[closed] if you're here and I'm here then who's flying the plane

[katabasis]

WHO: Flint & Yseult
WHAT: Trust exercises
WHEN: Immediately pre-hasmal invasion
WHERE: Near Hasmal
NOTES: will include content warning in subject lines if applicable

It's almost guaranteed that their contact has utilized the flow of refugees across the border and toward Hasmal as a cover to pass into the South, though they aren't meant to meet them in that. Doubtless every breed of intelligencier currently peddles their trade there, for if an agent of one secret network might slip in that direction then why not agents of all?

Rather, after crossing the broad width of the Minanter on one of the point-nosed ferries (in the company of a pilot with a near supernatural skill for weaseling extra coin out of pocket, but who tactfully neglects to intervene in the debate his passengers are engaged in), they hire a pair of horses and turn west toward what is allegedly an all but forgotten trading post by the name of Drake's Landing which is said to boast such luxuries as a nearly empty inn and the cheapest drink in the political tri-corner.

At some point—perhaps after the fourth or fifth narrow bridge that they have to coax the horses across, for the landscape is threaded through with twisting offshoots of the Minanter—Flint remarks, "If we come this way again, it would be faster to row in."

Maybe that's how the Venatori beat them to the Landing. Or maybe the ferry pilot had a raven in the little cabin at the back of his boat who had carried word of a certain notable captain of Riftwatch swiftly North.

Regardless—

Comments

[katabasis]

Here, a laugh. It's exhausted by merit of their situation. It's made genuine by the simplicity of her agony. Maybe this version of torture is a preferable distraction from the other kind.

"Nascere could have proven its independence by routing the Venatori there and dispensing with Tevinter's claim on the island. With the Inquisition's endorsement, it might have found the means to entice the fighters on Seheron to join it's force, raided the Imperium's mines and liberated the slaves there. It could have razed Alam, captured Ath Velanis, and made the Straits into a place so feared by the Antivan merchant trade and coveted by the Qun that the south would have no choice but to recognize it or else risk the encroachment of Par Vollen."

Is that practical enough an example to satisfy her? Unlikely. It hinges on mights, and coulds, and perhapses.

"If enough people recognize something as true, then it is. And no one has to raise a sword to defend what everyone knows."

[hassaran]

It is a great many mights and coulds and perhapses, and even now it immediately begs a dozen more iterations of her question. How could one small island of unruly pirates be organized enough to do anything? How could they raze Alam or capture Ath Velanis? How could they be enough to make any dent in Seheron, where two great powers have failed for Ages? How do these pretty maxims account for even the present war's many demonstrations that recognition is no guarantee of safety within or without? How does any of this theory become reality?

Another day, the temptation to press and probe at the loose weave of this vision might win out. Now, she can't be arsed. There's only one question that really matters, anyway. "To what end?"

[katabasis]

They're carrying on a conversation better suited to a study while chained in a dark Hasmal cellar as she bleeds through her fingers and he can't lift his arms without flinching, yet the absurdity of that question still surprises him.

"What do you mean to what end?"

It's followed immediately by a second sawn laugh, reflexive and bewildered and an entirely different kind of exhausted. This must be what madness feels like—trapped in a pit with only someone who speaks the wrong language and the unrelenting urge to communicate for company. Flint checks himself from laughing again, though can feel the impulse of its mania lingering behind his ribs.

"To make a place here livable. Sailing off the edge of the world may be well and good for Alrazin, but it doesn't do anything for anyone stuck on the map."

[hassaran]

Yseult wonders if at some point she went delirious already without noticing, or unwittingly dozed off for some crucial minutes of the conversation. "What would make that place more livable than anywhere else? That you would rule it?"

[katabasis]

Clearly Flint has come to a similar conclusion. Maybe those minutes of silence had been her lapsing out of consciousness.

"I don't expect you to understand right now."

[hassaran]

"You know, I only pretend to read minds." She somehow sounds like her eyes are closed, head tipped back to catch her breath. "And if you already said I didn't hear it."

She might leave it there, but "Come on, what else are we going to talk about while I die?" Surely this can't be worse than fading away in his disgruntled silence. "I know how you enjoy speaking to me like I'm stupid; now's your chance."

[katabasis]

The clenched fist feeling in his chest that had started as that off kilter humor is meant to harden into something furious in answer to that goading. Instead it sits there, cooling and refusing to become anything else but a knot to breath around. He's tired. That vague passing inkling of despair is familiar, and all at once he's violently ill with something best called homesickness.

So for a long measure, the silence extends. It probably sounds like snub nosed obstinacy. In a sense it is. He doesn't, actually—enjoy it.

"If Corypheus we're pulled down tomorrow. What happens then?"

[hassaran]

"We die here for even less?" is not actually her answer. That takes another moment. She tries not to sound as weary as the question makes her; she did ask for this. But it's a reminder that it isn't getting any easier to imagine the end of this war, even when the chance she'll live to see it isn't slipping through her fingers as they speak.

She achieves at least the rough approximation of her usual tone, enough for the intention to be clear. "Tevinter tears itself apart deciding who rules next. The Qun takes advantage of the opportunity. The mage war begins again. Riftwatch dissolves into a half-dozen different causes."

[katabasis]

If he's at all surprised by the grim nature of his assessment—or the fact that it aligns so closing with his—, little trace of it exists in his voice. The point is that none of it sounds like a particularly welcome climate in which to live.

"Then you know that the luxury of being singleminded about pursuing Corypheus is something few can afford. There must be arrangements made now to guarantee that what follows isn't more of the same."

[hassaran]

It is near to a worst-case scenario, at least among scenarios where the war ends anytime soon with the defeat of Corypheus and without the destruction of any more major cities. Another day, in another place, she might give a more nuanced guess—the mage war might begin again, to a smaller degree, if x, y, and z do not happen—but she could be forgiven for painting with a broad black brush just at the moment.

"Such as?" Can he hear the implied 'starting a war in Nevarra as well?' in her tone?

[katabasis]

Great news: he can.

"Making vulnerable a front that, if united, would have had little reason to bother with negotiating with anyone beyond their borders much less acting in their interests. We do this by suggesting that the way forward is with strange partners, or not at all."

Surely this is a subject with which she is painfully familiar.

[hassaran]

"You fear the end of the war will bring instability, so your solution is to create more?" She sounds no more impressed with this notion than she did two (three? four?) years ago when he originally suggested it.

"Orlais is exhausted and Nevarra has lost its capital. Both will have reason enough to fear the conflict to the north spilling over. All you'd do is invite the Qun south. What is it you hope the Van Markhams or the mages will do for you?"

[katabasis]

The whole answer is ready for her as if it's a coin he is holding in his hand. It fits easily on his palm. He can see the shape of it, ordered in a straight line.

She should know as well as he does the benefit of a feint. How, if the Qun is to be kept at bay then Tevinter must retain some measure of its strength. How to do that and best Corypheus would require showing those in the Imperium willing to see things differently that there is a way forward that is neither the Magisterium's or the Southern Chantry's. And so they must look be able to look south and see an alternative to what they revile there. They must hear it from the mages who ought to have every right to defect rather than to fights. And to do that, someone—he hardly cares who—must be moved to offer them an accord. The pheasant must be beaten from the bush. Someone must carry the stick.

But what he says is, "Tell me why it matters to you."

[hassaran]

It's as well he can't see her face in the dark, because she is past caring what shows on it and finds this question every bit as absurd as he did hers.

"Why do I care about your aims? Or why do I care what happens to Nevarra? Or why do I care if--" whatever the third option was. There was one, maybe two. It slips her grasp, suddenly, like fish from a snapped line. Maybe it sounds like exasperation, the way she sputters to a halt for a moment and sighs. She breathes, then tries it simpler.

"When you imply your aim is stability, I don't believe you. I think you care more about ideas than people."

[katabasis]

"If that's what you think then it won't matter what I say."

Not here, not outside of this room, and certainly not when she is bleeding out from who knows where at who knows what rate. Maybe it's a illusion produced by the darkness, but it sounds straightforward when he says it. Patient (tired) and simple.

[hassaran]

This time it really is frustration that pushes out a weary laugh.

"You'll give me a grand plan for forcing the world to recognize a new nation but I ask you how this island you'd rule would be livable for people and you've nothing to say. What am I meant to think?"

[katabasis]

"That my first choice would be to become some kind of tyrant?"

There's a matching tinge of frustration there, the faintest shape of a huff like disbelief. He's sitting on a hard floor is a Hasmal cellar waiting for a Tevinter Magister to grow tired of entertaining them. Surely if that were his goal, there are easier or at least more direct paths toward it.

"When Corypheus is finished, you and Darras might easily go where you please with little concern for anyone else." They're already debating a fantasy. Let's pretend that she doesn't die in this place or on some battlefield or ingloriously tripping down the Gallows' stairs. "There are people who couldn't, and they should have a place made ready for them. I never said anything about it being subject to my leadership."

[hassaran]

"If I survive to get there, I will have earned that," she says, with a low vehemence that's slightly out of sync with their conversation, as if she is responding to someone else's remark, hearing some harsher tone than he took. Whatever corner that comment turned she steps back just as quickly, facing the rest of his response with the same muted exasperation.

"And I never said tyrant. I've already admitted I don't understand what you're after. Stop making me guess so that you can be offended instead of answering. How do you make an island full of pirates ready for people? How do you make that a place better than any other place? I've been to Estwatch. I've lived in Llomerryn. Unless you are a pirate they have no advantages on Lowtown."

[katabasis]

"It doesn't have to better. It just shouldn't be hostile to the people trying to—" He stops himself, a check on some flaring frustration. It's a short beat. When Flint continues, it's measured like a leash wrapped short around a hand.

"You make an island full of pirates ready for people by making them legitimate. Not by making them not Seheran, or not mages, or not whatever other kind of person might find themselves in such a place. You do it by making them strong enough or convenient enough that somewhere like Nevarra—the Van Markhams, the Pentaghasts, who gives a shit—sees the benefit in respecting what they already are."

And then, as if abruptly irritated with either himself or the trajectory of this conversation or some combination, he is abruptly more direct: "What do you want me to tell you? I don't have figures. You don't care for the people in question. That island doesn't even exist anymore."

[hassaran]

"Not figures. Not politics." Maybe she is half-delirious already, and that is why it feels as if they're speaking two entirely different languages. Maybe somewhere along the way she confused him with someone else or dreamt some exchange that never happened and has been talking nonsense ever since. "What did you want it to be? After all the business of legitimizing. What would the place be that would make it worth starting another war? Another Llomerryn isn't."

[katabasis]

Maybe she is delirious. That might account for why the whole shape of this feels like trying to blindly grab a snake out of a burlap sack without knowing which end has the fanged mouth. The beat in which he doesn't have a ready answer for her is one in which he struggles to think of some version of this he hasn't already said outright.

"Farms. A port. Trade. A real place made self sustaining where those people can be what they please and earn"—chafes—"What they can't elsewhere."

A beat, like trying to chew sinew.

"I don't know how to put it more plainly. Someone once had the idea or performed the politics for making the place you would choose to live in."

[hassaran]

"That's it? A place like any other, except you allow mages to be farmers too?"

She sounds incredulous. Surely not. All of the years of machinations and secrecy and cryptic philosophizing must be for more. Something grander, more radical, more troublesome. No one foments civil war and plots to wedge themselves between the Qun and the Imperium for the chance to turn a few pirates to shepherds. Or did she imagine all of that, too?

[katabasis]

More than just mages, but that thought strays awfully close to politics.

"Why not? Is that so unbelievable?"

[hassaran]

In any other circumstance she would find a better way to say this. Or, better, a way to not say it at all. But here is where they are. She says: "I expected more."

[katabasis]

Should that cut? Maybe in some other place under different circumstances, it would. And maybe if she weren't gut stabbed and dying and there weren't no point to it he might say, You should consider why that is and who it benefits that she would expect the world to be so very dangerous.

"I'm sorry to disappoint you."