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( closed ) PLAYER PLOT: STILL WATERS
WHO: Alistair, Herian, Myr, Nell, Prompto, Saoirse, Wren.
WHAT: ( Plot post ) Shady rumours concerning the Tranquil lead to a remote Circle in the Northern Anderfels. Its relative isolation from the rest of Thedas has prevented news from reaching the Inquisition sooner. Our crack team investigates.
WHEN: forward dated, around 21st-ish Cloudreach
WHERE: Salzklippe, the Anderfels.
NOTES: Content Warning for violence, murder, and other grim Dragon Age things. The grief demon threads in particular include themes of death, suicide, and gore. Please add additional warnings to subject lines where necessary.
WHAT: ( Plot post ) Shady rumours concerning the Tranquil lead to a remote Circle in the Northern Anderfels. Its relative isolation from the rest of Thedas has prevented news from reaching the Inquisition sooner. Our crack team investigates.
WHEN: forward dated, around 21st-ish Cloudreach
WHERE: Salzklippe, the Anderfels.
NOTES: Content Warning for violence, murder, and other grim Dragon Age things. The grief demon threads in particular include themes of death, suicide, and gore. Please add additional warnings to subject lines where necessary.
  — Making the approach (group thread) — Into the catacombs (individual starters) — Discovering the lake (group thread) — Into the tower (individual starters) — Bossfight (multiple group-ish) — Later Stuff (individual starters) FOR GROUP THREADS: in order to keep threads moving, I will be aiming to do a GM tag once every 24 hours. Don't worry about a strict tagging order, but please don't tag more than three times every 24 hours, just to make sure no one gets left behind. |
i woke up for the first time at 5 am and wrote my reply in my phone and it's incomprehensible so
"Honour," Rolls the shape of it in her mouth, past questions and accusation, "Honour."
As though the echo might snap it free. Finally, she turns to brush the hair free of Herian's crown, tuck it behind a mangled ear. Too little to hold, strands of black only slipping free again, unbidden. Her palm falls to a shoulder, and that much doesn't shift.
"What must be done?"
The words are very, very still.
nah you're good
(The contact is, granted, a little strange. Not unwelcome, just— strange.)
"The Rite of Tranquility," she replies. "I have proven myself a danger. Better it be done sooner, rather than later."
no i mean the original was like "lol honr a touch forehead ear"
Takes time enough to swallow the anger, the fear, the knowledge that she isn’t wholly wrong. A danger. That much has always been true. Magic endangers, and there are only so many ways to sever magic from mage, threat from possibility.
(Her hand had found hilt, as she'd struggled at once for air. Knows she'd have been ready, even then; knows their small dramas, too, not so easily separated.)
"What do you recall of your Harrowing?"
Perhaps it's taboo to ask; she hadn't overseen enough to say.
jkndfjkdkj we should write all our tags like that from now on
Rage and flame, both recurring themes in her life. Perhaps it would end with her cast into the coals, though her end would not be the tragedy of Andraste, not something to turn the Maker from his Children. Her fall into fire would be a welcome relief, a deserved punishment.
Perhaps not a relief, exactly, from Tranquility. It may simply be a matter of acceptance.
She takes the initial silence as acquiescence. "Who will perform the Rite?"
i'd be much faster
Norrington and Ashlock haven’t the stomach; she can’t say whether Reed knows how. And Caron — Caron is no fool. That she suspects he'd agree doesn't mean that he'd do so without leave.
She can’t give that.
There’s some comfort in the solidity of fact: In knowing the steaming storm of shit that would rain down, and so soon after the strike. To perform the Rite is more than their little outpost could weather.
"It was rage, then. And you did not give in. Rage —" And what? Despair? No. Desolation? Grief, "— And you have not now."
There’s some comfort in an excuse, and part of her knows that an excuse is what it is.
"We all face temptation."
To not lose another.
herun wer ang
"The Tranquil uphold duties, they— they are not vulnerable to giving way."
She shakes her head. No. This isn't acceptable. It's not possible. She has been hollowed out by flame for years, and finally when she has realised what must be done—
"Mages can request the Rite. You cannot deny me that."
Perhaps it is too hurt to be angry.
bird sad
An apostate might not request anything of a knight. If she's even yet a knight —
"Because the Tranquil are in that box. No. You serve the Inquisition, and you do so under my command." Her grip tightens, another palm raised in expectation: "Give me your crystal."
mag no
"I will take this to Skyhold if I must. You are not Commander over all Templars. I imagine there are even those in Kirkwall who would be glad to see a mage brought rightly to heel."
She makes no move to provide her crystal. "Rage has lived in me for years. This was but a reminder of something long present."
no subject
A pinky hooked roughly toward her heart.
"The hard thing is to master it." The words sound flimsy on her own ears. You always took the easy way out, "The right thing. Do you imagine it would not be easier, to make every mage Tranquil? That some would not be safer for it? There is a cost. You know it, you can yet feel to know it."
"Do not make me turn out your pockets."
no subject
Her voice is rough;strained. "You do not know how I have worked to control it. You have not cared to know. Ever since the Annulment I have poured everything into duty and to control, and even now—"
Her voice cracks, unbidden, and she looks away. "I do not need a crystal to contact Skyhold. I will appeal to Commander Cullen, if I must."
A templar of Kirkwall; bound to approve of voluntary tranquility. She hands the crystal over.
no subject
Hasn't fucking worked. Something spiny catches in her throat: The absurd thought of sea urchins, barnacles, a fishbone. Her scar prickles. The crystal disappears into a sodden fold of coat.
"Do you think this would not hurt," A breath. Cullen is a lot of things; he's also surrounded by clever eyes. Not an immediate concern. "Do you think this would not hurt the ones you matter to?"
no subject
"Do not," she grinds out, "use Cosima against me. You have never approved of us. You believed me a danger to her from the very beginning." She tries to speak, and her breath catches painfully, and her mouth twists before she is able to command herself to speak further. "This would see her safe from me. It would see all the people I love safe from me. This is the best thing I could do for them, when an abomination could devastate them, even if they survived me."
no subject
Spoken without thought, on wounded reflex. The ones you matter to. She didn't approve, she doesn't still: They'd come nearest to ruin only when the demon had plucked that face from the Fade.
"It was not," She manages at last. Feels winded. Out of place, "It is not only Cosima I worry for."
no subject
Herian shakes her head. "A Knight-Enchanter turned abomination would not be an easy adversary. You think me proud, too much lacking in humility and obedience."
Her jaw flexes, recalling that conversation; perhaps I am mistaken — but is not humility a knightly virtue?
"That pride is not misplaced. I am more a more than capable mage. I would be a horror as an abomination. Saoirse will understand." And who else is there, beyond Saoirse and Cosima? Really, who else is there that would feel the blow of her rendered Tranquil so easily? Sabine, perhaps, but Sabine might be pragmatic enough to understand the decision, to grasp the very real danger that mages represented, and perhaps there'd never be cause for her to know.
no subject
No. That isn't — necessary. That isn't who she'll be.
Slowly, her hand uncurls. Palm falls away. She turns aside that Herian can't see it ball again into fist. The ring bites against dirt-stained skin, still wearing into its own strange callouses.
"You are not thinking clearly," There's a bit fucking irony. "You are not considering the situation."
Empty words.
"You know that there are other options."
What? What options do any of them have, but to live? She stares into the crate. Preparing the skulls must have been a long process, ritual. Need to deflesh them to hasten it: sun stripped away, eyes plucked free and replaced with glimmering rock. It isn't Shivana she thinks of now, nor Averie, Werner.
It isn't them she pictures with sockets black.
no subject
That was what Casimir said. He did not remember what hurt meant. Life was rewritten in a new language with new shapes. Recognisable, but not necessarily understood. "The Tranquil think clearly."
Perhaps they think more clearly than anyone else. "I am not without my faults, and my temper, and my bias. I doubt there is a single word we've exchanged since meeting hence where you have not scorned me as some... naive idealist. I could be more useful as Tranquil than as bare bones."
no subject
The wagon creaks on its wheels, resettles; she shakes loose torn skin, splinters. Stupid. This whole affair, her handling of it — to rush in so soon after, as though they might claim some small, uncomplicated victory —
"Are you to speak as a demon, now?" Listless. Bitter. Bare bones, as though she intends one or the other, "To tempt others toward this?"
She stoops up to stand, forces herself to face her again.
no subject
“I would never force another to such a conclusion, not encourage it.”
That, she knows, would be terrible. This is something she has come to of her own accord, her own inquiries.
“Why are you so concerned with this? Why are you so outraged by it?”
no subject
Her fists shut again and stay. She makes no effort now to moderate the loom of her shoulders, the weight of herself in the doorway. A thoughtless breed of threat, unintended; bred in some thirty years and more commonly covered by consciousness. By conscience.
"You would have me wound you, or stand aside that you might do it yourself." How heavy the weight of hot iron. "You speak of this as though it is selflessness — as though that same spirit would not spred, not fucking spawn itself from the act. Leap between those who love you. Sicken us for it."
She's far too deep into it to notice the slip, to grant it any ground.
cw: suicide stuff
"That—" An uncomfortable exhale. "Sickness can be recovered from. It would be better than seeing— any of you scorched by my hand."
There are other ways to ensure she is not a thread, but she will not given them voice, not lay that weight on Wren's shoulders. It would be a sickening tactic to push Wren if it were not a possibility she would truly consider, and she would truly, if she did not consider duty and service so essential. That it might be redeeming, in some fashion. She does not speak it because she truly doesn't know, and because she's not sure it would be anything side from cruel.