faderift | [OPEN] now that you're living on the hill

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[OPEN] now that you're living on the hill

WHO: Simon and OPEN.
WHAT: Getting reacquainted with Kirkwall.
WHEN: Justinian, just like whenever.
WHERE: All over the city.
NOTES: I'm always happy to write up another starter if you'd like!

I. Hanged Man

Simon's never been a big drinker. He doesn't mind letting people size him up and assume he could drink them under the table, but on the whole, he thinks he has enough vices to atone for without being a lush on top of it all.

But some boredom needs the big guns busted out to take care of it. The Hanged Man has mostly lost the aura of forbidden mystery and excitement it had held when he was a teenage recruit in the Gallows, but the aura of shame and insufficient sanitation that's since replaced it isn't enough to keep him away when it's the only place in town he can afford. He's at the bar, on his third pint, cheering on the brawl that's begun on the other side of the room.

II. Living Quarters

There's plenty about the city that seems unfamiliar now that he's returning to it in his thirties, after nearly a decade and an intervening war, and on the whole, the strangeness isn't a bad thing. He hadn't liked the place to begin with. But all the same, there's something to be said for a little bit of familiarity here and there, and sharing the old templar rooms with Cade again isn't the bad kind of deja vu. It's certainly an improvement on the group quarters. He's on his way to move what few possessions he has into the room, whistling as he carries the box.

III. Markets

The marks from being electrically charbroiled by a furious lightning mage are beginning to fade, but the excruciating stiffness of having all his muscles involuntarily locked up and the bruises from the resulting deadweight collapse aren't quite so quick to dissipate.

Or perhaps they would be, if he were a little more patient with them, but Simon is not a man who takes well to any kind of imposition on his physical fitness. An injury that thinks it's going to keep him off the training grounds is an injury that needs to be taught a lesson and slapped right back into its place, damn it. To that end, he's wandering the market in his civvies, in search of some kind of potion or poultice that can teach his ornery muscle strain who's boss.

IV. Wildcard

Go nuts!

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She lowered his arm and gave pause before she looked right at his face. Kattrin could have kept her thoughts to herself but he'd been open with her and that deserved such in return. Honesty was something she highly valued. From anyone really.

"The Templar have been forbidden in the mountains since long before I was born. Even now with the many changes to priority for your order there is still caution taught to all Avvar children. Particularly those that are mages. I know I am not Avvar any longer but I still find it difficult to relax around those I have been taught to mistrust." She looked down, a little off to the side.

"I wish to learn more of you for you have shown me no ill will for being Avvar or mage. Perhaps we could learn from each other. You teach me about the Templar and I teach you of the Avvar." Looking up again, she tilted her head some and offered a hesitant little smile.

"Is this fair trade for you?"

Were she anyone else, Simon would still be pleased at the opportunity to minister about the Chant--or even just to talk about it, whether or not he was talking to someone who wanted to see truth in it. He's been taught all his life that it's his sacred duty to talk about his faith, but he loves doing it purely on its own merits. Like her healing, he'd never ask anything in trade for explaining what the templar path entails and why.

But he's particularly delighted by the offered exchange, when he'd wanted it even more than healing when he sought her out. If she won't be offended by his interest, or else distressed by talk of what she's lost, he'll be an endless fountain of questions.

"Oh, more than fair," he says, all earnestness. "I've always thought your people were fascinating. I've read some of the sagas, or at least the ones translated into trade, but you must know more of them--and I was never sure about how legend-marks work, but they sound so heroic. I don't know how exciting templars in particular are, in comparison, but I'll answer whatever you like. We get everything interesting about us from the Chantry."

She smiled gently at him. His eagerness really was putting her at ease. There was something rather...disarming about him. Kattrin took to helping his arm again while she relaxed, letting him chatter a little before speaking herself.

"I know not of what is written of the Avvar people for I never learned the written word. I can tell you a legend-mark is a great honor to bestow upon a person. A great deed is accomplished by a person and they are given a new name that replaces the family name they once had. That is their name from then on."

Did that make sense? She supposed he would ask if it didn't.

It makes enough sense to answer his unasked questions about it, and he nods, ever the intent audience. Even for someone who's always admired the Avvar more than feared them, she's not at all what he'd anticipated. He'd expected her to be standoffish at best, cold and forbidding at worst--but he ought to have given the benefit of the doubt to someone who joined the Inquisition of her own volition for the purpose of helping and healing. She's not at all like the unfriendly woman of his imagination.

"I'd wondered how many people had them, but if they're legends, then it stands to reason that they'd be rare," he muses. That's not the bit of information that had left him the most curious, though.

"Do you...not have a system of writing, then? I'd assume that if anyone would be using it, it'd be the mages..."

"The Avvar pass tales through spoken word. Or through pictures. I suppose you might call them runes. The words written in the lowlands are not known to me. The Avvar make trade with the Orlesians and obtain books from them. It is actually considered strange to learn to read the words within the pages."

Kattrin herself had always found it strange too. These days she found herself wondering if perhaps she should start to learn. It seemed that people here needed that information.

"Mages have no need for books for we are usually trained as messengers to the gods."

"The runes are something. I've seen them before, but I never had any way of knowing what they meant. Some scholars here in the lowlands study them, but it's all a bit beyond me." Maybe the Avvar feel similarly about the Orlesian texts they trade for, a sort of aesthetic appreciation if nothing else. He finds it interesting that they'd want them.

He's also not completely sure how the second part of her statement follows from the first. "I don't know what you mean by that. What does being a messenger to the gods entail?"

She lowered his arm now, not wanting to overwork the muscle even if the stretch had been good for it. Now she went to get out another salve that would just help to ease any possible tears in the muscle and at the very least relieve the pain and stiffness. It would be a slow road back to health but this was a beginning.

"Not every mage becomes one but they are very attuned to the gods. The lowlands sees them only as spirits. The shaman are lorekeepers and they know the rites and rituals of the people. One stands above them and is the augur. They are considered a spiritual leader of the hold." She gave pause in what she was doing before she added. "It is what I was being trained to become before my exile."

There was no pain or sadness in her tone though. Just a calmness that came from one stating fact.

"It just sounds...dangerous, to me," he says, though he does her the courtesy of listening with every bit as much attention as he had earlier before rendering this judgment. Of course, if the Avvar worship spirits as gods, the lowlanders' view of them--the Andrastians' view in particular--would seem reductive and narrow-minded. It's not lost on Simon, but still--in his view, spirits are spirits, whatever else people might choose to call them.

Exile though she may be, it's clear that she still takes her would-have-been role with deep, pious seriousness, and he wonders at the fact that she doesn't seem upset to have left it behind. But if the discussion isn't so emotionally fraught, he'll let himself ask the questions on his mind.

"What do the gods ask in return for your worship?" Spirits always want something, don't they?

"What does your Maker wish for in return for yours?" It was what it came down to really. Those that worshiped something or someone were giving their devotions to these powerful beings. The Avvar had theirs. The Dwarves had theirs. The Andrastians had theirs. This was what she'd been learning during her time down here.

"Various things can be asked for. A ritual to ask for better harvest. An offering for safe travels. I know that you mistrust the spirits and I would not ask you to change your mind so quickly. But, is it so strange to offer prayer and offering to that which one believes in so one may have a better life?"

Lifting her hand, she tucked some of her hair behind her ear then decided to venture a question of her own. About his believes and his life. "You are Templar. Were you always this? Was it your choice?"

Spirits don't care about those things, he wants to say, and they couldn't grant them anyway, but he doesn't. He'd never say such a thing aloud, not anymore. He knows better. And it isn't so strange, after all, that people would worship the spirits, pray to them, sacrifice to them. They're a hell of a lot more tangible than the Maker. Unlike Him, they're actually present, able to be contacted, and willing to talk. Simon would be lying through his teeth if he said he didn't see the appeal.

"It's not so strange, no," he concedes, rotating his shoulder carefully to see if he can. It's not quite ready for that level of motion. He considers her question, and thinks perhaps he might have to make a couple more concessions into the bargain.

"I did choose it. I always wanted to be a templar. I can't remember a time when I didn't. But we're not all in it of our own accord. Some of the lads I trained with were promised to the Chantry as soon as they were born. Some of them came later because they didn't have any other prospects--too many siblings to inherit anything, too highborn to learn a trade. But we were all sworn to it just the same. I feel sorry now for the ones who didn't want it, but at the time, I just felt like they were spitting in the Maker's face."

So there were those that chose it and those who were given no choice. She felt sorry for those that were the latter. To have that freedom taken away and to be told where one was going...

Kattrin understood what that was like actually. That had been how she'd been brought into the hold she'd fled from. For a second her expression was lost in the past before she brought herself back into the moment.

"Why is it you find interest in the Avvar if you also do not trust how the Avvar live their lives?" There was no judgement her in question, just a curiosity to know how his mind worked.

"I don't, that's--" Startled, he's launching a defense before he even really knows what he wants to say. It isn't about not trusting the Avvar, he wants to say, only about having good reason not to trust the spirits--but to her, he imagines, it seems like one and the same.

"There's more to life than religion," he says lamely, aware of the irony in a statement like that coming from a templar. "I might as well ask why you've come to help us if you don't believe in the Maker. Why heal us if you don't like what the Chantry says about magic? But I know they're two separate matters."

"I do not heal for the Chantry but for the Inquisition. I saw them perform an act that showed me they are on a holy quest. You could say I was guided here." She smiled a little and shook her head. "I do not believe in your Maker but I believe my gods wished me to be here rather than with the Avvar."

The smile faded then and a sort of sadness and even guilt took over. It was not easy to get over her feelings about abandoning her people.

"This exile is my choice because I chose to follow those signs."

It's the first time she's really seemed distressed when she talks of her exile, and he feels guilty even if he hadn't been the one to provoke it.

"Well--no one should fault you for that," he offers, sitting up straighter. "We in the Chantry would be nowhere if Andraste hadn't trusted in her visions. It's a noble thing, to sacrifice for a holy cause. Nothing worth doing's ever easy."

She'd never believed a Templar would be the one to comfort her during one of these moments. To make her feel better about them. Looking up at him, she studied his expression as she listened to him, falling silent for a moment before she spoke again.

"Visions... Yes." She lifted her hand like she was going to touch her shoulder the lowered it again. "Thank you. For your words. You are the first to not show any hesitation or doubt."

He feels another small ripple of guilt, an oddly dual-sided one--partly because he doesn't think he has been that great at overcoming hesitation and doubt, and partly because he wonders if perhaps he shouldn't be even more hesitant and doubtful, in the name of the Maker.

But he can, with effort, draw a distinction between 'this isn't sacred to me' and 'this can't be sacred to anyone,' and he's not unwilling to believe that there could be divine providence in the signs she saw, even if they each ascribe them to a different god. Even if the signs weren't holy in origin, he does find something admirable in the fact that she believed they were and followed them at her own expense. Piety is a great and respectable virtue.

"Just don't tell the revered mothers," he says, with a quirk of a smile. A breeze blows through the market, raising goosebumps on his arms, and it occurs to him that he probably ought to put his shirt back on. He reaches for it with his good arm.

"I think they are least likely to believe me."

She felt the breeze but really it was nothing compared to the mountains. In all honesty she was often finding it amazing it was so much warmer down here. How did lowlanders deal with it? Still, she couldn't just let him have his shirt that easily.

So with a smile, she shook her head. "Use the one you do not favor right now."

Basically, no shirt unless he used that arm a little. Yes he needed to rest it but it wouldn't harm him to do small but basic activities.

The last time he was shirtless outdoors for this length of time, he'd been a child back in Starkhaven, swimming in the river with the other village boys. It isn't so very cool outside, but he's not accustomed to feeling wind on bare skin.

But if she says he's got to work for the shirt, she is, after all, the healer. He sighs, mock-exasperated. "Oh, all right."

He reaches carefully for the shirt, pushing through the twinge of pain and finding that it's really not so bad now after all. "Look at that," he says admiringly. "It's better already."

"Animals can sometimes fear magic due to the surprise of it suddenly appearing. I taught myself how to heal with and without it so I could help anyone. Even if they mistrusted my gods."

She offered him a smile then got to her feet to brush herself off, pushing her hair back over her shoulder. With how it reached past her waist it sometimes fell forward so easily. That done, she offered her hand to him to help him up, not seeming to care that he was much taller than herself.

"I should be able to continue to heal the muscles within given time. Even if magic is faster, this may be gentler on your body."

He can't help but laugh, not unkindly, at the unexpected chivalry. It doesn't deter him from taking the proffered hand.

"I won't complain about that," he says. Any perk is a welcome one, even if he is unconcerned about straining his body further and only opting for the slower treatment for religious reasons. "When do you recommend I come back, then?"

Though small for an Avvar and clearly not built to be a fighter, she was still rather strong and helped him easily enough. Muscles could be built easily enough when your daily life was preparing for many months ahead, after all.

"Every few days at first and then it can be stretched out from there. Unless it truly hurts then come sooner. I work around the docks and rumor tends to lead one to where I am."

She was more than a little aware of the fact that everyone was talking about the Avvar woman who offered healing in Kirkwall.

"That's how I found you in the first place," he admits. "Mostly people told me to look for the fennec. They did sort of make you sound like you might be eight feet tall and breathing fire, though. I was almost disappointed. Almost."

"I suppose I would be even easier to find then." Really she had no idea why she was so relaxed around a Templar. They were supposed to be terrifying based on everything she'd heard since she was a child. Yet here she was, wanting to be close to one, enjoying talking with him and learning about him.

It was...very strange.

Reaching into her pack, she pulled out a small jar. "Take this. You can rub it into your shoulder when you need to do more work than you should."

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[OPEN] now that you're living on the hill

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