open | wherever we go, we'll never be lost

[supersonic]

WHO: Pietro Maximoff & YOU
WHAT: Arriving, complaining, settling in, poking his nose into things, etc.
WHEN: Anytime in April
WHERE: The Gallows, around Kirkwall
NOTES: Feel free to toss your own starter at this post! Gimme anything and I'll find a reason for Pietro to be there.

Arriving;

As accommodations go, the Gallows is one Pietro doubts he'll soon forget. After a long day of travel, longer still from Skyhold and the Brotherhood's latest camp beyond, watching those great white walls rise higher and higher from the approaching ferry, he's surprised he doesn't get a crick in his neck by the time they dock. When he finally comes to be standing on its front steps, feeling approximately the size of a pebble, he's started to wonder if all this was really such a great idea. Leaving. Pledging his loyalty to an organization he doesn't yet know if he trusts. Going to Kirkwall, of all places.

At least it's something different.

"Is all Tevinter architecture so oppressive?" he gripes under his breath as he starts up. "And spiky?" This seems like an unnecessary number of spikes. He's just saying.

—The garish pink birds milling about do help lighten the mood, he'll admit.

Group Quarters;

Inside the mages' tower, the long open rooms and rows of bunks are a little less intimidating, if no more welcome. It's been years since he's slept in an apprentice's hall, his sister tucked into the bunk above him, seeing who could whisper quietest as they fell asleep — or how silently she could toss a pillow at him for whispering something rude, often as not. Nostalgia isn't the right word for the memory of a time you wouldn't repeat, for the particular closeness that comes from living in shared fear, but it's heavy on his limbs the same way.

Still, this is the prudent choice. The choice their father would tell him to make. Best to have reason to linger within earshot of his fellow recruits. He wastes little time finding an unoccupied bed, dropping his travel pack and staff onto it with a resigned whumph.

"Just like old times," is wry.

Only the doors to this cage aren't locked anymore. One hopes. (He checks, actually, just a quick brush of his fingers over the mechanism, a glance for fresh wear on his way to the bath. Just in case.)

The Gallows;

Once he's had a chance to clean the dust and smell of hay and travel from himself, Pietro sets about getting the lay of the land. A new lean elf can be found surveying the training grounds with a close eye, not necessarily looking to participate but— appreciating. Magnus's training had been thorough, but he hadn't had anything so permanent to offer.

The herb garden and adjoining alchemy rooms earn a passing-through too, but it's the library that sees him pulled in for a longer visit. Careful fingers ghost over the spines of the books there, reading each title before pausing to pull one or two from their shelves with a sort of uncertain side-glance and a lift of the chin, as if daring anyone to question his right to them. If he is to work on behalf of this Inquisition, he ought to get something out of it. A history, perhaps, or a particularly esoteric-looking tome on magic, or even a book of myths might earn his attention, and a spot on the nearby reading table he's temporarily claimed.

Ostensibly, he ought to be looking for the proper office to report his arrival to, but — well, he doesn't seem to be in any hurry.

Wildcard;

[[Feel free to run into Pietro somewhere else in the Gallows or around Kirkwall, e.g. running errands or loitering in pubs in Lowtown, hanging around the alienage when he gets tired of shemlen, or plurk ping me for a closed starter, I just ran out of steam for more general starters tonight... x_x ]]

Comments

[arcaneadvisor]

"If it were insulting my mother I'd be a sight happier," and who knows, maybe it is and she hasn't quite slotted all those pieces together yet as one grimoire sits as it has for the past ten or more years in a pouch at her waist with the same tree upon the cover. "Either the simple wrote this or a drunkard with the aid of a great amount of elfroot without even using the eyes in their head for what they looked upon."

Which is to say: pretty much every elven ruin in Thedas, or every hint of elven anything in Thedas, through a Chantry lens or a 'scholarly' lens which isn't much different. Swap a few words round here and there but the Maker still elbows his way in.

Genitivi though, a name she sees all too often but her mouth curls upward, a knowing smirk of distate. "I had the..particular fortune to meet the man once. A most tiresome fellow. I would have left him to his fate, truth be told, the world would have been spared more volumes that way." Eat the scholars, feed them to cultists.

"And yet their thoughts on the Fade are those that we see and hear everywhere; what is it that you prefer instead? Something of the Beyond? The beliefs of the Avvar or other tribesmen?" If she leans forward, it's hard not to after all when she's thought about it so often with the rifters, with the eluvians, worlds beyond worlds and dreams and spirits being what they are now, something much more than they ever were before any of this began.

apologies this is so late, feel free to disregard if it's too crusty but i'd be happy to revive it

[supersonic]

"A pity." About Gentivi. It's genial, though.

"The Avvar believe— what, something about spirits being akin to gods?" Pietro winces, keenly aware of his own relatively ignorance on this subject. "The books the Circles kept about them were probably even less accurate than the ones about the Fade," he explains, wryly apologetic. He hasn't had many library breaks since the White Spire fell, either.

"I do not know about worshipping spirits exactly, but," Well. This is more than he should say, probably, but she certainly doesn't seem overly devout herself; she seems interested, in things he doesn't often get to discuss outside his father's echo chamber, and there's no one here to tell him to be more cautious. "I have known mages who took a more neutral approach to the Fade, let us say."

"It benefits the Chantry to instill fear of it — fear that makes it very easy for some to say a mage should spend their life confined for the supposed safety of everyone else. If I object to the second assumption, it seems only natural to question the first. To seek out other perspectives, if I have the chance."

[arcaneadvisor]

"I know more of the Chasind," to look at her, it wouldn't be surprising when more than ten years removed some things don't change, some things are too much a part of you. The dirt might be gone from under her nails only to be carried with her in other ways, and there are so few Avvar though this is an Inquisition and after watching so many Dalish come from their clans only to leave entirely, perhaps they are wise to keep to their mountains. "They believe in gods of some description though they lean towards animals. Some men and women are beloved of the gods, and if you've seen the weapons of the wilders, they've been made in the image of animals. 'Tis said that when a Chasind kills someone with that weapon, the gods will not believe 'twas the Chasind who did the killing but the animal the weapon is shaped for, say a wolf, that they can be confused."

Maybe it's superstition, or maybe it's what happens when they spend so long apart from the rest of the what became the Avvar, but in some part of her she might admire it. The trickery in it. To fool another thing more powerful than you, that might wish to exact a price, to cheat it.

"A mage that fears their magic is useful to the Chantry. Easily cowed, easy to be taught what to learn, to not reach for more than the Chantry allows. In time how much more would have been ground to nothing but dust? Mages who fear magic have no the strength to resist the demons when they come." Her first Circle was Kinloch Hold, not so easily forgotten the abominations, the growths stretched along the walls reaching as the bodies did for a hand, an ankle for anything to hold to. "Circle mages are...perhaps more reluctant to speak of the spirit practices even now, unless they use it for healing. I suppose that was the most acceptable use of it." Which is an encouragement to say more of it, after all there's what the rifters are and well it could be a very interesting discussion to have with someone who holds a neutral view.

[supersonic]

That earns a half-smile from Pietro, the idea of confusing a god. It is clever, in its way.

"The most acceptable, yes, but surely not the only use for the help of something so powerful."

He gives a glance to the doorway, the room — both empty but for the two of them — before leaning a tad closer. "I knew a mage who, even as a child asleep in her bunk, would speak to spirits of the Fade as friends instead of enemies." Who does still, though he'll not say it. His sister's secrets are her own.

"It is a difficult thing, I think, as we get older and that rhetoric of fear sinks in, to keep the mind from twisting our perceptions of the beings we may meet in dreaming, as much as it is a challenge to avoid possession by those who do mean harm. But in childhood, there is a certain ease I wish was encouraged instead of prohibited."

[arcaneadvisor]

Of course her thoughts go to Wynne, who had a spirit come to her. A spirit who healed but still came to possess a woman lying on a floor of the Circle tower to say get up, get up and fight again. How known are the truths of the Fifth Blight without any one of them to write them the way the dwarf had for the Champion?

"Limiting," she agrees but that's always been her opinion of Circles and the magic in them. Put it in a box. Define it comfortably for those without magic. Make it smaller and smaller. Crush it down into nothingness if you can. As she listens to him, her eyebrows climb higher and higher at what she hears. Children-- well she has a son who is strange. Who knows more than he should but she knows why, and aren't children always seemingly that touch more sensitive before they learn not to be? So it's not without admiration that she speaks. "I saw Circle dormitories but once, beds packed so close even a whisper would travel far; she must have been a rare girl not to have been afraid to speak with them with so many other ears that might wake in the night to hear."

To speak. To report. Morrigan imagines those things happen. People inform so commonly, it was half the Game to go listen in then run off and tell someone else behind a hand or the cover of a mask.

"My son is growing closer to the age where he would be put through a Harrowing had he been in a Circle, I see how he looks at the world, what he loves of it, what he fears he fears the way any boy might: there is a thing outside that makes a noise, I read something terrible I shouldn't have by the light of a candle and I don't want to say it's why I'm awake in the small hours." You know, if boys will insist on reading about Darkspawn and dragons when they have active imaginations. "There is a chance now, with those of the right mind to choose a path now. I have seen enough who carry whatever hurts from those days with them. More on the roads. How many are kept from sleep by the horrors they conjure themselves from their waking hours? Needless."

[supersonic]

"There was a little time, before the Circle." Not much, but a handful of moments, nights that shaped the twins' understanding of what they were before the Chantry or even their mother's fears about magic had a chance to take hold. They'd always been in a world of their own, full of secrets known only to each other. That some of those secrets were later deemed more dangerous than others didn't change the way they approached these things between themselves first, without judgment. "And some she trusted, after."

Him. And she's right, almost no one else. The Circle hadn't taught them to trust, any more than the rest of the world did.

"Your son—" Maker, that is a thought. Young mages growing up without the Circles' high walls keeping them in. "I hope he will not be the only one, to grow with no more to fear than what any boy fears. Even the apprentices, the ones I have traveled with since the White Spire fell, we teach them now to question the Chantry, but also how to run swiftly, to hide very well and stand very still should a Templar ever come near. I do not know that there will ever be a place in Orlais, or Fereldan or even the Free Marches, where we do not have to teach them to fear it."