![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
I. CLOSED.
WHO: Sabine and Martel
WHAT: We were promised rescuing lost animals.
WHEN: Haring 16
WHERE: Skyhold and beyond.
WHAT: We were promised rescuing lost animals.
WHEN: Haring 16
WHERE: Skyhold and beyond.
Sabine had spent just enough time in Skyhold to get the chill off her bones and eat something warm before braving the colder, steeper climbs of the Frostbacks once more. She leads the way, gamely clambouring over grey rocks, gloved hands over feet strapped into sturdy, light-weight boots, and a woollen cape that billows out like a sail at each gust of wind. Her nose has been pink since introduction, staying pink once they'd left the queerly warm heights of the Skyhold fortress. Her hair has been tamed, barely, into a thick braid, curls slipping free, and long, slender ears nipped by frigid air.
"But you're not a demon," she is saying. They're on the topic of how the big burly human got shat out of a fade rift, which normally is demons. Her Orlesian accent curls musical in her otherwise husky voice. "And you're not from the Fade."
Bear with her, here.
She temporarily disappears over a ledge of rock and snow, the sound of leather skidding along ice audible, followed by the sound of a landing that doesn't imply she broke anything. But she expects an answer all the same -- there are only five reasons she would be taking this journey with a human man. One is that he's a fabled rifter. The other four are the knives she has hidden on her person.
no subject
Fool of him to solve such a problem by trapping himself in her company. He does not entertain pushing her into a snowdrift (or a canyon) for a variety of reasons including his peculiar fondness for elves as he has discovered them in Thedas and the fact that allegations of demonhood and misbehaviour will not go away if he leaves the hold with company and returns without. Possibly, in this precise moment, mostly the latter.
"I am not a demon," he agrees, not flat - matter of fact, as if he could repeat this endlessly boring piece of information a thousand times and never bother to inflect it. "Nor am I from the fade. Nor am I the walking dead, though I confess that one took me rather by surprise. I rather thought this hell, when I came to."
There are jokes to be made about the company, but they're too flattering.
no subject
She says that like she's chosen to believe him, pausing to look back to see how he's fairing. Sabine's exposure to the great outdoors is somewhat limited, and cold like this is certainly a novelty, teeth set to chatter intermittently, but there is something a little joyous in her heavy footfalls sinking into the snow and skidding down rock face and hearty gusts of steam in the air. She's navigated enough rooftops to spring light and quick around angles.
And she has gone unencumbered with her bow and quiver, having seen little in the way of threatening predators save for the potential for hypothermia. "So what's it called, where you're from?"
no subject
Most nights, too.
"I was born in Elenia," he says, after a moment's pause during which he is considering whether to encourage this by humoring her or encourage her to give him a headache by resisting. He had been content enough with the marked lack of interest in his background to date - it hasn't obliged him to decide what he will and will not say. Out in the snow looking for a bedamned horse is not the way he might've chosen to begin making those decisions. "Nearby to a port city - Vardenais."
no subject
"I was born in Halamshiral," she offers, even if he didn't ask, and doesn't seem altogether very interested. Still, she would like him to know. It's only polite. And it wouldn't do for him to shrug at someone should they ask who she is and where she came from. "Of the Dales, in Orlais. That way," she adds, flinging out a hand and pointing in a north-eastern direction, a smile crooked on her mouth.
Her arms tuck back in to fold around her.
no subject
"Orlais, yes. I've heard of it."
Here, he does not feel the need to clarify. She can draw her own conclusions from his having been shat out of a rift.
no subject
She doesn't exactly sound chirpy. Animated, yes, but her questions and her comments both are like jabs, pointed and curious. When they'd first talked, none of what she said felt out of character to what she says now -- but longer silences in between, a certain amount of distance kept between them appropriate to two strangers, but that which somehow felt more specific within the confines of Skyhold.
They don't make much in the way of eye contact now, as she hunts the landscape for wandering old geldings, but when they had prior, it had been, also, deliberate in feeling.
"Or more things?"
no subject
As the Inquisition is primarily not Orlesian and not everyone feels the need to do nearly as much research on simple things like 'what on earth is an Orlesian when it's at home'. Besides something that still doesn't entirely sound real to him, when he says it - but time will wear away the strangeness of this novel place. He has no desire to resist the slow acceptance of his life as he now knows it -
There is no returning. Even were there...
There's nothing to return to.
He is a member of the Inquisition, now, and he will be best served making himself into whatever that needs to mean.
no subject
A silence falls, about as gentle as the drifting shake of icy flakes from the sky. Sabine has no idea how to call a horse. She knows cats better, and making kissy sounds and high pitched sweet nothings hadn't moved her scruffy steed much when she was astride it, so. Rather than try, she lends voice to her curiousity--
"What about the elves in your land?"
It's hard to tell, if he is impassive to her race, or sympathetic beneath aloof affect, but maybe things are different, elsewhere. As different as they already seem in Skyhold.
no subject
His tone is a bit more frank as he observes, "We've an interesting enough world without inventing more things to live in it. I was never quite the intended audience. Still, I'll take you over a troll and be glad of it."
Even you. Specifically you, Sabine, are even preferable to trolls.
no subject
But no, all the words fall into place, and can't mean much else.
"No elves?" she asks, open disbelief flashing across her face. "No dwarves? Just--" And she honestly cannot keep the dismay and slight disgust at the very idea from her voice as she says this last word. "--humans?"
A world run purely by humans. Gross.
no subject
He's heard of Genidians studying trolls - learning their language, if you can call it a language - but for all that Martel appreciates knowledge for its own sake, he's not sure he'd call it a worthwhile endeavour. Even so, he keeps to himself that its like as not they'll die out in a few more generations; become myth, as they almost are now. The idea of a species ground out to dust by their own inability to become anything more than what they are is not a pleasant one to contemplate.
"Though," glancing in the direction to which Skyhold lies, "neither are many humans."
no subject
She watches her feet sink into snow as they walk.
"I don't talk to many shems," she finally offers. Not timidly, or sadly, but a factual statement as she tips her attention back up, gloved hands raising to push loose hair out of her face, back behind her ears. "Of course I'll find one that doesn't know nothing about Elvhen."
no subject
"If I were to give you an equivalent," he says, instead, "I might say you remind me of a Styric. My little mother," an endearment, and if it were to be taken to mean she was his mother, who is he to object? In the end, she was, "was a daughter of Styricum. A difficult thing to be, in the heart of the most Elene of Elene nations."
Remembering her softens some of the harshness about him in a way he is undoubtedly not conscious of; he doesn't seem like the sort who might try to endear himself that way.
(He is. But not this instant.)
no subject
But maybe a little mischievous, all the same.
But she doesn't get a reaction, because he is ignorant or smarter than that. Can't win 'em all. When he talks of equivalence, she looks over and up at him, curious. The corner of her mouth twinges up. "And is difficulty being in a place the thing that reminds you?"
no subject
He is very carefully not smiling, when he says that, but for a man to swagger through the snow is no mean feat.
no subject
"There's a law in Halamshiral. We elves aren't to carry knives any longer than our palms. But there's a saying about what happens when your kind push us around enough to push back -- mien'harel." Another break in the terrain, a steeper drop of ice and rock. Sabine steps past Martel, feeling the stones beneath her boots. "Even short blades need to be respected."
Rather than continue on, she peers off towards where a tree line is developing, recalling the landscape to herself.
no subject
He doesn't recount this story because he thinks it flatters him, sets him up as some sort of hero to the undertrodden - he is not, and even then, he was not, however warmly self-righteous he felt after doing it - but rather because it doesn't, particularly. He meant well, but he was a boy with a boy's simple idea of the world and it hadn't really helped, or even always been particularly about the deed.
It is always so tempting to simplify these things down to those moments - it is tempting to simplify them here. Occasionally, he misses the days when he solved most of his problems by hitting them until he felt they were sufficiently solved.
"Is it familiar?"
--the landscape, not his violent youth. The snow makes looking for tracks, per se, a bit pointless - but any sign of passage is worth a glance, so he takes it. He's found harder game than one lost horse.
no subject
"Oui," she says, of the landscape. "I saw the road ahead, wasn't sure if he'd make it, and set him free here. Maybe he'll be looking for food."
There is a note of guilt in her voice. She didn't exactly want to leave the old horse to his fate, nor did she want to tie him someplace only to starve to death. She starts her way down, loose pebbles and ice sliding under her feet, keeping her balance in a vaguely helterskelter fashion. "He won't have got too far. He was a slow fucker."
no subject
But he would have been replaced, and with someone they knew less well to predict, and so it is a self-pityingly pointless fantasy in which Martel vastly overestimates his own essential purpose in the world. So perhaps it's just as well she's not quick to reward his modicum of self-awareness.
"How long has he had?" he asks, letting the rest go - not quite following her but fanning out a little, keeping her in easy reach on the offchance she loses her footing. He'd rather not have to dive for her, for pity's sake.
no subject
And the rest is history. Maybe she doesn't operate in things like hours and minutes, but events, strung together like beads on a string. Or she doesn't want to admit how long it's been in actual quantifiable words. Who knows, it's an elven mystery.
As it happens, Sabine is as light on her feet as any stereotype about elves might inform. Her clothing isn't particularly on par with even the freelance rogues, her boots worn and her trousers made of wool and canvas, and the only armor she wears is the leather on her feet, the lambskin fitting her hands. More like a servant used to rough work than an adventurer, but maybe she makes up for it with enthusiasm. The last few feet of descent are done in wild lopes, landing firm on steadier ground.
She seems to choose a direction, headed to a specific tree that stands out from the rest. "He'd been nibbling on the moss, last I saw him," she says, gloved fingertips touching where soft horsey muzzle had worked it over with scarier teeth.
no subject
He is not quite such a pedant as to announce it presently, mind you, when there are slightly more important things to attend to.
"He'll take the easiest route," he predicts, casting his eye from a vantage point nearby her chosen tree. "Damnably skittish creatures."
Even war horses are temperamental that way. Get the damned thing to do anything that isn't scamper towards some bloody apples -
"This way."