Myrobalan Shivana (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
faithlikeaseed) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
faderift2018-07-11 03:18 am
faithlikeaseed) wrote in faderift2018-07-11 03:18 am
when you've gone about things all wrong,
WHO: Myr + YOU! (With starters for Herian, Vandelin, and Newt.)
WHAT: Bees, glyphs, knight-enchanting, just plain Chant(ing), and other things relevant to Myr's interests
WHEN: Early to mid-Solace
WHERE: All around the Gallows & Kirkwall
NOTES: Will be added as needed!
WHAT: Bees, glyphs, knight-enchanting, just plain Chant(ing), and other things relevant to Myr's interests
WHEN: Early to mid-Solace
WHERE: All around the Gallows & Kirkwall
NOTES: Will be added as needed!
i. when the day begins to break // the Gallows courtyard
With the height of Kirkwall's summer cresting hot and muggy, Myr's made even more effort to confine his conditioning to the early morning hours. He's up and out before dawn to run laps of the prayer garden (much smaller than the courtyard, but fewer people there and the obstacles don't change day to day); after that, staff-sparring or grappling with whoever might be about, or barring a live opponent, a session with one of the dummies.
Then, magic: Today, he bends all his focus to a knight-enchanter's disruption field, throwing a rippling bubble of slowed time over a secluded corner of the courtyard. A footstep overheard, a voice--at the sound of someone approaching he'll toss a sunny smile their way, and a request: "If you've got a moment, d'you mind stepping inside there? Promise it's harmless; you'll just slow down a bit."
ii. in the things & the way they could have been // the library
Thursday evening, Chant discussion group. In light of recent concerns over the rifters, Myr'd opened the floor to talk of spirits--something he'd never have done on his own, uncomfortable as he is on the subject, if it hadn't felt like an inspired necessity. Tonight's discussion lingered long over Senior Enchanter Baden's treatise, with particular attention to how mankind's darkest desires intertwined with with the spirits' needs to lead them both into destruction. Not an easy topic to cover, not by a long shot, but--there was no true acrimony behind any of the arguing and no one had stomped off in a huff this time, so it went well enough.
Thus it's with a quiet sense of relief that he lingers as the rest of the group files out; he's usually the last to go, since it's his pledge to the archivists that gets them the study room every week and they expect the door locked when it's not in use. But today especially he needs a little bit of extra time to process what's been said and tuck it away--
Though he'll not be averse to anyone who wants to talk a little more privately on anything that came up in discussion.
iii. don't forget son when he's out on his own // Kirkwall alienage
Like many city elves born to the alienages, Myr's no precise idea when his nameday falls in the year. "Mid-Solace" is the closest he remembered from the little celebrations his father and Ben threw for him; he'd chosen the fifteenth himself much later out of a love of symmetry. (That it happened to coincide with the nameday of the comely Imayn--whose eye he'd been striving to catch at the time--was a nice bonus.) It had since stuck there, celebrated informally in Hasmal's Circle right up to the year of the rebellion.
After that--
After that he hadn't felt much like celebrating another year's survival, nor had anyone else. It still feels a little wrong to do so, even though the Inquisition's been a boon in other ways--but it is his thirtieth and that requires something to mark it.
He brings honeycomb and wildflowers to offer at the vhenadahl, that little bit of paganry even his father embraced. (The Maker, Iolan had said, had made the People as they were and given them to the lives they now led; He would not begrudge them their traditions, so long as it drew their hearts back to Him in the end.) He kneels at the foot of the great tree to make his gift of them; remains there, after, in quiet prayer to the Maker and His Bride, asking guidance for the coming year.
And then, as quietly: "I hope you can hear me, Dad. I know the Chantry says otherwise--but you'd always believed the Maker kinder than that, and I want to, too."
iv. wildcard
(Surprise me! Or hit me up on Plurk or Discord if you'd like a specific starter.)
no subject
"There's not a good or easy way to go about this, and after we worked together last you seem the sort to have an open mind in this. It's," she sighs, swallows and stretches her hands out atop the table uncomfortable with the whole of it still, "about spirits, the Chant of Light or parts of it, interpretations of particular verses. As they pertain to some individuals."
If she doesn't do it now she never will but there's no going back for her to say this to someone else is there? Her voice is soft, not the sotto voce mission murmur, not the confident chatter there and back, no this has the air of reluctant but necessary confession. "Magic serving man. I need to speak of that with you. I am aware how difficult a subject that must be for a mage after the negotiations as I can be, not being a mage myself but I...I have to know more. The better to know how we fit."
no subject
And expression kept politely interested despite the hollow those words carve in his gut. You seem the sort to have an open mind in this, which means either she's misjudged what she's about to say and how it'll sound to him (unlikely--oh, terribly unlikely; Petrana picked her as a second and Vandelin vouches for her perspicacity) or it's another revelation fit to overset parts of his faith he thought fixed beyond question. It's about spirits, puts it solidly in the latter category, and he breathes out in something that's not quite a sigh.
But listens all the way through, sensitive to her tone, the words she chooses, the hesitation--how uncomfortable this must be on her end as well. It goes to the core of what she is, after all-- And Thranduil had been, if not sanguine, at least not disturbed by the revelation he wasn't himself, but how might the other rifters feel about it? How would he feel about it, if someone had told him he weren't who he remembered being his whole life?
Magic serving man. He makes a brief noise like a laugh in the back of his throat, except there's no humor in it. "They don't have it quite correct here in the south either." The words are faint, tinged with melancholy. "That magic should serve man; it doesn't mean penning it up until it breaks-- But let's speak of it. You rifters are spirits, the Provost's said, not yourselves."
twelve years of rambling later
There's salt in her mouth, heavy on the back of her tongue where the tears won't fall not because she won't let them but because she's moved past them for now but they're still there. If she were older then there'd be less for her to want to weep over, but sometimes a girl goes to the Blooming Rose and wants to see her mother on the stairs, or to catch sight of her father's colours billowing in the harbour.
"Spirits are the Maker's First Children, I had so much reading to do to catch up with everything Lady Nightingale needed of me for my studies, and just to be here, to be part of this world, I had to read, and magic cuts through the heart of everything as deep as war does." Perhaps they're twined about one another, folded over a thousandfold within the same blade, one sharp terrible thrust to drive it into the heart of the world but how can she ever say that to someone here (she might have, she might have when she's had the thought with toes on the edge of the Abyssal Rift thinking that something as deep, as dark, as bereft must cut through the whole of the place to be mired in such violence). "I'll tell you what I told Thranduil: that there are things children do without thinking.
"She sits on her father's knee, picks up dice, rolls them in a cup and tips them over before she learns that her father plays at it because everyone at his table leans very close, and if she spots a lie there she spots it everywhere. A little girl doesn't know why her mother paints her face but she'll still sit behind her dresser every night, take up the brushes and do it too." A steadier voice than telling it to Thranduil that night since it's true, if a child does it, and a spirit is a child of the Maker, it makes sense, it makes far more sense than to have pulled a person across a world and out of a dream to somewhere else. "I've had time to grow accustomed to it, to learn lessons but now I realise I have yet more to learn still as we try to find our place yet again." Her hands unfold on the table this time with a deliberate noise, reaching out to touch him gently to indicate you, this is where I come to you.
Thranduil isn't of this world, and for all that he's a wise man, he's an old man. Araceli hasn't ever put all her stock in old men and their reasons for doing anything that they do, and she isn't about to start now when it's the whole of her on the line.
every bit of it worth it
He doesn't wish to interrupt her, doesn't know what he'd say at the moment even if he did. What words are there? But he can offer out his hands in a silent gesture of comfort; whatever--whoever--she might be, she's a person, she's mourning, and it is the least he can do to ease whatever of that he can. Would even if she were a total stranger (as if total strangers would have this conversation)--but she's Inquisition too, and that's begun to feel something like family.
So he offers his hands and his ears, listening intently to all she says (puts it away beneath an image of ocean--third floor, fifth room out clockwise--and wisps upon it, by the portrait of the stag crowned in spirits) and weighing what it means. What it could mean. How they fit. And when she's finished he's thinking still, returning the touch upon his hands by way of acknowledgment, I understand as he tries to put into words the tumble of ideas she's set loose. Things come together suddenly in a way they hadn't before--
"You've heard of the cult," he begins slowly, obliquely, laying down a first brick to build the rest of the foundation on. "Brother Jehan reported-- Who says you're hear to save us all and lead us back to the Maker by example. The Maker's Third Children, perfected at last, with attributes of both men and spirits.
"Spirits don't create of their own accord, we're told. Not the way we do--that's why I thought you couldn't be spirits to start, because how could they come up with worlds beyond ours? --But spirits given flesh--they change, they become more than they were, other--" So he's learning in all his clandestine research on Casimir's behalf; it sends a shiver down his spine to contemplate, still, but he has reason to persist at thinking it. Casimir--and now Araceli and all the other rifters.
"--I think you might be here to save yourselves as much as us." There's something of excitement to his tone--solemn stuff, cautious, careful. This might be heresy; this might end up revealing much more than he's often willing to confess on how far he is from the Southern Chantry's teachings in his heart. "'Nothing He has wrought shall be lost,' we're told. If He wished to give his First Children a chance to grow beyond their limits, without possession, why not like this?"
no subject
The breath she takes is steadying, as if it's all been knocked out of her again. Maybe it has. Maybe it will be each time she speaks of this, and Myr's hands are welcome anchors for her now.
"I'll speak to Brother Jehan the first chance that I have, if that idea gets out right now, well, imagine. Just imagine given the state of them worked themselves into if they heard of a cult." Araceli has placed her faith in people and things, but after the way too many of them have been conducting themselves, rifters are far from deserving of being given even more of herself even if this would be a less tangible part and piece. Thieves are thieves, after all though, and she's done her poking around in Chantry Relations as one might expect. "What sort of perfection are we--"
That's her bitterness, her exasperation with how they seem so determined to land everyone on the back foot before the negotiations even begin.
"That was the reason in the Chant for the Maker creating man, that they were only capable of imitation." Not entirely a question, just her making certain she has the Chant right when she's read it, but isn't a scholar of the whole of it the way she'd be with ships, blades, heraldry, or politics, the things that make sense in her mind that her head wraps around comfortably. "How do spirits gain flesh without possession, is there precedent for it other than us? I thought it was possession. It's why Andrastians burn their dead."
(A muted horror in her voice. Someone who is accustomed. Who does not want it for herself. Who still respects and understands the intent behind it.)
Araceli considers it, how he says it, the thump of her own heart as the words come out. There's always a way to use something, always an advantage but carefully, it always has to be careful when the Chantry is the great looming monolith for all that there are factions within factions, the same vying for power and position that there is in the Grand Game. The Chantry sweeps across the beating heart of near all of Thedas, it can't be so easily changed. Shartan proves that. "It would need to be done so carefully, that we are His will in some way. There's the anchor but the anchor is still as poorly understood as we are, and I don't imagine all rifters would be comforted by the idea of what we are even after however many of us experienced the plague. Which...could prove useful, if proof were needed. Same as what some of us experienced with lyrium which I know mages and Templars both use. How is it put, the Waters of the Fade?"
You know back in Skyhold she might never have dared to be having this conversation but her tongue is loosening, she's sitting straighter, she's finding her nerve again, if not her smile.
no subject
It galls a little, to think Marisol was right--but he's been on the wrong side of arguments before and learned the grace to concede a lost point. It galls more to think they might see him as a non-person in a non-world, not worth serious consideration even if he stood square in their way. But-- Be that in the Maker's care, he thinks, and lets the thought go with a breath, with a squeeze of her hands.
"That was the reason--He sought for something new in His creation, and the spirits could only echo what they'd seen. And there are--" Here, a moment's hesitation but a moment's only; he's trusted her this far, with this much heterodoxy, so what's a little more knowledge gleaned going about something the Chantry would despise, if they knew. "--there are rituals, to call a spirit and bind it to a tangible shape--beyond what we used to restore you after the plague. It's nothing I've studied so I couldn't say for certain it's 'flesh'--but they've physical forms, shaped of a mage's will."
And magic. And magic-- The thought gives him pause, pulls his attention like a rabbit across the path distracts a hound. There's something there but it hasn't gelled yet, hasn't taken solid form--and then she says lyrium and it clicks into place. "'The emerald waters of the Fade,' drawn from the well of all souls--the same place," thoughtfully, "the Maker drew 'a measure of flesh' to craft mortals. Lyrium for enchantments makes magic last long beyond what a mage could do--and you've lyrium in your blood."
He considers her in his eyeless way, head cocked a little to one side as he listens to the tempo of her breathing and how she shifts. "But if it could be done," he says, softly, "there's many who'd be willing to believe--to think the Maker's turned His face back toward us, if only a little." He does not say he's one of him, but that he's here is statement of faith enough.
Faith, and hope, which can ever be dangerous. "What more can I do to help you with this?"
tw: drowning mentions
They can have a place here if all of them can find it, but that's the problem: too many who want to demand that they carve the space themselves in a world not theirs, that Thedas fit itself around them, and not they who should shape themselves to Thedas. If she could go back, how differently she would have done it. Stayed quiet, crept amongst them, learnt what an Antivan was and that the natives were marked same as her (impossible, and she knows how impossible it is but there are times to lie in the dark with Korrin breathing beside her, Lux at her feet, with the life she has and might have yet stretching out before her that invites her to play pretend) to say hello, I was too close, I was hurt, my father is a sailor and brought me to the port and could bring me no further.
(Martel would have approved of such deception. He took far more interested when she grew up and saw the way the winds were blowing and aligned her fates to the Inquisition, to all there was for her.)
"They're selfish enough I want to drown them," said in the gasped laugh of someone who nearly slaps a hand over her mouth to chase the words back in, but doesn't. Wouldn't. "You know," he doesn't, she sniffs through her nose very sharply to remind herself that you are better than this, get some control over this, "I go to the sea and I go beneath the water until all I hear is my heart in my ears, until I think my lungs will burst. And my mind is so clear. It's never more clear. And I think it would do them some good."
(You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. You can still drag the damn thing in and watch it struggle until it no longer can and she is a very strong swimmer.)
Myrobalan's words give her time to consider her own, time to stem the tide of her ugliness, her frustrations that have risen on a cresting wave to hit the shore. Swallowing hurts, but sometimes it has to hurt, and the salt in her mouth is the sweat that clouded everything when the plague stole all of her away (again). "The spirits must have echoed us," sounding the idea out the way she'd said to Thranduil as a girl who learnt lessons before knowing, "from where they saw us - how far does the Fade extend, though it's dreaming, it must keep going, no? - and then the rest came. The part you're talking about now. Where the Maker has come in?"
It's not so difficult for her, beloved of the sea, child of a holy man and holy woman to talk of that part at least. That something else flows through them although lyrium burnt through her once by way of uncaring hands, her memories not her own, cold and dark, the box locked tight, the thumb rubbed until the joint eventually pops. Still, she sighs, imagining some people with it. "Not everyone would want to know the Maker's gaze is upon them. Speaking of rifters. Can you imagine the caterwauling?"