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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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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."

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