[player plot | closed] home isn't a place

[sulahnan]

WHO: Athessa, Bastien, Colin, [Derrica]
WHAT: Giving belated rites to long-dead family
WHEN: Harvestmere
WHERE: Somewhere in the forest...
NOTES: cw for animal death

ARAVEL.

It takes a little more than a day to navigate through the Planasene Forest, riding at an easy pace, headed southwest. The terrain isn't unreasonable, but there are still fallen trees and unexpected cliffs overlooking the Waking Sea and places where the horses simply refuse to walk for some ineffably equine reason.

Early the second day, they find it. Home, if that word even applies to the overgrown clearing where the remnants of Athessa's clan lay.

The Aravel is still there, still intact. Weather-worn, but ironbark doesn't rot, and the enchantment on the landship is still alive. The same can't be said for the surrounding camp, with its tattered cloth and discarded tools, a ring of stones around a fire pit that's grown over with moss and plants and bugs. There are no bones offering testament to slaughter, nor signs of blood or strife. Just abandon.

PREPARATION.

There's a fair amount of stuff to do before the burial. Acorns need to be gathered, cedar branches collected, oaken staves carved, food hunted and harvested. Athessa will do the hunting herself, and on the day of the burial she leads a halla into camp, alive. She doesn't look proud, or particularly excited about being able to find one.

RITUAL.

Not far from the camp is a cave, rocky and shallow, with a flat stone floor. It was once an altar, or something like it. Faded markings, a few bundles of once-dried herbs that have since fallen from their line and litter the ground, and two decades' worth of neglect. This is where, once the detritus is swept away, the halla will shed its mortal coil.

But before that, incense is burned, a prayer song is sung, and leaves of a hina plant are crushed to a paste and applied to the palms and face. It stains the skin red, to represent the blood of the halla (without actually being blood), and the blinding of Ghilan'nain. The stain will fade before they return to Kirkwall.

BURIAL.

After the halla has been bled, skinned, and butchered, its heart offered to Andruil, it's just a matter of carving the horns into charms and burying them with the acorns. Twenty-five in all; one for each clan member. Each acorn will need to be planted with room to grow, so there's some trekking about to be done in order to find suitable plots. Then, the cedar branches and oak staves are laid upon the soil.

As they work, Athessa sings:
Melava inan enansal
ir su aravel tu elvaral
u na emma abelas
in elgar sa vir mana
in tu setheneran din emma na
lath sulevin
lath araval ena
arla ven tu vir mahvir
melana ‘nehn
enasal ir sa lethalin

And it's easy to see why the stories about luring unsuspecting travelers to their fates came into being. The song drifts through the trees, reaching for heartstrings and pulling at them, melancholy and pleading.

WAKE.

The mourning may not be finished (nor will it ever truly be), but there must be room for celebration as well. The feast that is prepared by Colin, with the assistance of the other three, is a combination of Dalish, Rivaini, and Antivan, which is the result of trying to reverse engineer traditional recipes that escape the memory. There are hearth cakes, roasted root vegetables, a hearty halla stew (with perhaps more spices than Dalish cooking typically has), sweet grains and fruits, and a few bottles of a finely aged rowan mead to share.

Good food and good company around a fire, reminiscing about loved ones lost, sharing memories. Laughter interspersed with brief, bittersweet moments of silence.

THE RETURN.

The group returns to Kirkwall right on schedule, with ample time to loiter before returning the horses to the stables and catching the ferry back to The Gallows. Though the pall still lingers, it's not heavy or oppressive. It's just a bedsheet, diffusing the morning light until it's time to wake up and get out of bed.

Comments

[keenly]

"You can. Just not for magic." Colin's not really sure what else to suggest besides using an heirloom as a walking stick. It would be one thing if it were a ring or something, but a staff takes up quite a bit of space and doesn't transport well.

"Though it's up to you. Maybe it's...maybe since you can't bury your grandmother, you can bury this in her place."

[sulahnan]

"Maybe," she starts, but thinking about burying it feels...wrong. Maybe that's just her being childish. Remembering how much she wanted to hold the staff when she was little, remembering how often she was scolded for trying to squirrel it away.

"Or maybe you or Derrica could use it?"

[keenly]

"...Is that what you want?"

[sulahnan]

Athessa glances aside, barely a flicker. (She almost looks at Derrica.)

"I want it to be of some use to someone," she says, finally reaching to trace the carvings with her fingertips. It just feels like wood. No spark, no sense of something more. "She might be gone but the magic isn't."

Tears track down her cheeks before she even realizes she's weeping, but she doesn't wipe them away or try to hide them. She just lets them fall, and nods, and smiles a little faltering smile.

"A healer should use it."

[keenly]

As much as they say they are family, it would feel odd to lay claim to something so personal. And, perhaps to his discredit, he has been thinking of it more as Athessa joining his family than vice versa, feeling it on some subconscious level as an improvement of her lot to be part of a human family.

He reaches out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear.

"All that has to be decided for now is whether we're taking it back with us to Kirkwall."

[sulahnan]

Athessa nods again. They'll take it back with them and if neither he nor Derrica wants it, she'll just keep it in her room in case of emergencies, or give it to the Hahren of an Alienage as an olive branch.

"I...wish I could know what she would've wanted," she says, taking the staff and leaning it against the aravel. The little bell chimes, twinkly, and Athessa closes her eyes to just breathe, and let more tears fall, and take stock of her grief. "Do you think... D'you think it's okay to assume the best of someone when you didn't really know them?"

[keenly]

"Of course it is." He reaches out to wrap his arms around her tightly. "And no less likely to be accurate than assuming the worst."

[sulahnan]

Colin's embrace squeezes out the last of what his reassurance couldn't, and Athessa clings to him until she feels she can speak again without crumbling.

"Then I think — I hope she would be glad to know I'm here, giving rites even if I only half-remember them. A-and I hope she'd be happy knowing I wasn't alone for it. I know my dad would be."

The idea that her family would disapprove of her lack of elven friends hurts too much to think about, and it's been weighing on her more lately than ever before. Probably because she's confronting the memory of them here, knowing that if they were all killed, it was humans that did it. And if they were enslaved, it was humans who did that, too.

"Mum, though," she amends with a soft laugh, "She'd probably say something like twenty-nine years old and you still can't braid your own hair?"

[keenly]

A quiet chuckle. "I'll teach you, if that'll make her happy." He gives her a squeeze and pulls away to look at her face.

"Tell me about them. About your family."

[sulahnan]

She smiles a rather soggy little smile and nods, sniffling. Of course she does know how to braid, in general, but she's never gotten the hang of braiding her own unruly mane.

"My dad, Silas, was the Halla keeper," she starts, stepping away to start clearing debris out of the campfire. There will be time for sharing while not working after the burial. Right now, they'll have to multi-task. "Which isn't the same as the clan Keeper, like he wasn't a mage or anything. He just tended to the animals and sometimes he'd help with midwifery. Midwifing? Mid— He helped with the babies."

[keenly]

"Midwifery is right. It's, um. Never a pretty profession, but it's some of the most joy I ever get out of healing."

[sulahnan]

"Really?"

She steps into the ring of stones and starts to clear away any of the wood and leaves and debris that's too damp to burn.

"Because of the babies?"

[keenly]

"It's like...making families. Especially in Darktown, you see the mother endure so much pain, but the moment she's holding her child, she's as happy as any princess in a palace. When it goes well, I mean. And the things I've had part in! There was a mother with hips too narrow to deliver, and I called Sidony and we worked together. I put the mother to sleep, Sid took the baby out with surgery, and I healed her back up. She lost a lot of blood, but she lived."

[sulahnan]

Athessa gapes at Colin, horrified and instinctively putting a hand on her stomach to protect it from the mere thought of getting sliced open. It's a terrifying notion, having to be sliced open to give birth. (Thanks to her escapades with two different men with horns makes that fear a little bit scarier, even though she's 100% not at risk of pregnancy.)

"You cut her open?"

[keenly]

A wide-eyed look as he realizes the rest of the world is horrified by things he finds fascinating.

"Ummmmmm no. Sid did. At a glance I can tell you you wouldn't have that problem."

[sulahnan]

Her horror lessens, but only a little. It is nice to know that her hips wouldn't betray her like that. (It's not better to learn that someone who's been between your legs has cut a baby out of someone.)

"How did she do it? Like—" Her thumb takes the place of a scalpel and she draws a line on her abdomen, vertical. "—or like—" Again, horizontal.

[keenly]

"Like..." Colin draws the line on his own body. "Really, it's incredible what a good surgeon can do, especially with the help of a mage. It felt like..."

A smile touches his lips, just barely, but it's his eyes that glow.

"Like anything was possible. Like this, this situation that only ever killed the mother and usually the baby as well, it was something we could conquer. One of the worst things that happens, and we beat it."

[sulahnan]

"That's amazing."

It really is, and her sincerity comes through in her tone of voice, but there's still that little furrow between her brows where she's storing a little bit of horror alongside curiosity. She can't help but wonder about the past attempts to perfect such a procedure.

Athessa straightens up and steps out of the fire pit, having cleared a space for a fresh fire. Having worn them long enough, she wipes the tear tracks from her face (smudging her cheeks with dirt in the process) and plants her hands on her blessedly wide-enough hips.

"We should get some sticks for a new spit, probably."

[keenly]

"Did we not bring fire irons?" It seems ill-advised to use wood as a spit, but then he thinks about it. "Wait. Green wood?"

[sulahnan]

"Unless you brought them—"

Meaning no, they didn't bring them. But:

"Yeah, green wood. Otherwise it'd burn, ya know. We'll wanna get a sturdy one to hang a pot off of, too, probably?"

[keenly]

"That makes sense. This is for the...halla?"

He takes a moment to wipe the dirt from Athessa's face, hoping it'll hide his nervousness surrounding this sacrifice business.

[sulahnan]

"Maybe, or for rabbits or a boar or something. I don't even know if I'll be able to find a halla," she says, and finds herself searching his face. For what, she doesn't know. Answers to unasked questions, or maybe just reassurance.

[keenly]

He sees that look, and wraps his arms around her.

"Do you believe in gods, or fate, or anything like that?"

[sulahnan]

“Not fate. I...don’t believe in the Maker.”

They’ve talked about Andraste and Shartan, but that’s different. They were real people, regardless of the religion that claims them.

“Did I tell you the story of Ghilan’nain and the Hunter?”

[keenly]

"I don't think so."