CLOSED | i feel certain i am going to rise again

[limier]

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

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.

Comments

[dashing]

Us, sufficient a shock that she hesitates too long, and the collision of Coupe's shoulder against clavicsl draws a sharp breath from her. Pain can be born almost unflinching wth focus, but it was not the subject of her focus, now. She staggers, and when the upward swing comes she is forced back a step, snapping her head back to avoid the sword's tip. It catches the soft flesh where throat reaches to become chin, just, leaves a trail of blood on her chin.

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.

[limier]

The tear of fabric again, the red sting of impact. How easy to forget she's no cuirass here; how readily her stomach might have been spitted were this in earnest. She's need of this: Has let herself grow slack of long months behind a desk, of dragging her body between dim-witted extremes.

(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.

[dashing]

"Aye, we cannot."

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.

[limier]

"They are not so easily parted."

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

[dashing]

Her chest rises and falls with exertion that she has not pushed herself to. Her jaw is very tight.

"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

[limier]

Instinct tenses the melody in her veins, and for a moment she’s certain she’ll need to use it. A briefer moment yet, when she wonders whether she’d bother.

(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

[dashing]

Herian falters, for a moment. It has been a long while since she wore the necklace that Élodie gifted her. Years, now, for all that she still had it among her possessions. It was a guilty reminder, now, more than anything, an anchor in that it would drag her beneath the surface more than because of any steadying quality it might have. When she studies it, there is no feeling that drags at her that can be disentangled from guilt. At one time there had been an angry sort of affection, but even that has passed, now.

"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.

[limier]

"They gave the world what it wanted of them."

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,

[dashing]

Herian just tilts her head at that, though it serves more like a very slight sideways nod. Acknowledgement, in either case, though she's not sure she agrees entirely. The world might have wished them dead, but perhaps— perhaps them choosing it on their own terms was better than brutality.

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.

[limier]

It catches her midway through the swing — a fist this time, and not the sword — motion too fully committed to counter the sweep, she’s no choice but to fall or lunge into it, and fuck if she’s about to fall,

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.

[dashing]

Herian's first instinct is to twist so she can swing an elbow into Coupe's face; she resists the impulse, sucking in a breath and spitting out blood in a messy splatter on the dry dirt. She looks at the Templar before her, blood on her teeth, a gash in her lip that is already swelling and a little purpled from the impact.

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.

[limier]

She casts Herian a look. But she accepts the hand, hauls herself up with a short nod of gratitude. (Pride is for people who can afford to hobble their way through Val Royeaux.)

"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.