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

[foxsays]

"So a hobbit is what you are then? I did wonder but I thought as I come from a place of only humans, asking such a question is very odd." Besides, she sort of thought she had it covered: tall with horns? Various Qun-related folks. Pointy ears, with or without Vallaslin? Elves. Short and stocky? Dwarf. Everyone else? Human. But these Brandybucks must be daring then, to sail the river as they do but she'll leave aside her own loves for the moment. "What is it like there? Are there thick forests, great fields? I only know land that is built upon or shores and beaches."

[harthad_uluithiad]

"You won't know the Shire at all, then," he says, leaning forward, a little more enthusiastic now. "There's no shores nor beaches in the Shire, save the riverbanks. But we've got forests and fields aplenty: green, green far as the eye can see. You haven't eaten until you've eaten a hobbit-meal, or six of them. Rashers of bacon, cold mugs of beer, the freshest of greens, straight from the garden to the plate. All that and more!"

[foxsays]

There's a moment where she closes her eyes to try to imagine it a little better but it's too different for her to really manage. "The most green I see are kelp forests, and then only if I go for a swim. But six meals! If we have three a day then we count ourselves very lucky but six, how does one find the time? Oh Lux if I ate six meals a day I could roll you around the place like a very furry sort of barrel. To have such fresh vegetables, we must send for ours by sea, the soil is too salty for many things."

[harthad_uluithiad]

Sam smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling in happiness. He hasn't talked of home - really talked of home - in a long while, and to his pleasant surprise, he's actually enjoying thinking of the people and places he hasn't seen in so long. Perhaps it's the fact that Araceli misses her home, too, and yet doesn't seem to regret being here. Perhaps it's her obvious and genuine interest in the Shire, or the fox now curled up contentedly between their feet.

"There are some hobbits that nearly have to be rolled!" he admits, lighthearted. "But we do well enough; and what's the use of living in the midst of farms and fields and letting all of their riches go to waste? But I'm sure your own home has riches aplenty of its own. What - what does it look like, the sea?"

[foxsays]

Since arriving in Thedas, she’s had the good fortune to meet more than a few who’ve asked about what sort of world a rifter comes from, but never with anyone in the same boat, so to speak. She could happily have stayed in Castileos all of her days seeking out people from other lands to ask them tales but she’s always been restless, always wanting to know what the world is like. This is what being rich is to her, not the amount of coin she has in her purse.

“The only farms I can honestly say we have are for salt. Ebeos and Estene are where we get most everything else that has to be grown. Plants that like salt are only fit for goats.” Thedas is likely going to be the most green place she’ll have seen with her own two eyes and it’s hard to imagine what Sam describes to her in honesty. Well maybe the rolling bit, some merchants end up pretty portly and so do the nobles. “Sometimes the sea is a perfect mirror of the sky when it’s calm, especially at night when you can’t tell where one meets the other in the dark, the moon and stars above and below. When the storms rage the waves can come up over houses, like angry white horses charging, grey as the clouds but most places it’s so blue it almost hurts to look at it, if you’re out you can look down and watch the little fish darting about the reefs, silvers and bright colours, or the kelp forests. Sometimes it’s so blue that you don’t see a whale until it breaches right alongside the ship.”

[harthad_uluithiad]

It sounds beautiful and terrifying all at once. Sam listens raptly, eyes going wide at the description of the blueness of the water and the sea mirroring the sky, then shrinking away at the thought of the storms.

"I never saw no fish that weren't slimy and grey," he admits. "I'd dearly love to see the ones you speak of, if only I didn't have to get near the water to do so! But what's a whale?"

[foxsays]

"If we go somewhere warm, you can see them from the shallows without having to go too far - I would never let anyone drown." That's about the most solemn sort of vow she can ever give, because the sea is beautiful yes, and the sea gives life but the sea can be dangerous too, sweeping people away in an instant. Whales though, of all the things she never thought she would have to try to explain it would be a whale. "Most of them are huge, bigger than our ships. They cannot survive on land but unlike fish they have no gills so they come to the surface to breathe, having only one young at a time that they raise like other animals. Were it less cold I could show you my tattoo, I have one of one of the larger whales that feed off our coasts commonly. The voyages a whale goes on, even ships must stop to resupply and catch up to them."

[harthad_uluithiad]

Sam tries to imagine a whale, but it's hard, never having seen one and not knowing what they may look like.

Tattoo trips him up too, and he furrows his brow in confusion. "You have one here?" he asks in some alarm. "But how? There's no ocean here in Skyhold; something that big, someone would've noticed it sometime. And what's the cold got to do with it?"

[foxsays]

Easiest to roll up her sleeves to explain, because she won’t have to start stripping off entirely. "Tattoos," she says and holds out her forearms to reveal a greyscale fox along the length of the left and a compass and anchor along the right. "You don’t have those? You take an ink and needles and someone puts the ink in your skin, it lasts for life. I have another over my heart of the moon with waves within, a whale on my right shoulder, and a mermaid on a shell throne low on my back, on the left side."

But when it’s cold enough that her teeth are almost chattering, it’s too cold to strip off her jacket and shirt to reveal the humpback whale in shades of blue and grey, the painstaking detail that took hours to get just right.

[harthad_uluithiad]

He bends down to peer at the pictures on her arms, but when she mentions ink and needles he looks up, eyes wide in alarm.

"Ink in your skin!" he exclaims, appalled. "Why would anyone go for such a thing? And with needles?" He shudders. "Needles are for sewing up clothes, and not for sticking into people, why anyone knows that."

[foxsays]

With two quick jerking motions, she rolls her sleeves down before she leans closer; the look on her face would be a smile if it weren't so fixed and Lux perks up, ears forward, tail stiff.

"We have always tattooed ourselves. Always. There are things with meaning that we carry close to our skin at all times, no matter where we go in this life. Sailors with constellations and maps, with a compass and anchor, marks for each sea he has sailed, each land he has gone to and why. A reminder of mistakes, loved ones, important events. These are my life. So no, not everyone knows that."

[harthad_uluithiad]

Something about the way she smiles at him isn't quite right; it reminds him uncomfortably of the way her fox might bare his teeth, and he leans back, staring at her warily.

"Well...well all right," he stammers, surprised and uncertain. He huffs, unsure what to make of her sudden ferocity, and fidgets, his eyes darting away. "I didn't mean nothin by it," he mutters. "Just...just seems a bit queer is all."

[foxsays]

"I think," she says carefully as she passes the cloak back to him, at least taking the time to make sure that whatever warmth might be left in it from her isn't lost, "that I should leave and return to my friends, before I ruin the evening."

Her temper is a nasty ugly thing, and here, even if Sam is like her and torn from his world so cruelly without a chance to say goodbye then one of them has to be aware of what it might mean. An unkind word, a temper snapped taught like a sail in a storm, even a whisper of violence; she has read about the demons, she doesn't want to give anyone a reason to think that even a single one of them might harbour something ugly and festering.

"Gratitude for the warmth and companionship, but there are others who will not hesitate. And many I have seen with tattoos are far, far larger than I. This is neither of our worlds, tread lightly."

[harthad_uluithiad]

Sam sits, stunned, unable to do anything but accept the cloak. He still can't understand quite what it was he'd said that was so awful. But before he can think to respond, she's gone, disappeared into the night with her fox at her heels, and Sam is left with his thoughts, bewildered and lost and alone.