OPEN LOG: Establishing a Base in Kirkwall

[faderifting]

WHO: Many People
WHAT: Cleaning up Kirkwall
WHEN: Cloudreach 1-21
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: This log post is for characters who go early to Kirkwall to assist in preparing it for the rest of those assigned there. We strongly encourage IC discussion of things left to character discretion—someone should definitely do a crystal post to discuss what to do with the personal belongings left behind in the Gallows or what new form the statues should take!

Kirkwall once lived on the edge of the Tevinter Imperium and was home to nearly a million slaves. Stolen from elven lands or shipped from across the sea, all slaves fed the Imperium's unquenchable thirst for expansion. They worked in massive quarries and sweltering foundries that produced stone and steel for the Empire.

The city's complicated past is not easy to forget, history having earmarked many corners of the stone city. A ship approaching the harbor spots the city's namesake: an imposing black wall. It is visible for miles, and carved into the cliff side are a pantheon of vile guardians representing the Old Gods. Over the years, the Chantry has effaced many of these profane sentinels, but it will take many more years to erase them all.

Also carved into the cliff is a channel that permits ships into the city's interior. Flanking the channel are two massive bronze statues—the Twins of Kirkwall. The statues have a practical use. Kirkwall sits next to the narrowest point of the Waking Sea, and a massive chain net can be erected between the statues and the lighthouse, closing off the only narrow navigable lane. This stranglehold on sea traffic is jealously guarded by the ever-changing rulers of the city as the net trolls taxes, tolls, and extortions in from the sea.

—From In Pursuit of Knowledge: The Travels of a Chantry Scholar, by Brother Genitivi

---

Establishing a presence in Kirkwall is a delicate matter. First, there's Provisional Viscount Bran Cavin—a man so used to batting back friendly offers of entirely harmless occupation of the battered city-state that his first three responses to the Inquisition's leadership appeared to be slightly personalized form letters. Proving that the Inquisition is here to work and not to conquer will be a process. The first step in that process is the second reason the move is delicate: the only building the Provisional Viscount is willing to part with is the Gallows, left quarantined and unoccupied since Knight-Commander Meredith Stannard's famous crystallization into red lyrium in the courtyard. The Gallows have since overgrown with red lyrium. If anyone is going to live and work there, there's a lot of work to do.

↠ Cloudreach 1-3: The Journey There
↠ Cloudreach 3-4: Arrival
↠ Cloudreach 4-14: Haunted
↠ Cloudreach 14-21: Spring Cleaning

Comments

[inagutterson]

Congratulations, Yngvi's snorting laugh comes out.

"You'd get kicked out for saying that. Wouldn't burn you for it when your time was up, you might enjoy it and have something written down for scandalous things. I do have a list of every Chantry we got banned for going to for enthusiastic worship."

Is that how you put it when you need to run out in your boots, clutching everything to you with everything else flapping in the breeze?

"Same as parents do. Feign deafness."

[limier]

"I am sorry," She tips her head to the side, cups a free hand around an ear. "I did not catch that —"

Wren may not be anyone's dad, but she's committed.

"— If this business of public debate continues, I may do so." Feign deafness, that is. "Will I know any Chantries on the list? Anyone that I should avoid mentioning the Boneflayer name to?"

As though she intended to at all. A contact in the lyrium trade, that's all Yngvi's been of the reports thus far. Specifying Carta would be redundant.

[inagutterson]

"Dad? Dad it's your son. Yngvi. The handsome talented one."

Somewhere in Thedas, Gunnar curses his name as per usual, the next letter from him should be interesting ot say the least.

"Pretty much every Chantry we ever went to that? Not the gaudy ones in Orlais, they're just tasteless and you've got other stuff going on there. I don't know how they classed the thing with the wine in that one place though..."

They still got hired. You can't argue with results in the end and the reputation helped in a way because it was a scandalous thing for Orlesians to gossip about behind the masks. "One of them wrote the big fancy one in her book but that never happened, Melisende would've actually murdered us for that one."

[limier]

"The statues are so pretty, one forgets they're of an execution."

Gaudy. That's a word for it. Easier to think of another life, than to carry Andraste's legacy in this one. Doubtless it inspires some: Elevates the story, eases belief. More practically, the nobility enjoy their comforts. The money only flows so long as they continue to appear monied.

It's distasteful; so's wheeling a corpse out in a barrel. Still has to get done.

(You put out the fires at your feet before you set any more,)

"But you've got a book about you," She considers. "I may need to learn to read. Or perhaps I shall pay one of these fine, Orlesian scholars to dictate to me —"

[inagutterson]

"When I think about all the money it took to make the statues, and we're talking workers even if they weren't paid for it properly because let's face it, you don't pay them properly you just pay one person with some grand vision. Then the materials for the statues. The materials to make those into the finished product. Then the equipment? It's a good con."

Saying nothing of the lyrium, the armour, the vestments, the wine, the candles, a thousand other things that add up when he sees them in their red garments (dye isn't cheap but it's cheaper than lyrium if everyone's hard-up in some crackdown and you're trying to fob off a desperate Templar) asking for coin from folk who don't have it? Well, isn't Andraste watching? Andraste the slave? Who freed the slaves? Who marched alongside the elves they forget about?

He can picture her handling a corpse easier than her in repose.

"Come off it, Templars can read, there's no other way to memorise the Chant without your tongues falling off. And I'm not in it." He's never read the substance of the book, maybe he is. "They're filth. Utter filth. Very accurate in their depictions of Avvar life." (They're not, that was on purpose and she's something of a laughing stock for it.)

[limier]

She's been told now and again how the Chantry uses her. They do, but she chose it, and it’s been a fair trade. Food in her belly, clothes on her back; books, training, a cause. A little box in her room and a routine,

She owes them: Everyone who pays their tithes and hopes for a bit of peace.

"So I should have it dictated."

Filth's better among friends. Otherwise it's just the unfortunate drivel you find tucked away beneath the bunks. (The awkwardness always to wonder: Is this really the best they could get their hands on?)

"Do you ever," She begins, tries to decide whether to follow through. He's unhappy enough without adding her own mess. But grand statues crumble, grand visions fade. The con dies with the artist. "Think of how this shall be remembered? If anyone will at all. How small this business might seem, a few decades hence."

One way or another. Life will wind on, or the Venatori will stamp them out raw. Either way, she'll be long-gone; Yngvi, as any beetle, may survive a time beneath the boot.

[inagutterson]

Want to go tell the mages that? How there are people who'd kill, and do kill, for those same things? Yngvi'll watch and wait. He's got some traps he can set out, no charge, no fuss.

"Depends on how sturdy you think your ribs are. Or that of the one doing the reading. Might require a healer on retainer, some salons in the summer seasons have readings and between that and the corsets their lungs go pop." Yngvi does not put his finger in his mouth to make the noise, he knows where some of these corpses have been and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Yngvi looks up at her. Looks through her and there's a lurch in his gut because Wren is a Templar after all, Templars take lyrium, Templars need lyrium and for all the jokes it burns a hole through them. Is this why there was carving in Skyhold? So that some stone would remember? "One day all the mountains'll be whittled down by the wind and rain too. It's just names on bits of paper, trees wherever we buried the Dalish, bones and spirits eventually. Flags and banners. Might get some good songs and stories, that's the best you can hope for, that and someone that knows how to tell them and do them justice."

Nothing is permanent and Yngvi prefers it that way. That he can slip through the passage of time itself, through the eye of a needle.

[limier]

There's a funny expression on her face, difficult to place. Perhaps it's comforting, that none of this will matter in the end; she'd find it more so, if she could believe it made anything matter less in the moment.

But it's a longer string of serious words than she's ever heard of him, and that's something in itself. An offering. If it still all matters for too fucking much, and too little by turns —

— Well. At least they're not alone in that.

"Live in the now, yes?" Hashtag YOLO, tell your friends, but she doesn't sound as though her heart's in it. The body pile's not far ahead, she stoops to begin prying Bonesy out of the barrel. "Or in the stomach of a bird."

Let the Dalish keep their trees. (She does listen when he speaks, even if it's not to her.)

"Better voices of those, anyway."