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

[onlyhymns]

His head twitches slightly, and Cade leans down, then away, then clears his throat.
"Um," he murmurs into his curled hand, "could I-... would it... would it be all right, um..."

[nadasharillen]

One of Nari's eyebrows raises just slightly for a moment and she blinks, made curious by the halting speech that seems as if it's on its way to become a request. It's not as if Cade didn't speak this way regularly, but it's always interesting to find out what it is that gives him such pause. She's never tried to finish his sentences for him, preferring instead to watch and wait patiently for him to get wherever it is he's trying to go. This time is no different.

[onlyhymns]

Perhaps speaking the request isn't going to get him anywhere. Cade halts in his attempt, and, looking nervously toward Nari, brings his face a little closer to hers, and tucks one hand under her chin the way people do it in romantic stories.
It occurs to him then that he has no idea what he's really doing-- he's never kissed anyone before-- but he's gone too far to look back now.

[nadasharillen]

She has. Once. And it was less “kissing” and more “being kissed”. Nari had thought then, in the shadows outside the Arlathvhen’s campfires where all the young men and women of the Clans escaped off to eventually, excited by the prospect of elves strange to them, her mind absent and separate from the odd pressure of lips against hers, that it was supposed to mean something. It hadn't. But now…

Now just his slight movement toward her and the warmth of his hesitant fingers makes her tremble with a mix of anticipation and fear and several other things she doesn't know the names for, all of it naked and evident in her eyes, but even so she reaches up her hand to mirror Cade’s and moves to meet him.