WHO: Ellis + OTA WHAT: Homecoming WHEN: Guardian WHERE: Kirkwall NOTES: Thread collection. Closed and open starters in the comments. Holler if you want something bespoke or drop in a wildcard, I'll roll with it.
Surely, the creak of the door is meant to reveal Ellis. But instead, it is a massive mabari. It's sleek red coat is marred with scarring here and there, where someone might have tried and failed to kill it.
There's twitch of it's nose as it takes Richard's measure, before padding further in, keeping to the perimeter.
Ellis is only a few moments delayed. He moves near-silently through the open door, and closes it behind him.
And he too gives a silent greeting, a nod, before questioning, "I'd wondered if you were away yourself."
Picking up where their conversation had left off, more or less.
Ellis will arrive to find Silas standing nearly in the hearth he’s backed so close against it, last night’s embers stoked back up into a full flame, the scent of fresh coffee and stale weed hot in the air. He’d be in greater danger of catching alight if he’d gotten as far as putting a cloak on.
As is, he’s watching the beast patrolling his quarters with distrust that flickers near to betrayal upon Ellis’ entry -- as far as he can get from the door without having clambered up onto one of the beds.
Thot is on his shoulders, also watchful, all eyes and ears. She’s less concerned, stayed from climbing down to say hello only by a raise at his hand. She was a bird before. Now she’s a cat.
“Fresh returned,” Silas says, and doesn’t elaborate.
But not picked at. Silas is allowed his lack of response. Ellis' attention shifts from him to the mabari, whistles him over to where he stands just inside the doorway. And the beast goes without hesitation, leaving off it's snuffling of various items within reach.
"I think he'll recognize her," is for Thot. "If she has a scent, he knows it by now."
Which of course, begs the question whether or not Thot has a scent of her own, separate from whatever creature she is impersonating at the time.
Still, the invisible claw keeping her wadded up on his shoulder is slow to relax it’s grip; she stretches like hot tar down to the step of his raised forearm, and from there to the bed. Everything one long toe-splayed leg at a time.
Silas himself is reluctant to follow her lead, unpeeling himself from the hearth only after she’s dropped to the floor and wound her way for the door.
“‘Ruadh,’” he guesses, polite as he would be for any other unexpected +1.
There’s a steaming pot seeping a ring into the table, and he makes his way back over to straighten a dropped cloth beneath it. He’s missing a chip out of his left ear, a line glanced in across his cheek to match. Nothing that impedes the process of him filling a cup for himself.
Tired amusement comes and goes, crossing Ellis' face briefly before he turns watchful eye to Ruadh and Thot, the former having turned all snuffling attention to approaching feline.
He'd asked, months ago, if she'd told Silas things. And he wonders what else she's imparted, along with the name of an inherited mabari.
"Yes."
Offer accepted with full knowledge that coffee won't dispel bone-deep exhaustion Ellis has been carrying with him.
"What happened?" comes with a lift of Ellis' hand, tracing his own ear and cheek to illustrate the intention.
Thot splays a goblin paw to Ruadh’s broad nose, claws curled back snort of contact. Her nose will follow, sniffing velvety fine over the fork of her tongue, the poke of her fangs. She is fearless.
And, theoretically, immortal.
“Brother Gideon,” says Silas, as he pours into the second cup. He looks up expectantly once he has it full in hand, the rim tilted out. The room is largely dark, apart from the glow of the hearth, the sunrise struggling behind heavy clouds.
Is an explicit invitation really necessary? The warhound didn’t need one.
"Brother Gideon?" Ellis questions, repetition shaded with confusion.
It seems unlikely that a Chantry Brother took issue enough with Silas to take a knife to him.
Said warhound is tolerating Thot's sniffing. Ellis keeps them in his periphery as he crosses the room to join Silas. Accept the cup, ease into a chair.
“He declared a holy war against the Gallows while you were away.”
It’s more natural to sit once Ellis has, the spare chair pulled out and occupied. He’s also keeping an eye on the eel of his familiar through mabari legs, reserve hard in his brow despite himself. He’s only just gotten her back.
This is not reassurance as to what Ruadh is capable of. But he wonders now, what Silas might have come across in Thedas. Mabari are rare, but not completely impossible to come across.
“Did no one think to mention we are all now loyal converts to Andrastianism?”
Unsuccessful.
Silas finally looks to Ellis, difficult to read, save that he is doing some reading of his own: sweeping for evidence of injury, first. Then onto the poke of cheekbones, posture, exhaustion. He’s no great fan of coffee himself -- it shows on his face in his distraction, and in the acrid pause from one small sip to the next.
He has seen a mabari before, but,
“From a respectful distance.”
Uneaten and presumably whole, Thot threads back through wooden legs to find Silas’ ankle beneath the table.
And followed, casually, by the great bulk of Ruadh. The mabari cannot thread beneath the table with the same ease as Thot, so instead folds himself down with a huff to eye Thot's progress along Silas' ankles.
"I can send him away if you'd prefer."
To startle someone else while wandering the Gallows' halls.
Tension coils tell-tale between his shoulder blades at the hound’s proximity -- something about the great, sharky block of muscle mounted to the skull, the bulk of the shoulders vanishing beneath the far edge of the table that rings familiar. Ruadh pulls at his attention the way a shadow in the shape of a spider draws the eye.
Thot’s stay is short-lived accordingly. Given silent leave, she spurs out on skittering claws to flop into a slide before the hearth, belly up, claws out in open invitation. Better she than he.
"That -- " his voice has feathered thin, and he clears it, "that won’t be necessary." Assuming the mabari follows.
The question he’d like an answer to could be asked in different ways, some easier to deflect than others. It takes him a beat of quiet to calculate the angles, escape routes.
An invitation accepted. Ruadh huffs to his feet, gives an exaggerated shake, and then goes snuffling after Thot to nose gently at her. Ellis' attention follows them briefly, before returning to Silas.
If Ruadh is absent when Ellis darkens Silas' doorstep in the future, well. Nothing need be said of it.
"It wasn't my decision," is a predictable answer. Somewhere Vance is scoffing. "He chose me. It would have been..."
A pause here, while Ellis considers his words. What it would have been to send Ruadh away from him, leave him behind in Weisshaupt?
"Cruel," is what Ellis settles on. "Even if he might have chosen better for himself."
Silas wouldn't know the Fereldan lore. He's a smart man, who has learned much of Thedas in his time here, but old legends likely aren't high on his reading list.
The barb of a follow-up question catches sharp in a glint of firelight at his eye, weighed and left on the table. The same light picks silver shavings out at his temple, razored down close at his ear. Would it have been cruel to transmit his findings and abandon Riftwatch for the deep roads on the return journey?
“He seems content,” says Silas, who looks next to the pattering box of Thot’s beans around the beast’s jowls. “Very handsome.” Occupied, and over there.
Ruadh is content enough. Ellis sees no reason to whistle him over, even if the pair of them make for a strange tableau.
A furrow of his brow for the sentiment, signaling perhaps some uncertainty over response. Ellis sips slowly from his mug instead, letting the taste linger. Perhaps when he's been here for more than a handful of days, the bone-deep weariness will loosen it's grip on him.
Thot enjoys existence in such a way that curling her toes between crushing jaws into warm slaver that then attracts loose dog hair and ash to cling red and grey to her coat does not deter her from whatever game she’s made for herself. She nips and rolls and at one point slides oily beneath a cot, only to prick out with thorny claws once she’s investigated. Playful, light. Not trying to leave new scars.
Static at the table with cup in hand, Silas’ study of this affair has reassured itself into the realm of a buzzard’s watchful indifference.
Should the unthinkable happen, bringing her back is a matter of time and incense. The dog seems gentle for its size, indifferent to his unease. Incurious, even. Maybe that’s how they get you.
Ellis’ question pulls his focus back around with more polished precision, question for the question in eye contact. Nothing they’ve asked so far has required preamble or consent. This has all been very amicable so far.
“If you like.”
He sips his coffee in open invitation to kill his vibe.
Has Ruadh ever played this way before? Ellis will never know. The Warden who kept him is a shell of themself now, or dead and gone in the process of making them so, and whatever life there was before that is a mystery. Perhaps when he was a puppy. Or perhaps this snuffling, slow-motion game of tag is an echo of whatever he'd played as a pup in a kennel with a pack of mabari destined for safeguarding Wardens as best they could.
Silas is allowing it. Ellis gives it only the periphery of his attention, though Ruadh knows better than to use the full force of his jaws in return.
"You are capable of more than just Research, aye?"
Dreams are just that: dreams. It doesn't mean that reality will follow. And Ellis only knows thirdhand what had been done, but he'd heard a little. And observed a little.
"You could get into somewhere you weren't meant to be?"
He starts to smile -- a crinkle at crow’s feet, a crook at the corner of his mouth for the marvel of Ellis putting this to him as an earnest question. He reins it in before his teeth show, cup shifted from the dimly glowing crux of his left hand to the wrap of his right.
His wonder is genuine, no malice. It simply can’t be helped if the shadows it carves in around his bony face are a little sinister.
“Only insofar as I was born and bred to.”
Pithy.
“Yes,” he tries again, more politely. “I think so.”
Silas' reaction lightens something in Ellis' face in response. He doesn't muster a smile, but some flex of surprised good humor sparks up at the sight of it.
And then settles, ebbing away as Ellis puts down his cup.
"The information we need is not in Weisshaupt anymore."
This would be easier with a map, Ellis thinks.
"They sent it away to Tevinter. To the university, and into a city named Qarinus."
And so here is the real implication, what Ellis is asking: Can Silas infiltrate Tevinter?
"I don't know how I would present the idea of chasing after it to the Scoutmaster."
The creases around his eyes find sharper edges upon realization of the scope of what Ellis is suggesting, lingering levity let to to escape along dry valleys as the air leaves his side of the table. No atmosphere to hold it in.
It’s not clear what he’d been expecting. A little light thieving, perhaps. Another brush with the Antivan tavern scene.
Stupid.
Life returns to him after a very standard amount of study of his coffee, silence mottled with the scuffing of the tussle at the hearth. He sets his cup down safely away from the table's edge.
“If I’m captured you will have to find another blood mage.”
"I'm not asking you to go yourself," is a quick amendment, a muted flicker of alarm breaking through Ellis' staid expression. It settles once that point is made, his hand flattening against the tabletop as he looks at Silas.
But it begs explanation. Ellis very clearly takes a moment, sorts through his own thoughts to winnow down to—
"I don't know how to come at a thing sideways, unseen. I wouldn't know how...I'm not much of a spy."
He had, after all, ridden directly up to Weisshaupt and presented himself with only the barest of untruths. That wouldn't work anywhere else.
"I need to know how you would do it. If it were you, trying to break into a place like that."
Doubt plucks the hood of his brow askance, skepticism translucent in a glance. It’s the same glance that catches the flicker on Ellis’ face, and he stifles the sentiment with a controlled breath and a hand raised to smooth his whiskers.
Of course.
Silas waits for Ellis to take his moment, pressure released back into default neutrality.
“If they sent the records to a university it’s likely they believe they contain something worth dissecting.” To business. “How long ago were they taken?”
“It would be exciting research. And dangerous. Difficult to keep quiet without evangelical dedication from all involved.”
Across the room, Thot pushes a foot fully into Ruadh’s maw while groping around his jowls. She is ribboned with glistening slobber and matte swaths of ash.
“Florus might have insight into the level of buy-in from scholars pressed into service on similar projects. The level of student involvement. Simple information gathering from the periphery might be an easier pitch than deep infiltration, to start. Eavesdropping in taverns close to the university, pursuing rumors of the blighted or deceased.”
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outraged at this revision
There's twitch of it's nose as it takes Richard's measure, before padding further in, keeping to the perimeter.
Ellis is only a few moments delayed. He moves near-silently through the open door, and closes it behind him.
And he too gives a silent greeting, a nod, before questioning, "I'd wondered if you were away yourself."
Picking up where their conversation had left off, more or less.
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As is, he’s watching the beast patrolling his quarters with distrust that flickers near to betrayal upon Ellis’ entry -- as far as he can get from the door without having clambered up onto one of the beds.
Thot is on his shoulders, also watchful, all eyes and ears. She’s less concerned, stayed from climbing down to say hello only by a raise at his hand. She was a bird before. Now she’s a cat.
“Fresh returned,” Silas says, and doesn’t elaborate.
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But not picked at. Silas is allowed his lack of response. Ellis' attention shifts from him to the mabari, whistles him over to where he stands just inside the doorway. And the beast goes without hesitation, leaving off it's snuffling of various items within reach.
"I think he'll recognize her," is for Thot. "If she has a scent, he knows it by now."
Which of course, begs the question whether or not Thot has a scent of her own, separate from whatever creature she is impersonating at the time.
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“Alright.”
She must have a scent, surely.
Still, the invisible claw keeping her wadded up on his shoulder is slow to relax it’s grip; she stretches like hot tar down to the step of his raised forearm, and from there to the bed. Everything one long toe-splayed leg at a time.
Silas himself is reluctant to follow her lead, unpeeling himself from the hearth only after she’s dropped to the floor and wound her way for the door.
“‘Ruadh,’” he guesses, polite as he would be for any other unexpected +1.
There’s a steaming pot seeping a ring into the table, and he makes his way back over to straighten a dropped cloth beneath it. He’s missing a chip out of his left ear, a line glanced in across his cheek to match. Nothing that impedes the process of him filling a cup for himself.
“Coffee?”
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He'd asked, months ago, if she'd told Silas things. And he wonders what else she's imparted, along with the name of an inherited mabari.
"Yes."
Offer accepted with full knowledge that coffee won't dispel bone-deep exhaustion Ellis has been carrying with him.
"What happened?" comes with a lift of Ellis' hand, tracing his own ear and cheek to illustrate the intention.
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And, theoretically, immortal.
“Brother Gideon,” says Silas, as he pours into the second cup. He looks up expectantly once he has it full in hand, the rim tilted out. The room is largely dark, apart from the glow of the hearth, the sunrise struggling behind heavy clouds.
Is an explicit invitation really necessary? The warhound didn’t need one.
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It seems unlikely that a Chantry Brother took issue enough with Silas to take a knife to him.
Said warhound is tolerating Thot's sniffing. Ellis keeps them in his periphery as he crosses the room to join Silas. Accept the cup, ease into a chair.
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It’s more natural to sit once Ellis has, the spare chair pulled out and occupied. He’s also keeping an eye on the eel of his familiar through mabari legs, reserve hard in his brow despite himself. He’s only just gotten her back.
“During the Satinalia celebration.”
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Apart from one newly acquired scar.
"Have you never seen a mabari before?"
This is not reassurance as to what Ruadh is capable of. But he wonders now, what Silas might have come across in Thedas. Mabari are rare, but not completely impossible to come across.
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Unsuccessful.
Silas finally looks to Ellis, difficult to read, save that he is doing some reading of his own: sweeping for evidence of injury, first. Then onto the poke of cheekbones, posture, exhaustion. He’s no great fan of coffee himself -- it shows on his face in his distraction, and in the acrid pause from one small sip to the next.
He has seen a mabari before, but,
“From a respectful distance.”
Uneaten and presumably whole, Thot threads back through wooden legs to find Silas’ ankle beneath the table.
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"I can send him away if you'd prefer."
To startle someone else while wandering the Gallows' halls.
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Thot’s stay is short-lived accordingly. Given silent leave, she spurs out on skittering claws to flop into a slide before the hearth, belly up, claws out in open invitation. Better she than he.
"That -- " his voice has feathered thin, and he clears it, "that won’t be necessary." Assuming the mabari follows.
The question he’d like an answer to could be asked in different ways, some easier to deflect than others. It takes him a beat of quiet to calculate the angles, escape routes.
"What made you decide to keep him?"
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If Ruadh is absent when Ellis darkens Silas' doorstep in the future, well. Nothing need be said of it.
"It wasn't my decision," is a predictable answer. Somewhere Vance is scoffing. "He chose me. It would have been..."
A pause here, while Ellis considers his words. What it would have been to send Ruadh away from him, leave him behind in Weisshaupt?
"Cruel," is what Ellis settles on. "Even if he might have chosen better for himself."
Silas wouldn't know the Fereldan lore. He's a smart man, who has learned much of Thedas in his time here, but old legends likely aren't high on his reading list.
no subject
The barb of a follow-up question catches sharp in a glint of firelight at his eye, weighed and left on the table. The same light picks silver shavings out at his temple, razored down close at his ear. Would it have been cruel to transmit his findings and abandon Riftwatch for the deep roads on the return journey?
“He seems content,” says Silas, who looks next to the pattering box of Thot’s beans around the beast’s jowls. “Very handsome.” Occupied, and over there.
“I’m happy for you.”
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A furrow of his brow for the sentiment, signaling perhaps some uncertainty over response. Ellis sips slowly from his mug instead, letting the taste linger. Perhaps when he's been here for more than a handful of days, the bone-deep weariness will loosen it's grip on him.
"Can I ask you something of yourself?"
A roundabout approach to what Ellis has found.
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Static at the table with cup in hand, Silas’ study of this affair has reassured itself into the realm of a buzzard’s watchful indifference.
Should the unthinkable happen, bringing her back is a matter of time and incense. The dog seems gentle for its size, indifferent to his unease. Incurious, even. Maybe that’s how they get you.
Ellis’ question pulls his focus back around with more polished precision, question for the question in eye contact. Nothing they’ve asked so far has required preamble or consent. This has all been very amicable so far.
“If you like.”
He sips his coffee in open invitation to kill his vibe.
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Silas is allowing it. Ellis gives it only the periphery of his attention, though Ruadh knows better than to use the full force of his jaws in return.
"You are capable of more than just Research, aye?"
Dreams are just that: dreams. It doesn't mean that reality will follow. And Ellis only knows thirdhand what had been done, but he'd heard a little. And observed a little.
"You could get into somewhere you weren't meant to be?"
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His wonder is genuine, no malice. It simply can’t be helped if the shadows it carves in around his bony face are a little sinister.
“Only insofar as I was born and bred to.”
Pithy.
“Yes,” he tries again, more politely. “I think so.”
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And then settles, ebbing away as Ellis puts down his cup.
"The information we need is not in Weisshaupt anymore."
This would be easier with a map, Ellis thinks.
"They sent it away to Tevinter. To the university, and into a city named Qarinus."
And so here is the real implication, what Ellis is asking: Can Silas infiltrate Tevinter?
"I don't know how I would present the idea of chasing after it to the Scoutmaster."
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It’s not clear what he’d been expecting. A little light thieving, perhaps. Another brush with the Antivan tavern scene.
Stupid.
Life returns to him after a very standard amount of study of his coffee, silence mottled with the scuffing of the tussle at the hearth. He sets his cup down safely away from the table's edge.
“If I’m captured you will have to find another blood mage.”
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But it begs explanation. Ellis very clearly takes a moment, sorts through his own thoughts to winnow down to—
"I don't know how to come at a thing sideways, unseen. I wouldn't know how...I'm not much of a spy."
He had, after all, ridden directly up to Weisshaupt and presented himself with only the barest of untruths. That wouldn't work anywhere else.
"I need to know how you would do it. If it were you, trying to break into a place like that."
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Of course.
Silas waits for Ellis to take his moment, pressure released back into default neutrality.
“If they sent the records to a university it’s likely they believe they contain something worth dissecting.” To business. “How long ago were they taken?”
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Of course, that's a problem.
"It wasn't all at once. From what I could find, it seemed that they'd been sending them in batches. It's been going on for a year, maybe two."
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Across the room, Thot pushes a foot fully into Ruadh’s maw while groping around his jowls. She is ribboned with glistening slobber and matte swaths of ash.
“Florus might have insight into the level of buy-in from scholars pressed into service on similar projects. The level of student involvement. Simple information gathering from the periphery might be an easier pitch than deep infiltration, to start. Eavesdropping in taverns close to the university, pursuing rumors of the blighted or deceased.”
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a long delayed bow to slap on this thread