faderift | [OPEN] this guy is out now

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[OPEN] this guy is out now

WHO: Atticus Vedici, the Division Heads, Wren, Myr + OPEN
WHAT: Someone is free-ish from prison, finally.
WHEN: Early December.
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: In Benedict's thread, CW for Fade torture awfulness.

I. THE AGREEMENT (Closed to the Division Heads, Wren, and Myr)

Atticus has no choice but to submit to this condition of his freedom, even if in doing so he exchanges one set of shackles for another.

Tight-lipped and silent as he follows Ser Coupe into the private chamber to be utilized for this process, he schools his face into a neutral expression that only just succeeds in masking his outrage. Yet in this he knows he has no leverage, no trump card to play that would not in turn be played against him, too.

He stops in the centre of the room and waits. At this stage, there is little else he can do.

II. THE GALLOWS COURTYARD (OPEN)

It is exceptionally pleasant to step outdoors into a brisk autumn morning and not feel the looming presence of a Templar guard at his back, nor suffer the weight of the runed shackles around his wrists. Atticus examines the reddened flesh on his hands pensively, gives his fingers a tentative flex first this way, then that way; there appears to be no permanent damage, nor any adverse effects of his limited exposure to the lyrium within the runed cuffs.

In short, nothing truly worth remarking upon to distract him from his cursory, near feline exploration of the Gallows that are now laid out before him.

The courtyard isn’t his destination so much as a stop along the way; already he’s encountered a number of locked or warded doors that his better judgment refrained him from investigating further. The mess hall, at the early hour when he chose to rise, only had a scattered few individuals in it having their breakfast; curiously, none of them seemed interested in eating with him. So it has been during most of the interminable hours he’s passed this morning, though he can find little to complain over in having one of the communal baths exclusively to himself.

Likely he cuts an odd figure standing alone in the courtyard admiring this first unobscured view of the cloudy sky that he’s enjoyed in months, but that’s not reason enough for him to change his behaviour.

III. DREAMING (Closed to Benedict)

On some night--which one doesn’t especially matter, only that it is a still one, peaceable and quiet--Atticus lets his fadewalking lead him towards the outskirts of Benedict’s dreaming mind. It’s less that he intrudes, and more that he finds for himself some way to interweave himself into the world of the dream, and to search through it with vague interest for some sign of his former apprentice’s consciousness.

IV. IN THE LIBRARY (OPEN)

His freedom from the Gallows prison is accompanied by certain expectations, chief among them that Atticus will put his keen intellect and insight into the activity of the Venatori to good use and work.

So that is what he is doing now--or at the very least, he is perusing range after range of books upon aging shelves, withdrawing them at his leisure, bringing down volumes as they strike him as relevant, replacing those that don’t. He has acquired a small work station for himself in the corner, and returns to it occasionally to work.

V. PETRANA'S OFFICE (CLOSED)

If little else can be said for the quality of his character, let it at least be said that Atticus Vedici is punctual.

At the prescribed time he arrives outside Petrana's office door, but does not yet knock. An unexpected compulsion sees him taking a moment to straighten the sleeves and collar of the simple black robe he's acquired since being freed from the prisoner's tunic required of him in the jail cell. The fabric of the robe would never pass muster in Minrathous society; that alone makes him inexplicably satisfied by it.

He straightens and lifts his hand, hesitates only a moment, and then raps his knuckles against the door. "Madame de Cedoux," he says (never her given name, not so casually, not here).

VI. THRANDUIL'S OFFICE (CLOSED)

(OOC: This thread takes place shortly after the phylactery thread.)

Shortly after the phylactery ritual is completed, Atticus is summoned to a private meeting with the head of the Research Division. Well, that didn't take long.

He's given some time to himself to bathe first, wash his hair, shave the growth of stubble on his chin, and change out of his prisoner's tunic into something more fitting for one who is no longer meant to look like a prisoner. (He still is, he knows; as long as that phylactery exists. But that is a problem to be dealt with in the future.)

Now, dressed and clean, Atticus approaches Thranduil's office door and knocks.

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"I have drawn a fence around us," she explains, after a fashion. The words have a certain lilt to them, they are stilted in an obvious, blank sort of way; this is not her first language, nor her second or third, the words she reaches for aren't known to him. This is a poor explanation but, sadly, it is the only one she can give in a language with no words to describe the girdle.

"You will recall that I have no desire to remind the templars of my presence, so I have hidden us," Galadriel says and steps around him, as though she is considering circling him, but the alcove is far too small to allow for such a dramatic gesture. Were there any distance here, he might've seen where the world became watery, where the edge of the girdle looped around them, but the quarters were too close and the edges of the spell were well beyond the walls around them, hidden by solid stone.

"I have silenced this place, drawn it away and us within it, but worry not, Atticus. No danger can find you here, not while the fence is raised."

Edited (Better tag. Sorry for the edit.) 2017-12-21 07:39 (UTC)

A fence? Space within the girdle chafes against him, like someone drawing sandpaper over a raw wound; the sensation here is like and unlike pain, but the wrongness of it is just as difficult to tolerate as a broken bone.

Still. Caught though he is in this snare, she hasn't attacked him. In keeping with her words, there are no templars surging forward to drag him back into the dungeons, to do whatever manner of procedure it is that the Southern Chantry approves of to keep him in his own mind. (He thinks, unbidden, of Casimir Lyov, and a rush of nausea rocks him.)

It's a struggle to make himself straighten, to turn to face her, but he manages it. There's nothing to be done about his ashen, drawn complexion; he takes a steadying breath, one hand still braced against the wall, just in case. "I am no spirit," he replies, addressing her first observation, because it seems inevitable that they should circle back to that subject. She knows. He was reckless, and she knows. "A mage, a magister, as I have told you. The extent of my gifts are..."

His words taper off for a moment. "They are unknown, to the Inquisition."

Galadriel is not often given to rash statements but it takes some effort for her to refrain from making comment on the Inquisition and what it knows. She considers his words and how he gave them--they are likely honest, few men could lie while they suffer so startling and dramatic a surprise as this--and finds some respect for him in his non-answer. He has told her enough to satisfy the demand, the question of what he is, without managing to tell her precisely what they do not know.

Perhaps he assumes she does know, given that she has seen him in her dreams. It would not be a strange assumption to make.

"We are alike in that, then," Galadriel replies and already she can feel the strain of this spell upon her. This conversation could not be allowed to drone on. When she continues, she is not speaking aloud but to the heart of the man before her.

But still I cannot place what you are, for it is a rare occasion that I find someone has wandered into my mind unbidden.

They are alike in that regard, too, judging by the narrowing of his eyes, the startled look on his face; Atticus goes still where he still leans against the wall. Is this a threat, he wonders, or an overture?

He leverages himself cautiously away from the wall, forcibly straightening his back and shoulders; the wrongness of the girdle still chafes against him, but he has managed to master his body's discomfort with it for now. "I suspect," he starts, winded but coherent, "we may be at a crossroads with each other. I have no desire to be your enemy."

"A fortunate turn, for I have no desire to be yours," Galadriel replies in kind. Her expression hasn't hardened yet, it is still laced with far more curiosity than caution, and she steps forward, closing the distance between them.

"So tell me what it is you sought in my dreams? If it was the cold of Helcaraxë, you could have asked."

What small measure of relief he experiences at her words is undercut by his tremendous discomfort, but if nothing else it allows him to let go of the animalistic instinct towards readying his defence. She won't harm him here. Perhaps she might not harm him at all.

"So tell me what it is you sought in my dreams? If it was the cold of Helcaraxë, you could have asked."

He almost smiles, and a short (albeit humourless) laugh follows. Atticus dips his head as though conceding some point, then considers his words. After a pause, he meets her eyes. "Only satisfaction for my curiosity. I've been told," he adds wryly after a moment, "it can be pathological." His curiosity, that is.

"Curiosity," Galadriel repeats and considers him. She lacks the power to truly delve into his mind, into his heart, and see if he is lying...but if he is, what could he have hoped to gain? For all her terror about the One, it did not exist in these lands. There was no danger from the gathering shadows, nor any shadows to truly be wary of.

Of the two of them she has presented the most clear and obvious threat, she had unbalanced him and hidden him away, and to what end apart from silence? Her mild expression melts to something warmer, looking a bit more like humor, and she glances around them at the edge of the fence and the walls that hide it.

"I have done many ill advised things because of curiosity; I suppose I cannot fault you for indulging in yours," Galadriel acquiesces and begins to lift her hand but pauses. "I would warn you to be cautious, should your curiosity draw you in again. I am very old and there is much darkness in my mind that does not live in these lands; you may join me if you like but not all dreams are so...kind as Helcaraxë before the days of dawn."

He recognizes an easing of something in her expression, though what this new shift in their dynamic will yield for the future is still hard to say. Atticus regards her now with less wariness; rather, he considers a narrow cliff face, and whether he can scale it, or if the risk of losing his footing is too great.

He takes the plunge anyway.

"I would join you in your dreams," he volunteers simply and, at last, straightens up the rest of the way. (The weight of this fence on his mind is still immense, but knowing that it will be lifted soon helps him to rally.) "If they trouble you greatly, I can..." Here his words taper off, but he makes an idle gesture with his hands before meeting her gaze again. "I can change them."

Galadriel stops.

She is ever-moving, as all elves are, and sways with the wind like the beech trees that line the naith, or the reeds along a riverbank. She is gradual and her motions understated, but they are ever-present, even as time eddies and flows around her. But now, as he makes his offer, she comes to a dead halt. She freezes in place and her gaze fixes upon his face.

No creature, mortal or otherwise, had been able to offer her anything truly tempting in many, many thousands of years. When he speaks those words, gives her the promise of some reprieve from the dreams that plague her, Galadriel is filled with a sharp and hungry longing.

"You offer this to me freely...?"

Her tone shifts and some of the depth of her desire creeps out into her voice. It is a dreadful sort of desperation, more obvious now than anything she has ever expressed, and is only barely couched within the pauses that surround it. The fence around them shudders as her attention is dragged away and sound filters in like a distant echo. The Fade is the first to creep back in and the veil slides in behind it like thick tar pooling at their ankles.

"To sate your curiosity?"

It’s the touch of the Fade against his mind that he feels first--an exquisite correctness that acts as a balm for the ache caused by its own absence. Atticus closes his eyes at its presence and exhales, unable to completely mask his relief and pleasure at its return. The sensation is so acute and all-encompassing that he almost misses her words.

”You offer this to me freely…? To sate your curiosity?”

Almost.

“...not entirely for such a purpose, no.” The admission comes slowly, but having said it, he feels no desire to retract it. Honesty here runs the risk of ruining everything he’s been building towards for the past half a year--but deception, or a watering down of the truth, might destroy the beginnings of something even more valuable than his tenuous alliance with the Inquisition. Galadriel’s power, and the covetous desperation in her voice… perhaps they are more similar than they realize.

“Shaping the Fade in dreams, moulding it into an image that pleases me is--” A brief pause as he considers his words, “--my gift.” He might have said ‘my compulsion,’ and the words would have been equally true; he does not. “It is not one I often have the opportunity to explore--” exploit, “--in the company of others.”

He admits to his own self interest, if it can be called that, but Galadriel only hears the potential for relief in his words. The past has always haunted her, ere the days of dawn she has looked back and felt the gradual decay of the world. In this place, weakened as she is, forced to relive the long, harrowing years of her life in her slumber, the past is like the tide and it pulls her under with every passing night.

She has watched the world burn, has seen the darkest corners of the mirror, and has known the whispers in the dark. They come to her, at once, without end, and he can shape the Fade of this world, the land of dreams. It is a gift, or some turn of divine fortune, that they have met.

Her hand falls and with it the girdle is dispelled. It comes apart like leaves in the wind, unraveling to nothing around them and permitting sound, cold, and the breeze of Kirkwall into the alcove. The air is still only until it is disturbed and then the perfect calm of the atmosphere is restored to something more normal.

"Then I welcome you with open arms," Galadriel says, just upon the edge of sounding shaken. "And apologize for my brashness, mellon nin. I shall not startle you again in this fashion."

The fence breaks, and allows the rest of the world to rush back in. Atticus feels it upon his face as a cold wind off the Waking Sea, and it bites a flush of colour back into his face. Reflexive, he slips his hands into the sleeves of his simple black robe--nothing nearly so complex as what he wore in the Fade, but it is warm.

So are her words, warm with welcome and sincerity, feelings that Atticus balks at confronting. There's a guilelessness to his expression when he looks back at her; it is easier, in the moment, to beg ignorance of something simpler. He clears his throat and gathers his composure. "'Mellon nin'?" he repeats her own words back to her, curious.

There is a moment, when the chasm of what power she has spent opens before her, where Galadriel almost sways with the rush of exhaustion that floods her. She keeps her feet, she has had much practice in this, especially in Thedas, but her distraction bleeds into their conversation. She stares at him blankly, as if waiting on the rest of his question, before she realizes that he is done.

Of course, he would not know what it means.

"Ah, it is Sindarin," she answers, "Elvish...one of the languages that qualifies. It means my friend.

"I hope you do not object to the familiarity?"

"No," Atticus responds, realizes a moment later that his words could be read as a refusal of the thing she has offered to him, and clarifies with an idle hand gesture. "No, indeed not."

Friendship and its peculiarities are not alien concepts to him. They litter his boyhood memories--the names and faces of other children and adolescents whose company he kept while learning magic from his mother... and teaching himself the art of deception, of how to keep his abilities shrouded in secret while still enabling himself to explore the Fade through another's eyes. That had been part of the thrill of it, the excitement: he delighted and tormented his fellows in their sleep, only to rush up to them in the waking world to witness how their dreams preoccupied them, or their nightmares hounded them. More often than not the results disappointed, for the thinking mind is a startlingly resilient thing. Often it required two or three such visits to his friends' dreams to render them truly haggard from night terrors, or glowing with light from the inside, in the waking world.

Such familiarity breeds unfortunate associations; his childhood and adolescent friends either grew to want too little--or too much--from their relationships. So they became short-lived things out of necessity; to use a sleeping mind too often, too consistently, is to leave a path through the subconscious that leads back to the dreamwalker himself. He did not, as a rule, court familiarity. (Indeed, he'd killed men for demonstrating too much of it--and for far less.)

Nevertheless here he stood, confronting the most recent in an alarming number of faces who proved themselves to be exceptions to that rule. And this face the most alarming of all, for she extended unselfish familiarity to him and called it 'friendship' for no discernible purpose other than the knowledge that he could ease her sleeping mind.

In short, she knew his secret. And she would keep it.

He's let the silence drag on for too long. He clears his throat. "My apologies," he says, "I think the fence has left my mind in a fog."

That's one way to put it, surely.

"Yes, it is a feature of that art," Galadriel acknowledges--she, herself is more given to long silences during conversation, it comes part and parcel with immortality, and thinks little of it. Her own distraction bleeds heavily into her parsing of the situation, but she is not so far gone that she does not recognize that it is her turn to speak.

"It shall fade, in time. Even those caught upon the borders of it are not affected indefinitely." Though, depending on how long they lingered on the edges of the spell, they could suffer mortal consequences that were not directly linked to it.

The sounds of the courtyard are much greater than during their previous conversation. Perhaps it is the time of day, or the strangely inclement weather, but there are many more bodies this time around and Galadriel is increasingly uncomfortable with the din of them. She draws her cloak about herself and lifts her hood again. The effect of it is not instantaneous but something in her becomes less interesting as she is fully covered.

"Enjoy the snow, if you will, but I think I shall not linger out here; you of all people know why I am less than fond of cold."

As she grows more keenly aware of the other people that litter the nearby courtyard, so does Atticus--and he notes with keen interest the peculiar effect of the cloak she draws around her shoulders. The magic meant to encourage his eye to wander elsewhere works, but his mind, still shrewd, makes a note to enquire about it later.

At her words, he chuckles. It's a short sound, mostly lacking in humour. "In that, you and I are in agreement," he says, regards the nearby hanging icicle with clear disdain, and steps away from the wall. Before they go their separate ways, however, he pauses to meet her eyes again.

"Take care, Galadriel," he says. It may be the first time he's spoken the words aloud and meant them.

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[OPEN] this guy is out now

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