faderift | OPEN: this will be a better year

OPEN: this will be a better year

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!

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A twinge of guilt nagged at Cade. Mages were sent off as children, just as he was. And they were always kept behind locked doors, weren't they? Templars weren't. Most Templars, anyway.
Maybe just him.

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice formal.

"It wasn't you."

Her brow knits delicately. "Even before, at the gates. You didn't want to hurt anyone, but sometimes the light is harder to see. Shadows in the hollow places, and the safe places not. They lied, too."

"..maybe," Cade conceded, "but I still acted against the Maker's teachings." If there was one thing he had become more certain of since arriving at Skyhold, it was that taking responsibility for himself was the only way to move forward.

"You want to be better."

It makes a difference. Some were happy to rely on instinct, on self-preservation, or a sense of entitlement. There were probably worse reasons to hurt someone, but he hadn't hurt her badly. Apparently not badly enough to scare her away from him.

"...I want to be better, too," she adds solemnly, after a moment.

After a moment, he nodded. She was right-- that was, ultimately, what he wanted. Better of mind, of action, of soul.
"...perhaps we can," he decided, and glanced at River. "What... kind of magic is it...? That you do?"

"I'm not..."

It wasn't something she actively did, which was a difficult enough thing to explain when you were perfectly lucid. She'd go slow for him, though. Maybe not lose the ends of the threads this time.

"It's ripples on a pond. Some are from this side, from people. Some are from the other side, trying to reach through, or just watching us. They like to watch, and we're so bright here. Tiny green lights shifting like fireflies."

She shook her head abruptly. "Sometimes they come through, tearing through. There's blood and...and screaming then. Like before."

"So you're..." Cade tried, knitting his brow, "...you're always aware of the Fade?" It didn't sound like blood magic, at least not any he'd ever heard of.

She gives a nod, a tiny one. That's close enough to count, and better than she'd hoped for. "They wanted me to bleed through the cracks and edges, to take what wasn't mine for them. But the cracks went backwards, and now it's all in pieces. It's harder not to hear them, now, even when I don't want to."

Her teeth raked against her lower lip. "That's why I have to get better."

The girl spoke in riddles, and Cade had never been good at riddles. Abstraction tended to make him nervous, feel like he was stupid, and there had been no room in his life for metaphors. He followed the letter of the law and the Chant of Light, and that was all there was to it. When River spoke it was like being in, well, a river. One that moved too quickly for him to gauge the water level.

"I'm sorry," he said again, not certain why. He could sense a pain in her, to which he was sympathetic. And he was sorry that he couldn't understand her better, when she was clearly trying.

That sympathy was enough to keep him separate from the others. The helmets became masks, blank metal faces to hide monsters behind. But Cade wasn't a monster. He'd stumbled into their den was doing all he could to survive it.

She smiled, a small sad little curve of her mouth. "You care. That's why you wanted the warmth, reached for the light. Not a jewel in a crown but a flame to gather around. You're different."

It almost felt like an accusation, or at least Cade was accustomed to hearing it said in such a way. That he cared. Not that it had been so in the abbey, before training had really started, but in Kirkwall having any feeling for the mages was a weakness.
He wasn't sure he had any feeling for them left, but it seemed River was proving otherwise.

"The Light is all we have," he said, a bit absently.

"But it's not in stones, or words. They smell the smoke and say the words, but it's hollow and dark inside." Her brow wrinkles delicately, head tipping slightly in confusion.

"You went to find them there anyway. Why?"

Being raised with the Chant didn't necessarily meant she understood it all. The templars used it as a weapon. Perhaps Cade understood it differently.

Cade's brow furrowed. He had a feeling he knew what she was on about now, but was afraid to admit it.

"It's not always hollow," he said quietly, "...I..." He swallowed hard, suddenly frustrated that this girl was able to dredge such emotion from him, over things he'd prefer stayed long buried. He looked at River wearily. "...sometimes it's a comfort," he said, trying to be as plain as he could, "...to think someone greater than yourself is in charge. Has a plan." He looked out at the party again. "...cares about you."

"Sometimes it isn't."

She swallowed, dark eyes flickering away as her arms lift to wind around her thin arms. He means the Maker, but it could be anyone. "If they exist, and they care, and they can't save you...it feels worse. Waiting hurts. Digs and tears at you. Too many questions. Why didn't he save me?"

A moment passed, her eyes staring hard into the darkness before she turns back to Cade. "It's not your fault, if they don't. It doesn't mean they don't love you. Simon came. The Maker might, too."

She wasn't wrong. It hadn't always been the Maker who existed and didn't care, or who went out of his way to make things worse. Something about Skyhold-- something about River, and that strange time in the chapel, and seeing people from the abbey again was distorting his mind and making him remember things he'd long since decided never to think about again.

"..sometimes it isn't," he conceded, somewhat abashedly. Eager for a change of topic, he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and asked, "Simon?"

"My brother."

She goes quiet for a moment, the sound of the party below and the whistling of the wind the only noise, and muted from this high up. "When they took me, he came. He made them stop hurting me. Then we started running, until we came here."

Cade's mind immediately flashed with Apostate!! but he shook his head with a wince. He already knew this about River. He already knew Skyhold was lousy with them. This wasn't anything new or alarming, even if he couldn't turn off the Templar instincts.

"That was good of him," he said instead.

River stares at him quizzically a moment, arms still folded around her tiny frame. No, that wasn't right. It was, but it didn't fit the way he thought it did. "I wasn't running from the Circle," she added. "I know what they are, but I never went there. They'd have made it too quiet, and Simon would have been sad."

Cade hadn't expected that. His brow knit uncertainly as he looked down at her. "...then what were you running from?" he asked tentatively. He wasn't foolish enough to be unaware of the way Templars were viewed by mages, especially having been quite aggressively part of the problem himself when he'd been in Kirkwall. It had never set right with him, but being who he was, he had felt powerless to change a thing, and had disregarded his own misgivings as weakness. Now, people at Skyhold were validating them, but he wasn't ready for that yet. For all these years, he hadn't wanted to be right, because that would have meant the things he did within the Order were unquestionably atrocious.

"North."

Her eyes feel shut, her grip on her arms tightening. "Warm, foggy and old stone streets. Dragons at every turn, still and staring. The eyes of the old empire whittled down to its bones. A nest of vipers. No one left unscathed."

After a moment her eyes opened again, realization creeping in across her face. "...no one else left. They didn't come for them. Just Simon."

"...Tevinter?" he guessed, with a wince. He knew things about Tevinter, and that people from there were generally Enemies. but he had no concept of life there. At her conclusion, he asked, "..why?"

"Couldn't find them. Couldn't fight. Didn't know. Didn't care. Didn't want to know."

A number of reason. Any number of them. Maybe more than one. People were complicated in that way. River shakes her head again.

"Doesn't matter now."

"...fair enough."

Cade looked at River for a moment longer, then out at the party again. In a way, it was comfortable to watch the festivities, a reminder that the world wasn't all war and violence all the time, even if he wasn't down there celebrating with the rest. They were able to turn off their fear of the future, at least for a little while.

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OPEN: this will be a better year

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