open | neither snow nor rain

[nadasharillen]

WHO: Nari, Lexie, you~
WHAT: Guardian catch-all for some ladies. (Well, one Lady and one elf.)
WHEN: The Present!
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: prompts I have promised people will be appearing below as I get to them!

Nari

I.

With the sleet keeping everything near-constantly coated with ice, Guardian is hardly the right month to be jaunting about between the Gallows towers and the towers that hold the massive machinery designed to raise and lower Kirkwall's immense chain net. The massive machinery that hasn't been used in two decades, ever since Viscount Threnhold had used it to strangle Orlesian trade and the Divine had ordered the city's Templars to 'convince' him to lower it. Threnhold's successors had been loathe to use it with such a tangle in the recent past, and so its mechanism is full of two decades of largely untended metal shifting, weathering, rusting in places.

The winter seas are rough enough that an assault by sea isn't likely, but the thin dark Dalish woman had shrugged and said that the Archon's Palace raising into the sky above Minrathous hadn't been all that likely either, and so here she is, on her way to the Chain tower, a pack of tools slung over her back. A pack that has been repaired several times, and by the look of it is about to need one more: something heavy looking is inching its way out of the back of it with every step she takes. Won't be long before that's lost. Hope it's not important.


II.

What Guardian is the right month for is being here near the hearth in the Hanged Man's taproom with a hot mug of mulled wine and a mallet, tapping chairs back together and listening with quiet amusement to a harper on one side and two tipsy men one-upping each other outrageously in order to try to take the same woman home on the other.

The important thing, really, is that the weather is outside, but the entertainment isn't unwelcome.

“Are you listening to this?” she asks, looking up briefly with a crooked grin spreading across her face, “The taller one has gone from fisherman to ship's captain in the space of five minutes.”


[ or something else! ]


Alexandrie

Winter here has not brought the lovely romantic fluffy pristine snow she'd dreamed of. It's desperately horrible in Kirkwall, and what work she can do from home she does from home with great relief. Unfortunately there are still meetings to be had, new correspondence to discuss, and every so often new books, scraps, and sheafs of paper arrive for the Inquisition that are in need of translation. All these things are in the Gallows, and so, begrudgingly, is Alexandrie.

She can be found now, looking far less disgruntled than she actually is, sitting at a table in the library with a letter in one hand—at which she is frowning with extreme delicacy—and a painted porcelain cup of tea in the other, her maid doing a spot of embroidery close enough at hand to refresh it when that becomes necessary.

“Ah!” she exclaims quietly, her glance warm and pleased over her painstakingly painted smile, “C'est parfait. Have you a moment to spare?”


[ ...or something else! ]

Comments

[faithlikeaseed]

He is nothing--now--if not a good student, even if he took longer than some of the Circle-trained to learn the knack. Even if it's something he does not want to hear because of how it echoes what he does not wish to acknowledge, though that makes taking it in all the harder. His smile fades, expression grown shuttered as he balances between arguing with what she says (testing example and counterexample against it) and understanding it.

It at least has the heft of truth to it, that same kind of weight he'll accord to Gwenaëlle's cutting remarks, because he knows the world flawed and distorted from the Maker's ideal. But does that mean we've got to act like it, too? he wants to ask; discards it, because this isn't ethics or theology they're here for. As well to ask if a wyvern's having venom meant the Maker'd given men leave to poison each other with it.

That she sees as much in him and answers it without his having said so is a little eerie--but also a confirmation of his choice in teachers. Well, then. Can she pluck an actual secret out of his head as easily?

(Something he really hadn't told anyone, not even the man it concerned; a conviction that didn't accord at all with his own high-minded ideals but one.)

"So," he ventures at length--the word drawn out a little for he's still putting the ones to come after in their proper order, "as with anything we can't perceive direct with our senses, we need indirect evidences of what's there. The way a body blocks the sun or echoes dash against a wall.

"Or," a twitch of a smile, "we infer the Maker from His handiwork."

[coquettish_trees]

"Quite so. Silence speaks as well as word, and carries as much meaning." Alexandrie nods, and then smiles slightly, "I think I shall not have to teach you of the different sounds that silence makes, as I imagine you are accustomed to hearing the subtlety of such things. What I shall do," she pauses to retrieve another of the small pastries and set it on the saucer beside her cup, "is instruct you in identifying the full wealth of information available in them, as well as to interpret the minute changes in face and glance and stance that accompany both those larger things and the smaller feelings beneath them. Our bodies are quicker than we are, and we often show our thoughts before we have a chance to represent them ourselves.

"I think, perhaps, I need not teach you to perform them." Her eyes sparkle with some private mirth. "Honesty and earnestness make for a truly unsettling opponent. But I shall render you able to recognize well what you gain for having such a way about you, and render you well able to recognize who sees you as that opponent, what they think to win from you, and how they intend to win it. It is your choice how to wield the knowledge, but in your position you must have it."

[faithlikeaseed]

It's a relief, when he'd been nerving himself up to the idea that perhaps all the Maker asks of him would require--well, certainly not lying about everything he was about, but distortions of the truth much greater than he was used to making. When even not answering every idiot question he'd walked himself into still felt like a trial, developing a layer of subtlety appropriate to the Game on top of it tied his guts in knots. (He could do it if he had to. That much of the madcap confidence he came to the Inquisition with has not left him. But Maker, the cost, and whether it was worth paying--)

But it is a relief to hear her say that, and another sort of relief to hear that there's something native to him that gives him an edge in all of this. Myr lifts his chin at that--he hadn't been slumping or curling in on himself, not really, but perhaps a little dug-in in his own worries--and selects another little pastry of his own. "And I'll truly be indebted to you at the end of this, for that; as beyond my native gregariousness I admit I am," credulous, naive, callow, inexperienced, "not much practiced in gleaning such knowledge."

Though he's game to start, from the way he's looking at her; untrained, but already primed to search out the little signs she's mentioned. Face and glance and stance-- "Is that why the masks?" Abruptly, as it occurs to him. "And the--costuming," put delicately, as ever.

[coquettish_trees]

"Indeed! Such things contain a wealth of information. Dress may tell you the state of the fortunes of the wearer, the speed at which they receive information, how well they read the ebbs and flows of the court and whether or not they have the resources to quickly compensate. The extent of ones masking reveals both what one believes of ones own skills, and what one believes of the skills of those around them. Or, in both cases, what one wishes others to believe." She spreads her hands and then folds them again with a wry half smile.

"If it sounds as if it is a frightfully complex knotted web that folds back again on itself," not unlike one of those horrors they'd witnessed during the haunting, "then I have described it aptly."

[faithlikeaseed]

He's careful to finish his bite of pastry before snorting at that. (To do otherwise would result in powdered sugar everywhere. Or at least up one's nose, which would be embarrassing.) "Yes, that's about the impression I get--and here I am about to wade in and try unknotting it, without recourse to a sword. But, all right, to recollect--everything about anyone I encounter in an Orlesian court," and maybe outside it, or definitely outside it; consider how much might be woven into the enforced livery of Circle robes, "can tell me something about her and how she thinks. To be put together with whatever I can read of her face below the mask and how she holds herself and moves--"

Ah, wait. This is starting to sound familiar, from a slant angle. "--so rather like reading an opponent in the field, except at least she's not trying to kill me in that moment. This may not be as bad as I thought."

It's definitely going to be worse. He doesn't say that but it gets into his smile and turns it rueful all the same.

[coquettish_trees]

"Ah, but she is trying, save that it is not your bodily death she seeks. It is somewhat that is perhaps, in the greater sense, more serious." Alexandrie's smile is self-effacing for a moment, an acknowledgement of the seeming strangeness of her words, although she thinks a man of faith will understand better than any other she might teach.

"It is the death of your power, and through it, the power of your ideas. Your positions. Your values. To block you from expressing them, or to make of them a laughingstock, or render them simply unworthy of note." She lowers her gaze very slightly and stirs her chocolate with the small silver spoon laid beside it on the saucer. There's no tangible reason for the gesture--she's added nothing--but she does it in any case for an example. The movement holds the eye, holds attention, holds space, makes her silence a pause for effect instead of simply an absence of speech, and the previous lower of her eyes to attend to it means that she can raise them now to look at him again to emphasize what follows.

"It is seen, largely, as a great construction of innumerable falsehoods... but at its heart, the Game is about vying for the power to determine what is true."

[faithlikeaseed]

There it is: The worse.

He's put immediately in mind of demons as Alexandrie explains, who could kill all that mattered about a mage while leaving his body quite alive to be puppeted in the physical realm. Who fought with each other in the Fade over what a dreamer might see and believe there. Who, in the only sense that mattered in that shifting realm, determined what was true--or at least, what had the appearance of truth for those who didn't know any better.

(He is not fully cognizant of the effect she's working here, not the point he could appreciate it as the piece of artistry it is. But that is perhaps also a measure of the skill of the artist that it does not look so affected, and he knows dimly he's been drawn in.)

So, and so: He'd have thought an Orlesian court filled with demons in only a metaphorical sense, but here's someone who's lived through it saying otherwise. They weren't abominations but some of them surely matched the Maker's sinful first children in casual malevolence and grasping for what wasn't theirs by right. And he's supposed to walk into that--

Well. Who better than a Harrowed mage? (Especially when they wouldn't have certain knowledge of his thoughts, his heart; and that was an advantage in facing mortals over the thing with wings and eyes that still haunted his sleep.) "Then not an opponent in the field but an opponent in the Fade--itself a construction of innumerable falsehoods--except a player of the Game has to work with much subtler lines of force.

"Which, I should think--work all the better when she simply has to point out the shape of my ears to make a sport of me in many circles. A talking rabbit," how lightly he says that, "come to do a human's job." The words could be despairing, a complaint of an additional obstacle in his way on top of everything else heaped up before him; but now that he's begun to get the gist of the lesson they're anything but. There's an opportunity lurking in there somewhere, surely...

And he isn't completely unschooled in the kind of effects he achieves by acting less canny than he is.

[coquettish_trees]

"For all I cannot verify it myself, I think it an apt analogy, and a way in which you are prepared that your opponents shall not be expecting. Perhaps Madame de Fer herself has been so successful at court at least in part for such a reason."

Along with, of course, her absolutely striking beauty, her eye for fashion so sharp it had earned her her second epithet of the jewel of the high court of Orlais, and her penchant for readily freezing both the few Bards she couldn't turn to her employ and minor nobility not worth the application of her formidable mind to give them plenty of time to reconsider their future plans as they thawed.

(Does Alexandrie have a little crush? She does indeed.)

"To the other weapons in your arsenal, I see you have the ends of another already. Being so underestimated is often desirable. After all, even canny farmers oft find their gardens nibbled away by rabbits beneath their very noses, and if you have no qualms pretending at service there are many little burrows you may hop along through which other players may not follow."

She sips delicately at her chocolate, apparently entirely unbothered by her own use of the derogatory language.

"Granted, they shall have their eyes and ears within, but none shall enjoy the direct access you might, nor the ability to influence what those very eyes and ears see, hear, or return to those who have employed them, and as a ranking member of the Inquisition, you may attend court as well. Can you bear one edge of the sword, I think you shall find the other to be quite sharp indeed."

[faithlikeaseed]

He had picked up his cup as Alexandrie took up the lesson again, a smile creeping on to his face at the fond mention of Vivienne's court career. (If only all mages had the opportunity to be so successful--though surely not every one of them had the singular ambition to accomplish what she had.)

He sets his drink back down untasted at there are many little burrows you may hop along.

Of course, he'd introduced the analogy and it shouldn't have been a surprise, really, that she would embroider it. But it is a disappointment, nevertheless; one he cannot keep out of his face even though he listens to the rest of her words intently. No question that she understands the court and its undercurrents and vulnerabilities very well, and that is due ample respect. Just--

Just the framing of it all, as if he really were a curiosity to be marveled at--or go unnoticed, depending what he wore and how much he talked. "Truly, and were it merely my enemies who spoke that way of me, I shouldn't think their derision so terrible to bear given how it blinds them. But I confess it's a much harder cut to take from a friend."

[coquettish_trees]

The trouble is, of course, that Myr is a curiosity to be marveled at. An elf with power. An elven mage with power, and outside what was allotted to those of his rank within the bounds of the Circle. And no outsider, he. No unknown curiosity from outside the rules of their society like the Dalish Scoutmaster, like the Lord Provost who had issued from the rifts. And he wields this power in full view: the closest approximation to it might be the Empress's lover, but even Briala knotted and pulled her strings from Celene's shadow. No. In society, aided by the Inquisition's chaotic warp, Knight-Enchanter Myrobalan Shivana stood alone.

"You cannot mean the underestimation, surely," Alexandrie replies, her eyebrows lifting. She had, she'd thought, provided quite a thorough account of the ways in which he was far more qualified than he might have thought to enter the shadowed waters of the Game.

[faithlikeaseed]

It's not something he wants--it's not something he's ever wanted, even as he's begun to accept the inevitability of it. He shouldn't be marked out this way because no one, elf or human, mage or not, common or noble, should be. If he's remarkable it should be for the job he commits himself to do and not accidents of birth, because all men were of equal value in the Maker's sight.

Yet that isn't the shape of the world the Maker's second children had carved out for themselves, chasing after their own lusts and ambition instead of virtue. Their co-creation reflected that and much as he longs for things to be otherwise, tells himself it's his duty to the Maker to embody that virtue and expect it to shield him... It can't. It doesn't.

And Knight-Enchanter Myrobalan Shivana needs to adapt to that, as he has so much else. Pray his remaining resistance, now and again, doesn't end up breaking him.

"Referring to me as a garden pest." His voice is mild, gentle. "Furtive and burrowing. I know--it's a comparison I invited and all much of the world will see of me. My pride can bear that. Is that truly, though, how you think of me?"

His pride could bear that too, for the sake of what he needs to learn. And, he thinks, he may never be so skilled as to know if she lies to him in payment for so direct a question. But she had placed his earnestness back in his own hands as a weapon, and so--

[coquettish_trees]

"I?" It seems to have genuinely shocked her, lesson in pretense forgotten for the moment. "Non, desolée, it was meant as another in my enumeration of what you have at your disposal in this endeavor. There are many at court who believed me an empty-headed thing concerned with nothing but the pursuit of light amusement and sweeping romance, and it suited me well. And them, eventually, less so."

Even said... well. Some of them she does think so. Not in a disparaging way, simply that in this world, the city elves have indeed become prey animals. They will fight, when cornered, yes, but largely they are indeed furtive and burrowing things, and she thinks it no poor response to the lives they lead. So they survive, and survival is what matters. The elf across the table from her, however, has been given a choice by fate and circumstance to do more than simply survive, and those should ever and always be grasped.

"If I truly thought that to be what you were, do you think I should have expressed such interest in instructing you?"

[faithlikeaseed]

Just so. One corner of Myr's mouth twitches upward in a rueful smile to have the question batted back to him.

"Truly, lady--no, I don't. I think you'd wear your disdain obviously and I'd not have asked." Though it does not escape him that they are sitting here discussing exactly how someone might hide the real thoughts of her heart, drawing a veil over contempt, disgust, or anger in order to mislead her opponents. (It does not escape him that men might train lesser beasts to mimic them sheerly for the amusement of it, and it sickens him to even have the thought in this context, knowing it thoroughly untrue. She would not.)

That they've stepped outside of the lesson now gives him freedom to drop pretense and lay aside the indirection a moment, to reach up and run his fingers through his hair in a gesture purely troubled. As if by doing so he could as easily card his thoughts back into order. "Having said, it's simply not something I'm accustomed to hearing. Even now--I know how paltry the limits of my own experience are," else why ask for these lessons, "and that the Circle was unique in putting us all on the same footing, so none of us had any reason to think I couldn't aspire to what my human friends did. I know the world isn't that way, that I ought to expect contempt and little more from so much of it. But--"

He rolls his shoulders in a shrug, breathes out. "A part of me yet wants to rip that prejudice all up from the roots wherever I find it, and damn the cost. My own valor against me."

[coquettish_trees]

"And if the cost of one such brilliant uprooting were your opportunity to perhaps slowly poison the roots of it all?" Alexandrie tilts her head. It's not necessarily true; not necessarily a choice between one or the other, but despite the new-born volatility of her nature she still prefers the slow blade.

"Granted, martyrs are always en vogue. It is simply never the approach I have taken, though I am sure we could concoct something unforgettable. Although the Chantry may decide to 'gently' place it alongside Shartan rather than Andraste." Despite the contents it's said with careful respect, as is what follows. "I find your faith and loyalty to an institution that has treated your people so to be both admirable, in that it must come from a place of abiding truth and earnesty in you, and curious, given your reaction to the diminishment of the elves."

[faithlikeaseed]

Not unexpectedly, Alexandrie puts her finger exactly on the crux of why he'd sought her out, and Myr nearly but doesn't laugh to have himself so discovered. "I'd think myself the worst of sinners for my impatience. And while I think we could come up with a truly spectacular martyrdom between us, I've promises to keep that I won't do any such thing. So--"

So, here we are, he finishes with a gesture; here he is finally learning the subtlety and patience required for the longer campaign, rather than one glorious battle. (Would Ser Coupe be pleased if she knew he'd finally taken her lesson over the phylacteries to heart? Or frustrated that his course hadn't wavered? It's been a long time since he's wondered that and perhaps that's a thing that needs mending.)

At her observation his smile returns, bright and earnest as ever. "I remain," he says, "because to leave in a fury at the Chantry's stained history would be to accept the hateful thing that's been made of the Chant. To concede that Our Lady was not a woman who promised the People a home, but instead that She was glad to see that home taken from us. To acknowledge that all the good work ever done in Her name is not a thing apart from all the evil that crept in through human design, but instead entirely contingent upon it.

"Those who'd see us ground into dust want desperately to own the truth of Her and I won't make their task any easier."

[coquettish_trees]

"Then we have the truth that you shall make bid to grant primacy!" Alexandrie exclaims, her bright smile reappearing. And one which she thinks he feels strongly enough about to convince him not to stay his hand out of any remaining qualms. It's a high reach, moving the rock of the Chantry on the subject of the elves, but he would perhaps have a silent ally—or at least no enemy—in the Empress herself. And her lover as well.

"I shall set you a task, then. See if you are able to find someone who both stands against you and may be picked off as the slowest in the herd is." She laces her fingers together. "Come and tell me who, and why it is you chose them, and we shall set about it."