faderift | A SEA OF DEATH

A SEA OF DEATH

WHO: Anyone/Everyone
WHAT: A trip to sunny Nevarra
WHEN: Mid-Firstfall
WHERE: Nevarra City
NOTES: Undead cw. OOC post. We highly encourage using the OOC post for plotting and especially for coordinating strategy among characters participating in Part III.

Following the successful defense of Perendale, the Nevarran crown has extended an invitation to the Inquisition to send representatives to Nevarra City to enjoy its hospitality and gratitude. Most signs point toward an uneventful, perhaps even pleasant, stay, one that could foster a closer relationship between the Inquisition and the Northeast's premier military power. Other signs, however, point toward trouble. The Inquisition has previously addressed early Venatori attempts to influence the king, but reports from agents embedded in Nevarra City indicate that these attempts have resumed. While no immediate danger is expected, everyone will be advised to be on their guard during the visit and keep an eye out for potential enemy activity.

I. TRAVEL & TAVERN

The swiftest route to Nevarra City is to first travel by sea to Cumberland, an uneventful voyage followed by half a day to rest and eat before heading up the Imperial Highway toward the capital. It isn't a large group, consisting only of staff from Kirkwall's outpost who volunteered or were ordered to make the journey, so once on land they're able to move swiftly with horses and carts and spend only one night sleeping aside the road in tents. If there are bandits along the highway, the sight of a uniformed, armed, and relatively organized force on the horizon makes them disappear long before they're reached, and the Inquisition is troubled by nothing but bad weather along the way. The paved highway makes for quick travel despite the rain, except for those who are tasked with detouring off the main road to collect a new party of rifters.

Still, the Inquisition reaches the Nevarra City well after nightfall on the second day, with no time to explore before heading straight to the tavern and inn where they'll be residing during the visit. The Crooked Bone is a large establishment near the center of the city and built for crowds, though it is clearly unprepared for quite this large a number of overnight guests, and the staff may be heard debating the wisdom of taking such a contract, having to cancel and refuse other guests to fit the whole Inquisition contingent, but apparently making a pretty penny and earning favor with some unnamed royal courtier in exchange. Even though the Inquisition has been granted exclusive use of the inn for its stay, it fills up the available rooms without anyone, no matter how high-ranking, permitted a room of their own.

But it isn't an altogether uncomfortable arrangement, and definitely preferable to sleeping in tents. There's hot food downstairs at nearly any hour, not to mention ale and wine, served at long tables in a large room with space at the center for dancing—when there's music, which there won't be now unless someone among the Inquisition wishes to provide it—and a cheery sort of atmosphere lingers despite the decor, which tends toward dark wood and skeleton motifs. It's warmed by the proliferation of lanterns of all shapes and sizes, and the fire burning merrily in every grate, which combined with the full house lends the place a surprisingly cozy feel. Plus, the Inquisition's takeover of the inn means it can maintain its own security and thus genuinely relax indoors, something that won't be so true upon venturing out into the city.

II. NEVARRA CITY

Nevarra's capital city sits on the banks of the Minanter, where the river winds down through the hills that mark the border between Nevarra and its rival Orlais. The city is tucked into a high valley, surrounded by sharp cliffs and studded with rocky spires. The few tributaries of the Minanter that once flowed through have been rerouted into a central channel that tumbles down a fake falls into a large reflecting pool in the city's main park, feeding a fountain in the shape of a trio of water-spewing dragons. The City is renowned for its art and culture, grand buildings and meticulously manicured landscaping, unusually clean cobbled streets and soaring halls carved with intricate adornment. Though no longer as large or as busy as Cumberland, it is a wealthy city, and the immaculately dressed majority will not hesitate to stare at the Inquisition interlopers in their midst. They are frank about their curiosity and also about their suspicions: Nevarra has no love for Orlais, and the Inquisition has far more close ties to the southern Empire than anyone here is comfortable with.

Originally a Tevinter stronghold, the oldest parts of the city are distinctly Imperial in style, all polished, seamless black marble, like the columns that line the boulevard leading from the heart of the city up to the Castrum Draconis, where King Markus holds court. The way to the royal fortress is lined with statues, the finest examples of the hundreds of figures that exist throughout the city, likenesses of every hero and dragon-slayer, kings and generals. At this time of year, each noble family honors its famous ancestors with processions, marching through the city to drape their family's statues in the house colors.

These parades take many forms, from the loud and gaudy to the solemn and torchlit, attended by thousands or just a handful. The richest houses hire troupes of actors to man the streets beside the statues of their predecessors, costumed and acting out the most famous triumphs of their subject's life. This year, as the king's health declines, the competing efforts of the Pentaghasts and Van Markhams and their respective supporters take on a new urgency. Every theater in Nevarra has been emptied and some further afield too, to fill the long, black marble boulevard before the castle with players staging elaborate recreations of dragon hunts and historic battles. Accusations of sabotage, petty turf wars, or players making impromptu cameos in their rivals' shows raise tempers ever higher and the unlucky or unwary may be caught in the midst of a street brawl as tensions threaten to spill over.

The situation in the court itself is no less fraught, though the simmering anxiety is more successfully kept behind closed doors. The King is old, and that he is failing is no longer a secret. His mind has not gone, but his strength has, and he is only capable of brief spates of sharp attention before the effort exhausts his resources and he begins to drift or doze. He is constantly attended by a rotating trio of Mortalitasi, his most trusted companions. He holds court for roughly an hour a day, perhaps two if he is feeling especially hale, and courtiers are in constant competition to be among the few blessed with the king's personal attention. All other business is handled by a handful of advisors, most of long standing. While the Inquisition's representatives are welcomed, and official gratitude expressed for the assistance at Perendale, they may find the reception rather cool overall. The nobility is particularly wary, of Orlesian influence, foreign or Chantry factions meddling in the succession, of the potential threat to Nevarra if the sleeping dragon of the Imperium is poked too hard. It will take careful and strategic mingling indeed to begin to truly win anyone here over.

III. THE NECROPOLIS

Toward the end of the Inquisition's stay, a rare invitation will be extended to its members: an opportunity to tour the Grand Necropolis outside of Nevarra City, proffered out of awareness that its customs are seen as barbaric to outsiders and in hopes that a better understanding of Nevarra's customs will facilitate a better working relationship. The Inquisition will not require any particular person to attend the tour. It is a delicate subject, and one that may rightly make many people squeamish or afraid. But it would be rude not to send representatives, so those who are willing and curious enough to agree will be sent to meet Tivadar Nancollas, one of the Mortalitasi, at the entrance.

Within the walls, the Necropolis is nearly large enough to be a city of its own, were any of its population alive. It is divided into a warren of countless crypts, wound through with passageways. Those maintained by Nevarra's ancient families are enormous and ornate, paths as wide as real streets leading through a maze of oversized statuary and gilded rooms fit for living nobility. Others are smaller and simpler. Some belong to families that have since died out entirely and have fallen into disrepair, though the Mortalitasi see still to the remains within. There are vast public crypts as well, where the inexpertly mummified bodies of Nevarra's poor and nameless are housed en masse if delivered to the Necropolis from outlying communities. The one constant is the smell: the pervasive spicy-sweet aroma of the incense burned in censers throughout the Necropolis, heavy enough to cling to clothes and hair for hours afterwards, and give headaches to those unused to the scent.

As the group passes each crypt, Tivadar names its owner and perhaps some of the better-known figures residing within. The Pentaghast crypt is particularly enormous, and he guides the group inside, past the crowd of still and staring dead, for a brief glimpse at King Caspar still and silent on his throne, crown atop the wispy remains of his hair, finery conspicuously new yet crafted in the style of ages past, the blade of the sword laid across his lap still razor-sharp.

In contrast to the enraged corpses that may have climbed out of bogs or emerged from caves to attack Inquisition agents in their past travels, these possessed corpses are remarkably sedate. They do move: they may blink or turn their heads to watch someone pass, eyes (or eye sockets, depending on the age and wealth of the deceased) glowing with the presence of something otherworldly. But they seem content with watching, until—

(There's always an until.)

—deep in center of the Necropolis, where some of the oldest crypts are falling into ruin and even the Mortalitasi's careful work can't keep all the skin on the corpses' bones, Tivadar disappears—magic, perhaps, or a trick door, or some combination of the two—and the sealed door to a nearby crypt creaks open.

The corpses that lurch out of it are not sedate. They're rabid and grasping, red-eyed, and ready to claw and bite and pursue the Inquisition through the Necropolis' streets. These first enraged mummies count among the poor and poorly kept—they're numerous, but unarmed, brittle. As they push the Inquisition back through the streets, however, their presence seems to awaken the mummies that had previously sat or stood calmly elsewhere. Some of them retreat deeper into their crypts as if frightened. Others do not retreat, but join the swarm in attack. And the further the fighting progresses toward the doors, with the red-eyed corpses stirring each crypt they pass too close to to action, the better preserved and better armed the dead become, until they are wielding swords with names and clad in the dragon-scale armor of the royal houses themselves.

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Thranduil glances over at her, all manufactured laziness (does it actually put anyone at ease?) and smiles. It does not reach his eyes.

“They fear death.” Rifter, elf—and the elves here sunk so low, so abnormal. Easier to assume her kinship is closer to his than to the elvhen, to assume she knows normal. “They glut themselves on it so to make it less of a monster. A corpse wrapped in cloth of gold is no less a corpse.”

Only an empty shell. Nothing to be worshiped, nothing to be feared.

He turns to her, properly, a hand briefly touching over his heard. “Thranduil. I lead the Research Division here. I am Sindarin. Who are you? What do your kin call themselves?”

Elf, quendi, elvhen. Always family, no matter the distance. They must be—without unity, they will be rent asunder, and the Men call them knife-ear all alike.

Again there's a flash of black robes where there aren't any. It's the air of him that would make her take a step back if she was less than she was but forge yourself in dragon's breath and it comes out looking different.

"Mortality is the thing they fixed in everyone else," tree-sap young not even halfway through her first century yet Lorkhan Trickster lurks in the heart of men. "A nail in the throat. Necromancy is forbidden, legal for some but not to us." Meaning her people specifically who treat the dead with the respect the dead are due, not this crass barbarism, this public desecration.

He looks Altmer still. Holds an Altmer rank. Not enough to relax her after Valenwood raised her but her greeting is at least polite if stilted. "Brónach. Bosmer, means wood elf. Well, a few other things when you translate it but that's how the men got to recording it most."

"Brónach," he says. "Mae l'ovannen," for all it is worth, but he will stand on ceremony between the two of them when he meters out use of his language and grander displays of his culture to the peoples of Thedas.

"Have you any questions that have yet gone unanswered?" The things he himself had struggled with, coaxed the answers out of books or other Inquisition members, displeased with his own inability to find the answers.

She is-- refreshing. Another example of his kin out in words beyond this one. That satisfies him. Her wariness is something he does not read into. It is not worth peeling back yet.

Fine, if they're trading tongues no one said she needed to go speaking her own so, "drem yol lok," since she speaks more if the dragon's tongue than her own most times.

"I'd ask the why but fate happens, fate happened already. The dragon eats his own tail and," a gesture to the streets, a dragon banner that twists, writhes, is it flying or is it dying, "things seem similar across places. How long have you been here? How terrible are the men?"

To check. To confirm. Altmer have less charitable opinions than others but if he offered then she'll ask instead of letting her mouth run. He hasn't sneered. It's been an age since someone so much taller looked at her by just looking.

"Nearly two years," he says, and it is nothing, a drop of water in an ocean. For the question of the Men, he draws a glamour about them, makes their words a low buzz for anyone listening in. He has a position. A reputation to protect.

"Elf hunting is a sport for some nobles here," Thranduil says, and that ought to be enough, but he goes on. "Marriage between an elf and a Man is not recognized by the Chantry," a gesture to the nearest spire, "- who can be found in nigh on every country in this world."

A dire explanation, but she does not need gaps when his warning could save her life. "They will call you 'knife-ear' before they call you Rifter or demon. Mind yourself at night. If you need to defend yourself, be thorough, else they round up their friends and go the next night for an elf who cannot defend themselves."

Dragging a hand across her face - the right, not the left, her eyes ache to look at the left still - she heaves out a resigned sigh from deep in her bones at it. "I was in Skyrim that long against my choosing, I can do that again." Would rather not is written in the line of her mouth, the set of her jaw yet young as she is, what does it matter really? Life rarely asks her what she would like and once again it's failed to do so.

"You know," and this is the most conversational she's managed but given the subject her hackles are up, "it's elves hunting elves. They come for you and that's that, elves with pedigrees over who can breed, over who looks most like the old ancestors. Any priest will marry anyone who wants to get married but none of us follow the one god."

She does appreciate the warnings though and her cruel smirk is for the spire, not him. (Not yet. Only it's hard to shake off what she sees in the corner of her eye; to look at him burns too.) "My lady Nocturnal is the lady of night, darkness, and luck, and she smiles on me. Before all that we learn from fourteen to go on the hunt with the hunting parties, I know well enough to keep men from seeing me coming - they like their swords and shields or their magic. I have a bow." Also shouts but she would rather not have the guard on her then beggar herself paying the bribes. "A whole place of Stormcloaks or near enough, never thought I'd miss where I was."

“I do not know if such things would be more or less bearable than what we have here,” he says, because there, wherever her there is (Skyrim?) sounds just as rife with kinslaying as Thedas is. Glad for once that he needn’t make a choice, he traces her smirk to the spire and settles himself.

“Good,” Thranduil says, and means it. He holds tighter to the bonds of kindship between them—between all of them—because he holds to purpose. To order, to interlocking as vines use a tree as a ladder to reach sunlight.

“I hope you will come to me if you find yourself in need of a sympathetic ear, or should you need more mundane than a blessing from your Lady.”

"Do they re-educate here?" Let her cut right to the bone, to her mother who isn't her mother anymore, two people who could pass without recognising one another now same as too many others. If there is a wound there, it's old. Scarred. Ugly and re-opened enough that it healed so she doesn't feel when she presses on it most days, so she has something to be grateful for in that whole mess at least.

But since he doesn't know, no matter how Altmer he looks in the light, she can at least tell him with a glance up. "I'm more hers than she's mine," which he might get. Might not. Some don't understand what it is to carve away pieces of yourself in service to a greater thing, for the gifts that they give you in return with hers being the shadows, the way the dice rolls, the way that an eye might slip past her if she needs it to but Nocturnal is that if you'll pledge your soul to her. What was she doing with a dragon's soul anyway? Burning theirs away to bleached bone beneath a frozen aching sky. "What more d'you imagine I'll be needing?"

How strange to be offered anything. Even the Blades pressed. Not the right sort of hero, her with her mer blood after all, same with the Nords.

“No,” he says. “Not in the south. Among the Qunari, to the north? Yes, they are known for it. Here, it is nothing more than—suggestions. What they may do behind closed doors, I do not know.”

How many of the poorer ones go to the Chantry to learn to read? It is the backbone of Thedas.

“Ah,” he says, “I understand.” He hopes she still listens, whatever facet of power. The Ainur cannot hear them here, but when have they ever listened to Thranduil and his people? He trusts in Eru only, and he trusts Him in the way elves trust Him, which is—everything is in order already. You will never stop Being, but you will know pain and the destruction of your body if you are not fast enough and strong enough.

“Clothes, food, beyond the normal provision of the Inquisition. Money, until your wages come in, and for what they are not enough for. Information.”

Her jaw works. Her jaw keeps working, and her throat swallows convulsively as she breathes very sharply through her nose, gropes in the air for a thing nearby to hold herself to as the world shifts. Cold. She's cold and she hates it, hates it, hates-- "Even other worlds, you can't escape it. Can't escape anything no matter what you do. Better to be dead than to be a thing shaped how they like unless they kill you when it doesn't take."

That happened. They all knew when that happened when the lonely toast was raised in the dark in the trees.

"Once I get to where I can hunt, the first two I can cover. Not all Bosmer keep all our ways so strict but I was raised to honour the Green Pact, some things…the farther from home in a place that doesn't want you, the more you keep them." Maybe here it's going to be more difficult if she'll be expected to live amongst them all the time, to eat by them, to work with them, where they don't know Bosmer or even a single story of them. A thing she can sort through since it doesn't trouble her to find the time to be alone. Her preference when it wasn't the few families she found. (Misses them. Misses them already.) "They pay us here? Really." Brónach almost laughs. Almost. The guild, the dark brotherhood, the companions? It made sense to get paid there but this? Well she didn't reckon on it.

“You are not alone in these feelings,” he says, watching the panic wash over her and doing nothing but being solid himself. “Better dead than lost.”

He shrugs his shoulders elegantly, gestures to the city lazily with his fingers. “Kirkwall is an island city. But outside it, there are forests. What is the Green Pact?” He mimics the way she says it, the same care on the words where she places them.

“Something,” he says. “Once you account how they do not charge us for food, shelter, a few sets of clothes—it is enough to buy alcohol at the tavern. Trinkets. Solider’s pay.” It keeps them calm, gives the others something to send home to their families. Mannish war is profitable, if one is positioned right.

"The dead can be honoured. Remembered. We go back to what we were same as Ehlnofey became the Earth Bones, if we aren't dead, we can't do that. No one escapes the dreamsleeve." No one that isn't mer at least, she who battled to Sovngarde where the shades of men she'd slain passed her by, where the the guardian of the whalebone bridge fought her before letting her pass so every inch of it ground beneath her heels as if it might give way. There is always Sithis. There is always the Void. How many times can she carve her soul away.

Nodding to that, Brónach knows where she's being offered some small form of comfort at least. At least she's used to the smell of cities, the smell of the sea, the brine, the way men let fish linger until they stink but blame it on elves because that's what men do. "A pact made to Y'ffre, spirit of the now, who was Ehlnofey turned to the first of the Earth Bones, that we Bosmer keep in return for his patronage. No vegetation can be killed, injured, or eaten by the Bosmer. Only meat to be eaten, no wood or plants for building, no trees to be harmed, same rules for smoking as building, our bodies can't be altered.

"Abroad is…difficult." She concedes that with less reluctance than she might another. "We have loopholes in Valenwood and elsewhere that we might live." So someone knows now, someone who looks almost Altmer, who speaks so carefully that it doesn't feel so strange to tell him these things, to see how it goes to lay out the naked truth as much as she dares.

"The shelter I'll grant, I can sell or trade off the rest. It probably violates the pact, I've never not looked after myself. Seems soft to not go catch your own dinner." In the hunting party from fourteen so her perspective there is decidedly skewed, but it keeps a body sharp, and it never hurts to spend days hungry.

Mixed in with her regular speech are words that translate poorly, if at all, though he imagines it was much the same for him, and still is to those who overhear his conversation with his kin. But he follows—

“That will be difficult,” he says, and thinks of the Galadhrim, and those in Imaldris, who so often refrain from meat, and then his own little cohort in Mirkwood, who make use of the spiders. “The Gallows are mostly stone. Most of our furniture is wood. If you eat in our mess, expect a good deal of grain and filler—we are not wealthy enough to serve meat at every meal, especially with the winter and war.”

However she plans to smoke her kills—it occurs to him vaguely that she might use dung-fires—she will need to do it outside, but she seems the reasonable sort. “I wish you luck—and with us so close to Orlais, I suppose you might manage to live off cheese.”

"Skyrim was a cold, hard land. Crops grew poorly in many places but the game was abundant if a person was patient, the rivers bursting with fish. Fasting is necessary to the hunter.". Almost religious, the trance induced by that emptiness before taking up the bow but there are always people who won't be missed, places to go.

Cities were bordered by the wilds. Carved out. In time had come grudging respect. "There are no mammoths in Thedas. The giants made the best cheese from them if you were fast enough, better than goat. I can smith well, hunt better, but I'll wager you have few glass smiths. Might be enough. I'll wear gloves, put up my hood." Be smart.

“I would be loathe to lose you so soon after meeting you,” he says, and moves his attention from her to the crowds. The next few days will not be peaceful ones, he has snatched so much time from the jaws of the Inquisition’s plans already. This is no vacation, as idle as he has allowed himself to be. For all his eventual intentions, he is also a division head and owes the Inquisition work.

Sloth is not his chiefest failing.

“Be well,” he bids her—salutes her in the elven manner, fingertips brushing over his head and a bowed head, before he turns his back and makes for the tavern. She knows where to find him—perhaps she will make use of it.

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A SEA OF DEATH

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