faderift | July Catchall Post

WHO: Fingon and Open
WHAT: June-July Catchall Post
WHEN: mid-late Justinian, tending into Solace
WHERE: Kirkwall and surrounding environs
NOTES: None

Not Exactly the Tarnin Austra

Thedas’s chief summer holiday passes with Bloomingtide, but for Fingon the real holiday falls at Midsummer. The Gates of Summer, they call it, the longest day of the year, and this one is bittersweet. The holiday was weeks away when he left Arda, and the summer air reminds him of all he’d left behind.

And, of course, there is the one nagging detail he tries to forget: his next Midsummer's Day would be the last of his life. The last of too many lives of old friends and followers. The last time he would see his brother.

(Who would also die on a Midsummer's Day, not so very long afterwards. Sometimes he wonders why he'd kept asking for more news of what had happened to his family.)

Months now, he’s known about that....and he still doesn’t know how to deal with it. How do you mourn as dead people you remember as being so alive?

So Fingon falls quieter as Justinian passes, contemplative and sad... until one dawn late in the month, when he can be found on the roofs of the Gallows, a bottle of wine nearby, singing out ancient songs over the Sea.

A New Companion

Fingon's mood picks up in the days following and as the month peters out he can be found more frequently in the stables. It's time to make a commitment he hasn't felt ready to before, and soon he is once again the owner of a horse.

She's a Courser out of Amaranthine, and dark of coat where his horses in Arda were pale greys. But her long dark mane pleases him and there's a look in her eye he's come to like even more. Alassë, he names her in the tongue of his birth, and the joy he feels as they ride out together feels like a sign he chose rightly.

They head out of the city and into the wilds, learning to work together as far from Kirwall's crowded streets as they can go.

A Personal Project

Living in the Inquisitions' rooms has felt more like an inn, in some ways: impersonal, as though their lives could be swept away in a moment. Which is true, of course- but it has downsides when one must live in such a place. Perhaps it's time to bring some feel of home to his room. He has thoughts on what needs replacing (everything, the Noldo in him mutters, and perhaps that will come in time) but for now, he starts designing smaller pieces of furniture for them. A chair better suited for his cousin's height, perhaps. Maybe a table, inlaid with their grandfather's sigil....

It's been decades since he did any serious woodworking, and he was never a master. Still, practice makes perfect, does it not? He can be found working in a spare room in the Mages Tower, or outside in the gardens on particularly warm days.

Wildcard

Self-explanatory, don't you think?