faderift | open | then in the pounding of my heart

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open | then in the pounding of my heart

WHO: Myr & you!
WHAT: new eyes who dis
WHEN: Throughout Harvestmere, backdated to the team's return from the Abbey on the White Cliffs.
WHERE: The Gallows & Kirkwall
NOTES: potential cautionary cw for trauma & gore mentions

Their return was no triumphant one. What had started hopeful for alliance and aid from the Abbey on the White Cliffs had collapsed under the weight of the horror there and taken so many lives with it. One of the Inquisition's own is dead. A potential ally is lost. And a power from beyond the rifts has warped the world past bearing, making plain once more the awful danger rifters themselves could be.

As for Myr, subject to a miracle hidden in the heart of the whole thing--

He doesn't hide from his friends in the Inquisition, exactly. Doesn't shirk his duty or vanish into his quarters. But while he's often there in body there's some part of him missing in spirit, curled in on itself to reflect on what had happened.

i.

He spends his first full day back in the Gallows undoing his locator glyphs, one by one.

They could simply be unsnarled all at once without him walking the halls; he could have done it the moment he set foot on the Gallows' docks. But he has not seen the ugly place in person but for flashes granted by the Provost; he doesn't know the look of the halls, only how the glyphs stand in relation to one another and the sound of their chiming. Their removal, but for a handful, is a chance to learn his home of the past year by sight.

He pauses often, especially by inhabited rooms; he listens to echoes and sometimes stares concerningly long at a doorframe or a wall or a bit of tapestry. Sometimes it's with a look of puzzlement; sometimes with no look at all, his mind occupied with other troubles. He's surely run into someone in all that distraction.

ii. a.

The commission to head up the Chantry Relations project had been waiting for him on his return, piled up among his other correspondence. He'd not ever seen the seal on it before but it was different from the others in the pile and so he broke it open to read, in a halting way.

It took him three re-readings to fully comprehend the letter and set it gently back down atop the pile of its fellows.

"So that's why," he remarks to the air (or anyone outside the open door). "That's why You put me there."

From the first to the very awful last of it, miracle included. He makes a small helpless noise that might be a laugh or a sob.

b. (for Cade)

Of course, he began packing immediately--what there was to pack; much of what he'd kept in the Rifts and the Veil office was proper to that project and not his at all. There are Procedures and Forms to these things, though for the life of him they're all out of order in his head right now and all that remains is he needs to occupy the space allotted him.

He did remember at least to send a message to Cade--that he was back in the Gallows, that they'd be in a new office now--though somehow it slipped his mind to mention he didn't need help urgently for the move, being quite able to find his way between rooms with laden arms now.

iii.

It isn't all for sorrow. Whatever the cost of it, he'd been given a gift he couldn't not use; and slowly, as Harvestmere wears on, he grows into the joy of seeing again.

One morning is better than the others: He rises before dawn and goes for a run about the Gallows, flat out in a way he's not been able to for years. In no fit shape for it but game to push himself, he manages a lap at that pace and a second at a slower, before settling on the stairs down to the docks to watch the light break over the windless water.

"Good morning," he greets the first person who walks near him, smile bright. "D'you know, I didn't think the sea could be that still. It never feels it, riding across."

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I don't know 'willing' comes into it, Myr thinks of saying, and squashes it; it isn't that he's not, but he's keenly aware it's something that wants explaining and it feels too much like lying to him to let it go without. Instead, he proffers the chair before the desk to Julius with a gesture before circling around to get its mate and carry it 'round. (This isn't anything professional; they don't need the desk between them.)

"Of course," he replies as he does, returning a matching smile for Julius'. "If I'd been thinking about it, I'd've known that'd bring you to my door eventually." It goes without saying he hadn't needed them anymore.

"And nor'd I heard of healing like that outside stories about Andraste's ashes--the miracles done at the touch of them." He takes his seat and sighs, scrubbing at his face with a hand. "Before word started coming out about the abbey, anyway. I didn't know whether to credit it or not when we got invited out there."

His is a heart that's always believed in miracles--but orthodoxy spoke against them as being impossible in a world without the Maker's grace and labeled any stories to the contrary the work of charlatans.

Julius' faith is a complicated thing... present, certainly, but he's a pragmatic man by nature, and he tends to think that whatever the Maker's intentions, people are generally on their own. He's tended to read accounts of sanctioned miracles allegorically, when he gives them any thought at all. Then... something like this.

He sits.

"What were the rumors, before you went? I confess, I hadn't heard much of anything about it either way."

Something like this turned everything on its ear.

"The usual sort--people would go and come away healed, though rather than the ordinary run of wasting sickness or aching bones or madness," the kind of ailments that could be feigned, had one a mind to fool the trusting, "they were saving the maimed and the dying." There's a breath of a pause before he adds, "And the blind."

Though of course, the brief note of rue in his tone implies, he hadn't gotten his hopes up on that. "Regardless of who they were, too, though the abbey'd gotten rich on noble patronage. It was--all very strange, in retrospect. How suddenly it started and how unlike what you usually hear in every other detail but there's someone out there with a miracle."

"Yes, my understanding is that it's usually a relatively slow run-up unless someone in particular starts claiming to be chosen." The wryness in his tone suggests that he's aware of the irony, given how the Inquisition started, but even so. "So I assume you all went in on your guard, then. It sounds... not unlike a trap, on paper."

He makes a noise in the back of his throat, an almost-laugh. "You're forgetting how credulous I am," he says, and it's half-a-joke and half not, because: When it comes to this, he is.

When it came to this, it was. And it had been a trap, but not one set for him, and not one anyone at the abbey (bar one) had a hand in devising. Which makes it all the worse to hear Julius say it that way--and despite the burst of self-deprecating humor, that shows in Myr's face for a moment.

Then it's gone. "But we were, largely. I confess I was hoping there was something to it if only because--they'd invited our rifters out, specifically." Which was a hopeful sign, he doesn't need to say; Chantryfolk who wanted rifters around and didn't see them as demons. (Though seeing them as objects of worship was...probably not so much better.)

"Interesting. Did any rifters go with you?" That didn't necessarily make the invitation less suspicious, in Julius' view, but on the other hand he can see the potential benefits of a sect of the Chantry being overtly pro-rifter, whatever the motivation behind their rhetoric. It was something to work with, potentially.

"Made up more'n half of those that went--the Provost among them," which said something, that it had been a trap and someone ordinarily so cautious had walked into it anyway. Myr chews at his lower lip as something niggling falls into place about the whole thing, his gaze gone briefly cloudy.

Then he shakes the cobwebs out, continues: "And they got heroes' welcomes for it, too. The best of everything those poor people had--not that the rest of us weren't greeted nearly as kindly, but they loved the rifters especially. Talked about them as blessings sent from the Maker."

Which accorded near enough with what Myr believed that he'd been halfway to petitioning to stay at the abbey before everything went to shit--but, well, let that alone. "As far as I ever learned it was all in earnest, too. Everything they did--in total earnest."

Julius resists voicing the observation that this alone made the abbey remarkable; he knows he's more of a cynic than Myr, about the Chantry and generally, but there's no call to be unkind about it.

Instead, he says, "So. The healing. I assume investigating the rumors was a major motivation behind the visit." And while the results are self-evident, he's interested in how things unfolded more specifically.

At least in this instance, Myr would agree—whether it was kind or not. Sincerity of belief wasn’t in vogue for many parts of the Chantry. Especially not when it came to the inconvenient parts of belief, like treating all men—and elves, mages, and rifters—as equals.

“The healing,” Myr echoes. “Wasn’t actually the biggest part of it, no—they’d sent this huge sum of money to support the Inquisition and it didn’t seem diplomatic not to answer a request for a simple visit after that. But given how backwater the place was you can imagine there were questions about how they’d come by all that money.”

His expression flattens; he pauses a moment to take a breath in and let it out again. “And once we got there it was obvious something was off about the place—the weather was more awful than usual, the Fade was empty and magic didn’t work quite right, and they could hardly keep a fire lit to save their lives. Needless to say, that’s what everyone began poking into rather than the healing. That could be put down to a hoax to—“

A note of bitterness has crept into his voice and he stops to swallow it back. "—I'm sorry," he begins again after a moment. "It's—it didn't end well."

To ruin the story, but explain what's necessary about why he's telling it so.

Julius reaches out, to cover Myr's hand with his if he doesn't move away. He doesn't leave his hand there long, but it's a clear gesture of comfort. (Perhaps one he wouldn't have made, before Kit's funeral but... they'd seen each other in a way then that makes this seem all right.)

"A sadly common end to Inquisition investigations, I understand. Do you want to start with the healing now, then? Or circle back to it."

The Fade was empty is worrying, but Julius isn't in any rush.

Circle etiquette--the unspoken sort, the sort you learned that kept you from attracting too much unwanted templar attention--still keeps Myr from initiating contact on his own, half the time; but it doesn't make him any less starved for it when he's in a mood like this. He doesn't move his hand away, instead offering a wordless look of gratitude by way of reply--for the touch, and for Julius' observation.

"Might be better if I start with it," he concedes, once he's sure he's control of his voice. "I've not gotten better at telling the other parts for practice.

"They'd a rift artifact that granted them miracles at the cost of their lives."

"Maker. Are we talking about... one for one? A life for each miracle?" That seemed both oddly expensive and oddly cheap, looked at from different angles. A method few people would volunteer to practice, but on the other hand, how many people he knew died for much less than a genuine miracle?

"One for--one for many, sometimes. The last Revered Mother to use the artifact--she'd healed thirty people before--before me. In a week's time. It turned her from a young woman into a crone, and she--knew. She knew she'd die for me. And she was so glad I'd come to them."

That last word ends a little choked. This time he's able to swallow it, to keep momentum: "She was the thirtieth, too. To hold it-- Twenty-nine others before her and they'd all saved at least one life. They had to--they'd wounded and dying piled to the rafters because they were everyone's last chance."

Julius looks a bit shaken, though he supposes that isn't an unreasonable reaction to the information involved. "Would it be terribly heretical to observe it sounds as likely that the artifact was cursed as it was blessed? Not to look askance at the miracle you received in particular, of course, but... that's a great deal of pressure to place on a particular order."

Many people would die, cheerfully, doing what they saw as the Maker's will. But not an infinite amount of people, and almost certainly not fast enough for everyone who would come to them, hoping.

"No." Myr draws in a breath, holds it, lets it go; a calming exercise that hasn't worked so well for any of this before and doesn't really now, but he has to try. He always has.

When he picks up the story again it's with a semblance of that clinical detachment he can manage now and again, shoving away what he feels too keenly to think about rationally otherwise. "I think cursed is the fairest way to describe it, and that it killed its users wasn't even the least of it. They lingered after their deaths, trapped on this side of the Fade and implacably hostile. The more of them there were, the worse conditions got--the weather, the cold, the lack of fire. Drove off any spirits or demons inclined to linger around the place--and Maker, Julius, they'd an active rift at the abbey's heart. And those--things, those wraiths, the wreckage of their Revered Mothers kept them all safe."

Fucked up did not begin to describe the situation.

Edited 2019-03-04 06:31 (UTC)

"I've never heard of anything like," he says, quietly frank. It's strangely... balanced. True miracles and true horror.

(It strikes him, not for the first time, that he was possibly too pragmatic to be a good mage; that the wonder of what they did, the forces they were connected to, might be wasted on him sometimes. It's neither good nor bad, exactly, just true.)

After a moment, he says, "It ended badly, you said." A gentle prompt, but a question all the same.

He's--grateful. That's the feeling, grateful, to be nudged along by the question. Move lightly over the subject, relate it all as quickly as you can, don't get bogged down in details and--he might make it through the important parts of this without losing hold of the storyline or his own emotions.

"It did." Bleakly, now. "It couldn't have gone on forever even if we hadn't come, but we catalyzed the whole thing's collapse.

"They--had this ritual they'd come up with, whenever a Revered Mother performed her last healing. Brought the whole abbey in under the rift that'd spawned on top of them months before. Watched her do it--and die--and then the rift'd destabilize and demons would come out and the wraiths of the previous Mothers would kill them until the new Mother got her footing with the artifact and settled it all back down. They made a kind of--it was a kind of show to them, and they trusted they'd be safe.

"And we came along--and we didn't know any of this, not about the wraiths or the rift or the demons--" Again he cuts himself off, realizing his own agitation before it gets out of control. Breathes a moment.

"I didn't ask," he says at last, pained. "I asked about everything else under the sun but I didn't ask about the rift nor what happened when one Revered Mother passed her mantle to the next. They would've told me--they told us anything we wanted to know, they didn't hide a bit of it, but I didn't ask them and some of those poor people died because of it. Because no one knew what to expect--and they panicked--and they didn't fucking listen to anything said to them--"

Julius' first instinct, usually, is to smooth things over, but something makes him hesitate here. The gravity, perhaps, or just how much is outside his own experience. Instead of immediately reassuring Myr that it couldn't have been his fault, that he couldn't have known...

...instead, he says, "They asked you to come. Not you, necessarily, but they were introducing a necessarily volatile element into the ritual with rifters and people who are regularly closing rifts throughout Thedas. I have no idea whether they knew the implications of that or not, but I do know that panic is an ugly thing, and it isn't always possible for someone to stem the tide of it."

It's less comforting, perhaps, but it's honest. Julius suspects that's possibly more valuable, at present.

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open | then in the pounding of my heart

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/triumphant return from hiatus (like a week late, w/e)

this is snailtown, every tag is appreciated no matter the age

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