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WHO: Flint & Leander
WHAT: 2 Guys vs. Some conveniently placed misc Venatori informants; discussing mage business.
WHEN: Cloudreach
WHERE: The Wounded Coast
NOTES: Violence, definitely. Will update if necessary.

A week ago, a supposedly neutral ship flying an Antivan flag was seen leaving the waters near Val Chevin. Rumor has it, it carries a suspicious weight of goods possessed from the Orlesian countryside, some sum of raw coin, and Maker only knows what else in the way of occupation profits now en route Somewhere That is Almost Certainly Not Antiva. The trouble though, as is the trouble with most things here in the South, comes with legitimizing any assault on the ship either now or in the future.

And so here they are - attempting to legitimize themselves.

From their hiding place in the rocky hills along the coastline, Flint can just make out the smudge of the ship's masts hull down over the horizon through his glass. It is exactly where the lookout said it has been for hours, and now that dusk is falling it has become clear why the vessel has lingered so long. For the past hour, a small ship's boat has been creeping in to shore. Here, in the failing light, it finally runs up onto the rocky beach and disgorges four of its company with packs and traveling kit onto the sand.

In a matter of seconds, the boat is pulling away again. In a matter of seconds, they are two Riftwatch agents surveying the arrival of three men and a woman who can have no legitimate reason to be here, for is they did they might have landed in Kirkwall rather than here in some mysterious inlet no doubt meant to lie far from prying eyes.

Flint clicks the spyglass shut with a small rasp of metal. He looks to his partner in this.

"Ready?"

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Clever. He'll have to see how his more recent spellwork fares against an abomination some other time—not to trivialize the brutal choreography unfolding just metres away. One pleasure traded for another is hardly a loss.

The axe raises once more, and it falls, swinging too wide to be a mere error of momentum, its bearer trapped by his own instinct to turn away from the oncoming barrage of lights. They seem rather like wisps, but even lesser than their fellows, all of a single mind: to do harm. With five cracks, smaller echoes of the earlier thunder, they burst on impact in a cluster around head and shoulders. One misses; it kicks up a ring of gravel, instead, and flickers out in its little crater while the axeman staggers alongside it.

Leander snaps his attention away from the growing quantity of blood to look down to the screaming man—rather, to his sudden quiet as he regains enough wits to detect the body above him, a slim silhouette in the fading light. Their eyes meet. Leander towers like a shrine, the supplicant beneath him.

"Don't run," he says, like a parent warning a child.

Afterward, he checks pockets and packs for anything of value - letters, orders, any scrap of meaningful intelligence. A book in one of the dead men's packs has notes in the margins and though they seem perfectly innocuous, Flint sets it aside as something for Madame de Cedoux. A ring on the mage's small finger with a Tevene character inscribed on the band is pocketed. And then they are left with four corpses in the rapidly darkening twilight, the constant hissing of the sea against the nearby beach, and the smell of swelling weather on the salt air.

Flint fetches up the discarded bolt. Stuck sand is knocked free before it's tucked in alongside its unused fellows.

"Best to clear the path."

For all that the narrow goat trails on the coast are known for the threat of violence, they aren't a pair of hill bandits here to leave corpses strew the length of the beach any more than they have reason to hide them (though they could; the tide goes in three hours and would suck whatever is in the surf out with it).

While the captain bends to loot, his companion mage stands watch, avails himself of the opportunity to sip from a lyrium phial without being observed. Half should do for now; relying on a draught for rejuvenation is one of the quicker routes to death. And it won't help his lungs, anyway.

From the blood-soaked mage, he takes only a pair of similar little bottles—same contents, differently styled vessel.

"Mm," affirmative. "Shall we raise them up for the birds?"

He's already moving to slip his hands beneath the shoulders of a dead man. Yellow-pale, glazed eyes, the fatal slash to chest that didn't quite sever the baldric crossing it. The question wasn't a question; he's decided. If Flint doesn't care for the idea, he may watch Leander, of slim build and comparatively weak muscle, drag the bodies up and around to the rise and line them up himself.

He will fuss with them, either way, reciting verses at a murmur all the while. Placing hands over trunks, straightening heads, brushing the hair out of their eyes, pausing only when the first scant raindrops fall to feel a few more on his own upturned face. Flint can do whatever he likes with the weapons. Leander only concerns himself with the mage's short staff, which he leaves in one piece, adornments and all, and places on her chest beneath folded hands like the sword of a knight laid to rest.

Draw your last breath, my friends.
Cross the Veil and the Fade and all the stars in the sky.
Rest at the Maker's right hand,
And be Forgiven.

There. He stands, at last, and gathers himself for further travel.

The work will is done faster with two hands, and he has little interest in waiting as Leander busies himself with the fussing over of corpses. Were he in some greater hurry to be returned to Kirkwall, there might be a discussion over these finicky details. As it is, Flint takes the dead by the ankles so they might be dredged up the hill faster. The axe is replaced into is leather cover, and his sword belt loosened to accommodate slinging it to his side, but the the rest of the little group's armaments are left to them. It is likely that their belongings will be stripped by the opportunistic people who make a habit of picking over the Wounded Coast long before any scavenger strips flesh from bone.

And that it that. Once Leander is ready, Flint simply turns from the rise and leads the way down the shale and stony incline. There can be little reason to discuss the occupation of the past hour, and so he doesn't as they find their way not to footpath and the narrow roadway they'd taken to get here, but rather a secondary route that leads them through some other tangle of foothills trending in some twisting direction back to the city. The last thing they need would be to simply reverse course and be jumped by some fucking bandits who might have seen them come this way in the afternoon and had bet on the possibility that they might return with nightfall.

The occupation of finding this new path absorbs much of the space for conversation for some time. But eventually, on some irregular rise, Flint pauses in the speckling rain and the purple dusk to consider the horizon line.

"Damn."

Never mind how dark it is out there over the sea; it smells like a storm.

"We'll cut up into the foothills. We're more likely to find some shelter there." So much for getting back before the last ferry.

Flint assisted him without complaint, and so Leander follows him likewise. He is tired—it's obvious in his breath, in how he goes quiet for longer stretches—but he keeps pace, doesn't stumble, takes just the one rest after a difficult rise. The last rise, as it turns out, before the weather catches up with them.

"Well," he breathes, looking back, "that might've been dangerous in this." In the rain, he means. Flattened wet curls and strange smile, dripping, paler in the dusk.

What they find in the foothills is a place that tells a story: Ages earlier, this massive slab of rock tumbled down from a height and came to rest, and has since been weathered by time into a welcoming shape. There's an opening at each end, and a triangular space between them, nearly tall enough to stand in at its high point. It's a place that's been found before. Has to have been, Leander thinks, as he leans in to see the scattering of sticks and straw-like grass leavings—once arranged, perhaps, by a hand or two, long since batted about by wind and the exploration of animals.

"I couldn't have pictured a better shelter myself," he says, already stooping under the sloped ceiling, and corrects himself a moment after he's dropped his rain-heavy pack: "Well, no. Mine would've come with a towel." Sniff. "Shall I draw up a fire?"

Exhausted, soaked; still polite.

"If you would."

The slab above them is all dark from smoke, so it must be at just such a high to both keep the rain out and not choke them with a fire. Stooping, Flint sheds his own rained out gear - pack and crossbow, the salvaged ax, the sword at his belt (a veritable miniature armory) - and shifts through his things in search of the paltry field rations he'd brought along, not anticipating there would be any real need for them. They'll have to survive on the unglamorous meal of hardtack and salt pork for the evening, and make do with sleeping on hard ground under damp cloaks.

(Someone more superstitious might take all of this as a bad omen, given the givens.)

While Flint unburdens himself of various sodden items, Leander takes a knee and swipes at the stone floor with his palm until there's a good amount of fairly clear space. Out comes the chalk, then, and a series of marks he's made hundreds of times, in this very order—still he draws them carefully, without any sign of complacency in the sure speed of his hand. And then: a fire.

"It smells better," he explains, while throwing some of the cave's botanical detritus into the circle. (And it does fill some strange olfactory absence.) While rising, "I've an idea—" and he promptly exits the shelter, leaving Flint alone for several minutes with the burning glyph.

Quiet, but for the sound of rain.

Soon come hissing shuffling sounds; a pause, a pair of woody snaps, like thick twigs or bones; the sound growing nearer.

Finally Leander reappears, hunched and dripping and half-dragging the straightest tree limb he could find. It's half the width of his wrist, and not so long he shouldn't be able to carry it, but the state of him should answer any questions about that. Finally, he sits like he's going to rest—heavier, with a sigh—and cordially accepts whatever portion the captain offers.

"It's for a rack." He's looking past his shoulder to the branch lying there. Chewing, breaking off the nearest twigs, throwing them on the fire. "For drying our things. I'll finish it in a moment."

Edited (i'm not sorry this time) 2020-06-21 03:08 (UTC)

He's settled himself near the fire by the time Leander returns, and is fair enough when it comes to splitting the rations and passing the nearly empty water skin (a necessity, given how unpleasantly salty the cured meat is otherwise). It is mention of the stick which at last breaks past what has until now seemed like some deep well of reserve - not patience, exactly, but something practiced and methodical which had carried them free of Kirkwall, which had lived with them while they'd lain in wait for the Venatori in the foothills, which had followed them even as they'd made their way West again.

"Hand it here."

Using one of the finger thin branches at its end, Flint hefts the branch across both their knees and into his lap where he begins to strip it of its extraneous twigs so Leander might take a moment to look slightly less like he might keel over from the effort of being upright. The stone slab is cold at his back, but the fire is warm down the line of the one leg his has outstretched at an angle from it, and the air beyond their shelter is that heavy early summer kind - more heavy than it is chilled.

A welcome gesture, and a welcome shift in mood, however slight. The branch scrapes harmlessly across his thighs and into Flint's care. At first he grasps the sprigs over his own lap, as though to work alongside him, but shortly loosens it and just leaves his hand there.

Another breath. Deeper, this time, and longer coming out. A lengthening moment spent with his head tilted back, his eyes not quite closed, watching the dimly flickering stone, listening to the rush of the rain and the softly crackling glyph and the rustling of the man seated nearby.

Another breath, then. Shorter, this time. A sucking in of energy. Subdued resolve. He straightens his spine, clips off another dry and salty morsel with his teeth. Chews while he pries a twig loose.

"I thought I might lay my staff across them," he says, once his mouth is clear. "Break this piece in half, fork the ends. Shouldn't take long." As he lifts the hardtack to finish it, still conversational, "I suppose we could fasten it with this. Chew it and spit it on the joints." Not really. He's just aware they're eating paste.

He huffs out a low sound tinged with humor, if not necessarily the good kind. It's a terrible joke, and warrants a pained response in kind. "You're not obligated to eat it if you'd rather not."

The work continues interrupted though, twisting off still-green fingers of wood. When he reaches thumb width growths that aren't quite so eager to be worked free of their fastenings, Flint fetches the dead man's axe and plies its sharpened edge. It is an easy, industrious rhythm: the thuck of the blade being mischaracterized as a hand tool, the soft snap of twigs and rustle of subsequently discarded bits and pieces over stone. It isn't quiet.

"You should consider requesting a transfer if the idea hasn't occurred to you already," he says, unprompted as the axe drives a notch into a particularly stubborn bit of the branch. "I could use you in the field."

Ha, got him. There's a hint of playful triumph in Leander's manner as he settles, not back into torpor, but into presentness. A tired body shored up by the lively mind within—content, still, to rest until the captain speaks again.

"I'm not much of a soldier." Skepticism, smiling crookedly. It's a flattering suggestion, whether or not it's meant to be. "But I'd be lying if I said the idea hadn't come to me." Not that he's above lying—still. "There's a sort of... grim thrill to it, isn't there—the fighting. The purity of it. It's just you and them and a single purpose between you. You don't find that in many other places."

"It's not how I'd choose to describe it," though Leander can call it what he likes. Setting the axe aside, he hefts the limb farther along - the bare end of it jutting out into the rain so he can work on clearing the section that had sat idle across Leander's knees. There's an economy to this, the twisting of bark and snapping away of minor appendages.

"And you wouldn't be the only member of the division who isn't a soldier. The Provost's wife is among our number, as is your good friend Colin."

A flat look plays in Leander's direction. Now who thinks he's funny?

(Thak, grunts the axe blade as it bites into wood.)

"Oh, well, in that case."

Ha, ha.

Leander regards Flint for a time, watching his hands, the axe, his face. Mostly his face. He's never sat this close to the captain for this long; it's a fine opportunity to imbibe details. Crows' feet, creases, freckles. The nose's slope in profile, the ear's intricate shape. The shadows of bones beneath skin.

"How would you describe it, then?"

"As most power. It's cruel," he answers, ready enough. There is no slanting pull of consideration at the corner of his mouth to punctuate the claim. Instead, one of the twigs comes away with a shearing of bark which peels a yellowing stripe down the length of the limb by a hand's width. "I've rarely seen anything come out of being pleasant about the asking. But business like being necessary to the way forward colors the subject somewhat."

The glyph is making a valiant attempt of drying and warming the line of his extended leg, and the low glow of it are caught both by the rings on Flint's hand and by the cutting edge of the axe. He can feel the warmth radiating through his boot.

The last twig is snapped free with a pleasing pop.

"There's cruelty everywhere in life. We're cruel to each other all the time. I mean the moment of engagement, outside of any greater purpose or necessity. The simple doing of it." He's sitting forward, "Do you not find some clarity in that? Here, I'll take it," reaching for the stripped branch, to pull it clear of Flint's legs, careful not to disturb the fire.

What follows is impossible. The limb lies flat on the stone floor. Leander places one hand upon it, roughly halfway, grasps the half to his left, and gives it a few experimental bends upward to get a feel for its flexion. One, two—a fleeting tightening of his lips, a soft hitch of breath—and on the third, it splits with a tremendously satisfying crack.

His next exhalation is measured. Centering.

And immediately followed by a slight moue as he examines his finger. Splinter, presumably—he's already ducked to bare his teeth to it, to pinch it between his incisors—

Edited (nice) 2020-07-11 07:15 (UTC)

The snap is especially sharp in the small space.

"Was the axe not to your taste?" He draws one half of the severed limb back to him, the faintest air of exasperation in the sidelong look he trades for it. The length of wood is threaded under one knee and across his thigh, locked there into place so it doesn't shift as-- crack, the blade splits one end.

The breaking sounds are not dissimilar.

Victory. He blows the tiny shard off his tongue and, once he's had a moment to hold the afflicted side of his finger in his mouth, retakes his position as observer.

"It was my idea."

Speaking of thighs: his eye does wander adjacent to the busy blade now and then.

"You do, don't you. Find clarity in the doing."

Leverage is applied to the head of the axe, easing open the 'V' of the split. It's done carefully so as not to send the crack splintering further down the stripped branch any more than is necessary.

"It's deceptively easy work," he agrees. With an simple up-down working of the axe, Flint frees it from the split. And then it's turned in hand, converted into a hammer rather than a hacking edge. One of the discarded twigs is summarily tapped down into the gap, holding it open at an accommodating angle.

He glances up then, attention sliding from the other end of the cut limb and its clean break, to Leander's hand, to his face.

"There's a limit to it, isn't there? How much you can do before it wears you thin."

Is it the woodworking he means, or the fighting? Both? Leander considers the comparison, tilts his head to bring some partially-obscured detail of the process into focus. This is not what he had in mind, visually, but it will function the same. He's never sought a crafting collaboration with a non-mage—even now it's simply just happened.

"Everything comes with a price, as they say. It's no different than any other activity in that regard: push too hard, and you're likely to hurt yourself."

He's been moving his thumb against the side of his finger while he speaks. There isn't any glow, any indication he's done anything, but in moments the tiny wound has disappeared.

"Greater endurance, greater strength, it all comes with practice. Just the same."

His hum is a mild sound, low under the scattering hiss of the rain and the irregular crackle of the glyph fire. The split piece is traded for the second half of their would-be frame: "Rig that one to stand upright, then."

This end of the sheared limb earns the same treatment - a solid crack of the dead man's axehead, a working in of a make-do spacer into the gap leveraged by the blade.

"When did it become apparent?" A glance in Leander's direction, though his hands continue their work. As if they are discussing the weather. "That you were a mage."

"I was sent to the Circle in my sixth year."

Leander could easily be difficult, say he doesn't recall, or was never told. Why does Flint need to know? He doesn't—not for any readily spotted professional reason—and that's why he answers.

"But from what I remember, I learnt it of myself a bit earlier. Kept it a secret until I couldn't."

It's not so much rigging as wedging, in the narrowing of the sloped stone roof, with a slow application of force that ought not to be enough. The cords in his forearm, the silence while he strains, his calm expression. The wood scrapes, stalls, finally eases in by degrees.

"Templars looked like giants back then."

"Too young to have many aspirations otherwise, I assume."

What do children want to be when they are so small? For someone to pay attention to them, and to seem important. To be the mason because rocks are interesting, or to be a cat because they are allowed to ignore it when they are told to do things.

With the second fork made, the axe is set aside and this section of limb too is passed back to Leander.

"Were you afraid of it, or only what people might do because of it?"

This limb, too, is pressed into place, and again Leander is quiet as he does it. It's a particular kind of question—not dangerous of itself, but edging close—so he holds it while he works, to produce an impression of the reflection he does not need to find his answer. At length,

"I was never afraid."

One final pull: solid.

Kneeling there, placing his staff across the forks, might evoke a sense of reverence more suited to a Chantry altar—until he gives that a tug, too, and leans back on his heel to look at it.

"There, that's not bad."

Edited 2020-07-22 04:17 (UTC)

Certainly in the history of the world, worse lean to arrangements of sticks have existed.

"Neatly done."

Though the same might be said for most of what Leander touches, can't it? There are a number of carefully ordered bodies lying among the rock and rain a few miles from this place, their limbs precisely arranged which would testify to that much (never mind another set in Nevarra, or the nonsense business with Artemaeus).

Without rising, he leans out to fetch in the things allowed to at as a barrier between this side of the shelter and the damp. The heavy coat has picked up more of the rain, has already been made weightier for it and requires same shaking out before it's fit to pass for folding over the staff. A sort assortment of other discarded things belonging to both of them and fit for drying in this way are similarly handed up and over.

Flint's judgement is accepted with a lingering nod, tilted playful.

"You did most of the work."

Up and over, and all arranged on the makeshift rack. That great lovely coat takes up most of the space—it certainly won't do to hang it all bunched up—and whatever else will fit, he fits it in with a practised eye for spatial economy. The rest can lean or lie on their own.

The rest, in this case, includes the mage's boots, and his socks, neatly draped facing the fire. The captain's, too, if he so chooses.

(The blade slipped into the meat above Byerly's iliac crest—that was neatly done, too.)

"When did you decide to take to the sea?"

Stripped of all but shirt and slacks, and visibly relaxed for it, Leander pulls a broad handkerchief from his satchel (really a rag with hemmed edges, fashioned from the back panel of an old shirt with sleeves too bloody to rescue) and tosses it out onto a rock in the rain. The drops are falling thick now; it will be properly soaked in no time at all.

"And is it true, that old romantic notion—that men fall in love with it?"

His boots and socks remain firmly affixed to his feet though in the rearrangement that comes from passing up various odds and ends and shifting things around to account for the extra space afforded to them by the rack, one ankle ends hooked comfortably over the other and that is nearly a cousin to the sentiment - easy, in a sense. Not so different from the sideways humor he huffs out in reply.

There is a saying about the equity of turnabout.

"I was ten. My father had died in the business a year prior, and I was taken on by a man he'd once sailed with as a favor to him. Young, but not unreasonably so, and a boy's pay is the preferable substitute to none at all for those collecting it at home."

There must have been a point in which he'd begun to give, where the natural tension drawn across his shoulders and and the angle of his head and how he he holds himself from chest to hip had started to come unwound. Now, with the heat of the glyph and the rain falling heavier beyond their little triangle of shelter, some slack stillness has found him. His hands are untroubled by a lack of occupation.

"As for the heart of the thing—" A small turn of the hand in place of a shrug, the rings on his fingers catching light. "Who can blame a person for loving the thing they've learned to recognize best?"

Edited (7 hours later, gently adjusts) 2020-07-31 17:09 (UTC)

"Some can."

Leander's mussing his hair (curling aggressively as it dries), plucking at his shirt to reseat it on his shoulder (still damp), settling back down on mercifully dry ground not very far away. He could be further away—there's room for it—but chooses not to be.

"Well. They can try, at least."

With a little encouragement, the fire remains steady, and the smoke minimal despite the size of the flame. There are no rings on his fingers to throw any glints, only a few slim and simple bracelets fashioned of braided floss and softened leather encircling his wrist. They slip down the knob of bone to meet his hand as he gently fusses, brushing away sand and tiny pebbles to tidy up the glyph's edge.

"You must've grown up quickly."

"A boy of ten on his own in a ship full of men who have been at sea since they were boys of a similar age, and all of them committed to their due duty of harassing the Qun's force at sea?" He shoots Leander a sidelong look; the line of his mouth twitches behind the edge of his beard, though he manages to sound quite dry when he says, "Not at all."

It's more complicated than that, but all things are. And--

"I don't imagine you need it explained how living inside a box encourages growth in strange directions."

It does sound familiar. Were there any guards aboard? Some authority who'd kill a boy of ten for stepping out of line, and believe they were doing the Maker's work? It's a thing to wonder privately—to ask another time, perhaps.

"You seem normal enough to me."

On a delay, his mouth pulls crooked, too. Oh, yes—he's quite aware.

If you all don't already know that he's a pervert, you clearly haven't talked to him for more than a few sentences, Byerly had said.

Flint looks at him - all narrow and slim, hair all dark and curling from the rain. Not harmless, but here just as in that room with the other Division Heads, he would have trouble rationalizing why that's so bad a thing.

"I suspect most would prefer we thought otherwise," he says, hands spreading. And yet.

And yet.

"Oh, probably. Just a glimpse of this scene here would cause a great fuss, I'm sure." The close space, the thick air, humid as a shared breath.

His gaze slides away from the rings on Flint's hand (the hand, and the freckled wrist and forearm above it) to follow the turn of his head toward the weather. It's only chance that times it with a flash from outside—lightning, diffused by distance. He waits for the thunder before going on.

"The simplicity of it."

Lately, it is like having broken ribs again. If he breathes too deeply - pushes the matter with Jones and her connections in the North, refuses to answer questions from people who hardly have the right to ask them much less to expect the answers, or tries to take some measure of John Silver's fear and balance it against every other thing he is struggling to keep in hand - he becomes aware of the flexion in some cracked bone, and it winds him. He's tired, straight down to the marrow, and there is relief in being still.

It doesn't have to be such a trial.

With the world past him reduced to a flickering sheet of weather, he studies the turned away line of Leander's profile in the glyphlight. How straightforward might anyone be, he thinks distantly, if they all lived in places like this one.

"Recognizing the familiar in a dangerous thing has a way of stripping the fear from it. There is a risk of replacing it with reason."

Places like this cave have something in common with their respective boxes: there is little privacy but what you keep inside. You grow inward, in strange ways, to keep some of yourself for yourself. You recede to escape. Then you do escape, and all that unavoidable nearness becomes nostalgic.

It needn't be spoken aloud. Privately, Leander wonders if their thoughts are following the same current.

"There's danger in the familiar, too—and fear is just as often a herald of splendid things."

Aware of the study, he turns his eyes down and to the side towards it. A glance to test the limit of provocation, a stillness to keep it where it is.

"I'd call it a reasonable risk."

Why do sailors love the sea? Because it is dangerous, and the mastery of it is a conditional and temporary thing. It runs through the fingers. No one can hold or live on or know it indefinitely, but it runs and sometimes the animal visible in the shape it makes is one you know.

He laughs. It's a low pleasant thing, warm like the glyph glow in the narrow context of this triangle of shelter. When his hand shifts, it's to touch his own face - to run the pads of his fingers across his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose, to draw a hand across his beard as if to smooth its bristles and the gentle humor behind them away.

"Yes," he says, the corner of his mouth still pulling toward something he is fond of as he turns his face more directly to Leander. Nevermind an eye for the weather. "I think you're right."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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