[OPEN] Interview With A Mage

[sulahnan]

WHO: Athessa and you!
WHAT: Talking to Magefriends about Magic and Abominations
WHEN: August; Post-Abomination, Pre-Modplot
WHERE: Around the Gallows
NOTES: none yet

i. colin

It's one of the days that sees Athessa helping out in the apothecary, which means busy hands but a mind free to wander. She's separating the buds from dried, woody stems to place each into jars for their individual uses when she speaks:

"I've been thinking a lot about what happened..."

ii. kostos

This isn't a conversation that is going to happen organically. After reading through some esoteric writings on magic in the library, she gives up for a time and stalks off to find Kostos.

"Oi," she calls to him, jogging to catch up with him. "Got a minute?"

iii. isaac

[ Some late night crystal call when Athessa's eyes get tired of reading ]

Isaac, can I pick your brain a bit?

iv. derrica

[ They've had their fair share of difficult conversations of late, and this one bodes no different. The kicker, of course, is that it's far more personal to Derrica than it is to Athessa, so when the latter seeks out the former, she comes bearing gifts. Little spiced cookies and coffee over ice - does Derrica drink coffee? ]

It's not spice cake, but the flavor is pretty close.

v. wildcard/bring out your mage

[ either hmu on disco or plurk and i'll make a starter for you or wildcard me, whichever! ]

Comments

v. did someone say opinions

[coquettish_trees]

They've more than enough treatises on magic in the estate's main library—and Loki's secondary one—but by and large they're of the more esoteric variety. What reason for the brothers to keep anything but books on the finer points of what they had spent their lives in study of?

(She had thought, perhaps, at least Thor—being more hammer than stiletto—would have kept something she could step daintily to from the lessons she had periodically begged of her husband, but even the treatises on thaumaturgical tactics in warfare were written by mages for their peers.)

And so, the Gallows library.

...The Gallows library where The Lectures of First Enchanter Wenselus is missing. And The Four Schools: A Treatise, Beyond the Veil: Spirits and Demons, and even A Dissertation on the Fade as a Physical Manifestation. Inquiry reveals all of them to be with a certain someone... who is also not a mage.

And so, after a few more inquiries, the garden.

"A little light reading?" Alexandrie queries the book stack and its elf.

i

[keenly]

"About which thing that happened?" Colin asks, not looking up from his work.

OPINIONS!!

[sulahnan]

Light reading, that's funny. Athessa looks up from where she'd leaned so far over the book in her hands that if she'd shut it, it'd catch her nose. Her hair is in the kind of messy updo that's clearly the product of trying to get her hair out of her face, then forgetting the style and trying to drag her fingers through it upon reading something particularly confusing.

"Wha?" Is her most eloquent greeting of Alexandrie, then she looks at the stack of books beside her sheepishly. "Oh. Just...trying to wrap my head around this whole...abomination thing."

[sulahnan]

"The abomination thing," she says, also not diverting her attention. Her handwriting has improved enough that she can label the jars and Colin will be able to read them, rather than relying on being able to identify everything by unique characteristics. "I wasn't in the hall when it happened."

[keenly]

Now he stops working, a gleam of uncertainty coming to his eye. Is Athessa afraid of him now?

"What have you been thinking?"

[sulahnan]

She pauses, smelling the floral contents of the jar in her hand before plugging it with the cork.

"Mostly? Wondering why there isn't a way to...stop that from happening. Or reverse it, maybe."

[keenly]

He looks at her, trying to gauge how much this has changed between them.

"Training helps," he says cautiously. "Training counts for a lot. The better trained the mage, the more she knows, the less likely she is to succumb to that. Unless you make her very, very desperate."

His gaze falls away again. "And I don't know why there's not a way to reverse it. It happens sometimes, but only under very specific circumstances. We're taught that by the time a mage becomes an abomination, the demon has claimed its first victim. That mage is the first death caused by the abomination."

[coquettish_trees]

Speaking of Athessa's head, that hair is going to be in a tidy side braid with flowers filched from the garden tucked at the start of it by the time this conversation is over. Alexandrie's not even going to ask if she can; after all, she's responding to a piteous cry for help from that 'updo'.

And she needs something to distract herself with, as the muscles in her neck and shoulders tense when Athessa says 'abomination'.

"What of it?" asked lightly as she moves to free the poor hair.

iii

[wythersake]

How many did you pick it from?

[ hon hon. if he sounds obnoxiously well-rested, he is. this is his morning. ]

[sulahnan]

Athessa frowns. It just doesn't seem fair, which might be a childish sentiment but it's how she feels.

"But not everyone has access to that training," she says, though it's more question than confident statement. "And Circles are...well, here they're like prisons, aren't they? You lose everything and everyone from your life when you go into one?"

[sulahnan]

She leans her head whichever way is most helpful for Alexandrie's efforts, not even thinking twice about what she might be doing.

"There's gotta be a way to reverse it without the mage dying, right?" Right to the heart of the matter. "I mean there's all this stuff about demons and resisting them, training that can help and all that, but...I mean why does anybody have to die? We have ways of neutralizing magic, why isn't there a way to neutralize possession?"

[keenly]

"Yes." Colin sets aside his work and turns to lean back against the table. "Most possessions happen outside the Circle, which the Chantry has used as proof the Circles work. Thing is, those abominations happen because families didn't want to get ripped apart, so they hid their mages. The whole thing is just an incentive for people not to seek help. I wasn't even allowed to say goodbye to my family, they took me away so fast."

If there is pain in that admission, it's built well into a wall of acceptance of what happened. He's not sorry for himself anymore, not for this. This was well over half his lifetime ago.

[sulahnan]

How many mages we got?

[ Him being well rested should play well off of her perpetual lack of sleep. ]

[wythersake]

Maker, there could be any number of disguised apostates. Someone should check the Commander.

[sulahnan]

"There has to be a better way," said soft enough that it might be to herself, as if she's been trying to solve a puzzle and speaking it out loud might shake some revelation loose.

Another jar, another label, another place on the shelf. "The Chantry shouldn't be in charge of Circles."

[sulahnan]

[ She snorts. Can you even imagine. ]

I'm guessing you're Circle-trained, since you don't consider yourself apostate?

[coquettish_trees]

"There is," she replies evenly as she settles herself on the bench behind Athessa, removing her gloves and tucking them away so as to better finger-comb through the other woman's curls. After Minrathous, when the worst of her panics had ceased, she had read. Asked. "Not all possessions are malevolent spirits; some have made agreements to work with the mage and might even be asked to leave their body peaceably. It is that demons do not, on the whole, wish to do so.

"Do you mean how they might be forced out?"

[wythersake]

Mn, [ ""blah blah we're all apostates in the eyes of the chantry"" ] I went to Montsimmard when I was six, or thereabouts.

[tender]

[ Derrica accepts the coffee, though cookies are the real draw. The coffee is an indulgence, which makes Derrica wonder exactly what this is prefacing. ]

I can't believe you even found them, [ Derrica tells her. ] You should let me give you half of what they cost.

[sulahnan]

Rather than nod, she hums.

"Yeah, some way to save the mage once the demon has already taken over. But everything I've found so far says it's not possible."

[sulahnan]

How did they teach you to resist demons?

[wythersake]

At great length. I needn't inquire why you're asking,

[ they're still scrubbing out scorch marks ]

But if you've a specific concern —

[sulahnan]

Sure, you can give me half of nothin', [ She laughs, setting down next to Derrica and of course sitting in a way the seat was not made for. #bisexualdisaster ] Colin made them.

[ She sips her own coffee, which was the real expense here. Not that she'd expect recompense for something she gives freely. ]

They're also a little bit of a bribe, because I was hoping I could ask you some stuff about magic.

[sulahnan]

— is there really no way to stop an abomination without killing the mage? To reverse it or something?

ii, obvs

[exequy]

Have they made up?? Possibly. But it doesn't matter much. Whether they have or not, he keeps walking, at most slowing his pace a little to accommodate her walking alongside him.

He has a wisp with him. Maybe that's convenient.

"One," he says. One minute. (Really he has several, as long as she's willing to walk up the stairs of the central tower with him.)