faderift | OPEN ↠ HARING EVENT

OPEN ↠ HARING EVENT

WHO: All
WHAT: WINTER IS HERE
WHEN: Haring 15-Wintermarch 1
WHERE: The Gallows, Kirkwall
NOTES: You can use this post as an event-style mingle log, or just use it as background information for your RP elsewhere!

It's been a chilly month already, but in mid-Haring the temperature suddenly plummets. One day it's merely cold, and the next morning the Inquisition wakes to frost on the inside of the window panes and an icy draft whistling through every crack in the tower's masonry. Downstairs, the pipes that feed the bathing chambers and the kitchens creak in the walls, loud enough to be heard even out in the courtyard, where they run beneath the stones, and around midday, when the sun has failed to raise the temperature above freezing, a blocked pipe finally gives, cracking open to spill water across the central court and send it running down side passages. The whole area floods several inches deep and almost immediately begins to freeze, presenting at first a gigantic, treacherous slush puddle and, after a few hours, a sheet of sheer ice.

Melting a safe path from door to door and laying down sand or wood to keep it from becoming slick again is a simple enough undertaking, but before the entire courtyard can be thawed, someone appears with ice skates—and that’s a better idea, surely, for at least a few days. Anyone who complains about the frivolity can be assured it’s good exercise, not to mention good training for a force that may have to travel or fight on ice in the future.

Temperatures remain cold enough that even some parts of the harbor begin to freeze, first just at the calmest edges of the shoreline, and then the more protected nooks and crannies of the bay, inlets and the spaces between piers and beneath docks. It snows most days--not real storms, just a couple inches here and there--little enough for the window to blow most of it off the icy plain of the courtyard and other wide open, paved spaces, accumulating on branches and in alleyways, and creating growing drifts in corners and against walls.

After a week or so actual chunks of floating ice begin to fill the narrow channels of the harbor, threatening smaller and less-sturdy vessels, and the situation in the poorer parts of the city begins to grow dire. With the Viscount's blessing, Inquisition teams (particularly mages) are called in to help. Some are assigned to the docks, to clear ice that makes landing and unloading treacherous, others to help escort ships into harbor by melting a path ahead. Others are sent into Lowtown to clear ice and snow and to provide warmth and medical attention where needed. At least one mage is sent with each team, and while many neighborhoods are pleasantly surprised and grateful for the quick work fire glyphs make of cold hearths and frozen streets, a few are unable to overcome their distrust, and refuse the teams entry, determined to take care of their own without the help of dangerous outsiders.

In the last week of the year, a true blizzard strikes, snow falling steadily for more than a day, blanketing the city at least three feet deep. Digging out the Gallows will be a group effort, and most non-essential trips outside the base will be cancelled for a few days until travel is less difficult, while those who reside in the city or elsewhere may be encouraged to stay a night or two in the fortress so they might continue to work without traveling through the storm. But on the first day of Wintermarch the First Day feast goes on as planned, with modest but plentiful food and ale served in the Gallows' dining hall for anyone who wishes to celebrate the new year.

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better late than never!!!

Snow in Hasmal was a once-in-lifetime occurrence, one that had skipped over Myr's tenure there entirely. So when the first little flakes begin drifting down from the chilly Haring sky and catch him in transit through the Gallows courtyard, he stops dead in his tracks and tips his head back with a startled expression on his face.

"...This is snow, isn't it?" Even for a rhetorical question it's daft as hell, but from the mix of wonder and apprehension in his tone he's not thinking about that--or who might overhear it.

Galadriel has not, this time around, spent much time mingling and speaking with those who wander the Gallows. It is her way, to talk and move freely, but she is less secure here than she has ever been. Nevertheless, when she steps outside into the chill that hangs over the courtyard, her comments come unbidden. She has always disliked the changing of seasons and while snow is not, necessarily, something that bothers her greatly...without her ring it is a sad sight to behold.

"Yes," she answers the question, despite it not requiring an answer, and moves closer to the mage without thinking better of it. She knows not why she bothers, but he is an elf, and she has always been less guarded around elves. He is blindfolded, to whatever end, and she does not wonder to terribly at it as she stared up at the heavy clouds. "It looks as though there will be much of it in the days to come."

"Maker's breath." There's a helpless laugh behind the oath, as Myr holds out his ungloved hand to catch the drifting flakes. Curiosity's already begun to win out over his anxieties concerning the cold; the temperature may be abjectly miserable, but there really is something strangely enchanting about snow itself. "Much more of it--just what we need, isn't it? Though it's a damn sight better than the freezing rain. I'll need to see the hives have proper cover..."

What had lasted them through the sleet of earlier months might not hold up well against accumulating snow--to say nothing of the possibility of suffocation. (That could happen in snow, right? It's another form of water; it stood to reason it could kill by immersion.) And then there's the cold... Though given they're Sundermount bees, they must've overwintered before without help and surely he's being--

--quite rude to someone whose name he doesn't even know, yet. He shakes his head to clear the cobwebs (easier to sink into when he's so exhausted, so distracted lately) and turns a smile in Galadriel's direction. "But I don't think I've heard your voice before, serah. Are you new to the Gallows?"

He worries, frets over his apiary, and Galadriel is momentarily enchanted by the sentiment. Snowflakes gather on his hand but it is not cold enough to keep them from melting against his skin. She turns her attention upward and, after a few seconds of companionable silence, he speaks again, smiling blindly at her as he does.

"I am," she replies easily, for it is not untrue. "I have been here only a very short while, but I am not entirely new to these lands."

She draws her cloak around her shoulders a bit more tightly and the wealth of fabric flutters just so in the cold breeze. Her hand is above her heart, even if he cannot see it, and she bends her head forward as she introduces herself.

"I am called Galadriel."

That pulls the rest of Myr's laggard attention around, away from the hives and how unenchanting a melted snowflake is. Couched carefully as the words are, they suggest one thing to him--and of the few things about the Inquisition that remain an uncomplicated joy, meeting rifters is one. Even when they're surly or ill-mannered they're always interesting, and Galadriel hardly seems either.

(Though her name tickles at the back of his mind in a way he can't place, calling to something he hadn't bothered to commit to firm memory. Overheard gossip? A report in passing? A name caught over the crystals when the latest rifters had joined them on the way to Nevarra? But she's not entirely new--)

"Then I'm happy to welcome you to it--precious little as there is that's welcoming about the recent weather," he replies, with a self-deprecating laugh lurking beneath the words. The southerners among them take the snow in stride; perhaps he can learn to as well. (Even if he's quick now to shake beaded water off his hand and tuck it back in his sleeve against the chill wind.) "A pleasure to meet you all the same, serah Galadriel. I'm Myrobalan Shivana."

Lately of Hasmal Circle, he'd been accustomed to saying, but six months is too long for a lately; and how much that might matter to someone from beyond the Fade, he doesn't know. "And forgive me if it's impertinent to ask--but do I understand rightly that you're a rifter who's left and returned?"

"Myrobalan Shivana" she repeats his name and the way the syllables form is strange, they resonate more in Quenya than not, but she strives to match the way he says it. It is something of a challenge to keep her pronunciation from straying, his name is so similar to those she is accustomed to.

"Yes, I am," she confirms and lowers her hand to her side. She watches him for a moment before glancing back up at the sky and the falling snow. "Though the tale is somewhat uninteresting. To my recollection I simply awoke elsewhere...disheveled and out of sorts.

"It is not terribly strange for one of the Eldar to simply lose such spans of time, I have been known to let my attention wander for far longer than a few months, but to appear somewhere else, altogether, is somewhat less normal."

She considers her ring, where it might be and how she might find it, and the darkness that pulls at her thoughts is sobering. She dismisses the topic and turns her attention from the sky again.

"I fear I should dwell on less troubling topics. Please, tell me of your bees and of yourself. It has been too long since I have met someone new in these lands and I am eager to learn of you."

Buttons likes bacon.

It's one of the first things Myr'd been told on meeting the one-winged griffon, before someone had thrust a rasher into his hand and ushered him forward to offer it to the great predator. Buttons had plucked it delicately from his fingers without so much as a brush of that enormous beak, and it was love at first--

Well.

Since then, Myr's been in the habit of bringing ends and pieces of pork fat cajoled from the kitchen up to his feathery friend. Food's the coin to purchase Buttons' tractability, his aggression tempered by keeping him stuffed to the gills at all times. A good enough tactic when there weren't hands to spare to lavish attention on him--but it's also made him run to fat, and isn't a real solution to the frustration of being unable to fly.

So Myr devised a game.

The rules are simple: Myr freezes a sovereign-sized chunk of bacon fat into a ball and throws it hard as he can across a disused corner of the Gallows; Buttons goes scrambling after it at top speed, vaulting obstacles set out in his way. Once he's snapped up his treat he comes trotting proudly back to await another throw.

It's good exercise for the both of them and a welcome break from the general misery life's been otherwise. So even with snow coating the Gallows, Myr screws up his courage to brave the cold and the ice for the sake of his feathery friend--even if the space they'd usually use is so disused and sheltered from the wind it's acquired some sizable drifts. At least he hasn't got to freeze the bacon first on a day like this, while Buttons hardly seems to mind the snow, making a sport of diving after his treats like a fox hunting mice.

And between the delighted shrieks and heart-stopping thuds of a half-ton predator sliding merrily into things--to say nothing of Myr's laughter--it's easy for a listener to conclude there's a small war going on over there.

Half an hour is the longest they can keep the raucous game up before before one or the other of them begins to tire out. Then it's time for preening and a nap (both, mercifully, back in the warm dry griffon roosts). Myr's only too happy to help Buttons with the former; it's an opportunity to get elbow-deep in griffon feathers--like he is now--as he gently breaks apart feather sheathes with careful fingers. He talks as he works, a low constant stream of whatever comes to mind. Sometimes it's magical theory, sometimes the latest gossip in the Gallows, or commentary on the weather--

Sometimes a quiet outpouring of sorrows not fit for any other ears.

"--and now they have to know me for a liability and rightfully keep me out of the field. It wouldn't be so bad if I told them, but every time I think about telling anyone other than you-- It's like it's happening all over again and they'll ask me to justify myself and I can't, I haven't the words for it--"

Buttons is simply happy for the attention, passing no judgment and rendering no verdict as he sits with his golden eyes half-closed and makes a low purling noise deep in his throat.

Inessa enters the roost, a frequent visitor not only for Potato but the rest of the griffons. Since she's replaced Maja as one of the griffon keepers, duty -and a genuine love of the griffons- has her checking in on them whenever she's not needed in her office. She makes her rounds, giving treats and attention to those who are behaving. Potato takes to following her around, patiently waiting until she can have some undivided attention again. As Buttons already has someone, she's going to skip him for now...or she would, but Myr's voice reaches her ears and she pauses. Potato in tow, she makes a detour, clearing her throat. Sneaking around isn't something she's ever comfortable doing.

"Myr...."

At the approach of another person--and more importantly, another griffon--Buttons lifts his head and huffs a territorial warning. Myr stops in mid-sentence at that and the sound of his name, mightily resisting the urge to curl in on himself or demand what Inessa had overheard. Neither of them is a useful response.

"Inessa," he manages at last, once he's sure of his voice, his nerves. "It's good to hear your voice. Is that Potato with you?"

Potato stops short and squawks, Inessa pausing to pat her. This isn't the time to get huffy and have a spat with Buttons. "She is, but I'll keep her back. Buttons need not fear an intrusion."

She hesitates, but decides to own up to it. "I...overheard what you were saying. I don't want to keep you off the field, Myr. If anything, I want to help, but...I can't do that without knowing what's wrong."

"Thank you; I've just gotten him settled down." Buttons isn't quite so reassured, flexing his talons and shooting Potato an ears-flattened look of warning. But the nascent annoyance ebbs as Myr runs a careful hand over his hackles and mutters soothing nonsense in his calmest voice; clearly, he's been learning strategies for dealing with the griffon's aggression.

In this case it also plays double duty, buying Myr time to struggle over an answer to her implicit question. Delaying will only make it worse, he knows (only give her reason to do what she says she doesn't wish to)--but how can he explain when he's already half-choked at the barest thought of it? (Of the feeling of a hex winding the Fade into knots; of the echoes of a mind-shattering terror--)

I can't tell you, he nearly says; don't make me. Don't make him tear open the old wound anew and explain--bleeding--what it had left of him. Don't make him admit to his own cowardice, his own lack of control.

Don't make him explain abandoning his own cousin to the Nevarran dead in his terror.

"I--I don't know how," he finally forces out. "How to explain--how to put it into words for you."

Potato just plops down where she is with a huff, leveling a stare back at Buttons though she obeys Inessa, who just lets that go as long as it doesn't escalate. She looks over Myr, expression softening. She would leave him to his own thoughts, but either way he seems to be struggling. The least she can do is offer a sympathetic ear, he if can manage to say what's plaguing him.

"Hm...think of it like freeform writing? Don't worry about how you phrase it. What's important is putting it down on paper, or just saying it aloud, in this case. I promise, whatever you have to say will not face judgment from me. And it will never go beyond us, unless you wish it."

The suggestion's good for a humorless bark of laughter out of Myr (as Buttons lays his nearer ear back at the noise). She's trying, he knows, and he's in no position to scorn any offer of a solution to what's been eating away at him since the Blackmarsh-- But it seems so facile and his mood is so black that it's easier to transmute the fear to anger, to offense that someone might try and help him in a less-than-perfect fashion.

That someone might be concerned enough to come after him, when he'd tried his best to hide his struggles behind a brave face.

He tucks his chin against his chest as if staring down at Buttons' feathers, draws in a breath to temper the flash of anger and the misery with it. Maybe if he pretends he's still only speaking to the griffon, it might be bearable. "In--the Necropolis, in Nevarra--we encountered that, that thing that was stronger than the other corpses."

That humorless laughter provokes no response; Inessa can ignore her pride to focus on what's bothering Myr so deeply, or at least she'll try. Stroking Potato with one hand, she listens and nods, eyes darkening as she recalls that unholy creature. She had been trying had to forget its intense gaze, its relentless pace.

"It was...formidable, akin to a revenant." That they had escaped had all had been a welcome surprise.

As before, Myr considers briefly how easy it would be--not to lie to her, but mislead to something that didn't cause him panic just to think about. There were good reasons for people to be fearful of possessed corpses, understandable reasons. And it wouldn't be lying to say he had been afraid of it, truly--what with all of Uncle Vardren's vituperations against the Nevarran invaders and their plan to purge the alienage and raise its residents as an army, all his vivid descriptions of their unholy necromantic magic.

Easy to blame that for his fear--except she'd see right through it. There had been no revenant in the Blackmarsh.

"Right. It--it was, and it's by the Maker's grace we--that we got away at all." He hadn't been much help, already half-disabled by terror. At least he could keep a barrier and an aura going without thinking about it, even as the panic closed over him. (It's getting harder to breathe; his pulse sings in his ears as if the undead might have followed them back, might be on the stairs of the griffon roosts even now, waiting to ambush them. And then--)

"You and Vandelin--you d, did most of the work with-- You're both--" entropy mages, clever with hexes and terror, and from the start they'd both darkened and twisted the Fade into devouring the corpses around them, like oil on his skin... "--talented in--you know."

The words are drawn out and anguished and he stops the rest of them with the back of his hand, stops the frightened sob that might follow. Not again, not again.

"...in entropy magic." Inessa says slowly, connecting the dots to his behavior in the Blackmarsh months ago. There's a sudden stab of guilt, realizing that she's been quite liberal with hexes and death magic, having long-ago overcome her hesitation about that particular school when it got results. The Wardens had encouraged any method that aided their cause, after all.

Her tone softens, wanting to close in but uncertain he can take that right now. So, she'll just talk to him. "Myrobalan...I am sorry. I didn't realize that particular magic had an effect on you. Talent or not, I have other magic at my disposal. If working with you on the field means putting hexes and such aside, I'm willing to do that. Your comfort matters to me."

"I can't ask that."

His reply is slow in coming, forced out through a throat half-closed, a jaw clenched tight against a scream. (Buttons has tucked his head beneath his remaining wing and scarcely seems to mind Myr's hands digging into his feathers.) "My c, comfort isn't worth someone's death." Nor can he summarily demanding all of the Inquisition's entropy mages avoid their chosen school--but that's a further elaboration he can't force into words, try as he might.

Instead: "And you can't--you can't spare me from a Venatori mage." Or a terror demon. Or anything else hostile they might come across that could bend entropy to its command.

Inessa's response is quiet but firm. "No, I can't. But you're my friend, Myrobalan, and I have other magic at my disposal. It's not the hardship you think it is, for me to use another kind while in your presence. Rift magic, ice magic...I'll be fine, trust me."

Potato makes herself known again with a low rumble, and Inessa pats her. "Yes, I know I have you, too."

Where the griffons roost is another place to creep out of the cold, fingers stiff from working out in a frost known to her but no less welcome for that. (What's welcome in life? So little. Too little.) Some of them have come closer than Brónach for the meat in her pockets, or if her near-silent tread upsets them - these are good feathers to gather for the arrows she means to make in the quiet of her room - until this one.

Somewhere in the back of her mind there's a door darker than either Sanctuary door, it unlocks, flames reach out to lick her palm; the laughter kept shuttered behind a jaw that ached after a mountain shook--

"You find them or you don't," she says suddenly in what might pass for quiet here (there's no quiet in a city this size, not when she knows weeks without seeing faces) from the other side of the overgrown bird. "The words come or the words never do, people take a lifetime to find a word."

Walls in the dark, walls with dragons roosting atop them; her breath shudders out of her, not from the cold. "If this is a war the way they call it a war, every body is called for again and again." She's tired. Always tired, how many times does she have to see the dragon consuming his own tail?

So quiet are Brónach's footsteps and so enticing the smell of meat that Buttons does little more than lift his head to blink at her complacently as she nears. Neither obvious threat nor competition for his space; no reason to rouse himself from his comfortable lassitude to offer a warning to the elf tending him.

And Myr, expecting that warning, nearly starts out of his skin when the bosmer speaks into a wordless moment. Fingers curl and clutch at the feathers beneath them, prompting a squawk from the griffon. "Andraste's tits--warn someone, will you?" he snaps, startled into unwonted anger as a cover for shame and shock. "And what would you know about it? What would--"

What would anyone else know of it, Circle mage, but more than you? He stops himself short, setting his teeth against a further outburst--and finding the words harder to catch back than usual. (Tempting to take all the blackness that's built and built in his heart out on a total stranger; tempting to burn bridges before they're even built-- But she's blameless of any of it, and Buttons is grumbling in the back of his throat, reading Myr's mood to mean danger and flexing his talons for it. Get it in check, Myrobalan.)

"--Forgive me; you don't--you don't deserve that for surprising me." The apology's slower to come than he'd like--more reason for frustration.

"You snap, out comes an angry word that does nothing. Your griffon snaps, I lose my fingers at the very least. I need my fingers." What's an archer without her fingers? Nothing.

Silence came to Brónach naturally before it was honed through the guild, the brotherhood, Nocturnal's favour, and if he can't hear the rattle of her arrows in the quiver then she can drop into a crouch between Myr and the griffon. A neat and tidy distance from both for her own comfort. The sound in her throat isn't for Myr, it's the sound made for kills; it's just meat but that never means the meat has to suffer. The meat hasn't done her the wrongs so many other things have so the meat can be hushed.

"If apologies are the only words you're finding..." In the voice of someone not so accustomed to speaking as well-worn leather creaks as she settles into a more comfortable crouched, thighs spread to take her weight better. But that's not what she wants to say, that's no better than when the beast blood would set her to snapping fast and easy, same as her early days in Skyrim when the running had a fight spoiling in her. "There's a word--

"There's a word and sometimes a word is a whisper that is a shout, and sometimes they can shatter everything around them. You don't get to choose your own words when the world decides now is the time, not always. When your name is called." Feel the ground shake beneath you then have your name swallowed by the title that becomes all that you are, that's a word. A shout. Power. Her fingers have curled tight about her knees now, she flexes them, remembers how she ran from Valenwood with the grooves of her bow imprinted in her hand for days to come. "I know that it sits in your chest as if it would pin you down to eat whatever cuts it might find."

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OPEN ↠ HARING EVENT

Myrobalan Shivana

FIRST SNOW | OTA

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GRIFFON(S)!!! | OTA

CATHARSIS(?)

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