something useful in exchange.
"Form is the physical state. Truth is the state of mind. Regret is the state of the soul," he explained as he carefully scrawled the formula for his exploding powder. It started off as a simple mix of potash, aluminium powder and sulfur, but there were other additions as well. It had been useful many times in the past in driving off spirits that recoiled for sunlight - perhaps it would have some use against Darkspawn.
He let the ink dry, and then folded the paper, handing it to Morrigan.
no subject
It's so rare that anyone will ever indulge such a thing without getting bored or annoyed, telling her to stop speaking in trivialities or that it's all some witchy nonsense or whatever else they think sounds like it might put her in her place long enough for them to get away.
"Split into three," she murmurs, and it makes a sort of sense when she knows how so many spells work. Even with the clumsy systems of the Chantry there are always spells that work to dull the mind or confuse it, spells that inflict something upon the body itself and others that go far deeper down into the very core of a person. A chance meeting once again that has given rise to something and someone she will keep an eye on closely. Taking the paper, she examines it and smiles with warmth. "You have my thanks. Should you wish to speak privately, most days I can be found in my study not so far from here, the door is often open."
(Because she will have questions but she has the sense not to ask them out here with people flitting about that she doesn't know so well.)
no subject
That was, after all, the point of fate. Something brought about by the actions and choices of others.
The invitation to visit her in her office came as somewhat of a surprise. Part of it was probably the fact that he never lingered in a place long enough that anyone would extend such an invitation, so the situation was unusual to him. Even those he'd met more than once considered his presence a harbinger of trouble. And most people were not the sorts to leave their office doors open to the kind of trouble he brought.
"I will look for you there, then."
Gathering up his things, he hefted the wooden case onto his back, and bowed.
"As always, it was a pleasure."