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Entry tags:
CLOSED | i feel certain i am going to rise again
WHO: Wren + Herian
WHAT: While you were expressing yourself healthily, I Studied the Blade
WHEN: Vaguely this month
WHERE: Gallows
NOTES: Annulment stuff, a total excess of hair
WHAT: While you were expressing yourself healthily, I Studied the Blade
WHEN: Vaguely this month
WHERE: Gallows
NOTES: Annulment stuff, a total excess of hair
The hour's early, the grounds distant.
Time and isolation chosen to purpose, she's terribly aware of how this might appear to the unwary. Sixteen years and half a foot between them? To say nothing of the cause for their association.
That she's left off armor isn't an entirely a matter of perception, as little as she wishes to antagonize an already-tense bit of sparring. Most Amsel faces will not be so well-covered as mail and plate, and they both need the practice at it.
There's a skin of water laid out upon the bench, beside a heavy key, a blade to match that already in her hand: hacking out the recursive motions of one yet warming up — perhaps harder than necessary.
"Knight-Enchanter," The sword dips to earth; she turns and seems a brief moment to look right through her. It recollects, though as she catches glimpse of that mauled ear, something pinches between her brows and doesn't quite leave.
It's one thing to speak with a ghost. It's quite another to see one risen.
(To try and bludgeon it with a length of steel.)
"I was — ah — uncertain which style you might lately favour," A short gesture to the bench, and if she just keeps treading these small mundanities, maybe they won't swell up to drown them both. "But the simplest edge often cuts sharpest, no?"
Best for everyone that these are dulled.
enter stage right, A Grump
Improvised weapons, adaptability, those were realities she had understood from her days in the alienage. To kick dirt into the eyes of the enemy, that might be dishonourable - being ready to turn anything to a weapon was simply necessity. She might not be an expert, but she could appreciate the value of imagination. Maybe imagination motivated her, in some strange way, a determined imagining that the world might be made better, that she might have some hand in it for all that she is a half-breed mage.
Perhaps she is foolish. Perhaps she is naught but a soldier following orders and imagining he has some greater contribution.
Herian steps forward, dressed very simply for the purpose of training (though it is not as though she has ever really been dressed any way other than simply, if we're being entirely accurate) and picks up the blade, setting down her staff as she does. "I will confess I favour styles that tend not to end with innocents being cut down."
pinches her cheeks, but like, chivalrously
"Then you seek not technique, but those who wield it,"
Kinder than what she’d like to echo — To only practice what we favour, our undoing, Knight-Enchanter —
It’s not as though they even disagree. There can be no pride, no victory in the wreckage of good lives. But between them, Wren knows which hands have worn more innocent blood. Knows which would paint themselves again with less regret than the task deserves. She's uncomfortable around children; it's not without reason. This is an older guilt than Annulment which Amsel keeps pricking at now.
(Perhaps that should make this easier. It doesn't.)
"To exercise judgment, and not one’s arm," Wren steps back to the edge of the rough chalk ring, works her jaw slowly in its sockets. The sword is an anchor in port: Tread water, keep your head, keep an eye to shore. "A weightier task. Have you found the Inquisition capable?"
no subject
Doubtful, and she almost stops herself partway through saying. It is potentially rude, certainly defiant, and she wouldn't have said it save that she's been traveling alone, starved of regular companionship for months. And then even her return was challenging - it was hard to temper herself effectively, when faced with someone who represented so many tragedies, even if it was unfair to brand her so. Herian would have to do better; she could not afford to be so reckless with her tongue.
She does not drop her gaze, but holds silence a moment as she weighs the words, guards herself against further— bluntness. "My service is sworn to them. I do not make oaths lightly."
Well, so much for not being blunt, as she steps closer to the chalk ring, rolling her neck and shoulders. "And you? What is your assessment?"
no subject
Amsel's silence is acknowledgment enough. That the girl (a woman, by now, and how strange will that ever be —) knows she's overstepped, it's something. That it's come so soon already,
An eye to the shore: This need be managed carefully. She can already feel the pull of black brine, of all the bristling spiny things beneath.
"My oaths are due the Chantry. I do not break them lightly." The point lifts, just a touch, enough to signal readiness. "The Inquisition owns a necessary purpose,"
"It is we servants who own responsibility for its path."
It's not an answer. It is.
sorry for my slow i was drinking whiskey and plotting the downfall of men
A step forward, a strike to the Templar's sword. The purpose of swordplay is always to seek flesh rather than metal, so far as she can understand it. A battle is not one with sword against sword, but with saving your flesh or rending it from another. This is a tease, an invitation to battle, rather than a serious strike.
And, after a moment, "but you do break them, Knight-Lieutenant"
don't be sorry my excuse is way less cool
There's no amnesty of an Annulment. That by now there's no one coming for its scattered survivors isn't an absolution of law but of pragmatism and sentiment. The ravages of three years have thinned Templar ranks, even before the new protections the Inquisition grants, the homes that some few have reclaimed. She breaks her oaths with every stolen day the Spire breathes.
"Marin did not. Oriane. Durante,"
Vipond, she is not yet so venomous to say, Averie, Werner, she's buried the truth of too deeply to. The invitation's given; she dives in: A short flurry of blows, vicious and testing. The engagement of a duel is ever different from anything outside. Battle is nothing but trying very hard not to die, to put an end the other party as quickly as possible.
This is not battle. This is a conversation.
"They did not know," Between breaths, "What they followed. What they died for."
They tell you to protect: Your nation, your charges, your brothers, your faith — to protect, at any cost. But who has been saved by this? What single soul has benefitted of all this blood?
She should have been there to stop them. Hopes, desperately, that she would have tried to stop them. Her poor, stupid boys. Fucking cowards.
"The people here follow. They die," A stomp low towards her instep, one need keep light on their feet, "But the rest?"
The Inquisition is young. Reckless. And it thinks itself so very aged.
i mean the truth is that i was watching Forensic Files but still drinking whiskey
It could sound polite, even. It does not. It is not the viciousness of her swordplay that betrays her. She is too level headed for that, to fall into carelessness and brashness so easily, with so little provocation. "Or do they still deserve to be honoured?"
A counter. She is not near so seasoned a fighter as Wren. A few years of neglecting her magic for the sake of travelling more safely, of prioritising the blade could not nearly make up for the years of disciplined Templar training, no matter how rigorous she might have been. Her first instinct is still magic, the signs of her rage just as capable of being experienced by flames curling through the air as by her voice cutting it. She may be controlled and disciplined, but she has not had all the time and opportunity.
"No cause is without deaths," she replies, lunging forward with the sword to aim a strike at Wren's left shoulder, her forearm twisting to drive the strike with more force. A conversation, but still a dangerous one. "The Inquisition is ready to protect where others would condemn."
acceptable. also: literally just realized they're fighting in a circle lmao
She's seasoned. But here is the truth of it, the thing that no one tells you when you're thirty and full of potential: You don't grow to be seasoned without growing old along the way.
If the years have honed her craft, they've too dulled her reflexes, dragged at her veins. The blow comes far too close for comfort, a last desperate twist in carrying her aside. Where Herian's blade might have otherwise found some absent joint of armor, the raw tendon beneath, there's but a slice through cloth and skin.
It's no struggle to hiss as she closes the distance, drives the hilt up towards her face (no intent to land, just to force the girl back —)
"Protect who? Protect what?"
She paces the edge of the circle, gaze pulled distant: Blunt deception now, she's enough from the corner of her eye to catch the motion of any approach. This is basic shit; the tricks you pull on raw recruits. Whether Amsel will read insult in it, or seize the opportunity to another purpose, she wants to know. The cut's shallow, but a darker stain spreads across the red cloth, and she allows her shoulder to drop. A display of weakness it would be foolish to believe so soon. An invitation of its own.
"The Seekers would have spoken the same. What do you protect? The past does not need your defense. The dead do not."
ooohhhhh we meta
Herian moves with a stubborn sort of strength, a presence she lacked before. She had trained long and stubbornly, and has held the skills of a Champion for months. True, she had no others to train against, but it was still time to practice, being away on assignment. It is that strength that she lacked in the tower, a difference in the way she moves. As the templar pace the circle, Herian spins the sword in her grip.
"Those unable to protect themselves. Those who would be made victims. War is a game between those in power, but it devastates those with no voice, be they elf or human or mage." The words are not quite bitten out, but they verge on it. "I would ensure the Inquisition does not render them pawns as their other leaders would." There was an opportunity to influence here that they lacked in other places, and it was the Inquisition that took in refugees when Herian herded them away from peril, and they had been desperate and hungry.
"The Seekers were glad to murder children, an act that I cannot imagine Blessed Andraste would have looked upon with anything but horror. You think the dead do not need defence?" She waits, not eager to take up the bait, for all that she is itching to fight. Impulse is a thing she has learned to combat. "They need justice. Perrin, Violette, Ives. Do you remember them?"
Anger simmers under her skin, for all her control, all her schooling. "They were children. They were not the only ones, Knight-Lieutenant."
barfs tl;dr
The words swing like hammer blows, each name percussive, and yet — she's pleased.
There's something concrete, at last: Something that matters beyond abstract code and artifice. Amsel's grown. Call it strength, or call it certainty; they can't afford anyone be ignorant of their own motives. The Inquisition owns too much power now for that.
Wren's conscious there’s a point at which this need be brought back, that she might start swimming for shore. Aware too, of how deeply she’d prefer to swallow seawater. Until her lungs turn black, until she might spit back the salt they've been packed beneath.
"Are names the shape of justice? Is memory?" A shade of bitterness in that. She slips the blade into her other hand, shifts her stance. "Markus. Joanie. Vincente."
Older names, distant ones. If Herian knows these now, she'll know them for faces long shuffled quietly out of conversation: Runaways and Harrowings recollected only in occasional, passing moments. Things no one spoke of overlong.
"Naming them will not bring them back." Her tongue aches with it. Little marks on lists of the dead and missing, of bodies too altered to say. Checks on paperwork before that, the facts of where and who and when. They’re names and not knowledge. Had gone out of her way not to acquire that, not until a shade bigger and more likely to last. "It will not undo their murder."
(Ives, she had thought, would last —)
"Show me," It cracks out sharper than the rest, at once an order; she slashes in from the side, presses Herian’s guard. The strokes chosen more carefully now, even as they speed. "Show me how you imagine justice looks."
There will be no justice of this war. If they are all very lucky, perhaps there will be amnesty, compromise; enough ground given everyone to give a reason for peace. But luck won’t make those choices, people will. They'll find it easier to make them without so many voices in the room. If Herian wants to be heard, she’ll need to speak clearly indeed.
Amsel has learned. A dangerous thing, she cannot wholly cheer it —
And yet. And yet she's pleased.
lies I read all of it, gleefully
She loves the Circles, sincerely; regular food, clean water, the ability to bathe safely, clean clothes on her back. In a Circle she had belonged, as she never had in the alienage. She had been stronger than she had ever been. It had stripped her of her family, but her family was already in pieces before the Chantry ever came to collect her. The Circle could mean hope and home to so many, and yet it was— tainted. It left a bad taste in people's mouths, because what Andraste meant and symbolised was forgotten by the wants and prejudices of cruel, selfish men.
Words are not always her ally; it is easier to speak of honour and conduct than it is to express that what she loves must change to be worthy of that love, to explain that her loyalty has evolved and required evolution in turn. She is a loyalist, so far as she can understand it, but perhaps Herian does not fully grasp what she is loyal to. To be loyal (and honourable, kind, brave, knightly) has been woven into her identity so long she barely knows how to unstitch that word from her understanding of herself.
Just barely she blocks the strike; it is easier to know the steps in theory, to perfect the strikes against a stationary target than to bring then into play against a target that is moving and not dictated by her mind. The block is instinctual, quick, but not perfect. As each strike comes she blocks, blocks again, determined to be steady before she counters. The difference between Spirit Blade and sword are difficult to juggle between, at times, but some things remain consistent: she raises a foot to kick Coupe squarely in the chest, if she can manage it quick enough, and then chase her with a slash from shoulder across to the opposite hip, follows with as many strikes as she can manage before the Templar pushes back. She's rough, but what she lacks in technique she balances with focus born of years honing a Spirit Blade.
"Battle is not justice," she snaps out, "nor bloodshed. 'Tis but the means to stymying foul deeds so that better means might be used." The words are quiet, as she holds pressure against Coupe's blade with her own, attempting to force it closer to Coupe's chest.
no subject
To say the fucking least. The South is reeling from so many disasters that quite it's lost count. No different from the men who compose her. There's always some new crisis: rot in the wheat, a winter fever, a wayward child, a weeping wife. Small tragedies are the backbone of life from the powerless to the plenty-fed. There's so little space in their hearts for the few, the frightening.
"They are happier to ignore — for stasis — stability —"
Wren would know a thing or two about that. A heavy puff of breath as she skates back from the blow, just in time — and not quick enough to grab the leg, more's the pity, because Amsel's followed through such that there's no immediate option save retreat. A grunt, the rude sounds of exertion (they never write about that in the bloody songs), to parry and block.
"— They will resist us."
Us, and Maker, that's as much as she's ever committed to aloud to this. As close as she's come to throwing in her lot publicly with anything outside the Inquisition, outside Apcher. She need watch that, watch what Amsel might say of it. Wren isn't in a position to have ideas of resolution. It's one thing, to poke practical holes in the half-assed plans of others. It's quite another to bind herself to them.
She doesn't speak for herself here.
To lock the blades — it's not a bad move, had Amsel the weight. She doesn't. Height and bulk lend themselves well now to pressure down, trapping the blades down just long enough to barrel herself forward. Wren's shoulder smashes towards collarbone, her follow-through pivoted to bring steel up swinging.
Better means, and that's good enough, she supposes. Will suit for now. If Amsel can temper herself when required, when expedient,
That remains to be seen. There's no other way to see it.
"Enchanter Ceallach, a Warden," The categories of their motley group. Her breath by now is ragged; some hoarse catch in her throat that seems little to do with weariness, less with emotion. "The rest — a Seeker, Knights —"
no subject
Without her arms thrown up to block - well, she didn't block, a clear downside, but now she lunges forward again while Coupe's sword is raised, stepping past her so it serves as a slash to ribs rather than a direct stab to the gut. This is a friendly spar, after all. They meet as allies.
"Enchanter Ceallach and I were of the Starkhaven Circle together, and the alienate before that. Of what Warden do you speak?" Most of them, so far as she knew, were radicals content to see the world fall to ruins so long as their personal whims were indulged and the Wardens were entitled to respect. They were idealists, aye, but fools as well. Inessa wasn't terrible, at least, and Sabine was fond of the large ginger one, but Herian was not certain she would trust either of them to have sound politics on this.
no subject
(Armor won't do a damn thing against a spirit blade. She's need of this.)
"Daesun." Loud. Enthusiastic. Seemingly biddable; more heart than brains, Von Skraedder had claimed. "A believer,"
If Kaisa understands little of Circles, her disgust for Kirkwall's dissolution is something to work with. Kaisa is the least of hurdles. She clears Herian, rings the circle to consider her, to clear the scum of her throat.
"We've need of more those. The broad faithful. Outsiders to this," Her chin jerks to the Gallows. "We cannot afford to limit ourselves."
Upon any issue. The Chantry holds sway in far-flung villages, in the halls of fine lords, in education, and services, and trade. In race. Just look at this fucking mess of Briala, of the aristocracy's response to her appointment — perhaps the consequences were inevitable. Some consequences always were.
If the Inquisition is to meddle, then it must meddle carefully indeed.
no subject
It should not bring her satisfaction to see red blooming over the fabric, but it does. Blood is sticky and uncomfortably pooling at her chin, running a trail down her throat, but she doesn't wipe it away, break her focus on each of Coupe's movements as she walks, trying to predict is she might suddenly strike.
"You say 'us' and 'we'," she finally says, pacing just as Coupe does, maintaining the distance, "but what is it you would see Circles become? Do I stand here because you've doubts of the Annulment, or because of your orders within the Inquisition?"
A little more direct, now. Not rage at all this, relatively contained as it was, but a question asked with a steady gaze. Their duties might bind them, but better to know the truth of it, ti be certain than to let it simmer as an uncomfortable uncertainty.
no subject
She stills at that (oddly so, the angle perturbed; there's no bait in this now), waits a moment to take in the question, to hear it fully. Familiar — terribly so — yet never from another's mouth. The hilt rolls in her hand, the better to consider the dirt. At last she looks up to catch Herian's eyes once more.
"There is nothing that I can give you," Quietly, "That will ease this. You would be a fool to take it."
Herian's many things. She's not that.
"I did not," Her knuckles shift, tighten. So many words she's never spoken. Not between Arnault, Thorn; too familiar to need them. Not to Vauquelin: So much else to be said, so much neither of them must have wanted to know. They unhinge with uncharacteristic reluctance, these things that aren't secrets, that she guards jealously enough to act as synonyms. "I did not have word for a month. Another, before I could travel. By then,"
A shake of the head. Her free hand rubs at the high collar of her shirt, unconscious.
"I will forget, Amsel," Her jaws snap tight at that, the blade hefts up, straightens at the end of her arm. "You stand here because you will not."
cw: ref to corpses and stuff
"A month," she repeats, words clipped. "You heard no word for a month." Herian's voice is edged with incredulity, a sort of frost crawling over each word. "I woke in the rubble, Knight-Lieutenant. Dragged bodies through the halls where we lived and studied and prayed, all in service, that they might be granted the pyre to which all Andrastians should be entitled. I tried, for days, but they were bloating— foaming at their mouths. I could not stay indefinitely, could not give all of them what they were entitled, not with the Spire left as it was."
Was there anything left of them that was recognisable, after two months? Was there anyone that would have bothered to try? "I will not forget that the Seekers befouled their honour and the Templars', that they were content to murder children, because there are times when I can see nothing else. We serve an elevated cause that might protect mages and unite peoples, and they would see it corrupted."
It is rare, in these days so far from the Spire, from Starkhaven, from the alienage that saw her committed to the Spire because of a snap in her temper, for Herian to lose focus. Perspective, focus, balance, they are the enemies of rage, and rage could find its home in her all too easily. It was Rage and Pride that tempted her, during her Harrowing. Pride was more tempting, but Rage was intoxicating. She can feel the itch of it under her skin, the desire to use it, the song of the staff that she travels with. She could let magic dance through the air and make this a merry sport.
She will not; she fights fairly, justly, and they have met on terms that dictate she cannot, for all that it tempts her. The skin of her hands is uncomfortably hot, as her hands flex on the sword's grip. To burn is holy, divine; to scorch? To brand? Cruel. N not cleansing, but condemning.
Herian stays very, very still. "I killed Ser Vipond," she says, very quietly. "What say you to that?"
cw: mention of suicide
(She must. Work still to be done.)
The point of the blade doesn’t shift from its target across the ring.
Anger needs a place to go, eventually. There’s only so long it might be smothered by people like her, like Herian: More alike than she’s ever been to Vauquelin, and as terribly, equally distant. Anger needs a place to go, but she’ll not return to the fray just yet. Not until she’s certain that silence needn’t bloom from her lips.
"There was a suicide here." She says at last. The girl in the box, the thing in the researcher’s skin, all the glimmering malice of this place — and still, she’s thought of this more often. A grim little tableau. A purposeless one, "They’d taken poison, rather than set against one another."
A fucking waste, to die for each other,
"Rather than stand for anything at all."
When you might live for so many others.
She’s been living on almost three years’ borrowed time, and none of it bought so dearly as those eight fevered weeks. Amsel woke in rubble, righteous and alone; she woke in bundled sheets, swollen upon stolen blood.
Three, eight, two — two months, and there’d been naught but bones, offal, the pickings of scavengers and bureaucrats. The lists she’s collected, the reports she's curated so carefully, they’re skeletons of fact. Names, and not knowledge. Cold.
No. There’s never been justice in this, there will not be now. If there was justice, only one of them would have woken.
(A waste, with work still to be done.)
i almost edited my last comment again to add an apology for editing so many times tbh
"Some would say that was standing for something, in and of itself," Herian replies, the heat in her hands stabilising, easing. "A protest against what the world would force upon them. Solidarity with one another, to the last."
Perhaps in all that chaos it had seemed like the best they could hope for, when their world was appearing to end. When there was so much risk of losing each other in far more terrible, brutal ways. It might be cowardice, or it might be... a different shape of bravery.
"Élodie was better content to follow orders than question morality. She cut down Modestine, as she tried to usher some of the children away." Modestine, who Herian had truthfully considered a deeply annoying, elderly busybody, too interested in everybody else's affairs. Not a great mage by any measure, Herian had thought, in youthful arrogance. She rolls her shoulders, and her voice is a little softer. "Until that moment I would not have thought her capable." Whether she speaks of Modestine or Élodie is debatable; perhaps both.
She exhales, and raises her sword, eyebrow quirked in a silent question as to whether they will continue.
no subject
The bodies had looked almost peaceful, laid out in rot and rust. The elf had claimed no spirits lingered. But there are other thoughts, ones she'd not told him, doubts that she'll not echo here now.
How freely might one ever agree to such a pact? No way to know whether one of them might not have wished no. The advance is sudden, she cuts for limbs, darts in and out — right-handed once more.
"Did you think yourself?"
Capable. Modestine was old before Wren ever knew what age meant in a Circle, meant to the world outside. Had never really expected her to die, but stand as a bookend, sentinel to both ends of her time in the Spire. Vipond was young. Young in the way that Amsel was little time ago. Not a child, but with room yet to grow, to make her choices. Those she'd made then had not been promising.
How freely,
no subject
Perhaps that was naive. Herian had never been one to accept a quick solution over the challenge of a fight. Exceptions might be made to spare others, but never that.
Her block is rushed - Coupe's blade bites into her skin, shallow but stinging, and she corrects as quick as she can.
"I did not consider what I did not anticipate to be necessary," she bites out.
A twist, and a sweep, that in a real ("real," as if this were all play) fight might suit to cut the enemy's legs from under them.
no subject
Something happens.
She lunges, and something happens. Her face goes momentarily slack; abruptly, too distracted to pull the punch (its force still blunted by a falling arm), to do much but stab suddenly into the dirt. A jarring shock up the shoulders. As improvised canes go it’s literally not much to stand on. She’s really only questionably upright.
"Sssssshit," Wren hisses, in finest flowing Orlesian, truly the language of civilization. "Shit, shit, shit."
This is not especially knightly. Or intimidating. Or dignified, if what she thinks just happened happened. That this wasn’t anticipated either —
"Forgive me," Wren finally grits out, unmoving. "Your teeth?"
Her own fist’s not cut enough to have done any damage there, she’s certain, but Amsel's blood is on her knuckles and it bears asking.
no subject
Ice is not her specialty, unfortunately; many of the healing elements of magic elude her, and she is not convinced that cauterising her face is really the answer to this scenario. "I've dinner planned with a friend,"
(a date, but she is not saying that to a Templar who knew about Vipond, and who just punched her in the mouth)
"hopefully they are complete enough that food might not overcome me." A quick test with her tongue suggested they are smooth, intact, and she presses with her thumb to double check nothing is come loose. Despite the mutual destruction and all else, she offers Coupe her hand to ease her up from being supported by the sword. Honour, manners, all that knightly business.
"Ready for another round?" It's dry. Very faintly, quietly dry.
no subject
"Your technique has improved." It hardly bears stating that her own has declined. "The other blade,"
She limps to the bench, resists the urge to brace a hip. "If you've not been parrying with the hilt, it bears practice."
There's no reason the thing might not still be useful, even those times the Fade forces solid about her. Wren sets the sword aside to offer out a rag, jerks her chin again to the key.
"A cabinet, for reports. I imagine that might —" A wince as something twinges. "— Ah, might wait. For dinner. One would not wish to be overcome."
If that's wry, it's not at Herian's expense.