OPEN + starters | nothing is what it seems

[faithlikeaseed]

WHO: Myr & YOU; starter for Simon (and more by request)
WHAT: Divine Election nonsense + an elf/mage doing elf/mage things
WHEN: All through Drakonis
WHERE: The Gallows & Kirkwall
NOTES: hit me up if we've discussed something for this month & you would like a starter for it!

i. extended office hours - Chantry Relations office
With the Divine's election in the offing, there's much for Chantry Relations to do, both officially and not. Above the board there's letters to be sent on Inquisition policy, research to be done on the various candidates' intentions for the organization, requests to answer for their agents as guards or troubleshooters at Chantry functions, good will on all fronts to curry and maintain. That by itself would be enough to keep Myr in the office most working days of the week--

But there was also the matter of Skyhold's unofficial suggestion that Grand Cleric Clorentine ought to be discouraged in her ambitions. After much deliberation (and thought, and prayer), he had agreed to go along with it--and so there is all that much more deniable work to sort through as well, often later in the evenings when he's alone.

So: If anyone's looking for him they would find him in the office from shortly after breakfast to not long before dinner (and sometimes well after it), with or without Cade present; the door's usually open in invitation, a kettle of hot water for tea and a plate of treats on a side table to share with anyone who stops by with a concern or a report.

In the new-minted Inquisition tradition, he's also left a box outside for anyone who'd prefer to bring their comments, complaints, or other communications through writing.

ii. cash me outside - the gallows & kirkwall
Despite the workload, keeping at it seven days a week through the whole month would be a recipe for disaster and cruel to Cade, besides. Myr can afford to set aside a day to tend to body and soul, whether that means spending time in the library with some light reading (Hard in Hightown for the umpteenth time) or mucking around in the garden with the Comtesse on hand to dispose of grubs or dead plants with all a nug's voracity.

Sometimes you might catch him practicing spells in a disused corner of the courtyard, tweaking the Fade in volatile ways that are prone to backfiring (though mercifully without much effect on anyone but him).

On good days he'll make the trip out to Kirkwall and the Chantry memorial garden there, to pray at Andraste's feet or simply sit on a bench and absorb the early spring sunshine.

Comments

[laurenande]

She listens with the whole of her being as Myr answers, as he speaks in starts and splintered thoughts, dancing back and forth between starts and ends. It is a confusing confluence, but each aborted sentence is aligned to the same axis. He catches himself, begins, catches and begins again; she makes no move to stop him, nor to join the sentiments together through suggestion. She will wait--in this? Patience is the very least she should offer him and she has a great wealth of it.

Galadriel cannot know his guilt, especially not given the true weight of his blindness. That he had taken his sight from himself is a horror and one only he can know, but she recognizes the shape of this feeling, she has known its like. It is a tragic thing, that he should feel this, that he should have stumbled into it without real warning.

What was done, unfortunately, cannot be undone, not even if he should want to.

"Is it weakness to accept a gift given freely?" she asks and, for all her wisdom, there is a genuine question there. "Given to you with the full knowledge of what it would cost?"

It is a question she has pondered often and one for which she has no answer.

"In the end, it does not matter if you believe you deserved your sight," she continues and she speaks kindly, softly, despite the stark content of her thoughts. "The woman who returned it to you believed you deserved it. She believed you deserved what it would cost her to grant it. You did not take, you did not steal, you were given this gift...and once it became yours the question of deserving, or want or need, of weakness, that all became irrelevant."

She takes a deep breath and turns her gaze from him to look at the grass, at the fledgling shoots and blooms that litter the soil around them. Spring is dear to her and seeing it here brings her joy, despite all the ills of Kirkwall. Of Thedas. It is a small thing but she is grateful for it, regardless of the desolation and despair that wanders the lands beyond this small garden.

"Have your eyes given you joy?" she asks. "It has been some time since you regained them--have you seen anything beautiful or merry? Have you not beheld one precious thing that would have otherwise passed unknown?"

Is your gift a burden?

[faithlikeaseed]

Nor, for all his worry, his agonizing and his grief, would Myr undo it. That would be to squander the gift--bad enough if he'd deserved it, but a tragedy recapitulated if he hadn't. He looks sidelong at her as she answers that very line of thought, rubbing the thumb of one hand over the knuckles of the other where he's knotted his fingers together before him to keep from fidgeting. It's both hard to hear and liberating to hear, a reprise of that moment Alvar had said How can I refuse you? When she'd invited him to give up the pain he'd carried with him four years, the self-recrimination and the penitent identity he'd built with it it-- Something, it seems, he's had a harder time giving up than he thought.

(It makes him wonder, a moment, if along with all the evil Nenya bore with it the ring did not also carry a thread of gentle wisdom through all its bearers. Or perhaps he's simply been blessed to know two such women in his life who think of him so kindly. What a wonderful thing, if so.)

Was it weakness to accept a gift? No, he'd say for anyone else who wrestled with the same question. Rather, by taking the gift you gave the giver an opportunity to show that unforced kindness--and you honored their agency in offering something they were willing to spare for your sake. It seems so clean when it isn't about him and doesn't involve the scars he'd left all those years ago in Hasmal, still there for all the tangible ones were healed. But properly accepting Alvar's gift means accepting absolution for those too, absolution he's still convinced she had authority to give, however she got her position and whatever happened after...

Still, it's a hard question to answer aloud. Not so much the second one Galadriel asks him; that draws a helpless, breathless, delighted laugh out of Myr. "Oh, yes, lady. So many things I thought I'd never have the chance at. Even this awful old fortress--it's a hideous place but it's a piece of our history and it's worth knowing it." But there was also the sea, and the Chantry garden with the statue Nari had carved, and a halla in the woods, and all the new friends he'd made on joining the Inquisition, and Gwenaëlle's wedding in all its spectacle--

And Simon's face, and the way his lover looked at him. "I think," he begins again, after a quiet moment, "I think I didn't know how to weigh those against everything else that happened. To say the joy I have now balances with the evil that befell those poor people, because I--because I thought, if I'd only asked the right questions and spoken more to the rest of the team, everything that happened might've been averted."

He'd blamed himself. He still blames himself. He knows he shouldn't, that he was one among many and none of them but Galadriel and Thranduil truly knew what they were up against, but, but...

[laurenande]

Oh how lovely his hope, how bright and beautiful the sparkle of it is, even as it wounds him...even as it wounds Galadriel as well.

Her expression softens to the point of absolute fondness and then drops to something a bit sadder as she looks to his hands, twisted together in anxiety. She had not expected an answer to her first question, doesn't expect one still, and the fact that his eyes have brought him joy...that is heartening, if nothing else.

"You cannot..." she begins and stops, trails off as her gaze drifts and she considers her own hands.

For Myr, as she has done for no one else in all her life, she shifts and twists Nenya free. The ring parts from her with a tug, already resettled into the space between her fingers, the space that it shall occupy evermore. The ring appears as she moves it, her own light dimming as it shifts free. It is a fine band of mithril and adamant, delicate as woven roots, glimmering in the sun like the surface of a river at dawn.

It is small and, in the spring light of this garden, seems no more dangerous than any other piece of jewelry. It is a far cry from how it must have looked during the flight from the Abbey.

If anyone at all had been nearby she would not have done this, but for him, she will.

"No one," she begins again, the distinction much more firm. "Can avoid the price that must be paid. Many have tried, the wise and the strong, each with great knowledge of these bands, of the shadow that clings to them and the breadth of their power."

She takes a deep breath and, despite the grimness of the sentiment, cannot help but look at the ring with that same sad fondness that she levels at him.

"All have failed...including the elf who forged them," she admits and lets out a short sigh that is broken in the middle, either as a soft sob or a soft laugh, it is impossible to say. "Do not blame yourself for something far beyond your control, Myrobalan."

guess who almost mispelled alvar's name again rlfksld <3

[faithlikeaseed]

He may not know the full significance of what she does in showing this to him, but he knows enough. He knows enough that the breath catches in his throat--for worry, for awe--when her light dims and Nenya is revealed as itself: A ring, and no more than a ring, and not the terrifying bright star Alvar had held up between her fingers at the height of her madness and power.

A ring. A very pretty ring, that Jang had picked up and somewhere, somehow died for. Despite knowing that, despite everything that had happened, Myr's own curiosity still clamors that he reach for it and find out exactly what that power felt like, and the shadow that came with it. He's always wanted to learn these things for himself, first-hand--

But twenty-three years resisting demons who knew exactly how to play on that curiosity has made him stronger than it--at least, when the threat is known, when what he could pay for first-hand knowledge is still graven into his memory and unlikely to ever fade. By the time that thought reaches him he's already unlaced his fingers and must refold them, digit by digit, a small exercise in concentration. This is not for him. He could not bear it any better than the poor women at the abbey (think of all the lives his might buy if he walked into Darktown--or into a red templar camp); he had not joked in saying, not so long ago, maybe I'd rather be fleeting and glorious.

He knows himself for a would-be martyr, and that's not all for taking blame for what he couldn't control. Galadriel's gentle rebuke is well-taken. "I will not, lady," he says, softly--lifting eyes that had been drawn to the ring to her face. (Knowing it isn't as simple as saying I won't when it comes to dealing with turmoil in his own heart, but committing himself to it much as he has anything else. This isn't his to bear and he doesn't need to be told a third time.) "But--Andraste's ashes--how do you bear it? Bear knowing what's waiting?"

Knowing how he would answer that question gives no insight into how someone much older and more tempered would. (All that would give light must endure burning. Perhaps--no, surely--she knows better ways to weather the pain of that and the knowledge that the flame must someday consume what it touched.)

Me, in every tag I wrote with her name in it. You are not alone.

[laurenande]

She watches the emotions play on his face but holds the ring in the open, nonetheless. Something in her rallies against this foolishness, but her heart calms it. Myrobalan is too clever to fall for power so easily; he knows all too well the price of it. Eventually, he withdraws his hand and breaks his gaze on her ring.

When his eyes turn up to her, she can see the turmoil in them, the longing and the resignation. His heart is an honest one, for all his guilt and debate.

"I was not given this ring idly," she tells him and it is nothing so strong as a correction. She reaches down with her free hand and traces the lines of the metalwork with something like nostalgia.

"This ring, and both its sisters, were intended to protect us," she explains. "To protect our people from the rising shadow."

She lifts the ring again and, shifts it, settles it back into place on her finger. She has no desire to hide it from Myrobalan, but what he sees may no longer be the ring.

"They were...and they remain a necessity in Arda, for without them we would fall to ruin. I do not fear what Nenya will make of me, dreadful as it might be, because I know what could be without it. I know what would become of me if I cast it aside."

She is strangely at ease when she continues.

"I would fade to a wraith myself, a hundred times over, trapped ere the ending of all things, before I would surrender the security the rings grant....and I may suffer that yet, but such is the fate of those who bear rings of power."

@ii I'm telling myself it doesn't have to be perfect because I LOVE THIS & just. need to write more!

[faithlikeaseed]

It is--a part of the joy of talking to Galadriel that Myr can't ever anticipate her answers, that they're drawn from some place deeper in time and experience than anyone he's every known; drawn from a world where to be an elf is something noble and fair and within touching distance of Deity, so unlike the lot Thedas offers the elvhen. It isn't envy in him, exactly; it isn't regret for what he is or the scaffolding the Maker's handed him to build his life upon, only--only he does long to conduct himself so well, with such grace, to prove out as beautifully as often.

(Of course he knows that she's not perfect, that Thranduil and Fingon aren't perfect; he isn't such a sentimentalist he doesn't remember who went to kill whom in that meeting with Alvar, or how lightly the Provost carries all his secrets.

But it's still easy to be overcome by the brightness of them.)

Because I know what could be without it. You bore the cost because the alternatives were too awful to think, and knowing the cost--Myr shudders, even here in the clear light of the rising morning, to imagine what would be so awful that the fate of the wraiths paled before it. Thedas may be a world of sorrows and horrors but even the abstract notion of a Blight doesn't seem as horrible as that. Even whatever Corypheus intended for the world--which would in all likelihood end in its annihilation-- "Who would make such things? Who could?"

[laurenande]

"No one who lives knows the whole truth of how it came to pass...but I know much of it," she starts and it is an oddly soft beginning for this tale. She knows this tale will become very dark and she cannot tolerate the thought of Myrobalan judging them too harshly, not if it can be mitigated. Unconsciously she closes the hand that wears Nenya and tucks it into the other, resting them in the cradle of her lap.

"Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die," she repeats. It is a nursery rhyme, a warning for young elves, for young men, but in its simplicity there is a certain weight. Myrobalan has known her long enough to know she does not speak in verse.

"One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne."

Galadriel takes pause again, for words have power, and these are uneasily spoken in all languages. They were not scribed upon the One because Sauron had a penchant for poetry, after all.

"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and...in the darkness bind them. In the land of Mordor...where the Shadows lie."

Her hands shift in her lap, tense and uncomfortable, and she waits a long moment after she has spoken before she continues.

"The rings were not all made by the Sauron, but most of them were, and all of them can be bent to his will. Those who wear them can be made to serve him, they can and will be twisted with the force of the shadow and the weight of his power.

"Not all rings behave as mine does, not all rings grant power in this way...but mine was not made by Sauron."

"When Sauron first sought to consolidate his power, to take such staggering control, he did it cleverly. He came to us as--Maiar, you do not have Maiar, do you?"

Her story pauses and her brow dips on frustration as she looks at him. She is not so familiar with Thedas that she can say, without doubt, it has nothing that parallels the Maiar. That she has not encountered any is hardly proof, after all.

"Men called the last of them Wizards, in a land where the arts and magic was not so separate as it is here. They were beings of power, like spirits, but bound to the world and to bodies that were mortal...in practice if nothing else.

"They were not...the gods. But they were not as removed from them as I am, or as Men are."