faderift | Seven Thousand Steps

WHO: Galadriel and You
WHAT: Galadriel is getting bit stir crazy with all this winter and has decided to work in the library when she's not getting pumped. Open Wintermarch post/catch all.
WHEN: Throughout Wintermarch
WHERE: Kirkwall, The Gallows
NOTES: There will be a gunshow.

I Library

The Library at the Gallows was considerably larger than Skyhold's; it is not a feat to be overly proud of, considering the remote nature of the other fortress, but it is worthy of note. She crosses into the room and spares a moment of wonder for the rows of books, the tall shelves and the tables that litter the place, and then sets about her work.

Today she is not cloaked, not as she has been wont during the rest of her time in Kirkwall, and wears a dark brown dress of Orlesian brocade. Her brooch with its shining emerald is pinned at the lowest point of the modest neckline and it glitters as she passes through the shafts of light that the windows provide. She carries a stack of parchment and a small box, all of which she abandons on a table before she moves toward the stacks.

Galadriel spends some time wandering the books, plucking familiar tomes from the heavy laden shelves. None of them are exceptionally rare, nor are they of any real interest--histories, Chantry tomes, books on the places and peoples of Thedas. She stacks them on her table and moves out to locate more. Once she has amassed nearly a dozen, she finally takes her seat and begins her translations anew.

II Training (Stairs)

The stairs of Kirkwall are a remarkable feature, if somewhat depressing by their nature, and Galadriel is drawn to them. For so many thousands of years she has had ready, constant access to stairs and the steep climbs to lofty heights--without the trees of Lorien to demand it of her, she is beginning to grow soft. It is a luxury she cannot abide, not while she rests powerless in this human city, so she has decided to train.

She has not trained, not truly, since the days of dawn and the sudden rigor of her old routines catches her up quickly. Still, she is not a woman of idle resolve and she takes the stairs with speed and determination. It does gall her to be seen, to stand in the open so very plainly and without concealment, but she will tolerate it, if it will return to her some semblance of power.

Galadriel begins ere the sun has risen, in the frigid cold of the early morning, and starts down the steps. Icy and snow-laden, they are a struggle and one that mounts quickly and with great satisfaction. Then, once she has reached the foot of them, she takes them again, and again, and again. Six full trips is her goal so she runs.

Her acquired clothes are similar to what she wore when she first arrived in Thedas, in a winter years ago, and they fit her in the loosest sense of the term. The pants are short, the shirt is long in the body and the shoulder but short in the sleeve and tight across her chest. She looks very odd, with her hair bound back dressed in such a fashion, running up and down stairs, but no one has halted her progress yet and she can spare little thought for appearances.

III Training (Courtyard, yes, on the ice.)

a. ~~Tai chi~~
It is mid-afternoon by the time she finishes taking the stairs and, to ease her heart back down from the stress of that, she falls into an ancient rhythm. The forms are familiar to her, but they lack something without a weapon in hand. They are worth the effort, even bare handed, and she does them as she was taught. She moves slowly, almost excruciatingly so, and loses both herself and the time to the meditative nature of the activity.

b. Pushups and strength training

After running, Galadriel finds a corner of the courtyard, a place where the sky still hangs above but that is outside the area where ice-skating still occupies the time of those that live in the Gallows. The cold is bracing but she is not hesitant to drop to her hands and toes and push herself up from the ground. She does this with an almost worrying dedication before shifting to her back and curling up over her bent knees.

When her skin is cold enough that it has begun to pink from the bite of ice, she rises and gathers up bundles of the firewood that are kept outside the quartermaster's office. She hoists them over her shoulders and holds them just above them. Her arms strain at the strangeness of the angle, but hold fast as she moves them from one side of the yard to the other and then back again.

Wildcard~!

Anything else. :D

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"It is a comfort to know what awaits me, should I meet your Maker," Galadriel replies evenly and steps back out of the strike. She dips low slowly, straining every muscle they had trained on the stairs, and it takes great focus to avoid slipping on the ice beneath her feet.

She is gladdened for the lightness that has taken Gwenaëlle, even in the midst of her threats. When first she had joined in Galadriel's training, she had been driven and had taken herself to exhaustion as readily as Galadriel herself had. Now, they have both been tempered by the world and one another and though they were not easy in this physical conditioning, they no longer drove themselves to ruin. Not entirely.

Neither of them were given to stopping when the other was still going forward, after all.

"One day we should acquire weapons, it will make balancing much simpler."

If her gut still clenches at the thought of it, in front of Galadriel she manages not to show it; no mean feat when she is nothing if not the most transparent of Orlesian jewels, a prism refracting every gleam of light that passes through her. Every time she holds a knife in her hands it gets a little easier to do, and she hates it, hates it with every reluctant inch of her—

but she'd no more have Galadriel see in her a petulant child than she would Morrigan. She sees that pride and she likes it; she has no desire to see disappointment, or—worse still—pity. To be taken a little less seriously. Her own pride keeps her back straight where she wants to bend and rail at the unfairness of a world that makes her do these things she doesn't want to do, where it doesn't stop her from railing thus at Wren Coupe, whose persistence she is being slowly but steadily taught to take for granted.

“The weight distribution,” she presumes, and she's pleased with herself for not flinching.

It has been some time since Galadriel has attempted this form and, when she moves to lift her forward foot and pull it back, her back foot shifts on the ice and sends her down to the ground. There is not much distance to be had there, but it is a rather dramatic fall. She grimaces as she pushes herself up and braces her hands back on the frozen ground.

"Among other things," she replies and stares up at Gwenaëlle who has maintained her stance. "It is easier to catch a fall with a staff in hand, after all."

Caught halfway between dismay at the fall and a touch of amusement (because Galadriel isn't hurt and because it wasn't her who did the falling), Gwenaëlle offers her a hand. There's solidly even odds as to whether or not this succeeds in resulting in two people standing, or if the ice betrays them a second time and she just joins her on the courtyard's hard ground.

“They won't want to give us the impressive kind,” she says, wisely. “We might have to have something made.”

"I would prefer to commission it, regardless," Galadriel responds and takes her hand. Gwenaëlle is confident, as she often is, but the ice betrays her just as readily as it had betrayed Galadriel. Galadriel pulls to catch her footing and accomplishes little more than pulling Gwenaëlle down atop her.

She laughs, then, at the futility of the situation and at the interruption of their exercise, but doesn't seem terribly put off by the difficulty.

"I shall have to ask Maedhros--" and there is a strange sentence, one that gives her tangible pause as she speaks it aloud. She shakes off the sensation after a moment and pushes herself up onto her knees.

"I shall commission something appropriate. How much can you lift comfortably?"

Down with a shrieked laugh, then—Galadriel doesn't make as soft a landing as someone might imagine, all long slender limbs, and Gwenaëlle is still laughing, too, as they disentangle and rise with a bit more care this time. Cold damp clings to her knees and those hot baths are sounding better and better every moment.

“I don't know,” she admits, after a brief pause trying to think of an answer. “I don't usually do much heavy lifting other than myself.”

She can lift her own weight to climb, but she isn't sure she'd call that comfortably done. She'd rather not be lifting her own weight again in the form of a weapon, certainly.

"Then perhaps it is something we should test," Galadriel says and her eyes cross the courtyard. The piles of firewood are too low to train, but there is enough to gauge what might be made for Gwenaëlle. Now that their forms have come to a rather ungainly end, she motions for the younger woman to follow her and crosses to the heaps of cut wood.

"Hold your arms out straight and we shall see how many you can hold before it is too much," Galadriel tells her and lifts a few blocks of wood. Each are around five pounds, nothing terrible, and she expects Gwenaëlle will be able to handle a few of them. Unfortunately it is an inaccurate test and one that will require tweaking. If she trains with something too heavy, she will become discouraged or injure herself--which Galadriel cannot allow--and if it is too light, she will learn very little and condition herself not at all.

"When I began training in my youth I could lift the equivalent of three of these at a time, it is best to err on the side of lightness, given the option."

Some part of Gwenaëlle—the same part as is thinking longingly of the baths, or the copper tub in Thranduil's charred chambers, or her own in Hightown—briefly despairs that there is no part of this business of becoming whatever exactly it is Galadriel has in mind for them to become that doesn't feel slightly absurd when applied to herself. Further, she suspects what Galadriel has in mind will prove irritatingly seamless with what Coupe does, in time, and there's a contrary part of her that

can shut up, because she's holding her arms out, obediently.

She's not an idiot.

“Holding a knife felt heavy, the first time I did it with any sort of intent,” she notes, and Galadriel is about right in how much weight she can take—a little more than it looks like she'll be able to, but she's not going to shock anyone terribly with her early strength. “It wasn't actually, really.”

And it wasn't really her intent, but here she is, all the same.

Seven Thousand Steps

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