faderift | Maybe I'm meant for the sea

Church is only more confident (and maybe he should not be) after swimming lessons done up for a bit of a 'mission', which also ended up in an argument with the leader of the forces about basic life-saving medical procedures. He still has no idea how Coupe got the idea of blood magic being involved in CPR, but whatever.

He raises a hand. "Question: what's a skerry?"

Listen...he does not sea talk. Someone tells him to get on a boat, he gets on a boat. That's mostly it.

Treading water with her the hood of her cape pushed back, Araceli hesitates. There's always that moment when a word is there on the tip of her tongue, looking between Church and it and back again when she doesn't know another name for it at first, if the translation is right. It always was what it was. That out there my girl? Oh that's the skerry, same as that one, and that one, and if you squint you can see another collection curving past until they go out of sight.

But she tries. Mouth pursing around it. "See that very small island there? The tiny one? Almost a reef?" Her hand raises up out of the water, a sheet of water sluicing down the arm of the cape where she points; glossy black cormorants have settled on it, their wings held out at their sides to dry, shining blue-green in the light. "That's a skerry, I think...maybe you call it sea stacks other places? It was always the skerry. Too little to live on for us, good to just rest on. No seals hauled out today."

If there had been seals, she'd have revised plans, maybe taken out a lifeboat to moor it there or picked a different spot, she's not in the habit of disturbing seals but the birds won't bother them if they don't bother the birds.

Listen. It's a fair question. "Oh! Right. You know, I...did not know those things had names? I always thought of...just...rocks. That rock out there. Rocks out in the ocean. Reef works. I think reef is a--I mean I always think of reefs being under the water--"

And that's about the point where he decides he should really pay more attention to his body in the water than talking words, because it's rougher, here, and sea water in the mouth is gross, and also maybe don't! get pulled away! by the water! Thank you! He splashes a little, rights himself, back on track.

"Okay! I'm okay."

"Everything has a name, the sea is older than all things." She kicks her legs to get herself onto her back to take a few lazier strokes, buoyant and comfortable, better able to see. "Some of them are as old as the ones that bubble up with lava from undersea volcanoes and vents, I just don't know if Thedas has those or if it's a thing people have time to care about between all their wars."

That's the benefit of having only the one: time for so much more, all that effort poured into everything else you might possibly imagine as she rolls back into her front, dipping beneath the surface and back up.

"Do you need a hand?" Christine wouldn't be happy to have a half-sized Church returned at the end of the day.

"I'm fine, I'm good, just...got distracted, that's all." His movements are nowhere near as smooth as hers, as someone whose life has revolved around the sea since birth. He's had a couple of lessons and a couple of dips to go with them. There was never much reason to learn in Skyhold. Has anyone taken the idea of lifejackets under further consideration? Because they really should.

"You ever consider writing? Like, poetry. That's gotta have a big market in Thedas, sea poetry."

"At least you didn't come in armour, I thought some people might." You know how some people are Church, practically stitched into it (it's a disturbing little road to go down in her thoughts but on the surface, funny) although it does beg the question: "I mean I thought someone might try then just sink to the bottom, and it's not as if they have diving helmets at all here, they wouldn't even be any use down there. They'd be nipples on a breastplate."

Now if they did have diving helmets (and the suits) then they could just go strolling along the bottom of the seabed how do you do fellow armoured life how is the coral today? Any red lyrium to report? It almost has her gulping down water herself.

"Poetry? Oh no I'd--" She laughs, shaking her head, water flying everywhere, caught offguard by it. "I don't have the-- no, we should leave that to the professionals shouldn't we? Gwenaëlle for instance would be far more accomplished in that regard."

"...Did you know you're a genius? Okay. Two things. First, you know sea shanties and talk poetically about the ocean, I think you can manage writing some of it down and making a few silver for the efforts." Speaking of efforts, the water here does drag more than in Kirkwall's harbor proper. He has to stop himself speaking just to concentrate on keeping on past the pull. It helps, he thinks, to be as fit as he is from working out and carrying shit and marching around and swinging swords and generally narrowly avoiding death. The medieval workout. Not dying.

"Right, and, and second, diving helmets. You could make diving helmets. You could be the one to, like, help start these people on exploring the sea! Under the sea! Think of all the shipwrecks and lost treasure!"

Fortunately, having to keep swimming as something small and silver and faster than her blades carefully hidden back on the shore with Lux and the Walrus to guard them darts beneath her legs means Araceli can't turn back to stare at Church. She might if they'd been on land, but they wouldn't be having this conversation then.

"Singing the songs I've known since I was in the cradle older than my grandparents or even their grandparents is a whole other world from writing it. Poetry is-- I lived in a building before. And it was full of artists. Painters, writers, musicians, sculptors, poets, usually none of them with patrons or none who had steady or very wealthy patrons, but it was their passion, it was their life, there was something in them that was poetry. The sea is my blood same as theirs, it comes out a different way. It's easy to talk of a thing you love, another thing to show it that way." Another thing entirely to do it properly other than to live as she lives, as the sea wills it, which isn't a thing Araceli will ever be putting into words outside the select few souls it might be entrusted to as she kicks her legs harder, a prickling of sensation as the blood rushes through her against the cold of the water warming her.

That's life, she could say, but that might brand her a poet again and well she's a bard. A pirate. (Queensguard to those few who know it.)

The skerry is close, if she lengthened her strokes she could reach it but she turns back, a lazy kicking and minimal arms to keep an eye on Church since the water flow is interrupted about it. "I know duels. I know the lute. I know gambling, sailing, swimming, climbing and falling. I know my way around lockpicks. But my instruction in smithing - actually that might go beyond smithing I think, there was fabric involved but not a seamstress - is lacking past sharpening blades. Or knowing 'oh that's a pretty knife, I like that knife'. Besides I can hold my breath a long time and I came to possess this cape."

The cape is very much not just for show though it could be, it's a statement of a cape being as it is some strange leather and cut in the shape of a manta ray even with the lobes where the ray's mouth would be.

"You write down the words to the songs you sing, bam, it's poetry, baby." Church, that's a little simplistic... "People think--people always think that art-" and he pulls a hand up out of the water as if gripping a goblet for emphasis before putting it back down to try and keep up with her "-means a lot of study and work and smarts. Nah! It's just a thing you love. Next time you start talking poetic about the sea, someone should write down what you say. Poetry! Instant poetry."

Nobody's ever going to write down the things he says. They come out all jumbled and jambled. Stutter and start and stop. Ramble, crude, ineloquent. He can give a speech now and then, but it's not anything that'll be remembered in the years to come.

As for the shot down idea of diving helmets: "I was wondering why you were wearing dragging down clothes to swim?" Oh, well, he's just going to put a pin in the helmets and go for the cape instead. Less words, more curiosity.

Her fingertips touch the skerry, scraping over barnacles as she hauls herself up and out, turning to kneel as the water runs in sheets down and off her cloak, the hood sliding back with a good shake of her head. If she has to, she'll slide back in if Church needs her to but from here it gives Araceli the perfect vantage point to observe his form as well as answer. On the tip of her tongue is the quickest, easiest response (that's plagiarism) that might be shot down as easily (no one else from your home is here, it's been three years - almost - is anyone else ever going to come, who would know unless you told them) and instead she takes a deeper breath. Thinks of how long it must surely take Gwenaëlle to write her poetry. Of her first meeting with Beleth on a rooftop to start their bard lessons, the calluses worn into her fingertips from the lute. Her mother's father who drew beautiful things including the ink on her right shoulder.

"You do remember I'm a bard, don't you? It is a lot of study and hard work to do any of it. None of it is a thing done in an instant; people see the end result of a thing, same as a meal, but there's all that goes to making it. More than the moments immediately leading up to it. The years to even allow for that." More for her friends than for herself, the idea that they're being undervalued, their hard work, the backhanded clumsiness of the compliment edging around suspicion at flattery.

Better to focus on the cloak, lifting an arm of it. "This? Oh it's not heavy, it helps swimming, actually. It came out of a rift back about the time we were all making repairs at Llomerryn. I swim faster with it so for me, that's saying something, and it allows me to go longer beneath the water without breathing so it's got useless applications for the project, if I had any idea what it was made of I could perhaps track down more somehow, all I know is that it's not leather, it feels wrong for leather."

"Being a bard is different." His form is...sloppy, heavy-handed, still this side of a beginner. But he manages. For now, he comes to a stop, floating, gently kicking legs and waving his arms enough to keep afloat. "Because a bard's not just someone versed in all the arts." Oh sure. There are bards that are just bards. But some bards are more. Some are spies. Assassins. Scouts. "But also, because a bard's versed in all the arts. That's not the augh something touched my leg!"

He flails in an instant, goes under, and it's a hectic few moments before he's back up and swimming. Fuck this conversation, he's heading for land. And it's record time (for him) in reaching the skerry, slapping a hand against the rock, sliding a little as he clambers up.

"...I think it was just a fish. So now I feel, y'know, sufficiently stupid."

"In some ways," half an agreement because there's the side of being a bard that's lonely. The door open until it isn't, the way that you are watched, weighed, measured but in that respect how is it so different to being a rifter, to being the common girl risen to the ranks of queensguard? That's breathing to her. "But the arts very much matter, if you fuck up in front of them there they'll eviscerate you and you'll wish it had been a knife somewhere spilling everything out through the petticoats."

Almost a relief at the Winter Palace to have the invasion, the fighting, to drop the lute and the playing her polite little part of curiosity behind the mask to have her blades out with a small pack of terrified nobles stinking of perfumed sweat behind her. That idea cuts short, her hand grabbing his wrist to assist in hauling him up, steadying him.

Araceli's small but stubborn, she can tug hard when she has to.

"There was at least one octopus not long after we came here, nothing terribly exciting. No sharks." As she smiles with as many teeth.

Maybe I'm meant for the sea

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