OPEN | We don’t have to fall from grace

[keenly]

WHO: Colin, with a few closed starters for Nathaniel
WHAT: Open/catch-all log for May
WHEN: Bloomingtide
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: Starters inside. Let me know if you want something.

General Store

Colin has come to love this place. After six months here, it has come to smell like cloves and cedarwood. All the spices he uses in cooking have seasoned the wood panels. It really feels like it belongs to him now, even if the property belongs to the Inquisition courtesy of the City of Kirkwall.

At the moment, he is baking rather than cooking, this time more for therapy than anything else. There is something meditative about kneading dough. It's impossible not to slow down when doing this, be in the moment, stop worrying. A simple life is all he ever wanted, and that's what making bread means. It is a staple--easy and simple to make but vital to the function of one's house and therefore empowering. This is important work.

Gallows Garden

In one of the gardens, Colin sits on a patch of grass with his face turned upward toward the sun, eyes shut. He breathes deeply and evenly, and neither peeks nor starts when footsteps are heard. He knows you're there, but he's not thinking about you. He's emptying his mind. Somehow, the feel of sunlight works like a mantra, a white noise he can feel. His mother would say it's the Antivan in him that makes him love sunlight. Colin thinks it's the mage in him. For ten years, he wasn't allowed very much sunlight. Now, he can have his fill of it. He can hoard it all greedily and no one will know the difference. No one has the right to stop him or demand for him to justify this indulgence, or ask who said he could spend so much time sitting and doing nothing in the sunlight.

So his brown skin gets browner by the day, dark hair developing faint caramel highlights, but most importantly, some of his nervous mannerisms are being smoothed out. He can be seen leaving the garden looking, and feeling, lighter than air.

The Market

"I want the one that spit at me," Colin can be heard saying. It makes sense because he's at a clam stall. It's about five o'clock in the morning and he has just decided what lunch will be today. A merchant takes a scoop and digs through the clams. Several spit in different directions, each stream of water two or three feet long.

"You want to eat that one?" the merchant laughs, dumping clams into Colin's outstretched bag.

"Oh yes," Colin says firmly, smiling wickedly.

When all is done and paid for, Colin starts back to the Gallows. After a few paces he stops, looking at a shirt hanging at another merchant's stall. It is beautiful--bright, hand-painted silk. It is also expensive. Far less expensive are the tiny bits of jewelry at the same stall. He starts looking over a tray with numerous earrings, clearly distracted from his task. One clam gives one final, defiant spit before resigning itself to its parched fate.

Darktown Clinic

Maybe you are a volunteer here. Maybe you are a patient. Either way, Colin is here after work several times a week, and he isn't just here giving out potions. Here, he practices real healing magic, as someone who barely practices magic at all otherwise. This month, Colin is giving out Adalia's rain boots to every scavenger presenting with trench foot.

Of course, Darktown's shady reputation comes from somewhere. Today, a man sidles up to Colin as he works and claps an arm around his shoulders, starting to talk about how good a man he is and how he's making a real difference. He talks loudly, and as soon as Colin knows what he's up to (and he lived in Denerim--it doesn't take long), he shoves him away.

"Don't touch me," he growls, patting down his own pockets and finding--yes. Yes, that is his purse gone. He shouldn't have brought it here.

Annnnnd the man is already running away. Colin follows as far as the door with a sigh. Using magic to stop a pickpocket seems excessive, and there wasn't that much money in there, and...sigh.

Okay. He's over it.

Comments

[keenly]

What does Simon think will happen, worst-case scenario? That they won't talk anymore? They haven't talked in weeks. that Colin with rat him out to the appropriate authority? That one might be true, if what he did was as heinous as he's acting. But Colin thinks that won't be the case, not with a man like Simon. Just as Colin is not who he used to be, neither is Simon. No matter what he did or didn't do, he is clearly a decent man now. Colin doesn't think Compassion would ask this thing of him if Simon was unforgivable. He has seen the people who do the unforgivable. He has suffered the unforgivable. Simon isn't like that. Compassion isn't like that, he doesn't think. Compassion seems like a bare minimum, as virtues go, and its spirits are considered benevolent but somewhat weak.

"You won't shock me," he says. "I'm from Kinloch Hold. I've seen everything."

A light tone it is, a way of breaking the tension with an assurance that he doesn't necessarily feel is true, but doesn't necessarily feel is untrue. He saw the Circle overtaken by blood mages. He saw possessed templars get cut down through a crack in a wall. He saw some apprentices rise like stars while others muddled through. He saw a former friend in Tranquil robes. He saw much of Lake Calenhad from the top of the tower. He saw a despair demon freeze, then shatter. He saw death. He saw three possible outcomes when Ser Lutair unbuckled his belt. He saw Audra walk away.

[paladingus]

It's true, everyone's heard the story of those horrors, and for a moment, it gives him pause. Whether to be hopeful or horrified in sympathy or both, he doesn't know.

But Kinloch Hold hadn't started a war.

"That may be so, friend, and I'm sorry for it," he says, "but you weren't in the Gallows when Meredith Stannard ruled over it. I was." Slowly, he exhales.

"It was my first posting, soon as I finished training and came of age. I wasn't one of the lads who'd been promised from birth or raised to it as orphans; I wanted it more than anything. I had to beg my ma and da to let me train. They're not the most pious of folk and they'd rather I have stayed and helped my brother in the forge--they're smiths by trade."

'They,' not 'we.' He hasn't thought of his family as a 'we' for as long as he can remember.

[keenly]

Colin nods wordlessly and wonders if this man knows Gareth now. Very likely only peripherally. Templars always kept at a distance. At first, they justified it with well we might have to kill you so we can't get attached, and Colin was peeved. After Audra left, he stopped questioning any templars who chose to remain distant because the ones that did venture close weren't the sort he would have wanted to. Either way. Simon coming from a middle-class family makes a little sense now. Families who aren't the-heir-and-a-spare sort tend to treasure their children, as his own did. It's not surprising Simon's raised a fuss about him leaving. And he doesn't even know them.

"Do you still see them?" he asks. If the Blight hadn't hit Ferelden, Colin still has no idea whether he'd be welcomed back by his family, and he hadn't chosen to leave. Some parents might be understanding of a mage who was taken away, but a templar who walked away?