WHO: Gilia St. Low & YOU! WHAT: One Girls Quest To Be Absolutely Unnoticable: The Beginning. WHEN: From [gestures] to [gestures further along] WHERE: The Gallows, Kirkwall NOTES: None forseen, save for social anxiety and occasional eldritch horror.
The Hunter is no more resistant than the girl. What she was asked to do, she did. It was easiest that way, kept at bay the sense that she was little more than a scrap in the wind. So she stoops, snagging up the cord and lifting it onto her shoulder. She turns then to observe the girl, had assumed it was little more than fatigue.
The murmur around her form she mistakes as a shadow for a moment... but then the definition of too many eyes makes itself known to her. Grant us--
Anna all but throws the collection of blades at the girl, stepping back. Her whip flicks loose, deft and quick. It looks like lumenkin, hiding beneath the flesh of a girl. Anna is nauseated by it, by the tendrils and lights. Her head throbs with the sounds of the sea-- the runes bound in to her from the last time she had access to the workshop resonate with a deep hum of acknowledgement. The great deep sea and the hunter.
"I knew--" she chokes out, flipping the whip as restlessly as a horse stamping a hoof. "I knew you things could follow me here."
Gilia jumps a clear foot when the swords clatter to the ground between them. The sound loud and jarring, but not so strange around so many soldiers, training, marching, working living. Her hands up to shield herself from coming near them by sheer instinct.
"Please - " confused, she darts up, to Anna. Misunderstanding what she had done to cause such offense. To cause the weapon that slithers to life, snake-like and just as terrifying. The weapons of wars that she had never seen until coming to this place. But, oh how it shows, that flickering below her skin. Defensive, now, rather than simply shimmering like ripples, it spreads through her. " - please don't hurt me. I am sorry, I am sorry for speaking so - "
The tears are just as immediate, the fear thick in the air as in her body. Her hands drawing up, curling her body away.
"Silence!" it booms out of her, louder and more defiant than she ever is when not blood-drenched and reeling with joy. "Don't weep before me like a child!"
She can hear the Orphan's screaming. She can taste the rotting sea-flesh in her mouth. She snaps the whip again, it makes Gilia's dress flutter at the hems but it doesn't hit the girl. She can hear the Orphan's screaming, wailing over its dead mother and all the tortures it endured. She remembers Ebrietas turning slowly in the dark beneath the cathedral, caged there so that the Church could experiment on her weeping children. All her many eyes catching broken dapples of light as she made wishes on her Altar of Despair.
Anna pities them, and the pity feels like poison in her body. She can't pity them. She can't pity all those who have been maimed and transmogrified in the name of mankind's ambitions. She'll lose her grip. She'll lose her grip and she'll start screaming, all over again.
"You're a nightmare," she hisses, her voice low and teeth clenched. Now she's crept up on the frightened girl, fisted one of her gloved hands in those unruly curls and jerked on her head. She looks into the set of eyes that are not Gilia's. "Will you fiends ever let me sleep? Or must I gut you here to save myself?"
No one - not even Godfinn at his worst - had touched her thus, had ever raised a hand to her. Even when her siblings needed a hiding, she never bore much of it. Too mild-mannered a child, they'd said. Which is not to know she did not know pain, for that was often required in one task or another in life. But never, never, had it been violence done towards her.
And she crumbles with it, being yanked by her hair, she is pulled down, her eyes screwed up tightly as the wet leaked down her cheeks, the shriek of pain is a miserable, pitiful, cowering sound. With it, as she trips, trying to pull herself free, but what is she to the strength of a warrior? "I am sorry. Forgive me, please, I meant no harm, I have sought none - I have obeyed every - "
The old creeds, the old laws, the binding of the pit, she had never strayed. She had never strayed. "Please, please." Her voice wails, high pitched, sobbing.
And unseen to all but Anna, the black eyes watch back, deep and pitying and so very full they seem bright. An ocean in there, and with it, Gilia's state is her own undoing, the fear, the need to protect herself is her own undoing. Every line of her strange rippled soul deepens, twists, like flowers growing too far, the coral blooms, her skin beyond just sallow. Cool, so cool to the touch.
Anna's dark eyes are feverish with despair, her face drawn and clammy. She shouldn't have ever gotten this close to the thing. Should have had her face covered and her hat pulled low to keep the influence of such things from invading her sense of herself. Should have run it through with her cane when she first saw it. They were fragile, ephemeral things trying to walk in a fetid world where they did not truly belong-- bound in forms that did not contain them. Too late now, the weapon is useless at this intimate range. It slips out of her grip. A terrible sin for a Hunter to commit.
She can't hear anything Gillia is saying. Every utterance sounds like the crash of the ocean. Incomprehensible and endless, assaulting her thoughts with its thick, grating fog of sound. She puts her other gloved hand over Gillia's mouth to make it stop. The other hand goes around her neck. Both squeeze.
"I hate you," Anna whispers in hazy, thick confession; insensate to the girl. All she can see are coral blossoms, frothing currents, and a thousand starry eyes. "Everything that you are. Every wish and promise and curse."
She squeezes tighter, her leather gloves creaking. She smells like sweat and her hair is limp on her forehead.
In the madness straining off her body, it begins to manifest, her body neither corporeal nor a solid matter. The rushing water that begins to fill her voice unleashes itself when she screams against Anna's palm, a sea in full storm, crashing loud against her palm, the inside of her body. Inside her, there is the safety as the shadows around her, deepen and deepen. The sea will protect her as it has always protected her family.
Then it is no imagining, water drips off her fingers, sliding in a drip - drip,drip - drip,drip,drip of a stream picking up it's current. Faster and faster, and even when Anna chokes the air out of her lungs ( she has never been without breath before, not even at the depths of the ocean floor ),
( Was this how Godfin felt? When the black came up around him? )
but even when the sound of her voice is finally smothered out of her, the ocean only grows louder as she... doesn't even try to push and shove to save herself. Her head getting dizzy, air fading away from her lungs.
He didn't need the scales to tell him something had gone bad - it was the sort of thing you felt in your bones, at the back of your teeth and in the hairs on your neck standing on end - but they'd tipped anyway, the little bell chiming to politely announce that something was happening.
He could move very quickly when he wanted to, his calm, patient and rather lax demeanor belying the physical fortitude he kept so well under wraps as god forbid someone think him capable of actually doing work.
He saw the conflict, he felt the rise of the tides familiar as the Ayakashi of the Dragon's Triangle and he flung the ofuda without hesitation. The little rectangles of paper encircled both Anna and Gillia.
Barriers that could both protect and, hopefully, contain. At least until he could get to the bottom of this. For a moment, he focused on the rectangular charms but no markings appeared on them. Neither were Mononoke which meant...
She collapsed with Anna to hold her up. Crumbling like a sack of dropped grain, crumbling inwards, sobbing completely outside of herself, like all this weight could not know how to hold itself together or up.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." She wails it as she curls to sit half on one side, shoving her face into her hands, rocking herself in cold comfort to the ebb and flow of the tides. Her hair rapidly escaping its wimple and veil, trickling water over her clothes, her body. "Forgive me, please, please - " the only words that were in defence, pitching louder and louder as the ocean grew and grew inside of her, water pooling in her shadow like her only respite. "I did not break the accords! I did not touch them! Please, please, tell Nikolai - I never, I never - !"
It's a babble of fear, and as much sense as that has ever been to anyone. Save for that truth, surely Anna was sent here to punish her for being in a war camp, for even being sent to touch blades. It was a test and she had failed, please, please. "I do not want to go into the black, please." For surely that was what Anna's hard gloved fingers were, that same deep, deep black that smothered the light and the sea.
Distracted and confused by the merchant's interruption, she is stopped in her mission. She turns to look but more quickly than not the girl is wet and weeping on her, squalling more than ever. The frenzy at least is broken for the moment and Anna shoves Gillia off of her. Stepping backwards and looking at the pathetic thing with misery. Reminds her of the Research Hall, the blind weeping things filled with the sounds of the ocean. Every memory makes her dread tick upwards again, makes her feel nauseous and alone. She very nearly rears back to start kicking, just to make it stop make it stop make it stop--
She starts to reach for the flamesprayer at her hip instead, but doesn't make it that far.
As Gillia sank to the ground sobbing, the Medicine Seller positioned himself between the two of them - not enough that he was outright shielding Gillia, but he was watching Anna like a hawk and he could move at a split second's notice if he needed.
"What," he asked Anna in his slow, halting monotone, "has happened?"
He didn't ask Gillia - he figured it was best to let the crying run its course - at least he didn't feel like the world was going to drown at any moment. He could hear the hubbub around them - others were starting to take notice of the commotion. He'd need to end this quickly - Anna looked ill - ill and murderous and something there felt wrong and he had some idea of what Gillia was.
...Thedas could become a very dangerous place for any of them.
Her hand twitches away from the cannister under her coat as his question penetrates her haze. What has happened? Why were all his questions such endless holes.
"Nothing," she murmurs, realizing how dry her mouth is. Like she's been drinking salt water and only driving herself mad. "I laid eyes upon a thing I did not wish to see, and it stared back at me unblinking, endless."
She flicks her head, sweat and ocean flinging from her hair and face. "There is a rune writ on me, it hums with that thing. Down-reaching currents. Mine is simulacra of a voice. Hers--" an accusatory finger pointed, trembling, "--hers is not."
This is the kind of talk too many dismiss in Anna, when she sounds her maddest but is giving her most dire of warnings.
It didn't sound like madness to the Medicine Seller. It sounded like someone trying to describe something there weren't adequate words for. He'd seen it a lot, just like he had seen people broken down in sobbing messes and he likewise took it in stride.
"She is not something that needs to be slain," he said, calm and quiet but also assured. The ofuda vanished save for all but one as passersby slowed to rubberneck at what looked like some delicious drama.
He gestured to the rectangle of paper - blank as ever.
"Were she a threat, this would be covered in red writing. She is not a foe for you."
"All her secrets are a threat," the Hunter replies, but she's not looking at Gillia. She's looking off, away, out into the bleakness that is her awareness of the world. She wishes weren't here. She wishes that sea had drowned her here in the street and let her float free. No, instead she's still standing here ringing like a tuning fork.
"Desire for them drives men mad. This is no place for us"
Any of them. The girl, the merchant, herself.
She realizes then that she doesn't have her whip, and swoops for it, collapses it, hug it close to her body the way a child would hug a toy. She wishes she'd run Gillia through with it while she was still half-hypnotized by the swaying of the coral.
Only then does she look at the crying thing again. There's no apology or pity in her look, only frowning unhappiness and weariness. She opens her mouth to say something but only winces and turns back to the medicine seller.
I've no secrets she would protest, were she any other, because to her mind - save what the Seller has told her to keep to herself, she has done her best to keep to herself everything that mattered.
But as she is what she is, four eyes and all, all glitter wet and coral as soft as petals that dances to be seen and not seen, nothing comes of it. Only that she curls away from Anna's gaze, turning her body in. Wishing somehow, that her mother was here, that her fathers would do as when she was a child, and hold her until all the confusion went away.
They are not here, and she has no comfort to call on. Instead, Gilia curls her feet under her, watching the sea trickle against the deck. Drying as soon as it dripped away from her. The thick smell of salt air curling about her skin like a blanket.
Some wicked part of him wanted to say that it was humanity's own failings that drove them mad. That it was, so often, the regrets of humanity that twisted these things into the treacherous monstrosities - but he held his tongue. There was a sort of sense he could make of Anna's ramblings, that she had touched the raw, open wound of harsh truths, walked the places mortals didn't belong and that was a line of inquiry for another day. Private, away from the prying ears of those who cleaved to an absent god and sealed their prejudices with his name. The less of that trouble darkening his metaphorical doorstep, the better.
"I will take responsibility for this," he said, shifting to keep Gillia out of direct view of others. He hopes his words have some kind of assurance - he doubts it but he hopes nonetheless. He'd rather not see how this conflict would end (terribly, for everyone most likely).
She hasn't had anyone look at her so much, since she arrived, save for the brief passing of their gaze on a glowing green hand. The same hands that stay over her face as she sobs, wanting now, only to crawl away from the scrutiny. The attention without the wall of advisors to tell her what to do, what to say, leaves her bereft of what it is she's supposed to behave like. This wasn't in any of their lessons. For no one would ever dare touch her in such a way.
Still, when it is that the Medicine Seller comes back to her, she lifts her head just barely to look up at him, the same confusion on her lips. "Please, I did not do it. I swear it."
His tone wasn't sharp or angry, but there was an uncharacteristic firmness to it. Though he was usually polite to the point of passivity, there was a sense of urgency when he spoke.
"We should speak elsewhere. Can you get a hold of your abilities?"
She nods, shoulders stiff in her misery, but she nods. Then she shuts her eyes, opens her mouth and speaks as clear as she can. "Please, Father, I am safe now." The sound rushes once more of water, and then, as it came, it abates like a blanket falling over one's ears. Muffling it back to a dim far off noise, no longer beating against the senses as immediately, surely trapped back behind her skin and bones.
With it gone, or at least quiet, she begins to shakily pull herself up from the floor. Her clothes soaked to the bone, but it hardly seems to bother her.
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no subject
The murmur around her form she mistakes as a shadow for a moment... but then the definition of too many eyes makes itself known to her. Grant us--
Anna all but throws the collection of blades at the girl, stepping back. Her whip flicks loose, deft and quick. It looks like lumenkin, hiding beneath the flesh of a girl. Anna is nauseated by it, by the tendrils and lights. Her head throbs with the sounds of the sea-- the runes bound in to her from the last time she had access to the workshop resonate with a deep hum of acknowledgement. The great deep sea and the hunter.
"I knew--" she chokes out, flipping the whip as restlessly as a horse stamping a hoof. "I knew you things could follow me here."
no subject
"Please - " confused, she darts up, to Anna. Misunderstanding what she had done to cause such offense. To cause the weapon that slithers to life, snake-like and just as terrifying. The weapons of wars that she had never seen until coming to this place. But, oh how it shows, that flickering below her skin. Defensive, now, rather than simply shimmering like ripples, it spreads through her. " - please don't hurt me. I am sorry, I am sorry for speaking so - "
The tears are just as immediate, the fear thick in the air as in her body. Her hands drawing up, curling her body away.
no subject
She can hear the Orphan's screaming. She can taste the rotting sea-flesh in her mouth. She snaps the whip again, it makes Gilia's dress flutter at the hems but it doesn't hit the girl. She can hear the Orphan's screaming, wailing over its dead mother and all the tortures it endured. She remembers Ebrietas turning slowly in the dark beneath the cathedral, caged there so that the Church could experiment on her weeping children. All her many eyes catching broken dapples of light as she made wishes on her Altar of Despair.
Anna pities them, and the pity feels like poison in her body. She can't pity them. She can't pity all those who have been maimed and transmogrified in the name of mankind's ambitions. She'll lose her grip. She'll lose her grip and she'll start screaming, all over again.
"You're a nightmare," she hisses, her voice low and teeth clenched. Now she's crept up on the frightened girl, fisted one of her gloved hands in those unruly curls and jerked on her head. She looks into the set of eyes that are not Gilia's. "Will you fiends ever let me sleep? Or must I gut you here to save myself?"
no subject
And she crumbles with it, being yanked by her hair, she is pulled down, her eyes screwed up tightly as the wet leaked down her cheeks, the shriek of pain is a miserable, pitiful, cowering sound. With it, as she trips, trying to pull herself free, but what is she to the strength of a warrior? "I am sorry. Forgive me, please, I meant no harm, I have sought none - I have obeyed every - "
The old creeds, the old laws, the binding of the pit, she had never strayed. She had never strayed. "Please, please." Her voice wails, high pitched, sobbing.
And unseen to all but Anna, the black eyes watch back, deep and pitying and so very full they seem bright. An ocean in there, and with it, Gilia's state is her own undoing, the fear, the need to protect herself is her own undoing. Every line of her strange rippled soul deepens, twists, like flowers growing too far, the coral blooms, her skin beyond just sallow. Cool, so cool to the touch.
no subject
She can't hear anything Gillia is saying. Every utterance sounds like the crash of the ocean. Incomprehensible and endless, assaulting her thoughts with its thick, grating fog of sound. She puts her other gloved hand over Gillia's mouth to make it stop. The other hand goes around her neck. Both squeeze.
"I hate you," Anna whispers in hazy, thick confession; insensate to the girl. All she can see are coral blossoms, frothing currents, and a thousand starry eyes. "Everything that you are. Every wish and promise and curse."
She squeezes tighter, her leather gloves creaking. She smells like sweat and her hair is limp on her forehead.
"You can't stay."
no subject
Then it is no imagining, water drips off her fingers, sliding in a drip - drip,drip - drip,drip,drip of a stream picking up it's current. Faster and faster, and even when Anna chokes the air out of her lungs ( she has never been without breath before, not even at the depths of the ocean floor ),
( Was this how Godfin felt? When the black came up around him? )
but even when the sound of her voice is finally smothered out of her, the ocean only grows louder as she... doesn't even try to push and shove to save herself. Her head getting dizzy, air fading away from her lungs.
no subject
He could move very quickly when he wanted to, his calm, patient and rather lax demeanor belying the physical fortitude he kept so well under wraps as god forbid someone think him capable of actually doing work.
He saw the conflict, he felt the rise of the tides familiar as the Ayakashi of the Dragon's Triangle and he flung the ofuda without hesitation. The little rectangles of paper encircled both Anna and Gillia.
Barriers that could both protect and, hopefully, contain. At least until he could get to the bottom of this. For a moment, he focused on the rectangular charms but no markings appeared on them. Neither were Mononoke which meant...
"Lady Gillia - please get a hold of yourself."
no subject
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." She wails it as she curls to sit half on one side, shoving her face into her hands, rocking herself in cold comfort to the ebb and flow of the tides. Her hair rapidly escaping its wimple and veil, trickling water over her clothes, her body. "Forgive me, please, please - " the only words that were in defence, pitching louder and louder as the ocean grew and grew inside of her, water pooling in her shadow like her only respite. "I did not break the accords! I did not touch them! Please, please, tell Nikolai - I never, I never - !"
It's a babble of fear, and as much sense as that has ever been to anyone. Save for that truth, surely Anna was sent here to punish her for being in a war camp, for even being sent to touch blades. It was a test and she had failed, please, please. "I do not want to go into the black, please." For surely that was what Anna's hard gloved fingers were, that same deep, deep black that smothered the light and the sea.
no subject
She starts to reach for the flamesprayer at her hip instead, but doesn't make it that far.
no subject
"What," he asked Anna in his slow, halting monotone, "has happened?"
He didn't ask Gillia - he figured it was best to let the crying run its course - at least he didn't feel like the world was going to drown at any moment. He could hear the hubbub around them - others were starting to take notice of the commotion. He'd need to end this quickly - Anna looked ill - ill and murderous and something there felt wrong and he had some idea of what Gillia was.
...Thedas could become a very dangerous place for any of them.
no subject
"Nothing," she murmurs, realizing how dry her mouth is. Like she's been drinking salt water and only driving herself mad. "I laid eyes upon a thing I did not wish to see, and it stared back at me unblinking, endless."
She flicks her head, sweat and ocean flinging from her hair and face. "There is a rune writ on me, it hums with that thing. Down-reaching currents. Mine is simulacra of a voice. Hers--" an accusatory finger pointed, trembling, "--hers is not."
This is the kind of talk too many dismiss in Anna, when she sounds her maddest but is giving her most dire of warnings.
no subject
"She is not something that needs to be slain," he said, calm and quiet but also assured. The ofuda vanished save for all but one as passersby slowed to rubberneck at what looked like some delicious drama.
He gestured to the rectangle of paper - blank as ever.
"Were she a threat, this would be covered in red writing. She is not a foe for you."
no subject
"Desire for them drives men mad. This is no place for us"
Any of them. The girl, the merchant, herself.
She realizes then that she doesn't have her whip, and swoops for it, collapses it, hug it close to her body the way a child would hug a toy. She wishes she'd run Gillia through with it while she was still half-hypnotized by the swaying of the coral.
Only then does she look at the crying thing again. There's no apology or pity in her look, only frowning unhappiness and weariness. She opens her mouth to say something but only winces and turns back to the medicine seller.
"I'll... leave her to you..."
no subject
But as she is what she is, four eyes and all, all glitter wet and coral as soft as petals that dances to be seen and not seen, nothing comes of it. Only that she curls away from Anna's gaze, turning her body in. Wishing somehow, that her mother was here, that her fathers would do as when she was a child, and hold her until all the confusion went away.
They are not here, and she has no comfort to call on. Instead, Gilia curls her feet under her, watching the sea trickle against the deck. Drying as soon as it dripped away from her. The thick smell of salt air curling about her skin like a blanket.
no subject
"I will take responsibility for this," he said, shifting to keep Gillia out of direct view of others. He hopes his words have some kind of assurance - he doubts it but he hopes nonetheless. He'd rather not see how this conflict would end (terribly, for everyone most likely).
no subject
Still, when it is that the Medicine Seller comes back to her, she lifts her head just barely to look up at him, the same confusion on her lips. "Please, I did not do it. I swear it."
no subject
"We should speak elsewhere. Can you get a hold of your abilities?"
no subject
With it gone, or at least quiet, she begins to shakily pull herself up from the floor. Her clothes soaked to the bone, but it hardly seems to bother her.