faderift | OPEN | Dreams are more precious than gold

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OPEN | Dreams are more precious than gold

WHO: Pel, Nathaniel, and Colin
WHAT: Open log for the month of December/Haring
WHEN: All month
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: Some warning for grief and loss, anxiety disorders, chronic pain, and Rendon Howe.

Pel

I: The Alienage

Pel is bundled up, with coarse fennec pelts strapped around her boots for traction. Little Sina is similarly bundled and peering curiously at this new white world. Before leaving the Gallows, Pel stops to take the time to introduce the little girl to snow for the first time, letting her touch it to test the coldness, and showing her the intricacies of a single flake against the dark contrast of one glove. Then she hoists the baby up into a harness on her back and sets out.

The alienage has a great need right now, being in such a poor state of repair generally. Pel's aid there is less magic and more elbow grease, hauling a bag of sand gathered from the shore and scattering it over the ice. The only magic used for it is the magic she directs inward to increase her own strength.

Inside houses it's a little different. People are desperately cold. Some see that there are mages given to other parts of town and request magical aid, desperate not to freeze themselves and their children to death. Pel seldom suggests magic herself if there is any other way, but finds herself making quite a few glyphs--on stones, for putting at the foot of a bed, in the fireplace, even stitched discreetly into one man's gloves and stockings because he works at the docks and is in danger of frostbite. Sina observes all of this, and Pel somehow feels like this is just as important for her daughter as for anyone. At seven months old, she is already being exposed to the value of hard work.

Saoirse

A grateful elf has made hot stew for the Inquisition workers. Pel sits by Saoirse and hands her a bowl.

"Eat up while it's hot, lethallan."

II: Ice Skating

Pel is quite literally in her element in this weather. In the center of the courtyard, without asking anyone, she creates an ice sculpture of a roaring dragon unfolding its wings. And almost immediately after, she takes a pair of skates, straps them on, and introduces Little Sina to a new form of movement, holding her tightly in her arms so she can watch her daughter's face.

The first slide is gentle, slow, and the little girl looks at once baffled and intrigued. The second slide is quicker, and an open smile flashes across her face. By the third, she is laughing, and so is Pel. Faster and faster they go, making turns, sometimes going backwards. Soon, Sina is shrieking with laughter.

It's the first time since the older Sina's death that Pel has had laughter in her life.

Sorrel

"Here." Pel skates up to him to pass the baby to him, breathless and grinning. "Your turn."

Herian

Pel is now taking up her sword practice indoors, where it is not likely she will slip and break her neck. In a wide-open room, she goes through the stances while Sina lies belly-down on a blanket, trying to push herself up to hands and knees. Herian walks in, and Pel stops to give her a wave.

"Grab a sword and spar with me."

Nathaniel

I: Closed to Loghain

As Nathaniel is terribly formal, he leaves Loghain a note to join him for dinner in his quarters. As he is terribly polite, he cooks the meal himself. As he is terribly nervous, he fusses over table setting and almost calls off the entire thing because is it really doing to do him any good to have this conversation?

But he has to know.

He hears the knock. "Come in," he calls.

II: Warden Office

Most days, especially with the cold and snow, Nathaniel is drawn and pale. His ribs are nearly healed from the most recent break, but his rheumatism is worse than ever, and he can feel every shift in barometric pressure. He has gone all out with the fire glyphs and buried himself in paperwork, including a new sign (paper) on the door.

WARDENS--

Enquire here for work assignments. For relief effort requisitions, please speak with Senior Warden Teren.

--Ser Nathaniel

Ciri

A message comes over Ciri's crystal:

"Warden, please meet me in the office at your earliest convenience."

Bethany

Since there are relief efforts underway, Bethany and Nathaniel have been hard at work. Their donation funds are not going back to the public, of course--the Wardens need the charity. But they are finding an increase in donations the more legwork their people put into relief efforts. After Bethany delivers her daily report, Nathaniel stands, supporting himself against his desk.

"With that," he groans, "I'm done. If anyone else needs anything, Alistair or Loghain can handle it."

Colin

I: Closed to Gareth

It's bizarre, the effect any shift plays on Colin. He doesn't like the open, shared room he is in. He wants somewhere small and safe. But outside the room is less safe. He is paralyzed by a peculiar mix of complacency and fear, ready to simply tuck himself away until the snow melts because who would go outside in the snow? Isn't it a good excuse not to see or talk to anyone?

But he has to work. He has to help the city, too. These are orders, not options.

He calls Gareth over the crystals. He should probably talk to someone who already knows why he cowers like this, but Gareth feels safer.

"Gareth? Could you...could you come to my room?"

It's humiliating. He feels weak and pathetic. But he needs help leaving his room.

II: All Over Kirkwall

During lunchtime, Colin closes the shop and starts making his rounds in the city. He rolls a cart with a rich, hearty pork bone soup with fresh bread on the side, all kept piping hot by a couple of runestones. All the hardworking people need to do is bring a cup to get fed. In Lowtown and the alienage, quite a few citizens also come, and he feeds them without question.

Anders

After lunch is passed out, Colin sits on a step, sipping on a mug of soup and occasionally dipping bread into it. When he sees Anders, he grins and waves.

"Did you get food?"

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Nathaniel notes the look on Loghain's face, and his brow furrows. This is not going to be a happy conversation. He fortifies himself with a gulp of wine, sets down his glass, and steeples his fingers before him on the table.

"I wanted to know...how much of what happened was him, and how much was you. The murder of the Couslands. The poisoning of Eamon. The hunting of the Wardens. The Tevinter slavers."

While Nathaniel speaks, Loghain caves and opens the whisky. He finds his host's glass first and fills it with two fingers' worth, then his own. Then, when Nathaniel has finished speaking, he brings the glass up to take a swallow from it.

"What good would it do you," he begins quietly, staring at the whisky in the tumbler, "to hear me disclaim responsibility for those things? Your father was my confederate. His crimes were mine as well."

Nathaniel's gaze drops. He has asked himself, Anders has asked him the exact same question. What is the good in stirring these ghosts, in reopening these wounds?

Maybe, if he extracts the splinter left behind, the old wound will heal. That is what the good is. He must be kind enough to himself to understand what reality is. He must be informed enough to draw a line between himself and his evil father. And maybe he will never truly understand how much lives in him that came from his father. But he must know which of his memories are lies. He must put this ghost to rest.

"It's not about your responsibility," he answers quietly. "Mine, maybe. His, absolutely. I need...I need the picture. I need to know who he was. Who I am. I need to stop blaming you for who I am."

The more Nathaniel speaks, the deeper the furrow in Loghain's brow grows. He shifts in his seat and looks at his whisky again; there's no answers to be found in it, and he would know, having reached the bottom of a glass on his own in the past.

A heavy silence follows and settles between them. Then, "I had no part in the murder of the Couslands," he starts, quiet and introspective. But the rest cannot be so neatly bisected in the way that Nathaniel seems to require, because it was never a question of Howe's will or Loghain's. How many orders had he given, presumably to safeguard Anora's throne, at Howe's behest? It was impossible to know truthfully where his ideas ended and Howe's began.

He gives his head a small shake, gaze distant again. "...whatever the full picture is, Nathaniel, I'm in no position to grant it to you." The words come reluctantly, but there's a hard grain of truth running the length of them. "And whatever standard you choose to compare yourself against, I can't give you your father's true measure during that time, or my own. I can tell you that he dispensed cruelty with a casual, practiced hand, and that he coveted the Couslands' power and influence. I can tell you that at the time, I believed I made my every decision, my every mistake, for the good of Ferelden, and for Anora's throne. You know what that dedication wrought in Redcliffe, and in the Denerim alienage. Is that the full picture?"

It's perhaps the most candid he has been about his past with anyone since his arrival in Kirkwall, and likely not a conversation he'll be willing to revisit for some time. Loghain brings the tumbler up to drain the last of its contents in one go.

Nathaniel looks like he just bit into a lemon. It's shorthand for you caused the deaths and disgrace of my father and brother; you don't get the mercy of a short conversation. It's the same nonsense repeated to him by people who are either guessing or trying to spare him the hard answers. At least there is an answer about the Couslands--that was all Howe. And buried in all the rest, tiny nuggets of truth hidden like nuts in a cake.

"To whom did he dispense cruelty?" he asks, moving to refill Loghain's glass with another finger of whisky. "Oghren told me he slept next to his torture chamber, but I assumed it was a coincidence."

If the truth is hidden from Nathaniel here, it is by instinct, by circumstance, and not Loghain's conscious choice. It is not in his nature to shirk blame, even when the full weight of it should not be his to bear. Howe is no longer alive to carry this burden, nor to do any penance for it. Loghain is. It is, in some ways, that simple.

In some ways, it isn't.

"Oghren told me he slept next to his torture chamber, but I assumed it was a coincidence."

"It was attached to his bedchamber." The response comes after a pause; Loghain's expression is unreadable in the intervening silence. "I saw it only the one time, after the Landsmeet."

Nathaniel wants to say the layout of the estate isn't his father's fault, but if Rendon Howe was as depraved as people claim, he could easily have declared those rooms the new master suite because of their location. It's not the bedroom that's the issue, really, but what lay beneath it.

He's going to regret this conversation, maybe. He is certain there will be nights when he will regret asking this question. But he has to know the truth of the madness that lies in his own blood. He swallows, hand tightening around his glass.

"What did you see in there?"

A madness that belonged to Rendon Howe, but not necessarily to his son; still, Loghain doesn’t know his fear. Instead, he considers his empty plate for another moment of weighted silence. Then he draws a breath and speaks.

“Blood,” he begins, his voice quiet from necessity. He gestures with one hand. “The tools--and evidence--of wetworkers. Jonas did not speak to me in great detail of what he found, but… there were men, down there. Victims of torture, but torturers as well. Men paid to carry out the grisly business.”

Reluctantly, he meets Nate’s eyes. “I can’t tell you if he carried out the acts himself, Nathaniel. The truth is that I don’t know.”

There is a long pause now. Nathaniel's breath quickens for a few moments, his throat tightening, but really he doesn't feel very much. There is a numbness on him like armor. If he's going to have questions answered, now is the time to ask them.

"I...know he was killed in the dungeons. If he didn't carry out the acts, he at least watched. He was always...unflinching." He shuts his eyes and bows his head for a moment, before looking back up at Loghain and blowing out a breath. "Was it his idea to poison Eamon, then? It strikes me more as his weapon of choice than yours. But it seemed...botched, really, that he was ill for so long but didn't die."

"He wasn't meant to." There's no hesitation in the response this time, but Loghain's voice is not defensive. It's flat, detached, and his eyes are fixated somewhere just beyond Nathaniel's shoulder now. A slow breath drawn in, then let out. "To die, that is."

Up comes the whisky for a drink, draining the last of the contents. There's a flush to Loghain's face now, but it's hard to tell whether it's from his drink, or vestiges of shame even a decade later.

Nathaniel's eyes widen slightly and he sits forward in his chair. "What do you mean?"

"What do you mean?"

Loghain closes his eyes. What does Nathaniel think he means? Why must he insist on hearing the facts in such grisly, excruciating detail--how does it help him?

"Eamon and I were," a pause; how best to articulate this, "--at odds, over how to advise our king." That is one way of putting it. "I felt he was encouraging Cailan towards rash action at a delicate time, given the rising tension in the Bannorn and the darkspawn presence amassing in the Korcari Wilds. I needed time to sway Cailan's opinion."

He looks across the table at Nathaniel and grimaces. There's no easy way to say it, is there? He gestures simply, shaking his head. "I was at a loss for how to proceed. Rendon Howe made a--suggestion, and I..." And he what? He made the best decision for Ferelden? No, he doesn't believe that anymore, if he ever did. "...I conceded to his guidance. He made the arrangements."

Now is when Nathaniel looks down and sees his hands are shaking.

I conceded to his guidance.

It was always Father. Father who led Loghain astray, not the other way round as Nathaniel wanted to believe. He does not have to ask whether the Tevinter slavers were Rendon's idea. Perhaps Loghain discovered a dilemma, but the cruel solution could only have come from Howe. And the incapacitation of Eamon during such a time, leading to civil war and devastation in Redcliffe, a possessed child, a crucial Landsmeet delayed. The Butcher of Denerim might have been called the Butcher of Ferelden, if Loghain were not there to provide some buffer for the blame. Loghain, lost in the world of politics, trusted the wrong man.

And Howe felt no guilt. So it falls to Nathaniel to feel it for him, to carry the legacy of such evil until he can pass it on to the next generation. Hopefully, it will be lighter by then, but it is so very heavy now.

"I'm sorry," he finds himself saying in a wavering voice. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have seen, I should have known, but I didn't."

Yet the apology is intolerable to Loghain. It rankles in the worst way to see Nathaniel offer him pardon for something that, by rights, he would have been executed for had Riordan not intervened on his behalf. The Landsmeet would have seen his blood spilled right there in the Denerim palace, and they would have been right to do so--not for the crime of retreating at Ostagar, but for the rest of it, the blood and death and treachery that still stains his hands a decade later.

It's why the other Wardens never truly accepted him as one of their own. It's why Loghain won't accept this apology now.

"Stop that," he says suddenly, almost harsh but for the crease of grim resignation in his brows. He shakes his head. "You owe me no apologies, Nathaniel, and I won't accept them. At any time, I could have leveraged my own willpower to commandeer Rendon's orders, but I didn't. Not even when he captured my own daughter."

Anora was never in any real danger. Nevertheless... "My crimes are unforgivable."

After a moment, he clears his throat and starts to rise to his feet. "Thank you, for this meal, but I should return to work." And give them both some time to regain their composure.

Nathaniel hesitates, then dips his head in acquiescence.

"Thank you for speaking with me," he says quietly, and stands to show Loghain the door and open it for him.

He has inherited the blame and the guilt because his father didn't want them, and died before he could actually pay for his crimes. It strikes him now, very sharply, that Loghain has not let the same burden fall to Anora. He has accepted his part and paid his part. That is where the real line between them is drawn--not in whose mind originated which plot, but whether they even tried to protect their children from the consequences. Nathaniel used to believe his father was a good man, albeit a little reserved, but there was nothing about Rendon Howe that was either. Loghain was the true fallen hero of the story. Loghain is who Rendon Howe should have been, and the realization sweeps aside a great many things that have stuck Nathaniel to this entire affair.

He can finally give himself permission to give up on his father.

Nathaniel opens the door for him, and Loghain begins to step out into the corridor. On the threshold, however, he pauses to look at Rendon Howe's son, meeting his eyes and holding his gaze. He reaches out a hand to clasp his shoulder, squeezes it once. For a moment he looks as though he might speak.

Then without another word, he steps into the corridor and disappears from view, with Primrose rising from her watchful post to trot along at his heels.

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OPEN | Dreams are more precious than gold

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