[CLOSED] For the world's more full of weeping,

[faithlikeaseed]

WHO: Sina, Kit, Myr; later: Yngvi, Herian, Kaisa, Nari
WHAT: Something's not right about a warehouse down by the docks...
WHEN: Mid-Kingsway, while the rest of the Inquisition's off playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: Warnings for child abuse and abandonment, implied violent death.

There's a warehouse down near the Kirkwall docks with a mystery crouched inside it.

Myr had smelled it first on passing by the place: Decomposing meat, spilled bowels, rotting corpse. Something wrong, even in the bad parts of Kirkwall; something that demands investigation.

He'd left a glyph nearby to remind him of the place, returned the following evening to hunt around for the source of the smell. It wasn't so hard to isolate it to the one particular warehouse, not with the mephitic funk of recent death oozing from the back windows. Lingering long enough to place another marker, he caught the faintest high-pitched wail--and had to flee back to the road to evade the warehouse's inattentive guardian before he could make certain of what he'd heard.

Quiet inquiries made of passers-by didn't serve to unravel the mystery. Not many of them were inclined to speak to an elf--but the scraps he could garner were food for suspicion. It was empty; someone's cousin-or-other had heard it was up for sale; the single guard's posted to keep away squatters; no one knows or cares what had been stored there before.

A tidy story. A dull story. A story that doesn't explain the stench or the sound. Someone needs to dig further into it; how convenient that someone's here to dig.

It isn't the first time Myr's acted on mad impulse since coming to Kirkwall; it is the first time he's hesitated long enough to question if it's safe for him to do this alone. Elves are disappearing from the city and none of the authorities care. What's one more killed for nosing around somewhere he doesn't belong, even if--especially if--he's a mage? It wouldn't be hard to walk away from this. No matter the itching sense of urgency in the back of his head, he could walk back to the docks and hand this over to the Inquisition guard there. It would be the safe option.

The wind shifts, bringing with it the scent of rot. You don't have that kind of time. He clasps the sending crystal at his neck, awakening the enchantment and thinking of Kit and Sina.

"Have you two got time to come to the docks? I've turned up something down here I don't like." His description of his find is quick and to the point and doesn't neglect that heart-chilling, half-imagined cry.

Comments

batdwarf is here to help

[ragweed]

Myr's description is quick and to the point, and more than enough to get Kit dressed, out of bed, and booking it down to the docks. Relatively speaking, it doesn't take him long to get there; he's a denizen of the shadier reaches of the city now. In fact, some part of him is privately ashamed that he hasn't stumbled upon this chilling mystery prior to Myr's message.

He arrives at the docks perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes after receiving his friend's message, and finds him quickly enough.

"Hey, it's me," he announces himself, and briefly rests a hand on his friend's arm so he can know where, exactly, Kit is in relation to the rest of him.

na na na na na na na na na BATDWARF

[faithlikeaseed]

It had occurred to him that lurking directly across the street from the suspicious warehouse might be suspicious in turn, so by the time Kit's found him he's retreated around a corner, out of (what he presumes is) direct sight of the guard. Not that the fellow seems liable to notice anything around him short of a druffalo stampede with how engrossed he is in a grimy, much-folded quarterly.

"Hey," Myr echoes the greeting. "Glad you're here."

There's a glyph gleaming dimly at the corner of the wall beside him, and he nods toward it--and by extension the warehouse--before adding in an undertone, "Because I think we've got to get in there and damned if I have any idea how to do it."

[ragweed]

When the wind blows just right--or wrong--that charnel stench reaches Kit's nose and makes him grimace; he doesn't blanch or reel with nausea, possibly because that stink is only too reminiscent of the Deep Roads. He's too used to it.

"Because I think we've got to get in there and damned if I have any idea how to do it."

No shit. "Okay." He leans around the edge of the building to scope out the front of the warehouse, including the lackadaisical guard who seems more engrossed in his reading material than his duties. Kit looks back at Myr. "I've got a couple ideas," he says, taking care to speak softly.

[faithlikeaseed]

Myr hasn't thought so far ahead as to what it will be like when they get inside the warehouse and find whatever's rotting there. He's consciously avoiding imagining that--because the reek of decaying corpse isn't as unfamiliar as it should be, because scent is the handmaiden of memory and dread follows after it. (Still, he's pale, uncomfortable, breathing as shallow as he can make it without risking lightheadedness.)

Focus on the here and now. Don't let it overwhelm you. You're needed. "What can I do?" Not "what are they"; he's far enough out of his depth that he's sure he wouldn't know a good idea from a bad one. Point him in the right direction with clear instructions, though...

[ragweed]

"What can I do?"

"Wait here," Kit bids him, and adds before Myr can protest, "just long enough for me to go take a closer look. That front entrance is guarded, but if there's a window in that side alley, that might be a way for us to get in." It doesn't occur to him to question the goal of getting inside the warehouse, or to pass this responsibility off to someone else. The danger is immediate, and his nose is keen enough to tell him that they were already too late for some.

He touches his friend's arm one more time. "I'll be quick," he promises, and then slips around the edge of the building, moving with both swiftness and silence honed through over a decade in the Deep Roads. He sticks to the shadows.

[eolasemah]

As Kit leaves, Sina approaches, announcing her presence with a cough into her elbow that sounds like it's on the verge of becoming scary. She watches the dwarf go and comes to stand by Myr, lightly touching his back, not terribly concerned about startling him since she couldn't have made more noise getting here if she tried.
"My apologies for being slow," she says quietly, "what did you find?"

[faithlikeaseed]

"Wait here."

Not the hardest thing to do even if it requires bridling his impatience. Myr breathes a word of prayer over Kit as the dwarf slips away, trusting his friend to the Maker's hands-- And turns his attention to Sina with a worried frown and a sudden twinge of remorse for calling her out. That sounds bad.

"No need to apologize," he reassures. "You had farther to come." He knows better now than to broach the subject of the cough; better the more diplomatic explanation.

"I don't know exactly what I've found." The admission's frank. "Someone's died in there," a jerk of his head in the direction Kit disappeared, the glyph at the corner, and the warehouse beyond, "and I heard someone else cry out. It's supposed to be empty, up for sale. No one can tell me what used to be stored in it before the owners cleared it all out."

[eolasemah]

Sina looks tired, but on high alert, especially when she receives Myr's full explanation. She sniffs the air, and even from here there's a trace of death on it, a fact which sets her heart to a faster pace and causes her to rest a hand on her chest as though that will help to slow it.
Missing elves, she hears unpleasantly in her head: Saoirse was looking for them, as were others. Sina's throat tightens, and she steps toward the warehouse, still lightly touching Myr's arm.
"Creators," she whispers thinly, "please don't let this be what I fear it is."

waiting for reinforcements

[ragweed]

Kit makes a call.

With that done, he does what he can to help Sina and Myr remove the rest of the children--babies, they truly are just babies--out of the cage they've been confined to like livestock, his heart seizing so powerfully in his chest at the sight of their abuse and neglect that he doesn't trust himself to speak. Once they're free, the risks touching the blanket that was stowed away with them and uses that to cover the fallen body of the slave.

It feels wrong, somehow, to leave him without saying something over his body. "Atrast nal tunsha." May you always find your way in the dark.

"I'm going to wait outside for the others," he says to Myr and Sina, looking between them with undisguised worry on his face. "Will you two be all right?"

[inagutterson]

Generally Yngvi never takes long to get anywhere in Kirkwall unless taking long to get there is the done thing to be doing but he bowls over more than a few folk clattering his way out of the gallows with as many pelts possible stuffed into the keg nugs once drew from Orlais to Skyhold.

Tonight Yngvi drags it behind him with a length of rope because that'll do, the backs of his legs battered enough they'll bruise come the day after but he pays no heed to that.

Of course it's the docks, he should've-- He missed something didn't he? And his heart pounding isn't entirely from the desperate flight here, the haphazard packing, the lurching out of lazing with a book in his hand and nugs nosing around him but that sickening panic that he can smell on himself, sour as three day old sweat when there isn't even a stream for miles.

So an odd sight racing through Kirkwall to get to Kit and the rest (only knowing Kit but he would've come, some things you don't care about the faces asking you after all) screeching to a halt right outside, chest heaving like a bellows.

[unbrokenoath]

No one would accuse Kaisa of being particularly fast, but she's big and she's wearing heavy armor, so she manages to make a decent pace through Kirkwall in the same way a steamroller might. People who're smart get out of the way when they see a grimly determined Grey Warden warrior moving like a woman on a mission. People who aren't smart are forcibly relocated.

She's no elf, but she has them in her blood all the same. A childhood spent making trips to the alienage, a career of defending the weak started by rumbling with human kids who liked picking on kids smaller than them. This is different, worse, but Kaisa's still here, and still helping. She doesn't bring a lot with her besides her gear, just a handful of food, and...candy. Probably stupid, but sometimes a little bit of sweetness can make things a little brighter. It certainly sounds like it can't get much worse.

And so she shows up to the front of the warehouse, looking as gloomy and serious as Wardens are supposed to look. She takes a moment to glance at the dwarf already there--she's seen him before, hasn't she? Asher's crew--and gives him a quick nod. She'd usually be a lot chattier, but--not a lot to say, right now.

[dashing]

And here's Herian, all dark robes and that strange mix of restraint and wildness that seems to infiltrate how she moves all the more when there is urgency to it.

She has not summoned her Spirit Blade, but the hilt is close to hand, and her staff is at her back. Not for the first time, she feels a knot in her gut that she is all damage and no healing. All manner of memories come to mind: that possessed child and the red lyrium experiments in Emprise du Lion, the camp with Pel and Sina, the Dalish who had taken her father, the burned remains of the alienage in Halamshiral, the dust and collapse and death in the Spire. Her stomach twists, but she remains as controlled as always. They've all of them seen terrible things, there surely was not a single person in the Inquisition untouched, and perhaps not the Free Marches or Orlais or Thedas entire, but Maker she wishes that it did not so often involve children.

A respectful nod to each of them. She cannot think that she has worked with any of them before, but she was away a long while.
"Who else do we wait upon?" Her voice is quiet, but clear.

[faithlikeaseed]

"Go; we'll--" The words be all right stick in Myr's throat--and how could they not when he's got a baby in his arms that's little more than bones and a thready pulse? "--we'll manage here."

He's hardly the one who needs worrying about, anyway, though he's sick at heart and shivering from the cold. (It seemed a far better use of his cloak to give it to Sina and the other children.) That's nothing; that's forgettable.

"Don't think they'll be long, at least," he adds, in a murmur. Maker grant them haste; Andraste clear their way.

[nadasharillen]

An elf-shaped shadow detaches itself from a darker place along the docks moving with a fluid ground-eating stride. Nahariel is all business, raising a hand briefly in greeting to the others assembled as she gets close enough to discern, an extra nod for Kit. She has a sturdy pack over one shoulder with a blanket rolled and bound beneath it, and her green eyes shimmer oddly in the low-light as elven eyes are wont to do.

"Sina?" she queries, her tone asking for direction.

[ragweed]

"Who else do we wait upon?"

"You're it." The dwarf that waits for them outside the warehouse is standing slightly off to the side of the mouth of a dark alleyway, his eyes turned down it with a strange look on his face. Slumped to the ground is a guard, who is bound and gagged and unconscious. "He was guarding them," he explains to the others once they've arrived, and turns to look from face to face at last. Whatever he saw inside the warehouse, it's deeply affected him.

"Sina?" Nari asks.

"She's still inside," Kit replies. Then, as though to brace them all for what they're about to see, he says, "They're all still inside. The children, the--" A pause. "--The body."

[eolasemah]

Sina is indeed inside, with the four remaining children that couldn't be carried by Myr, already holding one, and Kit, who had the guard. Not wanting to move them without giving them somewhere to go, Sina has curled among them inside the cage, sitting with the two smallest bundled together in her shawl and pressed against her chest for warmth. The other two lean against her, one feebly gripping her tunic and the other simply sitting, staring, with no drive for self-preservation. All the children are skin and bone, horrid-looking little creatures that seem to embody every cruelty acted upon them.

Sina doesn't move from where she sits when everyone enters, though she is visibly relieved by the sight of Nari and, surprisingly, Herian. She says nothing as they approach, all out of voice or energy to do anything but exist and hold the little ones. It's too much.

Kit, Herian, & Myr

[faithlikeaseed]

Myr tries not to blanch as takes a knee beside the corpse.

"Kit," he calls, voice a little flat for the effort not to breathe too deep, "did you get a good look at him when you covered him?" It must be dark in the warehouse, he thinks; perhaps too dark for anyone not blessed with elven eyes to make out much of anything (though the aura he's since quenched shed its own weak light).

Too damn bad they haven't got a pair among them. He stretches out a careful hand to find the edge of the blanket; begins tracing its dimensions. It won't be so large he can't throw a barrier over all of it, but this will require a certain precision... "How good are you with a flashfire?" he directs at Herian.

[dashing]

"I am more than capable." Which is a Herian way of saying that fire magic is the magic she most excels in, beside those spells demanded of the Knight Enchanter. Admittedly some rust has crawled over those abilities since the collapse of the Spire and a focus on the magic of the Knight Enchanter over other branches, but something like flashfire still came easily - thanks to rigorous training to hone her focus, more than any natural talent for it.

She tries to see through the dark, looking for anything that might serve as a makeshift torch that might be lit with magic, but nothing makes itself very obvious.

"It is not the first time I will have used such an application for my magic," she adds, and she hopes its reassuring, but suspects it might not be.

[ragweed]

It becomes clear quickly enough to Kit what they all intend to do, and he can't keep himself from grimacing in dismay. It's not the dwarven way of doing things--but, he reminds himself, topsiders aren't of the Stone, and feel no need to return to it. Still, he can't keep himself from shifting his weight from foot to foot with some agitation.

He almost doesn't hear Myr, and has to turn his right ear towards him to hear the rest of what he asks. "No," he admits. "Just--enough to know he was an elf. He was badly beaten."

He kneels beside the body, hesitates, and then rests a hand against the place where the elf's shoulder is covered by the blanket. "Poor sod," he murmurs, face and voice pained.

[faithlikeaseed]

Reassurance--even of that very grim kind--is thin on the ground right now and Myr will take what he can get. "Right," he sighs. "Better you've got experience with it. I'm going to hold a barrier over it," the sort she's likely well familiar with, "so we don't bring the whole place down in embers."

Not that a part of him doesn't want to, and badly, to erase the stain of what had happened here. But-- He tips his head toward Kit as his friend kneels down nearby, trying--failing--to keep his own pain from his face at the description of the corpse. "Likely tried to help the children--Maker see him safe across the Veil." A servant, maybe. Or simply an elf at the wrong place at the wrong time, because that's all it took to get one killed when shems and their awful business are involved.

Myr shakes his head to dispel the thought, sitting back on his heels and considering now that he's worked out the size of the barrier they'll need. It'll have to be stronger than he's used to casting, last long enough for a flashfire to run its course... His hands work through the shape of a spell; a summoned wisp flicks into being from the Fade, bringing with it a dim emerald light that washes the scene before them in sickly hues. "Hate to ask," he murmurs, "but see if he's got anything identifying on him."

There may not be anything. Undoubtedly the monsters responsible have covered their tracks; but there's no sense in helping them by destroying evidence sight unseen.

cw discussion of dead bodies I guess

[ragweed]

"Hate to ask, but see if he's got anything identifying on him."

Kit takes a breath and lets it out in a single, long exhale. It's a sound idea, and he can't find fault with the logic of it. "Right," he says, more to himself than to anyone else. This isn't the first dead body he's ever seen, nor is it likely to be the last. It shouldn't make his insides lurch so to pull that blanket back and reveal to himself, yet again, the bruised and battered face of the elf whose only discernible 'crime' was tending to ill children.

He searches the body with as much respect as he can manage, trying to move him gently when he must. The stink of decay doesn't cause his gorge to rise; he's long accustomed to that from his tenure in the Deep Roads. At length, however, he pauses. "He's got a mark on him of some kind," he says, considering it. The design isn't one that he recognizes, but it makes him chill in a way that is all too familiar; he could be looking at a casteless' brand. "Doesn't look like the kind of tattoo anyone would willingly put on himself, frankly."

[dashing]

"Are there certain ways to mark the difference?" It's not interrogative, or accusatory - Herian genuinely wants to know, because there is so much she is still learning. She believes Kit, without hesitation, in his assessment, and perhaps she would have drawn the same conclusion, but she doesn't know that, and if there are markers she had better understand them, know what exactly to look for. Her own tattoos are willing, a sort of liberty that she admittedly would likely not have been allowed in the Circle, and she has seen them on others for different reasons.

"Do you think it the marking of a criminal, or," and she feels a little sick before she says it, but she suspects they've all felt ill this entire time, in spirit even if not physically, "property?"

And looking back to Myr, she returns to the idea that is uncomfortable, as necessary as it is. When she had burned bodies in the ruins of the Spire, at least they had been people she knew; when she burned a chevalier she had (miraculously, it must be admitted) bested in battle, he had been a felled foe. This man is a stranger in every sense, and it feels so impersonal— and yet, it must be done. "Are we ready to proceed?"

[faithlikeaseed]

Slave brand, is Myr's first thought, child of the Hasmal alienage as he is. They'd had their share of Tevinter escapees there--thin-faced men and women haunted always by the thought of recapture, who hid their marks beneath their clothing but never so perfectly a child might not glimpse one now and again. Might go home and ask his Tevene father what they meant...

Herian's questions are good ones, necessary ones, when Myr's all but ready to leap to conclusions about the unwilling kinds of tattoos. It's the last, though, that shakes him loose of his moment's reverie.

"Are we ready to proceed?"

"We are--if you are, Kit."

It'll be the most flagrant display of magic they've engaged in tonight, and it feels like damned poor repayment for all the help Kit's been to spring it on him without warning. Myr takes up his staff and rises to his feet once more, taking a step back from the corpse to await his friend's response.

Yngvi, Nari, Kaisa, & Anders

[inagutterson]

Nodding to Kaisa in gratitude, Yngvi manages another smile at the little ones before turning his attention to Nari's question.

"Up in the Gallows, my room's in what was the Templar tower before everything. If you meet us inside the door that should work." That was the strange luxury about having a tent in Skyhold: you could say exactly where you were without having to remember how many doors down or neighbours or anything like that. "Right you lot, we're going on an adventure and it's going to be fun, won't it Warden? All the nugs are tucked up in bed and if you fall asleep I won't take it personal either." Yngvi keeps his voice nice and soft as he starts pushing, having to put his back into it to get the keg going like this but that's fine. A little hard work might help put all this out his mind too.

[nadasharillen]

After hearing the directions, Nari's brow furrows - committing them to memory - and she nods. "I'll meet you there," she says, moving to give Sina's shoulder a quick squeeze before setting off towards the city proper at a lope to gather what's needed.