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

[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."