faderift | open | intro log.

Entry tags:

open | intro log.

WHO: Mhavos Dalat, resident newbie, & YOU.
WHAT: Mhavos takes stock of... all this... weird fucking shit.
WHEN: Aug 1-3ish, presumably everything in here doesn't happen the same day.
WHERE: Various places around the Gallows and Kirkwall proper.
NOTES: Poetry, discussions of slavery, a nerd whining about religious authenticit. Will update if anything intense happens.

a. OUTSIDE THE CHANTRY.

It's All Fool's Day. Mhavos has read of this holiday, but he's never been given leave to witness the celebration. He fins himself curious, and a little daring; he's got nothing else on his schedule, anyway.

Outside the Chantry, a play is being put on. In front of a respectably sized bonfire, play actors dance about, mimicking the sacred immolation of Andraste. Mhavos stands in the crowd, watching intently. At one point, he almost flinches, before crossing his arms and shaking his head. To himself, he murmurs, "That's not what happens."

b. GALLOWS LIBRARY.

Among the rows of long tables, Mhavos has collected around him a fair pile of books. He pages through one, writes something down in a ledger, scoffs, and returns it to a different pile, before selecting another. This pattern repeats, complete with Mhavos moving his lips to read each word, several times. Coming close, one will find the books are written in both Orlesian and Trade, and detail a large range of subjects.

Occasionally, one may hear Mhavos murmur, "terrible, terrible," under his breath, his Orlesian accent thicker than usual.

c. THE STREETS OF KIRKWALL.

You are presumably minding your own business, wandering aroun town, doing whatever it is you do with your day. That's fine. That's fair. Allowed.

A gentle hand taps your shoulder, or, if you're particularly tall, your elbow. Turning around, you'll find Mhavos Dalat, an elf with an Orlesian accent. He hands you some coin, or an object that's definitely yours.

"Excuse me," he says mildly, "I believe you were pick-pocketed."

d. LOWTOWN.

After memorizing a map of Kirkwall, Mhavos is set and determined to explore as much of it as possible on his free time. Lowtown is inevitable, and Mhavos isn't much afraid of it. He's just an elf, after all, and he elects to bring none of his belongings. It's easy enough to pass through without making any waves. Any ripples.

He watches a street performer, an elf juggling a series of hard wooden balls. The performer is a bit clumsy, and their clothes are tatty, and the balls are chipped from old paint, dented from years of use. It's clear why the performer hasn't moved their act to Hightown yet.

The performer drops two of the wooden balls, and they thud on the dirty ground before Mhavos deftly kicks them up into his hands, balancing them gracefully in his hands before throwing them back. The entire maneuver is quick and fluid, betraying far more grace than Mhavos had meant.

The performer thanks him, and Mhavos quickly makes his exit from the scene, walking fast, face down.

e. HIGHTOWN.

There are street preachers in every part of Kirkwall, but from Mhavos' survey of the city, the worst are most certainly in Hightown. He listens silently, walks by them, ignores them, until he can't stand it anymore.

On matters of faith, Mhavos has little care. But being uninformed...

You'll find him standing before one such preacher, an annoyed look on both their faces.

"That's inconsistent," Mhavos says, voice mild despite his expression. "Either we are bidden to choose the direction of our lives-- as you say, to be with the Maker or against Him-- or we are all acting in accordance with his will, but you cannot have both. If you preach, you are asking us to choose. If you preach that His will shapes our lives in every aspect, you are contradi-"

He's cut off by a loud shout from the preacher, and the words 'knife ear' are heard. Mhavos massages the bridge of his nose. "You clearly haven't read the Messendrine Epistles..."

f. WILDCARD.

[yo i'm down for anything, mix and match prompts, come up with new stuff, whatever. hmu @ wehwalt (i'm open to adds!) or a dm if you want to discuss anything!]

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“What? Motherfucker,” is not, typically, the sort of thing that one expects to hear out of a young woman with an accent like hers—she might have been dragged out of Orlais's upper echelons, but she still sounds like a High Quarter princess, aggrieved when she accepts back the delicate and costly bracelet she hadn't noticed being slipped off her thin wrist.

Snapping it back into place, she appraises him—a little shorter than she is, but not much. Elven. Oddly proportioned in the face, but she's hardly one to talk about great big eyes, or to try and claim that a goodly portion of her acquaintance couldn't be described as 'mildly unsettling at best'.

“Thank you,” seems appropriate, some of the tension that had coiled in her like a spring on being touched lessening. “I'd have been annoyed to lose that.”

Mhavos pauses a moment, unsure. He was expecting to be accused of extortion, or being the pickpocket himself. What does he do next?

It's only a second's pause, though. Hard to notice, harder to comment on, if one is bound to the rules of propriety. Anyway, he can always just state his expectation. It feels like a lie, but only because it's convenient; it's very much the truth.

He nods, a little dip of the head. Her Orlesian accent is unmistakable, and he can feel a Madame or Mademoiselle hiding beneath his tongue. He tries to forestall anything overt, but he does fall back on old habits, an almost courtly obsequience. "Of course."

He turns to go, wanting to detach himself from this unwanted memory, when he hears shouting. It's profanity and invective, knife ear and thief and bastard. The man running toward them has a bloody nose; Mhavos remembers it well. He took great pains to remove all signs of blood or fighting before returning the jewelry.

He's still not sure why he did it. It was something to do?

The pickpocket-- for that is obviously what he is-- comes at them running. Mhavos stands in front, sighing, braces himself.

"You can go," he says over his shoulder.

Her first instinct is one she tamps down, immediately; as satisfying as it would be to sweep around him and raise her shield (and it would be, because she's seen things collide with her barrier before and she doesn't get bored of it), it would also be courting clusterfuck on Kirkwall streets, liable to have her mistaken for a mage by locals less familiar with the precise details of the anchor-shards certain members of Riftwatch bear, and potentially provoke mage-related unrest in her immediate vicinity. Which she has definitely lectured other people about, and which she could expect them to waste absolutely no time in reminding her—

but for as small as she is, she still has weight to be thrown around, and she draws herself up to her full height of fuck all, fingers curling around his elbow, objecting immediately and implicitly to the way that this has been framed.

She could go. She doesn't, skirting around him (literally; they are heavy, even the lighter fabrics in this summer heat, and they swirl around his ankles with the speed of her movement) to plant herself and her spoiled, expensive humanity between him and who she surmises to be in fact her pickpocket. It is no less literal a barrier than the one she might have exploded out of her left hand.

“Felix,” she says, tranquilly.

The aging, gaunt Orlesian man who rejoins her has at least a foot on the both of them, and every appearance of having also probably just the one expression.

“This man wishes to apologise to me for his theft. Assist him.”

One small elf is one thing; the crowd would have been on his side. Guilfoyle moves like an assassin because it's what he was before he was anything else and he might be slower than he once was, but not so much that he can't take full advantage of the pickpocket's forward momentum to prevent him from making it very quickly backwards momentum, catching him by the collar of his shirt.

"Oh," he says when she stands in front of him.

"Ah," he says when the literal man in black steps in front of her.

He'd be (even more of) a liar if he pretended that wasn't enjoyable to watch. The vindictive part of him thinks, that's what you get. The rest of him thinks, what do I owe.

Hedging himself carefully, he politely extracts himself from the woman's grasp, and gives a murmured thank you. "May I ask-" He sounds hesitant, because he genuinely is- "May I ask why, mademoiselle?"

He does not ask the servant, for he is clearly a servant, and thus all his actions are credited to his master.

For some reason, namely that occasionally Gwenaëlle is so clever as to be a fucking idiot, she visibly doesn't anticipate the question, is discomfited by it and lacks an immediate, obvious answer. He could only have tipped her further into unease by expressing his gratitude loud enough that she couldn't pretend not to have noticed, but the murmur is easy enough to ignore. Less the (reasonable, easily anticipated) question.

“Madame,” she says, both to sidestep it at least momentarily and because she doesn't care what the Divine says about her marriage, likes the way her husband savors it when she is addressed correctly. “Baudin.”

(There are a lot of Baudins, in Orlais, but in Kirkwall the number of prominent young Orlesian women whose increasingly scandalous name has been signed to recently republished works is just one.)

Guilfoyle is still holding the pickpocket. His toes are touching the ground, but his heels are not. An exchange of glances sees him set down, resentful, muttering something that might have borne vague resemblance to penitence when Guilfoyle's heavy gaze doesn't leave him and then fleeing when his hands do.

Gwenaëlle regards Mhavos. At this point, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that she isn't actually going to answer him, but she says— “I like that bracelet. I gave its twin to a friend.” And in the moment, that had been enough.

Edited 2019-08-03 13:26 (UTC)

"Je suis désolé," he murmurs out of habit, "Madame Baudin."

He hasn't been in Kirkwall long enough to know of any infamous Baudins. It's just a name, a familiar one at that, for a whole host of reasons. Anyway, her answer is unsatisfactory, perhaps pointedly so. He shouldn't press it.

He does anyway. "You believed I was not the pickpocket. You defended me from another man who, for all you know, is entirely innocent. I-... Why?"

What will he do with his freedom? Blunder into stupid situations and try to get himself killed, apparently.

Edited 2019-08-03 17:28 (UTC)

The scornful look she sends after the pickpocket's retreating back is immediate, and she thinks speaks for itself on whether or not she lends any credence to for all she might know. That her entire argument being 'he looked sort of guilty, under the blood' and 'you gave me back my bracelet' isn't actually very compelling is probably why she allows it to only speak for itself. It's much harder to argue with things that aren't said.

“I wouldn't have done it if I knew there was going to be a quiz after,” she says, with some asperity. “What answer are you going to find satisfactory?”

If there is such an answer. If there is such an answer that she would give, even less likely.

“Madame,” Guilfoyle's voice is quiet, steady; polished by years of upper class service but originating somewhere much lower. “The ferry.”

To the Gallows, back to Riftwatch.

“There'll be another,” is a reflex.

In that tone, with that accent-- he takes the answer as a reprimand. What little expression on his face fades completely. A quick dip of his head, deferential, servile, and he takes a step back.

"My apologies, Madame," he says. "I'll be on my way."

Her expression shifts—frustration, but she angles it past him in a way that is both purposeful and not precisely personal. It is a point of pride that she is only ever unkind on purpose, so people fucking know—

“I don't pay him,” she says, and Guilfoyle's expression doesn't shift but his eyes do briefly cast towards the Maker, as if to beg of strength, “he's doing charity work.”

—although just because she thinks and strives for that to be the case doesn't make it necessarily so. It isn't precisely an apology, only that she can see what happens in the moment and dislikes it.

“Where's your way?”

That she proposes he's under no obligation to defer to her and then poses a question that only a lifetime of entitlement could suggest to her he'll answer is a contradiction she doesn't notice.

Mhavos is, in fact, entirely unsure what her meaning is. Plenty of people aren't paid to do work. Most are Chantry laymen, slaves or indentured servants. She assumes the hulking mass behind her is the former; it makes no difference to Mhavos, but why point it out?

He takes a half-second to consider his answer, looking for the one that seems least suspicious. Which won't lead him to the stocks, or worse? It's the truth, oddly enough. Stray elves ought always be able to prove their employment. Their masters would miss them, making them a less appealing subject for capture, and most importantly, it explains what they're doing on their own.

"Back to my place of work, Madame." He says, his eyes still carefully downcast. "I was heading to the Gallows. I am a clerk there."

“Oh—good. Then we're going the same way, but we're going to miss the ferry—”

that a moment ago she was indifferent to in pursuit of unraveling this confusing interaction,

“—so we should probably get a move on before someone else interrupts you.”

Not her, but she's not insensible to the fact that her timely intervention might just make him a target in the next hour or so. Not enough, she thinks, to merit a lingering grudge; enough to prompt a petty retaliation, though, the moment her back is turned.

Mhavos is just confused. This interaction has, continuously, failed to go as expected, and he's somewhat at a loss. Having only gut instinct and decades of conditioning to guide him, he falls into step immediately. "I'll see if I can catch it."

After all, a well-dressed noblewoman (or a woman who looks like a noblewoman; in many situations, there really is no difference) is enough to stall a ferry a few moments in hopes of getting a few extra coin in thanks. Mhavos dashes forward, fleet-footed through the crowd at the docks.

There is some shouting. In Kirkwall, Mhavos has learned, there is always shouting. He lets out a shrill whistle, and says a highborn woman is coming; as predicted, the ferryman eases his oar back, paddling in reverse.

An odd feeling settles in the pit of her stomach that Gwenaëlle doesn't know how to identify, and behind her, Guilfoyle folds his hands behind his back and continues at an unhurried pace, observing. She doesn't need to decipher his behaviour the way he does hers; she understands what's happening, what she's looking at. That it's been a while since she inspired it doesn't mean she's forgotten.

She wonders what her mother would think. It occurs to her she doesn't know which of them she means.

Deciphering her own reactions is set momentarily aside when the ferry comes to enough of a stop that they can board it and the ferryman's expression clears into familiarity, “Head too delicate to run for it yourself, girl?”

“Excuse me,” she says, very primly, as if she has never crawled hungover into the bottom of this ferry in her entire life and has absolutely no idea to what he could possibly be referring. Guilfoyle meets his eyes over her head, and when all of them are stowed, he pushes off.

Mhavos is deferential to this woman; that, he can't escape. But he's not so deferential to take offense for her sake. He just keeps his eyes blank and focused on nothing, letting himself slide into the comforting nothingness of a servant, living furniture.

He could say nothing. Some part of him wants to ride it out in silent oblivion so he can hide elsewhere. This is what he's doing with his freedom? Really?

But he's a fool, so he says, "I am Mhavos," quietly, carefully, "should you have further need of me." Quietly, carefully an idiot.

For some reason, a modicum of tension in her shoulders releases. (Not all of it, but she's Orlesian; has she ever been without tension in a public space in her entire life? It seems unlikely.)

“Gwenaëlle,” she says, although she's aware the likelihood he was expecting her to treat it as a trade is low. “I'm with Forces,” and there are less likely looking candidates for that, but not many, and fewer still whose pretty faces had been sketched onto the covers of informative Inquisition pamphlets a couple of years ago, with a different surname.

(Copies of the editions she'd published remain in circulation, mainly in Ferelden and Orlais; the Gallows library has several, though she dimly remembers Adalia struggling to locate one of them when she was new.)

“Or the central tower. If you need anything. You look new.”

A pinscratch appears at the corner of Mhavos' mouth, the closest to a frown he'll allow himself. The name Gwenaëlle is a rather unusual Orlesian name, held principally by one writer of note (making the name even more rare, as it's attached to some scandal about the writer).

There's no earthly reason to point out that if she didn't want to give a name, there was no reason she had to give a fake one. He expected to be met with silence. He always expects to be met with silence.

He ought to return the expectation with more. He would if he were smart. But this 'freedom' makes him stupid; he doesn't know the rules, and he's eager to say all the things he's never been able to.

"You've read her as well?"

Her surprise is genuine; all of her expressions are, which is one of the more interesting things about her face besides the fact that she's only worn a mask on it perhaps three times in as many years, now. Orlais is not kind to someone as easily read as she is, and divorced from that immediate context she knows there's a tendency for new acquaintances to assume that it's false, to ascribe her more complicated motives than she has.

But it isn't. She's just surprised. It takes her a moment to parse what his question means, and she says, slightly cautiously—

“Have I read Gwenaëlle Baudin?”

It's a politer ask than why you're giving me a false name. But he doesn't say it. He doesn't think he ever will. Not to people like her. It seems impossible, like the moon getting up and walking away.

So he just nods, polite, as though he hasn't noticed the shock of being caught out on her face.

In spite of herself, she starts to smile.

(It suits her better than the supercilious way she'd said assist him, earlier, negligent. She can still shrug on the trappings of that life too easily for her own comfort, the more she's obliged to examine it.)

“You've read my work,” she says, turning towards him in the ferry seat, her hands curved around her knees, an ease in her obvious delight that lightens her entire affect. Alexander had cited her observations of a lady as among the reasons for his joining the Inquisition when he did, and it had been tempting at the time to tell absolutely anyone who would listen. (She'd restrained herself to a small handful of confidantes, who had demonstrated what she feels was the appropriate level of pride in her accomplishment.)

"Ah..." The sound escapes him unbidden. How does he proceed? Is she lying? Telling the truth? There's nothing to be gained in either outcome, and none of it makes sense. And he remembers, suddenly and without meaning to, a line from Baudin's Réverbères: to you he was never the giant he believed himself to be.

It makes him nostalgic, but for what, he couldn't say.

The logical part of him returns from its respite; if this is some elaborate hoax, there's nothing for it but to play along. But damn him, he can feel his cheeks heating.

"I'd heard she was with the Inquisition," he said. "I'd not read the latest periodicals." Is that the right word in Trade? "Riftwatch as well?"

“I stopped writing them after the Winter Palace,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear; in Iorveth's absence, it isn't braided as tightly as she likes. Thranduil doesn't always has time. Sometimes her arms ache, from archery practise, and she hasn't the patience to wind it so precisely. “I have an anchor-shard, so when they sent everyone to the Gallows...”

She tilts her left hand so he can better see the dull green glow in the center of her palm binding her to the war effort long before she made the choice to throw all in.

“So. Riftwatch as well. You've read the re-releases, I take it,” since he recognised Gwenaëlle Baudin where Val de Fonce had been so fucking appalled to discover that Jehan's wretched little baby cousin was the Ilde Sauvageon he'd so admired, “those were all—I did that after we came here, but before we. Seceded. Whatever the fuck it was we did.”

There is a similarity to her writing voice in her sharpness, but her casual conversation wants for editing. She can polish what she puts down in a way she's never mastered, face to face.

“It was appropriate to use a pseudonym when I had a reputation to protect, but I'm not a Vauquelin any more.”

And her reputation is an entirely different beast.

His brow lifts slightly, inspecting the oddity. Magic in the hands of a non-mage. And then, the absurd emotion: I'm horribly behind.

He inclines his head a quarter inch. "I have- had... My selection was limited to the library of whomever employed me." Or is it whoever? He hates Trade. "And what time I was afforded. Le Comte de Tiratlé was a fan."

And he has no clue how to offer condolences, and why should he want to? But it's clear he believes her utterly, now. He can't help it. He wants to believe it's true. The logical part of his mind squirms for purchase, and is ignored completely.

"I preferred the re-releases. Your edits and commentary gave them more context."

Not what he meant to say.

A good point, though, and an observation of what had been a pointed decision about works whose lack of context had been a deliberate choice in the first place. An artistic rebellion to go with all the rest of them: if you will look, then I defy you not to see me. She's never courted attention the way some of her peers did; the lack of control she had over it had always frustrated her. She asserts herself, the ways that she can. The ways that she knows how.

There is no need to offer condolences; she's still smiling. Warmer, if anything, for his stated preference.

“Art when it leaves you is a hundred little deaths,” she says, thoughtfully. “You die and are remade every time someone reads it. What you intended didn't matter. The impact matters. But I wanted—”

She hesitates.

“I wanted to remind everyone whose words they were. Thank you.”

He cocks his head to the side, unable to stop a genuine smile. Poetry and song, paintings and sculpture, have always touched his heart directly. He let them, because they could not hurt him. Now, he can't help but feel that familiar warmth. The world is not the cold place it pretends to be, if people can rise above their petty wants to create something more than immortal.

"I read your books over and over; I'm sorry to have killed you so many times."

Too close to the metaphorical, far from literal. That's what art is to him, anyway. A freedom from the bounds of the actual, wrapped in the words of something just close enough to be familiar, uncomfortable, gentle and sharp.

"I admit, I have a preference for more strict metered form, but your verse was always... it was touching enough that I forgot the indifference to structure. Or perhaps that aided it."

my feet remember the way / twenty-one steps, staircase, balcony, the third door / the graze of stone under my palms, a collision

He knows it was a poem about loves and lovers, but he always felt that one line, that little verse, encapsulated how he felt when leaving the scene of a murder, halting and intimate and horrid.

I wanted to die would be a melodramatic and absurd thing to say out loud, even if she laughed when she said it, even if she meant it. Especially if she laughed, and if she meant it. So she doesn't, she says, “I have the luxury of being able to make my own rules, about structure,” which is and is not a statement about poetry.

A statement about expressing something, through poetry. A luxury that she might not have had when she wrote those things, and expelled them from herself under a carefully chosen nom de guerre. She wouldn't say she isn't indifferent to structure because the point has always been that she would like to be; that she could take refuge in this thing where she was allowed to be. Where she allowed herself to be.

It's been a while, she thinks, since she talked to anyone about her poetry. The thought doesn't tilt one way or another; she only sits with it.

“I've thought about publishing newer works, but we've been—”

A gesture, towards the Gallows. She's hip-deep in Riftwatch's war effort, and has been for some time. Poetry had fallen somewhat by the wayside, or at least sharing it. “I gave my husband a book of everything I'd written about him for a gift.”

I have sharpened the blade for you, she had whispered to paper in a piece she might say she has half-forgotten and she has not, which had not been about him but about her and republished with all the rest, unedited, without comment, I have held myself still.

the streets of kirkwall.

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