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Entry tags:
Oh the highway is my great wall
WHO: The Medicine Seller, Open
WHAT: Monthly Catch-All
WHEN: All month
WHERE: Various
NOTES: None for now - will update if necessary
WHAT: Monthly Catch-All
WHEN: All month
WHERE: Various
NOTES: None for now - will update if necessary
The Gallows: Rainy Days
The Medicine Seller was never a hard man to find if he was in an amenable mood for being found. When heavy rains kept him from his usual haunts in the markets (or wherever he wandered off to), so he had taken to exploring the Gallows.
His pace was erratic, sometimes swift and purposeful, and other times languid and ambling. Often he would stop dead in the middle of a corridor, and stare at what seemed to be nothing, heedless of any around him. And then, just as suddenly, he’d continue on.
Other times he could be found in his quarters, a paper sign pinned up by the entrance that read;
Medicine
Prices Negotiable
The doors were open, the inviting smell of incense wafting into the stone corridor that remained chilly despite the summer heat. There was a pleasant pink and purple glow emanating from the room, the source a number of coloured paper lanterns he’d strung from the ceiling.
He was there at a narrow work station in the corner, carefully going over his notes as something bubbled in a glass beaker over a flame.
The Gallows: Curiosity Killed the Cat
The Medicine Seller had considered the library in Skyhold to be on the biased side of things in terms of content. That was, he found, absolutely nothing when compared to the one in the Gallows. Sizable as it was, as he picked through the shelves of the books that had survived whatever disaster had befallen the place and the creeping dust and mold of neglect, he found very little in what anyone would consider adequate recreational reading.
He’d often found himself wondering about the prior inhabitants of the Gallows and their circumstances. The fact that even a small respite such as an enjoyable book was kept from them during Meredith’s reign evoked a bit of genuine sympathy for him. He didn’t dwell on it, however. Such things had passed, and he’d been worlds away when they had. It was nothing to do with him.
Locating a book that at least seemed promising, he plucked it from the shelf, and headed out for the gardens where he could recline on a bench, smoking that long, thin pipe of his.
Sundermount: Sleeping in a Silk Shell
He’d needed to replenish his stocks, and the foot of Sundermount was a good place to do so. The wooded area was thick with vegetation, and he was developing a keen eye for the medicinal plants of Thedas. He would pause occasionally to take small cuttings, scrape bark from a tree, or carefully dig up roots and bulbs.
As he carefully cut the stem of a royal elfroot, he noticed something among the purple-tinted leaves. A chrysalis - and one he didn’t recognize. He’d already cut the plant it was on, so, very delicately, he plucked the stem it had made its home and placed it in one of the drawers of his Medicine Pack. It could go through its cycle safely in his quarters, and he’d get to observe one of nature’s many fascinating processes. Besides, he was curious what might come out.
Hightown: What Looks Like an Elf But Isn’t an Elf
It was a handsome alembic - crystal clear blown glass set on an ornate copper stand. He’d been looking for equipment to start applying his studies into Thedosian medicine and he certainly wasn’t one to settle for subpar equipment.
He’d been aware of the shopkeeper watching him like a hawk as he’d wandered between the shelves. There was no actual rule against elves being in the upscale, Hightown store - after all, servants were sent to pick up equipment and ingredients all the time - but the Medicine Seller didn’t look like a servant. The shop owner wasn’t sure what he looked like besides an elf, and an elf which carried himself clearly with airs above his station. The voluminous sleeves and the hefty wooden pack the Medicine Seller carried were also a cause for concern - they were the sorts of things where small, expensive pieces of merchandise could vanish into very quickly.
When he picked up the alembic to check the price, it was the last straw from the shop owner, he rose from his seat, nostrils flared.
”I hope you’ve got the coin to pay for that!” he said abruptly, nostrils flared and an accusatory finger pointed at the Medicine Seller.
“Of course,” came the Medicine Seller’s silky reply. He didn’t even turn to spare the shopkeeper a glance. “I am merely checking the price.”
The elderly man looked utterly incensed at the casual dismissal, and his face turned a peculiar shade of puce as his temper flared. This was probably not going to end well.
Wildcard: The Luck of the Draw
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sundermount;
Her eyes look up more often than they should. Here more than in the last few years does she expect something great and terrible to blot out the sun, to laugh, to set a hand upon her shoulder and hiss did you think it would be so easy, Morrigan but it hasn't come yet.
Shades, giant spiders, a medicine seller.
"What comes," she calls out softly lest she disturb what still walks without rest though neither of them are high enough for the worst of the nightmares to come down upon them. "How do you find Kirkwall?" (As if she wasn't almost the last one out of Skyhold.)
no subject
He looked up at the greeting. As far as chance encounters went, there were none better he could ask for. Six months in Thedas and he deeply appreciated a person who didn't recoil at the mere mention of peculiar things.
He stood, still holding the chrysalis, and bowed.
"Only some deer earlier," he said, head turning in the direction they had gone. He took that greeting a bit too literally.
"Kirkwall is..." well, agreeable wasn't the word he'd used, though he vastly preferred it to Skyhold, "...busy. Though I would ask the same of yourself."
no subject
Still, good to see that he hasn't disappeared into the ether, better still that the same project occupies their time.
"None of the waking horrors has come to greet you yet? How rude of them." Said as if a revanant might not come strolling down the slopes at any moment or corpses burst from the ground since those things have happened but she'd rather those than the locals most days.
Laughing quietly, she steps closer to inspect the-- and yes, that is a chrysalis, she's familiar from Kieran's fascinations with insects and looks about. "There are times I almost miss the Wilds I left more than ten years ago now, living in such a city. Living in the confines of a former Circle for the moment. Kieran and I took the longest route that we might delay yet still I find it barely liveable."
no subject
And clever in his placement of the paper wards he was so skilled with. He wasn't a native to Thedas, but Sundermount had a certain reputation that hadn't escaped his keen ears. He wasn't here on that kind of business today. Just herbs.
"The Gallows have been... educational," he said in a way that almost sounded like he was agreeing with her sentiment. The atmosphere there was tangible - so much so that a stroll through demon infested trees was infinitely preferable when the walls of the Gallows and the walls of the city grew unbearable.
"I cannot imagine such a prison keeping you."
Though doubtless there were a number of templars who would give a great deal to see a mage like Morrigan locked up.
"Do you find the city peculiar?"
no subject
Humans first, no doubt, enemies of the People though with how things have changed if they'd even recognise their own? Alas, attempting to study that is the sort of thing that gets the foolhardy killed.
Morrigan tips her head one of those gestures that becomes habit when you spend so long in a skin that isn't yours; what do the rifters learn of these places, to see Thedas with such new eyes without the weight of history. "In time I believe the Inquisition hopes that shall be the greater part of their legacy with these divisions and projects we find ourselves with now rather more officially. Yet even as they strip away the obvious parts of the history, it remains for those who know where to look, to listen." If you aren't wholly blind to the nature of the world but given how many of them are, sadly, then it remains to be seen what they'll ever bother to remember and she sighs as she says it, because this is what she has tried to teach people since arriving but how often does anyone listen and retain information?
"Nothing," she says, resolute and firm, "is to be caged."
Better death than a cage, she's believed that a long time.
"Before Orlais, I had been only to Denerim; Orzammar is dwarven, too different." Orzammar was the weight of the whole world above your head, carved from the stone, the heat of the lava that illuminated what the lamps did not and knowing how very close you stood to so very many Darkspawn. Impossible to compare. "So many people living so close, so confined, how it has built upon itself level upon level. Magic had sunk deep into the stones of Skyhold but Kirkwall was home to much darker things."
no subject
There was very little that people could say or do that would much endear them to the Medicine Seller, but the sort of conviction Morrigan had when she said that had certainly struck some kind of chord.
He didn't voice his agreement, but the small, satisfied smirk that crept into his lips, his fangs peeking just out the corners of his mouth, was confirmation he shared the sentiment.
"Darker things indeed." He'd read the history books in his down time, tried to sort through the hyperbole and propaganda. But even free of those constraints, it was a puzzling web that didn't add up to the winding routes he'd walked. "I find myself still getting lost."
He said this with the barest hint of agitation, as though it were some bad habit he should have grown out of by now. He knew cities. Old cities, with their bloody histories of war and conquest, and the buildings that grew taller with each successive decade as the world plunged itself into modernism. But nothing had ever felt like Kirkwall.
"It is... peculiar," he reiterated.
no subject
"What is it that they use in some tales? String? A trail of crumbs?" Imagine the nightmares that might follow if any were foolish enough to follow along after anything left behind that way but she did do reading (because she made Kieran do reading, no one sends a child out into the world unarmed and if his mind is sharp then that's one of the best advantages she can give him) and knows the bloody history. "There is...something unsettling about this place. So long a place of slavery, death, and blood for the Tevinter Imperium before it had the name Kirkwall after all. What is it about that you find so odd?"
After all, this is one who figured out so much of the eluvians far quicker than those who had clapped eyes on them and spent months in Skyhold with Morrigan. Someone who knows the hidden world that so few do. She would hear it. She would take the rare chance to learn from someone who possesses insight for whatever he might care to share even if it's nothing more than a feeling.