[ CLOSED ] Scarce the blessing from on high

[filotimo]

WHO: Byerly, Flint, Madi, Silver
WHAT: A Princess Returns From The Dead
WHEN: mid-August
WHERE: Kirkwall/The Gallows
NOTES: Bad news from Nascere is followed a week or so later by an unexpected arrival.

Two things, all the world among,
Help the lover to attain
All that doth to Love belong:
E’en desire the good to gain,
Hope that makes the coward strong.
Both within my bosom lay.
No, ‘twas in my stricken soul
That they lurked to take away
My desire to reach the goal.
Hope hath fled and will not stay.

Comments

[bouchonne]

[ heh heh heh heh. intimately. ]

Does anyone know the man well?

[filotimo]

[ She shakes her head. ]

There are times when I think not even he can make such a claim.

[ But how can one wield a weapon so effectively without knowing it? Its edges, the chips in the steel, its weight, where it balances and where it topples. ]

[bouchonne]

Well, of course. No man actually knows himself. Indeed, I think people are most ignorant of themselves.

[filotimo]

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

[bouchonne]

Are you wise? Enlightened?

[filotimo]

Far from it, [ She has read books by men who claim enlightenment, but that doesn't impart the quality. ] All I know is what is expected of me, and that I must rise to meet it. Or die trying.

[bouchonne]

What's expected of you? [ He ventures a guess: ] Courage.

[filotimo]

[ A whisper of a smile. ] That is part of it.

[bouchonne]

I look forward to finding out what the other parts are.

[ He bows her into the Gallows. ]

It will be a lengthy climb to his office, I fear. I hope you have your wind.

[filotimo]

[ It has been nearly three years since she's seen either Flint or Silver. She can wait however long it takes to climb these stairs. ]

I hope you have yours.

[bouchonne]

Scarcely.

[ With a little laugh - ]

Every day I brave these stairs, and every day it's an agony. Please do not think little of me as I gasp and sweat.

[filotimo]

Even giants gasp and sweat, Lord Ambassador. After you.

[bouchonne]

[ And so this particular giant pushes his lanky form up the stairs, as he's done many times before, as he'll do many times again, leading her up to the Forces office. The first few flights are accompanied by idle commentary, pointing out this-and-that about the Gallows; after those first steps, he falls silent, concentrating on not breathing too unflatteringly hard.

Finally, they get to the office in question. By raps on the door and finds it open; then he bows her inside. ]

[katabasis]

[The office which lies beyond that door is in so many ways indicative of its occupant's relationship to the organization it helps oversee. The furniture is nearly without exception a mismatched assemblage of relics left from the division's previous head or whatever happened to be convenient to hand to replace what was taken when she'd left; the heavy desk nearest the widows is a demonstrations of trying and only partially succeeding in controlling an administrative nightmare, its surface papered in variably ordered stacks of missives and reports and miscellaneous letters being held down against whatever scant breeze might pass into the room by whatever collection of books, instrument filled cups, and ugly paperweights (the products of ill-advised Satinalia gifting gone horribly awry) could be scrounged for the effort. A second, smaller desk twice as overflowing with miscellany has been unceremoniously jammed between two records shelves. A mediocre painting of a familiar ship in a cheap frame, a series of books forgotten on the mantle, and a sword hanging from a chair arm are the only immediately personal items of note to hand. All of it is evidence of a man who has slid slowly, even unwillingly, into the role of a person who inhabits an eighth floor tower office rather than a ship's cabin or some tavern's back room.

At the center of the room is a great table upon which rest a series of maps and open chart books - a war table reproduced in miniature. It's over this table that Riftwatch's Commander is bent, his attention consumed by a ledger in which he's doing quick work and his face in the shadow of the hand he's supporting his brow against while he writes.

The rap is distinct. He starts to say,]

This had best be important, Rutyer. Otherwise, kindly fuck off until—

[and then stops. Fixed in place, with a thumb still pressed to his temple, the ready (weary) irritation peels back from his face like a shedding skin. Flint stares at her without comprehension.]

[filotimo]

[ The minutiae of the office's decor can be appreciated some other time, when the hour is not so late and no-one is at risk of unwanted vulnerability. For now, Madi steps through the door ahead of Byerly, halting her apprising glance when it finds the man she expects in a position she should have expected. ]

Thank you, Lord Ambassador, [ she turns her head to address him over her shoulder. ] I can take it from here.

[bouchonne]

[ Oh ho. Now that is an interesting face on the Commander's part. Byerly very, very much does not want to disappear.

So instead - ]

Just a moment -

[ He pants. He is out of breath in truth, but exaggerates it for his advantage. ]

To catch my wind. Forgive me. Carry on.

[ And he braces a hand against the doorframe, breathing heavily. ]

[katabasis]

[A reliable man on a fast horse had been sent North days ago; it will be days yet before they might might even begin to hope for news to make its way back from Antiva (on a raven's wings, or otherwise). Indeed it would be weeks yet - if ever -, he had assumed, before they could hope to have anything nearing a complete picture on what had occurred on a small island in a Northern sea. He had been prepared to wait them, not to hold off seeing to the business of arming a ship and men and arranging his reasons for why

(—why he is leaving; where he is going; under what circumstances he might return. There are pirates in Llomerryn he should have courted years ago who might be somehow persuaded to—)

but to reserve a place for the possibility that one most vital detail might yet make itself known. And here it is. Something which had been buried in the ground, whose last whereabouts had been known by just two men.

Without being fully conscious of it, he has risen to his feet and crossed the distance between them. But Flint's hand finds the door rather than the woman just inside it, and as his attention slides to Byerly it sharpens until it is the most dangerous thing in the Gallows.

His breath can either be found more comfortably elsewhere, or here minus the luxury of the continued use of his fingers (or anything else which might by some unhappy accident be caught in a closing door).]

[filotimo]

[ If Byerly looks to Madi for some kind of support, any sign that she might be more willing to admit him than Flint, he won't find it. Her glance in his direction is impassive at best, leaning towards withering.

But it is not her office to govern. Let the Captain see to the expulsion of prying eyes and ears. ]

[bouchonne]

[ Oh, fine.

He sighs, drops the pretense, and floats on out. ]

[katabasis]

[And so the door is shut, and though his hand settles briefly at the bolt he decides not to throw it.

Instead he turns to regard her there and is struck by how unchanged she seems under any examination (and the reverse—a curdling thought—, how much Kirkwall must show in him).]

We received word that the effort on Nascere had been eradicated, the majority and its leaders put to the sword. That's clearly not the whole of the truth.

[Have you seen him yet? is what he should ask.]

So what is?

[filotimo]

[ Where is he? Is what she wants to ask.

She sighs, glancing back at Flint's work, at the maps and charts and potential plans that charge the air with desperation like heat rising. ]

The whole truth... is that our disadvantage there is greater than any of us — you or I or Silver, [ Where is he? ] perhaps even the Governor himself — could have ever conceived.

There is something under that island.

[katabasis]

[It is so fundamentally removed from every consideration he has given for the shape of that place - not just since news of the failure there had reached them here, but ever in a long history of wherein he has thought of little else but the dimension of that place - that for a bare moment, Flint just looks at her. Something stark and unmoving lies there in his face, a wall built halfway. Beyond it, visible through its incompletion, lives a dangerous thing. Uncertainty.

But there is a barbed hook which works in him. It drags him remorselessly from this toward the great heavy desk on the far side of the room and the sending crystal waiting expectantly there.]

Tell me what you know.

[Once upon a time—']

[filotimo]

Nascere has been no stranger to calamity over the centuries. We all know this. But perhaps what we did not consider is the depth of that calamity. The darkness in which its scars reside.

My father told of a network of caves he used to smuggle supplies off of the island. For years, he sent men and women and children into these caves to save them from servitude. My mother and myself were delivered by these caves.

The tides of our war have changed the landscape beneath our feet. Unearthed an ancient ruin, steeped in the blood of wars long past and whet by fresh offerings. At first I heard stories, told as many times as there are men, that the ruin was cursed. Haunted. Prone to a preternatural fog. Some claimed to have heard the voices of their mothers, fathers, the voices of gods calling to them, bidding them enter.

We both know the power a story has to twist the minds of men. But the number we have lost to those ruins is no fabrication.

Not one man, ours or the Governor’s, have returned after crossing that threshold.