faderift | What Comes Due | Open (with prompt for Myr)

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What Comes Due | Open (with prompt for Myr)

WHO: Sorrel
WHAT: Dietary supplements
WHEN: A good bit after Kirkwail
WHERE: Just outside Kirkwall
NOTES: hunting gore, ect.

Winter in Kirkwall was about as unpleasant as anything else in Kirkwall. It had a scrubby, grasping character, and if it had been a person it would have been a bent old man, steely-haired, dressed in rags, and in possession of a lengthy bankroll which he would neither evidence nor share. In such a manner did the flowers sleep under the begrudging snow around the city; secret, miserly, and invisible.

It was, in a word, absolutely miserable hunting. Even if the hungry habits of the city's ordinary population of scavengers had not made it so, nature herself would have. Sorrel quietly attributed it to some unheard-of curse from Andruil, but did not share this opinion with anyone when he went out into it. Sometimes, you just need to know your best audience; Kirkwall was not it. And anyways, he was out of practice enough that there was probably no curse here not going by the more ordinary name of 'laziness,' not that hunting was his job. Sorrel left Kirkwall in sensible leather footwraps, robes left behind in favor of practical, close-bodied leathers, bow, arrows, and kit in tow. He was going to get the hell out of this city, just for a little while. He needed the air, and the quiet, and the clean empty hate of the world to wash away the clinging, personal hatred that came with living in the Gallows, or in Kirkwall at all.

And it felt good, to breathe.

_i._for myr_
....And, as promised, he brought Myr along with him! The weather had begun grey and sullen, lightening slowly over the morning until the sky shone with that particular purity of blue that was unique to bright winter afternoons. The cold was biting, even though the wind was low, but Sorrel paid it no mind with the sun warming his back, and was happy to chat quietly with Myr along their path. Luck, and a lot of trudging through an ice-backed skin of snow-over-mud eventually found them a chance when they crossed a deer-path, and they'd turned to follow it without much real hope, though in a cheerful spirit.

Or, Sorrel felt cheerful. The point of this was, in a small part, to get a very petty sort of comeuppance, and that is always an emotion to warm one's heart, even when your fingertips are numb and tingling.

"What do you think of it, so far?" He was presently asking, with that very same cheer. Sorrel turned a grin on Myr as he did so; alright, he was enjoying it, and wouldn't apologize. It's a beautiful day.

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"Well,you can always ask," Sorrel puts himself opposite Myr across the fire, close enough to be warmed, though he doesn't sit, "Halla are like people; they know what duty is, and beauty, they fall in love, and have opinions about everything."

There's a world of stories in every word, the life of a hundred people tied to a breeding-herd of beings no more similar to a human, or an elf, than a dragon is to a carthorse. And yet, they were all as one, family and fate intertwined.

"But that's all it is, you know: asking. You just have to accept it, when they say they won't do something; they aren't slaves, after all."

Edited 2019-03-13 17:54 (UTC)

"Oh. I hadn't thought slaves, so much, as--" As mabari, which Myr's got a feeling now is a demeaning comparison, however intelligent the big dogs were. "--well; I'd thought wrong," he concludes, with an upward quirk of one corner of his mouth.

He looks down at the cooking rabbit, thoughtfully. "How do you hear them? When they speak to you, that is--is it truly words or something," he gestures like he's trying to pull those self-same words from the air, at a loss for them himself, "more like knowing how they feel?"

A pause, and then a little more hushed: "And can you get better at it?"

There's a sharp-eyed moment in there, when he is certain, certain Myr is about to compare Halla to pets, but the moment passes and Myr is, thankfully, wiser than that.

"Sometimes words," He shrugs, thoughtfully. Funny how you'd go your whole life knowing something and never really think about it, in detail, "To my experience it's sort of like... we use words because we have to and they don't have to. I think, it's that most Halla see a Dalish clan as being a herd of Halla that bring a bunch of elves around with them out of love and duty, and to do difficult work, rather than the other way around. So they don't really worry much about how elves talk to one another, because it's not all that important."

He paused, groping for the words. The fire crackled and spat in the dampened ground, and the smell of roasting meat curled around them, no less potent than the woodsmoke. The birds around them are, slowly, beginning to lose their alarum and return to song.

"...I'm never a herdmaster, of course, but like anything else, I suppose."

"...Huh."

That's enough food for thought all at once that Myr lapses silent entirely, staring into the fire--staring through the fire--as he thinks on what Sorrel's said. To think of oneself--one's entire people--of standing in the same relation to halla that halla were to elves; to imagine how an entire species might reason among themselves without words, deciding when and where to travel as naturally as birds threading the sky on their way north in the winter.

Like deer making trails. Like a mage dreaming her way through the Fade. How much of what any of them were came from things below conscious thought--from instinct, from predators, from the shape of the land they walked?

He shakes himself from getting too deep on the question to turn the rabbit again.

"I think," softly, "it's a very great shame we never got a chance to know them, in the cities." Embers escape from the edge of the fire as a small log burns through; he takes up a stick to poke them back over the body of the smoldering glyph.

"I know we couldn't. It would be cruel to keep something wild inside the alienage's walls; they'd never choose it for themselves. And even if they did, the worst sort of shems would take them for meat." And what does that say about the People? "But anyone can see we've lost our place in the world and now I don't wonder that they're part of it."

"Of course they are. The Halla are the same blood as we are, descended out of Arlathan, and through The Dales. Even a city-born circle mage like you still carries it," Sorrel replies, flippant only because what is new sorrow for Myr was the flavor of bread and the coolness of water, taken in with mother's milk when he was yet a babe in arms, "Shivana."

He says it contemplatively, as if the notion had only occured to him. Sorrel tilts his head back, eyes far away, thinking, and for a few breaths the only movement in him is one thumb rubbing over a shiny spot on the cuff of his glove.

"That's a Dalish name, you know. It's Elvhen," There's a breath, the way he says it, that means something more than merely elven, as if there were some larger form of Elf than just elves, "Whoever named you, they weren't more than a generation in the city. I hear the like sometimes, in the alienage; the names blur in people's mouths, get more shem with time. Yours still has a meaning, so it has to be fresher."

He looks up at the way Sorrel says his name, hearing it for once like it belongs to someone else--someone who's better-suited to these woods, who long ago learned to hunt rabbits and commune with halla and walk more quietly between the branches.

The words that follow surprise him more than a little, because: "Dad," pause, "my father came south from Tevinter. With my older brother. They didn't talk much about family."

Of course, he'd always assumed his father for a child of some Tevene alienage, stretching back generations, much as his mother's side made claims of long residence in Hasmal. And sentiments in Hasmal being what they were about Tevinter, that little piece of family history was an assumption Myr was wholly comfortable leaving unexplored; it wasn't romantic or dramatic or exciting, but it was familiar.

This knocks the top off the whole thing.

It's enough to make Sorrel wonder, just for a moment, if he's somehow pronouncing it wrong. But then he snorts at himself and remembers; no, of course not. Of course, not.

"Duty," He tells Myr, in the shadow of that revelation. Even free elves, in Tevinter, were as trapped and kept low as in any southern alienage. Moreso, perhaps, because despite his practical ignorance, Sorrel felt quite certain that there were slave-takers who would take any excuse at all to hunt the alienages as happily as the rest of the world, should there be profit in it, "Shivanas is Duty. If you were wondering."

Duty.

Well. Myr almost--but doesn't--laugh; it would be at himself and not Sorrel but there's not always a good way to make that distinction, and it's the sort of laugh that might bubble over into a little hysteria at the--the appropriateness of it.

Dad had never said. Maybe Dad hadn't known, depending on how such a purely Dalish name made its way into Tevinter. Or maybe there was something of the meaning of the name in the keeping of it, and maybe he'd have learned that when he was older, along with whatever had happened to Ben's mother and whether he'd any other half-siblings who hadn't been able to flee.

"A little," he says when he think he's control of himself; it's ironic understatement. "I always had. I--like names; like the meanings of them. But you can't find Dalish names in any books they keep around the Circles."

So he never knew. His gaze drifts back to the fire, expression quit of its usual animation. A little like the listlessness of a man in shock--because even if this isn't true (and Sorrel couldn't know how the name had gotten there, how it had been kept and progressed south to Hasmal's alienage where it ended up bestowed on a child whose mother would have nearly nothing to do with her husband--but what he suggests), it opens up a whole avenue of the past he'd never even considered.

Edited (better icon) 2019-03-20 02:22 (UTC)

There are more waiting silences in conversation with Myr than Sorrel could have predicted. He's about to say something, unplanned and probably very stupid indeed, when Myr finally opens his mouth. He wasn't expecting that, either, the contents of circle libraries being only occasionally the subject of idle, childish inquiry. But it's the lack of surprise that makes him laugh, not unkindly.

"The Circle's run by the Chantry," He says, weary, and turns the rabbit again for Myr, because he's not heartless enough to eat burned rabbit out of spite alone, or go hungry, "The Chantry is one of the reasons we call all humans quick. They like to hurry up and forget the inconvenient past, as if by lying to their children they get to be better. The Dalish are an inconvenient truth, a reminder of what Orlais, and the Chantry, are really founded on. So they erase us, where they can. But I'll tell you a secret, Myr."

He taps at the side of his face, where the lines of white, like fishbones, feather across his cheek. Dirth'amen, the silent message, Lord of Secrets, and their protection very nearly sacred to Sorrel's faith, "A lie, no matter how pretty, or comforting, or how many wise and good people believe it, will always be a lie."

It's a measure of how comfortable he's gotten with someone--how much he thinks he owes someone--that Myr will slow down enough to think in said person's presence, quiet and pensive instead of bubbling over with the effervescence of an overactive mind. Not as if he doesn't do well enough on reasoning on his feet, but this--this, all of it--it required something quieter. It's a measure of trust in Sorrel's good sense that he hasn't put all those thoughts away for somewhere quieter and private, instead leaving the whole messy process of coming to grips with new information out where it can be seen.

But trust and a willingness to listen doesn't mean he'll let everything get by him unopposed. He rouses at Sorrel's words with the sharpness of a man called to defend his beloved; right or wrong, the Chantry's his--

(He remembers saying something very like what Sorrel had to Simon once, not long after they first met, in the very same tone. Hearing it echoed back like this throws wide the chasm between him and anything else outside his dissolved Circle he could belong to. A city elf Circle mage with a shem templar for a lover--not human enough for the faith he'd give his life for, with too many ties to the Chantry's world to give it all up and follow an aravel; not enough of a Loyalist for any non-mage to wholly trust his intentions and too much of one for most mages to think he had their backs.

It's probably self-pitying to dwell like that on what the Maker had given him to work with: But there it was.)

"You needn't tell me that. I'd not be out here if I believed the tidy lie." He takes a breath to cool his tone, holds it for a count of three, breathes out. "And Orlais can get fucked for all they've done and haven't put right, but that isn't all the Chantry is. She knew who and what the Liberator was for two Ages before docking his ears; they still sing about his dying charge every week, whether or not they admit to themselves who the People that followed him were. It can be put back."

"The Liberator," Sorrel can't help the laugh in his voice. Oh, that's rich, "Use his name, if you're going to talk about him. It's titles like that that forget people, and make filing their ears off possible; like Herald. I'll just bet you didn't learn about Shartan by accident."

The Herald of Andraste had died a hero. But, who remembered them? What kind of soup did they like, did they prefer dogs to cats, or the reverse? Did they even believe in the Chant, really? No one would ever know, because there wasn't a person there, anymore. Only The Herald, Andraste's chosen, the sainted shoulders upon which so many of the Inquisition's edifice was founded.

"I practiced that shitty line in front of a mirror, you know," He said, finally, and turned away again, intensity lost, "You could at least let me be right for—"

For what, he doesn't say, because at that moment the peace is shattered by a low, piercing scream. It doesn't sound at all like a person, too resonant and sharp, fearful and angry, piping through the trees like a war-horn, an alien urgency, calling for aid. Sorrel's reaction is instantaneous.

"Grab the meat!" He shouts and is already leaping into action, running towards the sound without even stopping to snatch up his bow. But then, the bow was for hunting; for real threats, they both had better weaponry.

That's one way to forestall an argument.

Not, mind, that Myr would have gone into it with the same vigor he'd had that day he'd first shown up in Sorrel's office; he knows better than that now. But he couldn't just leave things lie with his conscience pricked the way it's been--perhaps it's a good thing, then, when that outraged shriek reaches their clearing and Sorrel takes off with, "Grab the meat!"

Given all they went through to get it, Myr's not even going to question the strangeness of that command; he simply obeys, dumping the contents of his pack so he can bundle the rabbit into it. A gesture extinguishes the glyphs fueling the fire--more to reclaim the mana than any forethought about what an untended fire might do to the forest--and then Myr's off after Sorrel at a sprint, hilt of his spirit blade already in-hand.

The scene is as badly as you might imagine, a cavalcade of bloodshed and fear; two human hunters, clearly from nearby Kirkwall, if not natives of the same, stand in the midst of their own, much more purposeful hunt. Their quarry, however, is no less fortunate than Myr's ill-fated rabbit, though much more precious: the Halla, blood a clear and startling red against its flank.

It's a knife-edge tableau, with the Halla half-prone, one Hunter advancing on it with clear intent and knife in hand, the other nocking a second arrow meant to join the first, standing like an ugly, limbless sapling out of the Halla's pinkened fur. She calls out again, seeing the two elves, that same horror and anger, shockingly expressive when voiced from an animal's throat.

Sorrel, does not seem surprised; urgent, in every motion, in the speed of his reaction, and very angry, but not surprised.

"Oi!" He snarls, enough to get first a glance and then a second look and a filthy oath from both humans. Neither seems to know what to do with himself, and the hunter with the bow is clearly struggling with the tactical decision; what to shoot first, the elves or the meat? Sorrel doesn't give him time to ponder it, "You get away from that Halla!"

"Or you'll what, knife-ear? We caught it fair and square! That's our pay that is, fine pelt like that. Fuck a dog, and go get your own if you like."

If he'd been inclined to gentleness, Sorrel would have lost the inclination at that, "Or I'll set you on fire, that's what, you stupid shem'len."

They don't for a quiet moment, seem to know what to do with that. Their eyes dart across Sorrel's shoulders, looking for a sign of a staff, catch on Myr as he comes up behind him, and then go back. There is a brief conference in what Sorrel can only imagine they must think is an undertone, though it's clearly audible.

"Oi, Mendy," the one with the knife is a sand-haired fellow, with small, piggish brown eyes. He's short and round and he'd have a very young face if not for the clear tracks of a youthful fight with pox that had left him a map of pitted craters across his cheeks, "Mendy. That ones one o' them Dalish sorts. Reckon' he means it?"

"Six days we ain't got nowt more'n rats to show for it, Piker, and you turn on me now, I swear to Andraste I'll string you up by your balls as soon as look at ye if y'don't shut up."

"Yeah, alright, but I'm only sayin'"

"An' I'm saying shut it!"

It is not a dignified conversation, and would be almost humorous if not for the whimpering, lowing distress of the downed Halla. Sorrel, at least, doesn't find it funny at all, and turns his head only as little as he needs to to speak to Myr out of the side of his mouth.

"Myr, if you've got a better idea than just killing them, I'll hear it. Otherwise..."

As ever, when he's thrown into the moment, Myr finds it easier to act than temporize.

Just killing them isn't an option; as much as the grim scene strikes him as sacrilege to be redressed with fire and violence, these stupid shem'len don't know what they've brought to bay. Either with the halla or the elves arguing for her-- Oh, the waver of Mendy's bow doesn't go unnoticed, and it firms Myr's resolve to end this quickly.

He speaks a word under his breath--not an answer to Sorrel, not directly--and then another, gesturing with his free hand and the hilt of his spirit blade as he pulls barriers from the Fade to wrap around the two of them...and the downed halla. The shimmer of them warps the air like the heat of high summer transplanted to this wintery afternoon: Not quite so threatening as igniting the spirit blade but an obvious message all the same: You're outmatched.

Only with the terms thus on the table does he address the hunters: "He means it, serahs. If you'd not test our patience, best let her go." Maker, let them not be so stupid they'd throw themselves at a brace of mages for pride, he thinks, half-praying, grasping for something else to convince them with. The faint scent of cooked rabbit from his pack suggests itself; he slides it off his shoulder, careful to keep both hands in view.

"And we'll swap our take for yours. No fine pelt but rabbit's better eating than rat." Eyes hard as amber glass--look willing the hunters to do the smart thing--he fixes his gaze on Piker and holds the pack out.

Take it or leave it, gentlemen; the offer won't be open long.

Edited 2019-03-29 15:20 (UTC)

Sorrel too is keeping both his hands in view, but not for the reason of Myr's caution; it's easier to cast with both hands free and unencumbered. He's itching for it, for an excuse, and Myr's barrier lends him a veil of confidence and time both.

Piker, unencumbered by the virtue of wit, stares in open horror at the barrier around the Halla, dragging his eyes away from it only reluctantly, as might a man faced with the proximity of a venomous serpent. Disgust and fear make a worse mask of his face than its natural state could hope to do— and he startles visibly to see the trick repeated twice-over, once for each elf. Piker, he neither understands nor likes magic, and it would surprise none who know him to hear he had looked always upon the Gallows with suspicion and its late Knight-Commander with an equal serving therefore, of reverence.

"Mendy," It's a hiss, the tip of Piker's knife waving in a crazy betrayal of his anxiety.

Mendy, for his part, makes no reply. His face is a sneer, no less than it had been since the first, but there's a gimlet of real hatred in his eyes now. Perhaps he doesn't realize how clearly it stands there, a cold, silver flame, contemplating the value of a death in the service of getting something, getting his back out of the hide of two hopped-up subhumans, rabbits crawled out of the dirt, when they ought to know better. How dare they. How dare they look him in the eye. Sorrel's back is straight and his head held high; he says nothing.

Piker prods again, and Mendy nods once, then again, very hard, and not unlike a petulant child in his anger, despite the very real violence in his hands. Tension goes out of the bow.

"Give it 'ere," broad, meaty hands snatch at the pack and the two retreat; not without a backwards glance, and loudly enough that their cursing could be heard as it receded, even minutes later.

Sorrel waits until it is completely silent before he moves. He waits until the birds start to sing again.

"Clan goes hungry today. Let's get to work."

Myr is as silent to watch them go, jaw clenched and the tip of his tongue between his teeth.

The hatred isn't half so hard to bear as the terror. He'd never-- He knew, he knew how the world beyond a Circle's walls regarded mages; knew how careful he had to be, how diplomatic and unassuming not to invoke that terror. And here he'd used it without even a thought--

To save a life. To save more than one, given how easily that could've come to fatal violence. Would have come to fatal violence, if it hadn't been defused otherwise; and now all of them get to walk away from it and see another dawn.

You used the tools you had as best you could. Don't linger on it.

Tension bleeds out of Myr as Sorrel speaks up; he returns the hilt to his belt and crosses the clearing on legs weak-kneed with relief. Gone is the cocksure flinty confidence of the knight-enchanter in his element, replaced by something softer and anxious as he drops to both knees in the dirt beside the injured halla.

She's got an arrow sticking out of her. He can't heal an arrow wound. You aren't supposed to remove an arrow, are you? Or you could knick an artery and bleed out--but what if she's already bleeding inside, and they have to, and he can't heal that, and he hadn't brought any lyrium potions and she could still die-- "I hope," he says, the words sounding almost calm but for a waver running through them, "you're a better healer than I am because I can't do a damned thing for arrows."

And then, much less calm: "She's not going to die, is she?"

Please say she won't die.

Edited (icon etc) 2019-03-30 05:35 (UTC)

Sorrel is not nearly so unsanguine: he would have much preferred to kill the humans and be done with it. There's nothing to explain in a couple of hunters not coming back out of the forest. Even this close to the city, there's plenty to die of, and no need to explain the lack of a corpse.

Not that Kirkwall didn't eat people handily enough even within the walls. But to work.

"No, no, no," Sorrel replies, coming to kneel beside Myr, soothing the moaning Halla with gentle, trembling hands, "She's too strong for one arrow to kill her. But she is hurt, and she'll never be able to run like this, especially with the smell drawing every hungry thing for miles around on her trail. I can heal her if you pull out the arrow, alright?"

Is that alright, Myr? Can you manage that much?

"Pull it straight out, absolutely straight, and slowly."

"All right."

All right, all right, all right. This is something he can do and having a defined task settles Myr down. He reaches to lay hands on the halla, flinching when she does but keeping his touch steady. "Sh-h-h, cousin, I'm sorry it hurts but Sorrel will fix it..."

The content of the words is largely repetitive, a soothing loop meant as much for him as for her as he braces the fingers of one hand around the entry wound--draws breath--and begins to draw the arrow out. He keeps Sorrel in the corner of his vision as he does, sensitive to the merest twitch, the littlest sign he's doing it wrong and needs to stop.

He can do this much. He can.

Sorrel's magic sinks into the Halla's body like rain into thirsty ground, and he sinks with it. The arrow is not particularly nasty, as these things go, but it's still a hunting arrow, diamond-shaped point broad and ugly, meant to tear as its pulled out. The Halla moans and shudders with every inch, but Sorrel only presses his hands more firmly against her flank as she churns the dust with her thrashing, and the action of her fore-hooves.

It's like a cresting wave, as always, the pressure building, rising, and then over in a rush, the damage suddenly coming together easily, snap, as the body recognized how it ought to be. The Halla struggled to her feet immediately, a chaotic, dusty surge of white and brown and red. She was gone almost as soon as she had gained her feet, and the crashing of the brush was audible, once, twice, and again, and then gone.

Sorrel lay on his back where he'd been kicked as she made her first heaving leap, dazed and completely filthy, with nothing to show for it but what would soon enough be a spectacular bruise at his middle.

"Ow," He told Myr, intelligently, and then again, with more indignation: "Ow. So much for gratitude. You alright?"

A noise escapes Myr that's not quite a laugh as the halla knocks them aside like ninepins and vaults out of the clearing; an idiosyncratic escape of tension, a sound of relief as he tries to rise himself--to give her space--and ends up going down in the leaf litter on his ass for all his trouble. His eyes follow the track she left long after she's gone, holding to that abrupt departure as reassurance she'd survive.

"Uhm." Sorrel's question doesn't quite penetrate; Myr looks over at him, comically bewildered. "I--yeah," though the word's hesitant, and he pats himself down to be sure before responding with more certainty: "Yeah. I'm fine. You?"

Even as he's asking he's getting back to his knees, inching over to sit back down beside Sorrel heavily. He doesn't look fine, Myr decides, though the healing came off all right. (Something for him to envy later, when he's less rattled; he really isn't any kind of healer at all.) It's the work of moments to scratch out a pattern on the ground and invoke a spellbloom, coalescing mana from the Fade like water for the taking. ...It probably won't be that much help but it feels like he's helping, so there, have this dumb little flower made of magic, Sorrel. "Need something for, uh. ...Did she kick you?"

He didn't see it in all the commotion but thinks he might've heard a distinctly meaty thump.

"I'm fine," Sorrel grunted, not yet moving. And then Myr did... something, something fancy undoubtedly learned in his fancy Circle lessons. Sorrel took a deep breath and it came with the scent of flowers and a rush of returning Mana, "...I said, I'm fine."

Well, now he's just whining. So mature!

"Let's head back."

Myr knows that breed of prickly when he hears it.

Still, it doesn't keep him from reaching out to offer Sorrel a hand up once he's regained his feet.

"Let's." A breath in, a breath out. "I owe you dinner."

He won't apologize for giving away the rabbit; he isn't sorry to have saved lives with it. But it's a kind of apology all the same.

"Need to go collect my gear before we do, though. If squirrels haven't made off with it."

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What Comes Due | Open (with prompt for Myr)

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