OPEN: this will be a better year

[faderifting]

WHO: Everyone
WHAT: First Day
WHEN: Wintermarch 1 (forward-dated)
WHERE: Skyhold
NOTES: Scouts from both the Western Approach and Emprise du Lion are welcome (but not required) to have returned to Skyhold in time for this event.

There have been better First Day feasts, and less crowded ones, and cheerier ones. It isn't a good year for many to look back on, and this one isn't starting any better. Reports from both Eastern and Western Orlais are grim. Many in the Inquisition can't afford to take more than a few hours away from their work, if that.

But for those who can, the ambassador does her best. At lunchtime some tables, hot food, and finery are reserved for visiting nobility and wealthy pilgrims--cause for grumbling in some quarters, perhaps, but they're the people filling the Inquisition's coffers, and allowances must be made--but there's plenty of stew, bread, and ale for everyone, even with the soldiers and refugees who stay outside the fortress invited inside for the holiday. The recently repaired garden and its carefully tended plants aren't off limits, but anyone noisy and holding a drink will be stopped at the door; the battlements, with their potential for deadly falls, are blocked by Inquisition guards. But the courtyards brim with people, most of them happy despite the possibility that the world might end before another First Day arrives.

If the courtyards are too full of tipsy visitors for comfort, there's also the valley beyond the fortress, expansive, barren, and covered in snow. By the river the soldiers help the refugees make a bonfire larger than would ever be allowed inside Skyhold's walls, and some lend their shields to use as sleds down the embankments. A group of scouts start the most intense game of hide and seek Thedas has ever seen, with snowballs to the face for whoever is found first. In the camp, a refugee girl with her hand wrapped in a green scarf chases other children around the tents, shouting raaar, I'm from the rifts!

Comments

[glandival]

Yes. It will be such a good trophy for me.

[ She could address that seriously, maybe, about that it isn't so much his hand as it is that he is perhaps the only human around she can believe harbours no hatred for her kind in his heart, but, they are dancing, even if there's a bit of an edge to her claiming her own dance out of him, as he did her, ill-gotten mutual enjoyment for both not withstanding. But she has never been without her edges.

When the dance comes to a close, her fingertips steady him to stop, lightly, before she steps back to sketch a curtsey. Dairy cows have curtseyed with more grace than she. ]

You are the only shem I know who doesn't mind it. Perhaps you may have it after all. So many arguments with my kind will become friendly for you.

[apostasia]

( very few dairy cows are as charming. probably there is one, animals and nature and all that being very sweet or something, but - not many.

he bows. his mother would not be ashamed of him. for the bow, at least. )

Well, I shall treasure it, little sister.

( a turn of phrase, but a presumptuous one even if he defended himself with just a turn of phrase. )

[glandival]

You're weird.

[ Which sounds, in its own way, approving, as opposed to a suggestion of what he ought change. Weird humans are definitely superior to the normal kind.

But he got his dance and then some, so Sabine turns on a heel and continues the way she went, her steps borderline stamping at the snow as if the only way to deal with its slow acting chill is to go on the offensive. She grips her skirt to keep it above the ice. ]

Enjoy your First Day, shem, [ she tosses over her shoulder. ]

[apostasia]

And you, yours--!

( delivered much the same way-

a hint of old swagger in his step as he departs in search of adelaide leblanc.

he is rather pleased with how that went. )