faderift | [closed] the most dangerous game

WHO: Derrica, Flint, Marcus, & Matthias
WHAT: Recruiting for the war effort.
WHEN: Solace
WHERE: Somewhere in Eastern Nevarra
NOTES: Ethically Dubious Enlistment Practices, Violence

MAGE HUNTING.

The afternoon heat sticks. It worms its oily fingers under shirt collars, turns the road into a dust chalk stripe, and keeps the horses to a plodding pace. If there is any consolation to cutting through Nevarra in Solace, it is that they know their would-be defectors are traveling on foot.

As it turns out, it isn't so difficult to follow ten people when you know roughly where and in what direction to look for them. It is, to some extent, impossible to uproot so many lives and leave no trace behind - to avoid leaving rumors in one's wake, to impress upon every stranger in the road to say nothing and that they had seen no one. Yet this league of the road is very like the last one they've traveled, cutting between patchwork jumbles of cultivated land. There is virtually no reason for Flint to draw his horse up here as opposed to anywhere else in the road.

He regards the series of fields to their right. There is a farmhouse in the distance, a stark white square on the far side of an ocean of yellow wheat set against a painfully blue sky. A single cypress tree casts a purple shadow there over it. A pale grey smoke smudge rises ribbon-like from the chimney.

After some moments of study, Flint turns slightly back in his saddle toward the rest of them. "Do we doubt that they're taking the day?" he asks of the conspicuously still landscape, farmers being somewhat known for their propensity to work from sunup to sundown.

MAGE HUNTERS.

As it turns out, it isn't so difficult to follow ten people when you know roughly where and in what direction to look for them. Which is, given the givens, more or less the issue.

Two mage hunters in the company of two hired swords make their way into Nevarra in pursuit of a mixed bag of apostates. Two mage hunters and their hired swords, having come across a farmhouse to find their quarry recently fled and the place occupied by an entirely different set of mages (and change) than the ones they'd bargained on, end up dead in a dusty yard to the sound of squalling chickens, and a near comic cloud of down feathers drift in idle swirling circles about them. An acrid smell hangs in the air from one of the mage hunter's exploding alchemical pots. Something may or may not be on fire.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It is night. Night is cooler than the day, and out in the world, away from the stuffy confines of the Gallows towers, it could almost be pleasant, even as they head further and further north.

Flint is alone until he isn't. They have arranged for a simple watch schedule and he had a little more time, by his reckoning, before he would expect the sound of crunching footfalls quietly make their way from their little encampment towards himself and the low fire. The fire itself leaps to attention, built up on a different fuel than only the dry wood, and the smoke and sparks that gutter from it seem to dwindle, constrict, and funnel off away from both himself and the person approaching.

Marcus sits down at a polite but not antisocial distance. Rising from his sleep has made him a little less formal, with his hair down and no frippery in the form of neckties, but he is wearing his armor still, and he sets down the heavy, bladed staff he carries in the dirt beside him.

"How long do you think we have?"

Edited 2020-07-12 09:44 (UTC)

There is grit on the back of his neck from a day spent sweating under the sun. He has felt it rasping between his skin and shirt collar with every small movement he's made in the past hours to encourage the heat from dying entirely from their embers, and he feels it now against as he straightens in reply to how the fire huffs high of its own accord.

The slim book open on Flint's knee is closed and set alongside the crossbow in his company.

"That depends. Are you asking how long we have until your friends escape into Tevinter, or how quickly we should be moving if we aim to outpace whomever else is pursuing them?"

"The latter."

The answer comes clipped and easy, as if ambiguous questions were not innately designed to see how they might be answered. It's been hot enough throughout the day that Marcus doesn't lean into the heat fanning out from the fire, just keeps his attention on its form. He is crossed legged, arms resting on his knees, and a steely kind of alertness edges sharp from within the haze of a weary day's travel.

He ponders this word, friends. He ponders the word escape. He asks another question, maybe even before Flint has a chance to address the first; "Would they be welcomed?"

Good. Because the answer to Rowntree's first question is, I have no idea, and that is the last thing he wants to say aloud to this man. They have only the barest idea of who is after the apostates, in what numbers, or how motivated they may or may not be. It is likely they're in no hurry - ten mages move slowly, and there is plenty of time to make up any lead - but maybe they have somewhere else to be.

So he allows himself to be led by the nose in this new direction.

"I can think of a few things I'd prefer a half dozen mages do rather than defect across the border to our enemy," is a sense of humor left to go sour.

"Would that they'd seen those few things for themselves first."

But they didn't. They left because Southern Thedas couldn't offer something better than the illusion of whatever it is Tevinter has on offer. Not yet it can't, anyway, and it would be easy to sink into that sort of discontent quiet, maybe pick up the threads of rumours shared with him.

But the mission at hand takes precedent, and Marcus presses, "My meaning is whether they would be welcomed into the ranks of our enemy at all? How perilous it would be for them. If they could make it out again."

"Then in answer to your meaning," he says. Imagine, what novelty might be found from speaking in straight lines rather than bending like hooks to test the edge of a barb. "If they were determined to make a life out of fighting their homeland instead of simply disappearing into whatever security Tevinter might offer, then yes. I imagine they could - were they willing to weather suspicion and the absolute lowest posting that could be considered suitable for a laetan - find someone to be convinced of their use."

There are better lives more easily led to be had in the Imperium, and Southern mages have had their pick of wars.

"From there, the Tevene military is little different from any fighting force. How much that has changed and what dangers a mage might specifically face there by being under Corypheus' direction, I can't say. As to slipping free of it"—he looks to Marcus, hands turning in place of a shrug—"It's a cage like any other, depending more on its oversight than its construction. Why?"

He can ask broad questions too.

Marcus watches him at attention, invested in the answer for having asked the question as much as he is also curious. Inevitably. Other ways of life. (What the fuck's a laetan.)

And then it's his turn to answer a question. He rolls his shoulders forward to rid himself of some minor twinge from the day's travel. "Because if they make their journey, then they could be of use to us," he says. He ordinarily deals in straight lines, and does so now. "Perhaps not in the thick of enemy activity, not untrained as they are, but as civilians behind their lines.

"Information in exchange for aid in coming home some day," he adds. "If they want it."

Edited 2020-08-10 10:39 (UTC)

"It's bloody hot," Matthias points out, somewhat unnecessarily. He's been slumped in his saddle when no one's looking his way, dazed by their pace and the heat and saving up his energy for when Flint or Derrica or Enchanter Rowantree turns a look in his direction; then he straightens up and tries to look like a living man instead of a heatstroked boy. As they've gone, Matthias has slowly converted his outfit. By now his shirtsleeves are rolled up and he's picked off bits of his leather armor when no one was looking, bundled them away in saddlebags or lashed them to his saddle to keep out of sight. There's a red bloom of sunburn on his cheeks.

He is shading his eyes with one hand, while the other is twisted around the reins of his horse and the pommel of the saddle. Then he thinks, oh, hang on.

"Serrah," he adds, somewhat belatedly, and drops his hand. "If a farmer is take his lunch, he's daft if his custom is to take it inside a stuffy cottage with the windows shut up and a fire going. Better to find a tree and some air."

By contrast, Derrica is all but glowing in the heat. Along the way she'd twisted her braids into an even more elaborate bun, stuck a few bits of jewelry into it for safekeeping in anticipation of finding their quarry. It seems bad form to be luxuriating over the weather, so she's largely kept her enjoyment to herself.

She draws her horse up alongside Matthias, one hand immediately coming up to absently stroke at her horse's neck while she follows Flint's gaze down at the farmhouse.

"Matthias is right," and Flint's suspicions were correct in the first place. "But it's going to be hard to sneak up to try and check without anyone in that house seeing us coming from a distance."

The perils of trying to do anything in broad daylight. It wouldn't matter so much if it just a farmer, but the alternative—

The large grey-white horse that Marcus is riding is happy for any excuse to stop, lowering its head down to nose at the scruff of grass nearest to him.

"Then we don't sneak," says Marcus, leaning forwards some in his saddle as if to escape the good posture he's been maintaining for the most of the journey. "We approach some distance, and wait. Maybe one of them comes forward."

And if not, one of them will have to do so. He's not about to volunteer the children, or the resident Division Head.

[closed] the most dangerous game

before, on the road. closed to flint.

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mage hunting

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