semi-open. your childhood home is just powder white bone, and you'll never find your way back.

[apostasia]

WHO:n Martel + Adelaide / OPEN.
WHAT: In preparation for offering combat lessons to mages, Martel is teaching Adelaide LeBlanc to duel.
WHEN: DUSK.
WHERE: The garden, Skyhold.
NOTES: Contains violence in the context of training, and possibly Adelaide's potty mouth. There's a starter for Adelaide, but if you'd like to hit up Martel afterwards, he'll have stayed in the garden after she leaves to write some notes on what they were doing. If you wanted 'Martel is sweaty, muscular' CR, now's your chance. (You also have a shot at catching a sweaty, angry Adelaide as she stalks off.)

Before Adelaide can say again for the eighth time, Martel steps to one side and puts up his training sword, the blunted, capped tip of the rapier bouncing against his shoulder as he half-turns to avoid her with ease. She's tiring - she's tired. Overextending herself, dropping her guard, breathing hard; he can see the unsteadiness in her limbs, the precursors to training injuries that will teach her nothing she can't learn by remembering she already damn well knows it. Nothing more will be productive this evening, no matter how determined she is to master the parry - they have worked hard enough that he is beginning to feel it, his lightweight shirt tacky with sweat against his skin.

"Enough, now," he says, with a finality he entirely expects her to ignore the first few times he's obliged to say it. "We'll take it up again tomorrow."

Comments

[eolasemah]

Sina's expression changes from worried to surprised, then relieved. Oh. Is that all? "...of course," she responds, the corner of her mouth twitching into a small, reassuring smile. She's never one to run her mouth, least of all about the personal problems of those she considers friends.

[fleurdesel]

"Thank you." Adelaide stares back to the practice field, curses herself for a fool again, and makes to sit next to Sina. Her mind is still snarled in knots and Sina has ever been a soothing presence, even when the said nothing. After a moment, a long moment, she mutters. "I am unaccustomed to- it is arrogant to think let alone say- I am unaccustomed to being average."

[eolasemah]

Sina scoots over to give her some room in the brush, and folds her hands around her drawn-up knees. At Adelaide's words, she smiles sympathetically.
"It's hard to feel helpless," she says, the corner of her mouth quirking up slightly, "especially when you haven't always. But... sometimes average is better than nothing." She rests her head on her knees, angling her face towards Adelaide.

[fleurdesel]

"I hold impossible standards, and as high as I hold them for my students and my peers- I hold them higher still for myself. I should be further along." Though whether that is her own mind or her mother's voice- she cannot say. "Average was...unacceptable, in my household growing up. My mentors in the spire likewise wished us to be exceptional. They could charge more for our services that way."

[eolasemah]

Sina's smile dwindles as she listens, and is once more convinced that the circles are a cruelty, though she keeps it to herself. Not that her own upbringing as the only other mage in the clan didn't have its woes, but it seems a betrayal to both clan and Keeper to wonder if she was ill-treated; life is hard in the wilderness, and the Keeper is the lynchpin that holds a clan together. She must be strong.
Realizing her mind has wandered, Sina blinks rapidly and puts on an apologetic smile. "But we're here now," she says, not certain if she's talking to Adelaide or herself.

[fleurdesel]

"...and I wonder if it is to the credit of the Inquisition should I continue to hold those standards quite so high." To expect everyone to perform to the best of their ability, to push themselves to be better than the day before. "How is it you were taught, Sina? I know that the Keeper is the one that teaches the mages of a Dalish Clan, but little else."

[eolasemah]

Sina snorts lightly in surprise and mild amusement as she's caught by the very thing she was thinking about. Her smile broadens, but remains hesitant.
"Keeper Thalia taught me one-on-one," she says, "it was nothing like the way it's done here. ...I'd never met another mage until coming to Skyhold." She self-consciously tucks a strand of hair behind one pointed ear. "I was very young when my magic manifested, and was taken almost completely into the Keeper's care. My parents still live, but I don't know them well." She shrugs. "I understand that to be fairly similar to how the Circles function, though I'm glad I at least get to see them. I'm not certain other clans do it the same way, but ours has few resources."

[fleurdesel]

"It must have been overwhelming." Coming here. Being at the meeting. As tentative and terrified as Sina has been- considering that she hasn't been around other mages until now? She's surprised she handled it half so well. "Most never see their families again. Some are privileged enough to receive letters- at least in the Spire. Not every Circle was the same."

[eolasemah]

"It was," Sina replies softly, "...it is." She purses her lips, knitting her brow sympathetically to Adelaide's explanation, perhaps with a bit of empathy mixed in. "At least they can see them now," she notes.

[fleurdesel]

"I don't imagine what happened to Lauren made it easier." The poor boy who became an Abomination. "Some have been getting letters. Some have been sending them- with the state of things I do not know if it will gain the Inquisition support or loathing but. I hope for the former."

[eolasemah]

Sina's blood runs cold at the mention of the Abomination, or at least, of the boy it had been formerly. Her heart gives a pang of fear, which echoes strangely in a small spurt of energy from the shard. She claps her hand over it quickly, pausing to take in a deep breath as the thing calms again.

"I watched him change," she says suddenly. "...he looked at me."

[fleurdesel]

"Sina?" That- any reaction or behavior of the shard is cause for concern on it's own, but the fear? That anxiety, she hadn't intended to cause it. She knows the feeling too well to wish it on anyone. Adelaide extends a hand, brow furrowed. "...That...had to be horrific."

[eolasemah]

Sina takes a second deep breath, hand still over her chest, her eyes fluttering closed for a moment. "I've never seen anything like it," she says in a quiet, breathy tone, "...such a thing is nearly unheard of among the Dalish, with the exception of..." She hesitates. "...well, I've heard things. About the Sabrae. But there were sh--" She stops herself, glancing at Adelaide and blushing. "...humans involved."

[fleurdesel]

"Sabrae?" In the interest of finding a truth- the beginning of that word is ignored entirely. Sina is Dalish and has been among the Dalish and their contempt for humans all her life. Holding it against her isn't going to help either of them; though in another context Adelaide might frown, she's far too concerned about what Sina knows to be vexed.

[eolasemah]

It's a word Sina has had to catch herself on several times over, after spending nineteen years with a clan that used it openly. She understands now that calling a human a shem isn't too unlike a human calling her a knife-ears or a rabbit; although the dynamics are different, it's generally not a thing one does in polite company, with people one respects. Old habits die hard, but she's smart and she tries.

"Clan Sabrae was beset by an abomination when their Keeper took in a demon," she explains, her voice low, "to protect her First from the consequences of blood magic. Merrill." She glances around furtively. "Merrill still lives, and is here. I have seen her, I know her from the arlathvens, from when I was small. How she shows her face among the People again I can't imagine." The gall. The terror Sina feels in knowing just how badly a First can betray her clan. "She was in league with the Champion of Kirkwall when Clan Sabrae fell. It is a tale of warning to other clans of the Free Marches." She purses her lips, then concludes, "some answers are not worth the risk."

[fleurdesel]

This is-


Too much of it comes from a place she does not know well enough to comment on, doesn't at all understand. The world and lives of the Dalish are too foreign for her to have any frame of reference for anything other than the blood magic and the demon. That, sadly, is universal. Demons are demons. Blood magic is blood magic. Loss is loss.

"I- I cannot imagine how horrific that must have been."

[eolasemah]

Sina pauses to look at her, a small, apologetic smile covering her previous condemnation. "I only know if it through hearsay," she says, "I wasn't there, and was only a child when it happened. But Keeper Thalia made sure I knew, and understood where such a path inevitably leads."

[fleurdesel]

"The ends do not always justify the means. More often than not the means are what is remembered best for better or worse, no matter the intention or the result." It is a lesson they are all given in the tower, knotted up in not listening to demons for easy answers.