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

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

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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

"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?"

"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."

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?"

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."

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.

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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?"

"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.

"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.

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

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

“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?”

"I don't think so."

“Well. Let’s go find some wood for the spit, tinder and logs for the fire, and I’ll tell it to you.”

She steps away, out of the fire pit and calls to the others they they’re going to collect firewood before leading Colin into the surrounding trees. It isn’t so deep into autumn that there isn’t dry wood to be found, though they have to search harder for dry tinder.

“So for context, Andruil is the Huntress. She’s the goddess Dalish hunters pay tribute to, and she watches over the animals in the forest. And Ghilan’nain was her beloved.”

"What was he god of?"

“She wasn’t a god at all.”

"...Oh." Colin actually looks more interested now. "Oh. I get the feeling this isn't like Andraste's love story with the Maker."

Athessa smiles and shakes her head. “It’s definitely different.”

Not that she knows much about that love story. She sniffs, just a remnant of having cried so recently, and it serves as her taking a breath in preparation for the story.

“One day, Ghilan’nain met a strange hunter in the woods. She didn’t know him, but she saw that he’d killed a hawk, pierced its heart with an arrow. Ghilan’nain was so angry at the man, because the hawk was one of Andruil’s favorite creatures, and she demanded he make it right by making an offering, but the hunter refused. With all her righteous fury, Ghilan’nain called out to her goddess to curse him so he could never hunt again, could never take another life.

“And it worked. The hunter couldn’t hunt; his arrows would fly astray, his prey would always escape. His friends and family began to mock him. What good is a hunter that can’t hunt? Ashamed, he vowed to find Ghilan’nain and make her pay for what she’d done to him.”

It seems a bit disproportionate, cursing a man forever over a bird, but he wants to be sensitive--this is her heritage, her culture--and nods for her to continue as he tests the flexibility of a nearby sapling.

“He found Ghilan’nain while she was on a hunt with her sisters, and pretended to have learned his lesson,” she continues, finding a small log that won’t burn very long, but that will make decent kindling. “He begged her to come with him, to teach him how to make a proper offering to Andruil. She was moved by his plea, and followed him into the woods. But as soon as they were far enough away from her sisters, the hunter turned on Ghilan’nain.

“First, he blinded her. And then he bound her the way hunters bind their kills, but because he was cursed, he couldn’t end her life. So he left her there to die on her own.”

Her lips quirk, remembering Bastien’s reaction when she told him this legend. Something to the tune of Men are awful.

“Ghilan’nain prayed to the gods for help. She prayed to Elgar’nan for vengeance, to Mythal for protection, but with all her heart she prayed to her beloved Andruil. The goddess sent her hares to chew through the ropes that bound Ghilan’nain, but she was still blind and couldn’t find her way home. So Andruil transformed her into a beautiful white deer, the first halla. Ghilan’nain returned to her sisters in this new shape and they in turn tracked down the hunter and brought him to justice.”

"I like that a lot better than Andraste and the Maker." He glances over. "D'you believe in them, then?"

Her lips quirk, glad to hear that the story is well-received. It used to strike her as something of a downer, but as she's gotten older and thought on it more, she finds it beautiful. Sad, still, but it describes a kind of love that a lot of stories don't.

"I try to," is her answer. "I think I'd know more about whether or not I believed if I had someone who knew better, to answer my questions."

Athessa shrugs, testing another sapling. This one should do fine.

"Ghilan'nain is said to guide the dead through the Beyond to the Eternal City. There, the souls live on and gain enlightenment, and Andruil is reunited with her beloved. That's...part of why sacrificing a halla is supposed to gain Andruil's favor, before a burial. But I dunno how that works, or is supposed to work, or whatever. I just know it's a nice story."

Colin takes the little saw out from his kit and gives her a smile.

"Then if she's real, then whatever honors her, she'll give us. Yeah?"

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