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

[fleurdesel]

Every evening for weeks, now, at dusk she comes here, she takes the sword he's given her- and learns the motions. The posture, the strikes, the steps, pushing herself in every swing. For the most part early in each lesson she need only be corrected on something once before she knows that she has managed or that she has not. Learning the way something felt, memorizing that is the bulk of the lesson. The rest? Has been a trial in patience.

And tonight she is not doing terribly well when it came to being patient.

Skirts and kirtles and gowns have no place here, nor her usual sleeves; Adelaide is dressed simply- trousers, shirt, gloves boots, the jacket a concession to the weather that's long since been unbuttoned for how effort has left her perspiring. Hair damp and stuck to her nape and temples in dark curls she snarls, more to herself than him, and insists. "Again. I almost have it."