faderift | openish ☓ i see god in birds and satan in long words

Ilias had considered wearing something subtler, truly. He owns at least one shirt. But those are clothes for when he needs to be someone else; here, he is still a Speaker paying his respects to the dead, even if these dead are not his to care for. Even if the living may not see past the strangeness of his robes.

"Touch me with fire that I might be cleansed," is recited, quiet, as his gaze travels up the statue. One possible explanation.

Devotion, it seems, is only a question for one of them. But the look he gives Isaac in return is warm in the eyes, unoffended.

"You are not one for miracles?"

"The intercession of the Maker?" Or Andraste, or the Herald, or any other benign lingering legend — "In the sense of earthly kindness, I suppose."

He isn't a particular believer in that, either. If inherent goodness could be relied upon, there'd have been no reason for a god to ever turn away; for Ages spent trying to shout him back. (There'd be no reason for other, pettier ills.)

But if the Chant echoes in silence, that's more comfortable than the alternative. The fashionable atheism of certain Circle sects has never sat entirely well upon his shoulders. Wears less easily than cosmic inattention, the knowledge that some things may pass unseen.

"It's that which built all this." Tore it down in the first place, but. "Kirkwall's been a dozen things. A slave port, a battlefield."

He stoops to smear wax from the plinth.

"Is a miracle proof we can do better?"

Edited 2018-11-04 05:03 (UTC)

"I do not know about proof."

The problem with believing in an absent god, for Ilias, has never been believing in the existence or absence; it's believing he'll ever return. That there is a point to getting up in the morning if he doesn't. Proof seems too certain a thing, in a world like that. Maybe they can't do better. Maybe they never will.

"Hope, though. Inspiration. An excuse to try. I think a miracle can be that." A fire and a statue, no matter where they come from, still bring a community together. "I am not certain it needs to be more."

It's not an argument —

"Facts do weigh it down." — If it's not the most positive spin, either. The demon's in the details. Earthly kindnesses breed earthly enemies: A pair of hands carved this, cut the wood, perhaps even saw it saved from flame. But people have hands; people have faces and words that seldom agree. "Still."

He rises again, fingers extended and fresh with wax.

"Someone made this. Another bought it, brought it here. Lit the wick," Small things, little sacrifices. Another choice that might go unwitnessed, save that here they are, witnesses. "There's inspiration, and there's action."

"And you," Because it is Isaac he's watching now, not Andraste, soft shoes skimming the dirt in idle semi-circle behind him, "You would not overlook the latter for sake of the former."

An absent god, but not absent people. Decisions. Complexity. Not just result.

"That is a more complicated sort of hope. Most people prefer their faith to be simpler -- here, I imagine, as much as in Nevarra. Easier not to be reminded it requires anyone to act."

“Easier, maybe, to know what to do.”

But that’s speaking, and not listening: The tedious guilt that forty years has more or less faded to drone, crawling its way out of his mouth again, uninvited. A sacrifice can be made in any direction. A choice can. A glance up, the brush of fingers clean; he watches back.

Ilias circles like — well, Isaac’s never seen a shark outside the market, but he knows the picture. Discards it, too sinister by half. It’s difficult to accord the Mortalitasi any particular dramatic weight when you’ve stuck out a decade among certain of their cast-offs.

Perhaps a sparrow would be the better choice, or some other restless metaphor. What are you looking at?

The wrong question. Revised, What are you looking for?

“And your miracles?”

How does he take them (save that he seems to —)? Medium rare, sunny side up?

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"Mine?" Steps pause. He doesn't look away from Isaac, but there's something studying in it now. Considering how honest to be. Wondering what happens if he is.

"I should tell you I believe the simple answer. The will of the Maker in all things." It's what he would tell his fellows. Most of their patrons, too. A lie for those who needed it, himself included from time to time. "I can't say the idea does not appeal, but—" a hook-mouthed exhale, "Nothing true is ever simple, is it?"

Sometimes truth is a knife in the gut, and he would have that too.

But maybe that's a bit much for so early in the evening. Instead, he turns to sweep a palm toward the rest of the garden. "Even this. It is not only the site of a miracle."

There must have been ashes aplenty, before there was a forest to burn.

Should? There's a curious admission — if it's an admission at all. It takes a good liar, to seem like a bad one. I should tell you,

And there's that breath.

"Can't call it miraculous, if something hasn't gone terribly wrong." Isaac steps past, glances to see he's been followed. Out, past the little copse of trees and toward a wide white wall, etched with names. No, not only the site of a miracle. But no miracles without it. "Seven years, now."

Or is it eight? Finds himself counting back on Gareth's fingers, numbering these strangers that he ought to feel something greater for; can't. A tragedy written in abstraction, in the coolness of stone. Suppose that's what they all are, eventually. A name in a record, and the great lingering question of who exactly would name their daughter Crystal Raven.

The moment stretches before he decides to ask:

"Why should you lie about it?"

"I don't like to worry people."

--Is certainly not a worrying answer. He grimaces a touch, chagrined, as he steps into place alongside Isaac. "What I mean is that, there is a certain image that is kinder to uphold, in my line of work."

But this isn't work. The grieving rarely need his doubts, his colleagues and family certainly don't, but-- now, apparently, Isaac is something else. And Ilias is doing that thing again, where his eyes keep drifting to catch the contours of a face instead of the lines of carved marble that ought to have his full attention.

And it does, in a sense. This isn't a place or an event he expects to understand in an afternoon stroll; it's something to let sink in, to filter through the lens of other people. (Other people, and not him.)

"What happened here--" A tragedy. A tipping point. An end. A beginning. "May I ask what it meant for you?"

He keeps from quite lifting a skeptical brow to worry,

"It was a time before I had the news." Trading favours had gotten abruptly more difficult. "Which I suppose was its own signal. I just imagined it was personal."

"We talked louder, or we stopped altogether. But when we spoke?" Something less kind than nostalgia slips his teeth; a brief flash of missing molar. "This wall seemed very far away.”

Stone will do that. What does it mean? Sympathy that refuses to unwind itself about those responsible, that won't settle any more readily upon the shoulders of the dead.

"I wish I could say that it was something more than an object lesson. What do I know of them, of what their lives meant? Save the danger," A gesture that might include himself, might only implicate the garden. "In choosing not to know."

They don't think we're people has always been a common refrain, and it’s true enough. But how many of the dead were people to us?

He doesn’t like to think of it: The letter to a friend, the pocket worry stone. The greater good is a pretty line. So he doesn't think of it. Instead,

"You don’t want," He observes. Has observed, too, the manner in which glances linger. "Simple comforts."

The way Isaac tells it, in volumes and distances, blurs as many details as it invokes, unbidden, into their place. Ilias's own raised voices echo against sandstone walls, in closed chambers, where They don't think we're people had been met with a stretch of silence for the unasked question, What if we aren't? The scratch of a quill returned to paper. The whip of air from slamming door.

There is danger for all of them, in choosing not to know. (Does he belong here beside another mage now, or on this wall, with the rest of the blind?) His throat feels wet with it, grief threatening to seep through seams he doesn't want breached.

Grateful, then, to focus instead on the weight of a pause. To consider the shape of it on his tongue, the potential in it, compared cautiously to an array of others as if the absence of language was a language of its own, before he speaks. No, not simple comforts, but--

"Honest ones." A breathed smile, "If I haven't drawn enough of that from you for one afternoon."

"Not so short a supply."

It is. Don't worry about it. The brush of shoulder to shoulder might be accidental if it weren't so obviously intended, the slight crunch of winter grass beneath heel accompanying an exit toward the gate.

Here, the solemnity of the garden breaks open onto life: The guards again — still there, still bored — the bustle of Hightown in the hours before dusk. Well-kept streets, high windows on the houses, and,

The steps down, because Isaac can't afford all that.

"Did you ever manage the tools you needed?"

It has been a little while since he's done this. Walking. Smiling at the conspicuous brush of a shoulder. Enjoying a moment with another living person that isn't measured in the number of steps it takes to cross a tavern. Three years? Longer? It feels a little like cracking the rust off his bones to fall into step with Isaac, but he does.

Below, Kirkwall's less well-kept streets make for an odd fit. Ilias is all clean lines, tidy angles cast against mismatched cobblestones and stray cats. But there are fewer eyes on a set of foreign robes down here, and that seems to suit him fine.

"Not all of them. Why, are we shopping?"

How charmingly normal.

Cheerfully:

"I’ve heard a great deal about that —"

As though he hasn’t been out of the Circle four years. As though there weren’t outings to the market, with Montsimmard less tense (as though he’d any money then either).

"— We might consider it a hunt. See where the trail leads us."

Past this guy here, hawking figurines of the Champion; another, taking the dictation of letters. Smoke and fish, a stray chicken,

And two rushing children, small and caked to the knees in dirt, one shoving in front of the other with hands extended up, a length of brightly-coloured wrapping cord within.

"Messere," To Ilias, already reaching for his wrist. "Help me show something to my brother."

Isaac looks about to open his mouth; stops.

openish ☓ i see god in birds and satan in long words

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