faderift | [OPEN] not good with words.

WHO: Laura Kint and YOU
WHAT: How's Laura doing? WELL, SHE'S BEEN BETTER. If you'd like a closed starter with something more specific, please drop me a line on dw or elsewhere o/
WHEN: Various days mid-Harvestmere, after the initial messenger drama
WHERE: The Gallows, Kirkwall
NOTES: TBD

first, a wildcard.

It's not exactly the easiest these days, finding Laura. She doesn't linger in common areas and frequently takes food away from the dining hall to eat privately. It's possible to catch her in corridors, however, or loading up a plate to run away with, or holed up in the corner of a nominally public room. (The library is a good place to try, Laura trying to be as unnoticeable as possible while reading fairy tales and other decidedly-not-war-philosophy books.)

But occasionally, things work out differently.

and then the ferry.

Early one morning, she strikes out for the first ferry of the day, with what she's hoping is unimpeachable logic: The messenger gave no description of her, and the townspeople have no reason to know who she is. In a way, is she not safer there?

(More importantly, walking through the Gallows is suffocating. People here know who she is and what she has done. Whether they care is immaterial.)

She wears her hood and tries to stay near enough others that she looks like she belongs here at the water's edge, waiting to go away from the Gallows for a time. It might not entirely work.

or the memorial garden.

The green, dying scent of plants draws her into Hightown despite her best efforts to avoid it. (If the messenger is still here, if the diplomat she answered to is here, they will both be in Hightown. Laura is nearly sure of that.) She hasn't spent much time there in general--it does not seem especially welcoming--but when she does, she goes to the garden that used to be a building. So it goes today.

"What is this called?" she asks the person near her. The plant, that's what she means, but anyone even mildly familiar with her could be forgiven for assuming she's referring to the garden as a whole.

or the market.

Normally, she goes to the market to examine the jewelry and spices available. Today, she is looking at boots and sacks and water skins and trying to determine which might be the best purchases to consider. She is not here to buy, only to think.

And to follow a sound down an alleyway--someplace in the shadows between buildings, a person is being held up at knifepoint. Laura stops short, heat in her gaze, and gives a flat, "Leave," to the would-be mugger.

or the ships.

Some of the ships are huge--others, little more than fishing boats--and in the months she's been in Kirkwall, Laura has taken notice of them for the first time. (She does not like water, in her defense. There has been little reason to acknowledge the possibility of sailing.) She does her best not to gawk, but it is difficult not to feel some awe at the sight of a ship in the harbor, nearly tall enough to scrape clouds.

And she occasionally asks others questions, people who look like they belong in this place. "Where is it going?" and "Does it take travelers?" and "What does it cost to travel?"

She promised Matthias she would stay until she couldn't. When that day comes, she wants to be ready.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It is not the elfroot she's accustomed to, and that makes the difference. Slight changes to scent, appearance, and name are enough to require its own category: other elfroot.

Laura regards the plant with mild interest, plucking one of the leaves at the top of the stalk, so she can rub it idly between finger and thumb. If it prefers rivers, she doubts it enjoys growing high on a cliff above the sea. But it is growing. "The Hinterlands are in...Ferelden?"

"Yeah. South Ferelden. There are.... a lot of bears?" He doesn't sound confident; Sorrel hasn't spent much time there, but you hear stories. Mostly horrible ones, which is odd for such a supposedly farm-choked place, "I'm sorry, but who are you?"

Please, who are you.

"Not that I'd prefer a regular mugging, mind. Gardening lessons are nicer. I'm just confused."

Laura's expression shifts three times in succession, perhaps too rapidly (or too minutely) to register for someone who doesn't know her: confusion, then something like hurt, finally to something studiously flat.

This is not someone who knows what she has done, unless he is lying about knowing her name and claws. This is somehow worse. He looked at her, and listened to her, and thought she seemed like someone in the process of...an irregular mugging? (She knows what muggings are. They happened in Cumberland, too.)

So she is disinclined to provide information beyond a stiff-backed, "I am not here to steal from you."

"That's...good," He says, after the moment of further incredulity has passed, "I don't actually like setting people on fire, and I don't have much worth stealing."

Sorrel lives a life buried in the past. It's a natural tendancy, for him, very Dalish. More than that; it's his job. If it's less than a thousand years old, or didn't have points to its ears, he's likely to have missed it entirely. Bookish, you might call him, if he hadn't spent so much of his life in the out-of-doors.

He doesn't know who Laura is, that is to say. Nor what she's done. There has now been something of a pause. It is not a particularly comfortable one.

"...I'm Sorrelean Ashara. And, you are...?"

Laura does not want to give her name to him, this man who assumes she would let him set her on fire without consequence, and who still does not appear to believe she wouldn't steal from him. If he did, would he tell her he was poor?

She existed in the last long moment between when she spoke and when he did, and she exists now in this space of deliberation. If the silence is uncomfortable, she does not notice. She does not care.

"It does not matter." She did not come here for the garden, only stopped to smell it. Staying is beginning to seem like a waste of time--so, royal elfroot leaf in hand, Laura turns to go.

The pause stretches its limbs lazily, like a cat, and Sorrel opens his mouth to fill that silence at just the wrong moment.

"Wh—" He starts to ask, more confused now than ever, but she interrupts him, and turns away. What in the world was that about? "...If you say so."

This is a very weird morning. Humans are always a little odd, but this is the weirdest shemlen he's met in a long while. For a minute or two he entertains himself trying to imagine who she might be, to be so cagey. Was she a Tevinter spy, sent to surveil the Riftwatch? An Antivan Assassin taking a moment in the gardens on her way back from a successful mission? A long-lost apostate, who never bought the story that the circles were dissolved, and who still skulks around the Kirkwall underground to this day?

He really doesn't know how to feel about all this. But feelings or no, time will not wait; Sorrel dusts off his robes and goes about his business. Maybe he'll see her again.

[OPEN] not good with words.

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