open: we built this circle on rock and roll

[exequy]

WHO: Open (mostly), targeted toward people who care about mage problems but anybody's welcome.
WHAT: Looting a Circle, fighting some scavengers, and arguing about the ethics of falsifying records of abuse.
WHEN: Cloudreach
WHERE: Markham
NOTES: This is a sliver of a couple bigger schemes, including a plan to publicize mage mistreatment (which will double as an anti-Gertruda Divine-influencing plot) and a plan to hide some Circle valuables from the Chantry, but your character doesn't have to be aware of those plans to participate in this! They can just be along to help fight bandits and carry heavy stuff. ETA: In some places this log says Ostwick, rather than Markham, because I'm dumb. Ignore them.

Calling an outbreak of enchantment-related deaths and mysterious incidents in Markham convenient would be horribly insensitive to the various burn victims and vanished druffalo involved, but, you know. It is. All of the arguments about whether or not to make formal request for permission to secure the Circle's contents, when it's already their stuff, and if Ostwick says no it might mean the Inquisition won't give them leave to go—those arguments were all for nothing. Markham's response is, essentially, Please do. Hooray!

Comments

[sarcophage]

This charming tangle of sentences is quietly appreciated as they all come tumbling out in whatever order they arrive. Lea himself was much the same way at that age, bursting with ideas and questions, struggling to sort them all; now the flow of his thoughts is smooth as blood.

"Every sound."

Taking care to leave a clear line of sight between the boy and the man on the floor, Lea stops about halfway between them, looks from one to the other and back again. His look to the captive is a touch less neutral, eyes slipping sideways to complete the turn, the warning made clear.

To the boy, he says, "It'd be cruel to leave him like this, don't you think?"

He's watching Matthias carefully now, and calmly, to see how he answers with his body as well as his voice, his tone, the words he chooses. There's a bit of blood freckled on his cheekbone, his neck—probably not his own. (But then, he's probably not the only one.)

[inkindled]

Matthias, wrong-footed by the question and the cool calm way that Leander looks at him when he asks it, runs the question once more through his head. It's simple, doesn't need another real pass. The implication is strong.

He looks back at the man, wavering.

"I mean," slowly, as he looks him over, and then darts a glance back at Leander, "maybe. A little. Yeah. Only they'll be sending him away, like I said, so--"

Uncertain, he looks back at the man again, trying to see if he can read something on him, some tell that will let him know what to do. The bandit has his eyes on the floor, and is sitting, hunched forward, in pain.

"If there's any justice, they won't be kind to him." Decisive, that. Something to be believed in.

[sarcophage]

They'll be kinder than Leander himself would be. (Has been.)

He presses a faint smile, nods just the once: both seem purely polite, out of respect for the boy's opinion, stated so firmly. Or for justice, perhaps.

"We'll tie him up, then. If he lives, he can join the others."

The handful of scavengers who managed not to die, he means, whether by surrendering or by a scrap of threadbare luck, or by cowardice, like this fellow here. Lea would rather think of it as wisdom—and that the wiser move would be to flee at first glimpse of a mage—since self-preservation is the most natural instinct. He can respect a man who recognizes when it's time to get out.
(Can. Doesn't always.)

"Have you found a rope? I haven't got one."

As he steps to the glyph, Lea snuffs the effect with an almost trivial gesture—mostly his first two fingers—and then scuffs at it with his boot. Instantly audible: the bandit's thin and careful breathing, the slow grit as he drags his leg to a position no more comfortable than the last.

If he lives. As if Lea himself is powerless to change the man's fate. He was introduced as a Creation mage before they'd even left the Gallows, so the party would know where to turn. (Isaac's the obvious choice; Lea's not a trained medic.)

[inkindled]

Pleased at what seems to be both a fair compromise and a show of respect for his valued opinion, Matthias mumbles something along the lines of yeah sure somewhere hang on mate and swings around the bag that he's been carrying with him, for supplies and to carry back anything useful he might find. There is a rope in there, somewhere--what if he'd found a hole in the ground and had needed to climb down it, he'd be bloody glad for a rope then--and then there's the sharp staggered sound of pained breathing, and Matthias looks around, surprised.

The breathing is coming from the man, but Matthias sees the scuffed glyph first. Then he makes the connection, and looks up just in time to see the man pull his leg around. Even that looks sluggish and painful, and Matthias' breath catches before he thinks better of it. A bandit is a bandit, right. At least he was allowed to live.

"He sounds bad." He holds out the coil of rope, decisive in that, too, at odds with the quiet pitch of his voice. "Worse than I thought. He looks hurt, but I reckoned, I don't know-- I mean, it's the right thing to do, isn't it. 'Cause he deserves it. Getting taken somewhere else and having everyone know what he did and all. Even if he could be healed," and can he be? Matthias doesn't know. Most injuries he's seen were too far gone by the time he was seeing them. If anyone could heal, a Creation mage could. Might. "Even if he could, that wouldn't be totally right."

[sarcophage]

A Creation mage could, indeed. Will he, though? It seems not. Perhaps he's no more sure of what should be done than Matthias; perhaps, as a Circle mage, he's unaccustomed to combat. Certainly there are worse reactions to have than lack of affect.

Lea raises his hand in gentle refusal to the rope. It's yours, kid—you do it.

"I've done enough for him already." To. The word he should be using is to. After some deliberation—not at all visible outside his own head—he offers this inadequate warning: "Mind his wrists."

It may be difficult to tell from the outside, especially if one isn't accustomed to spotting injuries, but both the man's wrists are in bad shape. He's been careful not to move them, hasn't even flexed a finger, since Matthias entered the little room. His legs, on the other hand, are fine. In case he feels like running. (Leander was hoping he would try.)

[inkindled]

Uncertain, a measure crestfallen, Matthias looks down at the rope that he's holding. This part has never been his--the typing-up part, the part where the prisoner is really taken. They didn't much do prisoners. And when they did, it was--

Well, it was different.

But he's not a coward. He puts away that feeling, and he moves, decisively, into the storeroom proper, crossing the glyph where Leander had scuffed a path. It feels too strange to enter it by any other way.

"What d'you," he starts, but now that he's closer he can see the nasty shape that the wrists are in, and the mute pain that is in the man's breathing gets clearer--the way his mouth is clamped tight and his eyes are all glassy--but Matthias has seen worse, of course he has. And this is a bandit, someone that was stripping the Circle. When this was a Circle--a proper Circle, not just an empty half-haunted wreck--no one who was made to live here wanted to be here in the first place but they were made to be here, so by rights, the things that were here belong to the mages that suffered for them. Not to bandits.

He drops to a stoop, then, and throws the rope about the man's wrists. The intake of breath that answers that is half a sob. Matthias ignores it, stuffs his ears against it. He loops, and pulls, and knots. Easy movements. He's been tying knots all his life.

The last tug is maybe a little too sharp. The man is openly in pain now, panting wet and ragged, breathing through his teeth. Please, maybe, is in there somewhere, and Matthias looks back at Leander, trying to set his face into something blank.

"S' done. We take him back to the others now, yeah?"

[sarcophage]

The bandit thinks he's braced himself for pain, but at the first touch of the rope he knows he hasn't come close. Please, he says, as if anyone is listening.

He hears you, Leander wants to say. It's just that he doesn't care.

So in silence he stands, quite still, and looks on past Matthias's shoulder. His gaze flits between their hands, their faces. Satisfaction touches the shape of his mouth, the minuscule bunching of his eyelids—a smile without a smile, pushed just that little bit further to become something like a restrained grimace when the boy turns to see him.

Leander steps into the broken circle (on the floor of the broken Circle), and, as he comes in close to the two of them, grasps Matthias's shoulder warmly. It's brief; reassurance isn't a complex message. By the time he's crouched, Lea's hand has slipped away, reaching instead for the man's bound hands. He's ignoring the signs of panic, grasping wide across both wrists, rope and all.

The Veil shifts. Light touches their three faces from below, soft as a reflection on cool water, passes through rope to impress his will on living bone. The man's terrified silence bursts suddenly as a sob of relief.

"The cracked bones were grinding—I'm making it stop. It won't relieve his pain completely," he explains, library quiet, "and his wrists may never bend properly again. But it will save us having to answer too many questions. There—now we take him."

[inkindled]

Relief steals over Matthias--first at the touch on his shoulder, and then at the neat solution to the current true problem. It's traitorous, a little, isn't it? He should know by now what he's doing; he should have a firmer understanding of himself and how everything fits together in the world around him.

Everything, from bandits to justice to punishment to mercy--it isn't so complex. What he wants is to do the right thing, and do right by people he cares about. Reassurance isn't such a silly thing to crave when the world is turned on its ear, when the ground shifts a little, sometimes daily, and leaves Matthias without an understanding of which way is up. It's right that a thief should be punished. It's not right to leave him in torment. Not for very long, at least. Just enough that he taste some bit of that punishment that waits for him.

The glow of magic is as much a comfort as the bracing grip at his shoulder. All right, there it is: the ground to be stood upon. Matthias can count on magic, on someone giving him an answer, telling him it was well done, what he did, and here's what we do next. That means that he's already brightened a little once it's all settled.

"Yeah," he says, with a kind of brimming gratefulness, "brilliant. Well done."

Like Leander needs to hear that. He knows what he's about, clearly. To save face, Matthias pushes to his feet and grabs at the rope, brusque again. "All right--you heard him. You'll be all right, more or less, at least for now--so you can get proper justice--so c'mon, then--on your feet. And if you say too much," and he shoots Leander a look, a little conspiratorial, waiting to have this vague threat verified, "well, then things'll go a bit differently for you."

[sarcophage]

Leander nods once, meaningful, lips pressed in approval: nonspecific conspiracy confirmed.

"That's right," he says, his voice still low, laden with kindness and gravity. And with a touch of furtive pride, perhaps, if you're listening for it. (Or want badly enough to hear it.) Rather than leaving him to the mercy of the rope and his own unsteady limbs, Lea helps their captive to his feet, grasping one arm just below the elbow while they stand.

With a single squeeze of his hand, those wet eyes turn to him with fear renewed; he meets them, steady, and his fingers release, gentle as you please. What benevolence. "Carefully, now." I can take it back just as easily. "Watch your step."

He means the footing, surely. Well done, and here's what we do next:

"Go ahead, you know the way back. I'll follow your lead."

[inkindled]

If there was ever anyone listening for pride, it's Matthias. He's fine-tuned toward it, poised to pick apart even the shortest sentence to find the evidence. His shoulders lift--self-consciously, first, hitched up around his ears--and then to a more manful position, settled comfortably under the mantle of approval.

That's how he remains as they set off, out of the storage room. "Step," he cautions, without looking behind him, in case the bandit has forgotten the two short stairs that lead to the hall. Watch your step.

It's a curious sort of parade that they make, with a prisoner between them. They're doing the right thing. There's a little spring in Matthias' step, born of his confidence in their judgement and their mercy. All that uncertainty is ebbing away. This is all going to tie up neatly, and it will be thanks to the two of them that it happened.