faderifting: (Default)
Fade Rift Mods ([personal profile] faderifting) wrote in [community profile] faderift2017-04-02 10:59 pm

OPEN LOG: Establishing a Base in Kirkwall

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
inagutterson: (Default)

[personal profile] inagutterson 2017-04-23 07:46 pm (UTC)(link)
The first sort of magical healing he's received in the Inquisition that hasn't been a swiped poultice or potion (coin is left, or something equivalent in value) feels so different to Amalia that he's waiting for the punch. It gives him time to sit still so he doesn't mess up her work because that's rude (and Amalia would give him an actual punch, he doesn't fancy testing the waters with a stranger.)

Rules tend to be a very hazy thing to someone who was taught a strange version of the law that revolved around loopholes and breaking it and bending it or gaming the system but he did learn things. Mostly to not get arrested or to get out of being arrested or have hands cut off or something unpleasant.

"Did you not let go of your spirit when it was time? Augur taught us all that bit, said it was different to Circle mages here and how they do it, you all get possessed for a bit then you need to let it back out of you." He's butchering Gjurd's far more measured and eloquent words, what do you expect from a Kirkwall boy?
theexile: (Here to help)

[personal profile] theexile 2017-04-24 06:58 am (UTC)(link)
"I released my teacher when the time came. That was some time ago." Several years actually. "The gods led me to leave the life I was living behind and to move towards this Inquisition instead."

That left out a lot of details but it was the absolute truth as she saw it. Kattrin smiled a little but really she saw no reason to keep that part from the dwarf. He knew some measure of the practices of her former people and so he had earned the answer to his question. At least as far as that much went.

"It is not common for an Augur to share such things with outsiders though. The practices of the Avvar are often kept among the Avvar alone since others may find them displeasing."
inagutterson: (That's all and that's no joke)

[personal profile] inagutterson 2017-04-24 10:20 pm (UTC)(link)
"Asher was more Avvar than his blood said. Things festering nearly killed him and I guess they did. His mother hid that she was half-Avvar, Asher's grandfather says that Asher's a joke the gods played on her for denying who she was and she exiled Asher from her home. When Asher took us there for the first time he gave me and my brother a last name all proper like, said we were his family."

Yngvi still struggles with that sometimes. Family. Family maybe being a thing you got to choose instead of being a thing that happened to you because Asher said you were allowed to have a family that way if you wanted to. Roaming around the hold and only being teased gently or when he was actually a menace. Honoured guest and it meaning something for the first time in however many years he'd had. (Too few, it's generally accepted he has too few under his belt.)

It's unfair he went how he did, Yngvi hasn't made his peace with it even if he said he did.

"Look, no one's shoving a spirit up me and you lot haven't blown up my home so why would I care? You were all around 'fore everyone else yeah? So. You know what you're doing with it. Got sat down by a fire and told stories because if we were his family, everyone said me and Gunnar should know things."
theexile: (The Exile)

[personal profile] theexile 2017-05-05 12:18 am (UTC)(link)
"They are a very open hold. Not every hold would have felt the same as they." The one she'd left certainly wouldn't have. Their views on lowlanders were far more...unfriendly. Certainly more so than the hold she'd been born to. Not that it mattered as much now since she wouldn't be seeing any of the holds ever again.

"There would be many stories to tell though."

Of that she was certain. The Avvar were different but they had just as long of a history. Perhaps longer one could argue.