so look alive, it's much cheaper | closed

[wythersake]

WHO: Isaac + Joselyn, Betrys, others
WHAT: Thread catchall
WHEN: Not in a jungle
WHERE: Not in a jungle
NOTES: Editing these in as I go. HMU if you want a starter.

Comments

[obdurata]

Somewhere in all that, she manages to interject, it's a frivolous use of a fire glyph but it looked effective and then, but if you light your chest hair on fire I had nothing to do with it.

He gets to his question, and Joselyn eases onto her elbows, considering it. Him. The universe at large. The Inquisition, and Riftwatch, and push ups.

“Which this was that? Because I thought the push-ups were relatively self-explanatory.”

[wythersake]

"I don't know," Propped on his side, shuffling in a pocket for smokes. A lone seagull pecks the ramparts nearby, the only eavesdropper; they've still an hour at least until shift change bustles in. "Aren't you a bit young for a mid-life crisis?"

She doesn't look a day over twenty, etcetera. His eyes roll pre-emptively.

"No, I suppose — the Inquisition," Riftwatch comes answered, in searing green ink. "After the early days, you could have done anything."

[obdurata]

Riftwatch is even more self-explanatory than push-ups, but—

“No, I couldn't.”

Yes, she could. Joselyn Smythe has worn the identity of mage for almost as long as she's been alive, now, somewhere mumble-north of twenty, and it would never have been easier to slough it off than in the aftermath. She could have put down a staff that she's never been truly able to use and changed her clothes and disappeared—

the phylactery that the Chantry believes is hers contains the same blood as the one labeled Miriam. More than anyone else who grew up in a Circle, Joselyn was free the second she stepped out of it.

“My sister is with the Inquisition,” she says, after a moment. “She's currently still on mission for them; she's supposed to join me here when she's been released from her duties, they.”

They assured her. Miriam assured her.

(Every day that Miriam isn't here, Joselyn worries that there will be another duty; that the Inquisition will not release her; that she is lying to herself that it's the Inquisition making the choice.)

“We had apprentices with us, during the war—there wasn't anywhere safe for them to go except to the Inquisition. And there's not a lot of safe ways for mages to leave the Inquisition. They know us now. These things have a way of drawing you back in.” They may well have two goddamn phylacteries for Miriam, and she isn't nearly as devout as she pretends to be but she prays daily that no one takes hers out to make sure she's at Riftwatch.

[wythersake]

"They do,"

Blanket agreement. The Inquisition, the Chantry; these things have a way — and it wasn't so different then as now. There was a window with fewer eyes upon them (us), but there have always been windows. There's always been a cost to the view.

"What is she like?" It's she that answer truly stuttered on. "Your sister?"

Collateral in blood.

[obdurata]

“Braver,” she says, wry. “She's the battle-mage—when people can tell us apart, that's usually how.”

Because otherwise they're identical, yes. (It always would have been how.)

“This is the longest we've ever been apart,” she notes, after a moment. “A few months, when we were children; her magic manifested before mine.” Joselyn has told this lie so many times it's effortless now. It almost feels true.

[wythersake]

The pause as he props cigarette in teeth might be only that.

Lucky. Of course she'll have heard that before: Lucky it was both of them, lucky to not be separated still.

"Did you want it, back then?"

The magic — he supposes, the sister.

Was there a time when Isaac ever wished it? Some apprentices got letters, and the excitement of it; something else. How he'd wanted one, the way they made it look, and never a thought for the names inside. It wasn't as if the Kellars could read.

[obdurata]

It would be difficult to express in so many words just how much,

“I don't remember the rest of our family,” is what she says, eventually. “Not very well, you know. Anecdotes. Moments. The house where we lived, but not the street it was on. I only really thought of being with my sister.”

For a long time after, too, for the Smythes to slip so. She thinks of them now, sometimes, but mostly in how peculiar it is how easy it was to let go—a pang of something that she doesn't quite identify as guilt. That doesn't quite feel like guilt, just an oddness. Like a gap in her teeth where she presses her tongue sometimes to feel its shape.

[wythersake]

It would be unkind to ask whether the sister thought of her.

"I suppose," He ventures, and it's uncertain territory. Traipsed down some blind turn — "If you think of something enough, you begin to think less of it."

"Only, no. I don't mean it like that. Enough trees make a forest," Condense: A filtered pattern. "But we only recognize a few."

"Landmarks."