faderift | Seven Thousand Steps

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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

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If nothing else, Coupe will have to approve of the results of so much time spent in the company of her newest cousin; often as not, with little in pressing need of her attention in the Gallows, Gwenaëlle can be found alongside Galadriel in slightly better dressed miniature. Up and down the stairs is relentless, exhausting, but in truth she finds the real challenge is perfecting forms far less familiar to her when she joins her in the courtyard—to force her limbs to be still and smooth and obey her at that slow, deliberate pace. Easier said than done.

Practise improves everything, in time. Gwenaëlle, hair braided down her back and breath turning to clouds in the cold air even as sweat tacks fabric to her skin, is diligent.

“I am going to lie in the heated baths for the rest of my life,” she says, most cheerfully, “cursing your name to the Maker.”

Gwenaëlle has done well to keep time with her, she has almost a full foot on the woman and most of it in her legs. That Gwenaëlle had not fallen behind as they ran the stairs, nor collapsed in a heap at the end of them is a testament to her growing fortitude. Galadriel is proud and Gwenaëlle's comment only amplifies the feeling.

"Ah, a new deity that shall dislike me," Galadriel replies as she stretches her arms out and balances on one foot, carefully. This move would be done with the speed of a striking serpent, with a polearm in hand, thrust forward, but she holds the final form of it for several seconds instead. Her legs are burning and the ice beneath them is not sure footing. It assists this exercise very little.

"You make me feel young again, gwanur nin," she says. "Raise your hands up and lean back to move out of this, else you will fall."

The advice is good, and she heeds it—carefully, correcting herself when she'd have followed it too fast, and fallen anyway. A tenuous moment where she might go in any direction, and then steadiness, and something sufficiently alike to precision. Imperfect but promising; Gwenaëlle all over.

“I'm not persuaded He exists, but in the event He does, He will know your name,” she promises, far lighter than she'd been days before, before Thranduil's return from Orlais. Then she had taken to the stairs with bloody-minded determination to run from her own thoughts, too, had grit her teeth on screaming muscles and worked herself to exhaustion rather than self-examination.

The fire fades. The lessons of it settle. Today, she can jest and stretch and take more from this than a good reason to sleep.

"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."

It has been some time since Solas glimpsed Galadriel; he can still recall seeing her, wondering about her and her nature, their few interactions offering enough for him to recognise something great within her, something along the same vein as what he witnesses in Thranduil even now. It has been difficult to be near the two of them at times, nostalgic and uncertain in equal measures, but he knows he cannot keep his distance without bringing attention to the very fact that he has been avoiding them in the first place. It is a difficult balance, and one that he himself must manage before anything else.

For now, he is respectful. They're not close enough to be anything else, he thinks, and that gives him room to breathe - it has been long enough that there is distance between them, one that he nods even as he makes his way to the library.

"It has been some time." That is what he says in lieu of a proper greeting, moving forward with the books heavy in his arms more than obvious. They had been left at Skyhold, but they had also made the journey with him; he might not be capable of keeping his distance, but making an alliance of sorts might be beneficial. Dangerous, but perhaps worthwhile, in the end. "You forget these, I believe."

Galadriel is halfway down a page, the curling shapes of the tengwar at odds with the Orlesian script she translates from, when Solas approaches her. At first she does not look up, braced for some form of harsh acknowledgment that harkens back to Skyhold. She half expects he is a templar, but he does not clank with the sounds of heavy plate. When he addresses her, politely and too quietly to truly be aimed at anyone else, she glances up from her work.

She knows his face, both from passing and very old conversation. His name is Solas. There is something odd in the fact that his name reminds her of a drawing, but she lets the thought pass, smiling politely as he approaches. The books he carries are obvious but she pays them little attention until he directs her to them.

At once she sets aside her quill and rises from her chair. Her eyes are wide and some combination of delight and shock takes her features for a moment.

"Ai, but I have, have I not?" She asks, her surprise echoing in her quiet exclaimation. She moves around the table with some eagerness. "Where did you find these? I had assumed they were destroyed in my absence."

Edited 2018-01-16 10:30 (UTC)

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.

He would wait patiently for her attention, he thinks, and it's a somewhat shocking revelation; the idea that he would hover, awaiting her to turn her gaze... It reminds him of a time long passed, but of something shorter, briefer, too, hovering in Haven, hovering in Skyhold, waiting to be consulted and quizzed, questioned on his knowledge and expertise. It hasn't been so long that he has quite forgotten the feeling, even if it brings something of a smile to his lips.

It has been some time, at least, since he and the lady Galadriel were face to face with one another - and he has not forgotten her beauty, the wonder of it, how much she reminds him of a lifetime long lost. His mask is kept in place and he nods his head in lieu of a bow, turning to move closer once she has recognised that he's there for her, to offer her something, rather than to ask her to move.

"They were left with my other books. I thought fit to bring them with me, in case they were needed." A kindness that he had barely thought about, he supposes; he simply packed them up with the other tomes that he thought might need to make the journey from Skyhold to Kirkwall with him. Offering them out, Solas waits for her to take them from his hands.

"I would not have let them be destroyed."

Galadriel glances up at his face as she moves to lift the books from his hands; his expression is mild and polite. She takes them from him gently and turns them over in her hands, her expression open and glad. They are all of them present and, were she to guess, the loose pages all accounted for as well. Still, she cannot help but flip open the cover and look over the tight notes, the layered tengwar and scattered sarati. The quiet laugh she lets out is short and full of relief.

"Then you have my sincerest thanks, twice over," she says and closes her notes. While she had not relished the idea of beginning her translations anew, translation was a task that merely took time to accomplish. Time was something she had in abundance. No, the real value of these notes, of the books of them, were her own accounts buried inside the translations. It had become cathartic, writing notes, and she had kept a log of her thoughts, of her experiences, ere Thranduil had arrived and following her imprisonment.

They were not extensive tales, nor all of them complete, but they were her own.

"I do not often find myself attached to material things but these...these I am extremely fond of." She turns and makes a space for them on her table and, idly, she asks: "Did you read through them?"

It does not occur to her until after she has asked that he most likely cannot.

"That translation is utterly worthless."

Worthless, spoken in such a tone as to get at Val's actual meaning, which is: shit. A clear subtext, given the sneer in his voice.

Passing by the library table, Val had glanced at the spines of the collected texts, to see if this woman was hoarding one that he was looking for. The Gallows library is so disorganized, it is a wonder that anyone is able to find any of the texts that they are looking for. The system of categorization has been completely disregarded, lost to time. In other instances, this disregard for tradition and organization Val could support, but for the fact that this is a library. Nearly holy ground.

So: the woman does not have a text that he seeks. But she does have Évariste du Bois Thibault's collected essays on modern Nevarra, and that is the text that Val is pointing to with such disdain. The deep red cover, the gold filigree of its title. All a sham, like a disguise.

"Thibault is best read in Orlesian. The man who translated that version was of no account. I shall not even speak his name. Do not flip to the frontispiece to read it, please. The hack, we shall say, substituted whatever words he could think of, like a man taking a hatchet to a dictionary. You must secure the original Orlesian or you shall come away with such unjust and clumsy impressions of Nevarra."

In case she was wondering. She clearly was. That is why she is sat in a library: to wonder, and to learn. How lucky that Val was here to save her from herself.

At first, there is a fleeting moment where Galadriel is certain he is speaking of her own translating, impossible though such commentary might be. She lifts her quill from the parchment and glances up, hackles on the rise and prepared to dismiss this man...only to find him gesturing at one of the tomes upon the table. She had collected an array of new books, to add to her notes once she had finished replicating them, and his issue seems to be with one of those.

His tirade is strange and unprompted but, overall, somewhat helpful. It is a combination Galadriel is uncertain how to address and so, for a moment, she simply regards him. When she does speak, it is with the slow cadence of one duly chastised and curious about the correct course. It is a demeanor and tone that is extremely uncommon for her and she is understandably awkward in its employ.

"I was unaware it was a translation," Galadriel admits and sets her quill aside. "Do these libraries hold the original?"

"If they do not hold the original, than they are two shades toward worthless themselves."

A cruel judgement, perhaps. One that Val will confess to Jehan later, and be pardoned for it, as they share a sad laugh over the state of affairs in the Gallows. Val glares at the offending book.

"It can be borrowed from the great library, of course. I know many of the librarians there, quite personally. Some more personally than others. And if you are truly interested, my friend, I would be happy to write to any of them on your behalf and request that they send a copy most immediately. We must seek always to the purest form of words, the purest intentions of the author. Especially one so esteemed as Thibault."

He regards the woman herself quite second to the tome and the impromptu lecture, and thinks, oh. An elf. Yes? She has a different look about her, if he were to be categorizing. Her voice is most pleasant: that registers second.

"If I may ask, what is that you are endeavoring to work on?"

Adalia is on her way from the library to her room, Charis flying above her and out of sight, when she sees the woman she'd found on the field, when they were both newly ejected from their rift. The exercises she does seem almost meditative in nature, and Adalia is loath to interrupt her, but... well.

"Galadriel? That was your name, wasn't it?"

You're supposed to check on a patient after you heal them, right? That's what people do.

It's clear that she appreciates his forethought, and Solas is glad for it. It's not truly borne of a desire to impress her, though he's sure anyone would be glad to find something they decided to do welcome and met with thanks, but it was the protection of knowledge and merit. He might not be entirely aware of the content of the books and what is written inside them, but it's still knowledge. It's the sort of thing that he might take into the Fade and his dreams with him, to share with the Spirits of Wisdom and Purpose and Learning. He is glad to bring them something new, just as they do the same for him.

"You are welcome, twice over." The urge to open and read the books had been there, but Solas didn't give into it, not really - he had opened the covers to see if they had belonged to her, as he had imagined they might, but he didn't poke any further. Unable to read the language he had been entirely unaware of the content of it, not able to translate the words despite his knowledge of languages. He had hoped, quietly, to himself, that she might offer him the chance, but he wouldn't push. That might take things too far.

Solas would not take someone's mind from them. That is not his duty, nor his desire.

"Then I am all the happier to return them to you." He smiles, soft and gentle. "I looked at the first page, to make sure I knew who they should be given to, but no further than that. I didn't recognise the wording well enough to make the attempt."

Galadriel recognizes the voice before she sees her face and knows her name with speed, it is an advantage that comes from having been within the mind of the person who addresses her. She will never be unknown to this elf. She moves her arms, her rhythm unbroken by the interruption and draws back into a very delicate stance her hands aligned before her as if awaiting a staff.

"Yes, I am called that," Galadriel agrees with her and her eyes glance sidelong at the woman. "And you are Adalia. How fare you, my dear?"

She looks back to find him smiling and her expression mirrors his. He has done her a considerable kindness, one with no price levvied upon it, and that has endeared him to her greatly. She gestures to the table alongside them with one hand.

"Would you care to join me?" The offer is extended without reservation, as is the next: "If you wish to learn the tengwar or the language I would happily teach you.

"I have offered this to all elves I have met in these lands; it is called elvish, collectively, so it seemed only right."

Few had taken her up on the offer, surprisingly, but those who had were given her full attention and care. These books were not for them, they already knew their world's history, but they would serve well enough as practice.

It doesn't take much effort for him to move forward and make himself comfortable, sitting near her with a nod of her head. It's a welcome chance to learn more about her, especially since he recognises the power of her and the strength in her - and, of course, she has an connection with Thranduil. It seems foolish to ignore the merit of that.

"I would be glad to." The offer surprises him, though, and he cannot deny he is curious. Often, this place does not feel real, as though it's some kind of illusion or a scrape of a world that he had once known, but there is an opportunity to learn here and he cannot ignore his curiosity.

"If you have the time to teach then I would be glad to learn. It might be interesting to compare it to the native tongue of the People."

Not the scraps of elven that the Dalish cling to; the flowing, easy language that he knows, that's second nature to him, the delicate shifts of word that the people of this Thedas had long since forgotten or abandoned. That is what he might compare it to, and he might well gift her an education in return.

"Is there only one version of the language where you are from?"

He joins her, his curiosity and surprise evident in his smile and Galadriel does not hesitate to answer him. She turns, just briefly, to pluck her papers and her quill from across the table. A page is pulled from the notes he has returned, but the text across it is small and layered many times over.

"There are many, more even than I can claim to know, but I speak most," she explains and carefully begins scribing the basic letters of the Tengwar for him. The whole of it is curls and stems and the sum of them resembles nothing so much as branches or perhaps musical notes.

"The eldest that I would teach is called Quenya and, ages ago, it was written in letter that were not so simple as these. Fortunately, the tengwar replaced the sarati and reading one is as simple as any other language."

She passes him both the chart and the layered notes that he had returned. Upon close inspection the letters on the layered notes are compared against those of Thedas. Trade, Orlesian, some Dwarvish, and partial Qunlat are all interspersed between the rows of tengwar and sarati. The first pages she had made were a base for translation, for all her cousins and those who might join her in these lands.

"Sindarin is more common, but it is a mutation. A combination of Quenya and Sylvan and knowing the former is more than a bridge." She settles her hands on the table and smiles at him, happy for the conversation. "I would be glad to teach anything you like. I find myself with little purpose of late and this would be a balm."

Solas has always been curious, almost endlessly so, and that is why he reads; his research might be focussed upon the Fade, the Veil and the Rifts but that does not mean he has no time for other areas or other studies. There had not been much opportunity before, with his isolation in Skyhold, but there is a chance now and he welcomes it.

"Then I have found myself a good teacher." He leans forward to watch as she writes, looking at the shape of the letters and the care in which she writes them. It's not as similar to his native tongue as he had imagined it might be, but that doesn't surprise him as much as it could have.

These people were pulled from Rifts, brought here by something still unknown to him, and he has some qualms about the nature of their existence and what it means for Thedas. He'll never voice it, certainly, but seeing their language, something grand and wonderful that could not be simply imagined, gives him pause for thought.

At least the trade and Orlesian is familiar, and while he doesn't speak much in the way of either Dwarvish or Qunlat he can recognise the lettering. He wonders if he could do the same for elven, offer a true translation of her letters into the tongue of the People, but he doesn't quite have the heart to make any kind of offer. He is still sore and embittered by the nature of elves today, and he can't find the words to deal with it.

Instead, he focusses on her, on the education he is being given.

"The tengwar is the easiest, if not the most common?" Solas turns to look at her again, thoughtful and curious. It might be beneficial to learn a language that few here speak, especially with his growing closeness to both Thranduil and Galadriel herself. "I would be glad to learn whichever would be most suitable."

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Seven Thousand Steps

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