[closed] the most dangerous game

[katabasis]

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.

Comments

[luaithre]

"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?"

[katabasis]

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.

[luaithre]

"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."

[katabasis]

"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.

[luaithre]

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."