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

[arcaneadvisor]

"Wynne had a way of treating near all of us as if we were unruly and oft exasperating grandchildren, for all her protestations that she was not an old lady. But those who commune so very closely with faith seem to see things from so very far away." Yet how would Wynne have been treated had her predicament been much more common knowledge, knowing just how delicate a climate it was, and the stories out of Kirkwall of that single apostate. And indeed, how often was faith of any sort used as the justification for a great many deeds?

"No temptation to do away with your escort?" She asks, happier to steer the conversation from children when Kieran is still so close and likely to be awake most of the night, burbling away and asking questions. Somewhere deep in the Korcari Wilds there may still be rusting helms, armour and weapons from Templars, if the Chasind and passing Darkspawn haven't scavenged them all. "To fight in a Circle is a trial, and that was in and up, not down and out."

[fleurdesel]

"I never minded them. Aside from being present they were not so terrible- of course- until they were." More the fool her for not being more aware of the tensions winding tighter and tighter until they were fit to snap. "Here at least I may go my way with my students without fear of hovering. It is something of a relief- and I've skills enough in dispelling magic should anything get out of hand. Thusfar I've had no need to do so. Aside from summoning enough snow to cover our section of the garden when all she meant was enough for a single ball the once,lessons have been unremarkable."

It is the best one can hope for- to be unremarkable.

"...so you are that Morrigan- the one who fought in the Blight?"