faderift | MOD PLOT ↠ Wings of Death

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MOD PLOT ↠ Wings of Death

WHO: Everyone (more or less)
WHAT: A trip to Rialto, in pursuit of convincing Antiva to give up its famed neutrality, just this once, pleaaaase.
WHEN: Cloudreach/Bloomingtide 9:48
WHERE: Rialto, Antiva
NOTES: OOC post here. Remember to use warnings in your subject lines for gore, sexual content, or anything else people might not expect to find while casually reading this log on a work computer.

YOUR DESTINATION

Rialto is Antiva's second city in importance and in population, but in many ways it is first in sheer Antivanness. When foreigners imagine Antiva, they often conjure images of graceful bridges arching over turquoise canals, lovers on a romantic gondola ride serenaded by a soprano's aria, fiery young men in vibrant leathers dueling for the honor of their houses in the piazza while down at the docks pirates share tales over bowls of seafood pasta. All of this is to be found in Rialto. While Antiva City is a teeming, bustling center of world commerce, with all the clamor and diversity that creates, Rialto is popular more with the city's uppermost classes than its vast mercantile middle, particularly the old aristocracy who prefer Rialto for its relative peace and its proximity to King Fulgeno's favorite residence. This is not to suggest that Rialto is a Hightown without any Low—like all major cities, for every palazzo-lined canal where the wealthy rest are ten more waterways packed with delivery boats and shops and taverns of every degree and description, from the broad spans edged with rows of fashionable tailors and jewelers to narrow, winding alleys of water overhung by leaning buildings of smoke-stained stucco. The docks, though neither as large nor as busy as the capital's or Kirkwall's, are still large and busy by any other measure, packed with merchants and sailors and fishermen, along with some who—uniquely common in Antiva, a kingdom founded by pirates—skirt the line between honest seamen and buccaneers.

Antivans will argue it's always a good time to visit their country, but everyone else agrees that spring is the ideal. The weather is consistently mild and pleasant, warmer than Kirkwall but without yet edging into the heat of summer the way it is in Tevinter to the north. In the city's parks and piazzas, flowers and shrubby add a few splashes of greenery and warm breezes send occasional showers of petals down from the cherry and citrus trees just finishing their blooms. Climbing flowers and arbors of grapevines are common adornments.

For the king's birthday celebration the city's elegant pale stone buildings are all decorated, with public buildings and bridges hung with bunting in the crown's favored purple and banners depicting the arms of Antiva and the royal house Campagna: a golden ship, sails unfurled, beneath a crown, the shield supported by a seahorse on one side and a stallion on the other. Along the grand canals every palazzo is bedecked in some combination of the occupant's colors and the kingdom's purple, and the theme continues throughout the city, every district finding some means to demonstrate its festive mood. The effect is only slightly diminished by the few areas where graffiti conflicts with the decorations, and Riftwatch, at least, will be pleased to see it mostly takes the form of anti-Tevinter sentiment, ranging from a scrawled FUCK THE VINTS to a few choice quotes from certain popular pamphlets and puppet plays, to a large and surprisingly skillful mural of a dragon and a caricatured merchant prince sitting together on a heap of gold playing with toy ships and dolls while behind them a fire rages.

The king's birthday is always an extravagant occasion, even more so when he hits any age ending in a 0 or a 5, as he is this year. A full week of revelry has been decreed, with each day marked by pageants and parades and games of all sorts, and every night new and fabulous parties in his honor hosted by various houses, guilds, and societies. Knowing the king's love of masquerades, many of these balls are masked, with themes ranging from House Campagna's most celebrated ancestors, to sea creatures, to all gold everything. (While fancy dress is of course always encouraged, many will simply attend in their best finery, with the intention of visiting multiple parties in the same night.) The city is lit with lanterns, torches, and even the occasional bonfire, as the bacchanal spills into the canals and piazzas each evening and continues long into the night.

YOUR MISSION

Riftwatch arrives on this scene by ship, which garners a few approval points from the merchants and pirate-descendants populating the city. The ship remains anchored in the harbor for the duration of their stay, reachable by tender and doubling as a temporary home for the selection of griffons who have accompanied them north.

Griffon riders will make the trip back and forth from the ship most often, as they'll be assigned to shifts that keep one or two of them in the air at all times, day or night. The outward justification for this is to entertain the Antivans below them; they're encouraged to fill some of the time with acrobatics over busy squares or particular parties, at times with banners and streamers to trail behind their mounts. Those with griffons who don't startle easily might be entrusted with a few fireworks to set off from the air. But the real purpose is surveillance, of course, and to serve as emergency back-up or ambulance for anyone who finds themselves caught in a tight spot and calls for help. Riders will be equipped with vials of antidotes to some common poisons, and particularly at night, anyone with healing magic or medical skills might be asked to ride along.

Meanwhile, down on the ground, a steady stream of influential merchants and socialites will want an interesting Riftwatcher or three at their dinners and private parties, each presenting an opportunity to impress upon influential people the importance of the war. These gatherings will range from stiff, formal affairs to wild bacchanals, depending on the host. Of note: a moonlit evening with a chamber quartet on Antonio Luppi's pleasure yacht, famously large enough to have a croquet pitch on the upper deck, a days-long Wicked Grace tournament with rising stakes where Marco "il Calabrone" Molinari defies anyone to beat him, and a race through the canals on gondalas owned by Antiva's who's-who. There are no rules, so finding ways–even magical or new-technological ways–to improve the odds of the more invested racers may win some favor, and a number of competitors are eager to see if Riftwatch has some arcane way to give them an edge.

Outside the city gates, on a grassy cliffside that overlooks the Amaranthine Ocean, there's a faire for the workers and peasantry. There's dancing, a series of field games (tug of war, footraces, horseshoes, wrestling, hammer throwing, blindfolded stick-dueling, mob football, and whatever the heck wallop is), a bonfire each evening, and young people goading one another into cliff diving and climbing back up, sopping wet, using stairs and handholds carved into the cliffside. While no single one of the participants is as influential as the better-heeled set hosting gathering elsewhere, it's still good politics to put in an appearance, play some games, and dispel any lingering perception of Riftwatch as a weird heretical sect or pack of wild demons.

They'll find similar opportunities scattered throughout the streets of Rialto: full tables at taverns who might listen raptly to their accounts of the war further south, minstrels and players who might be persuaded to change their tunes to whip up sympathy or anger for Corypheus' targets, and lower-level independent tradesman who might be persuaded to stop doing business with Tevinter or push for such an agreement within their guilds.

Riftwatchers who are especially active in outreach in these working-class quarters may find themselves approached quietly by representatives of I Figli Della Brace, an underground network of agitators that sprung up in the wake of Riftwatch's prior propaganda efforts and has been wreaking minor havoc by destroying Tevinter goods, carrying on the tradition of vandalism, and hassling those who do the most business with Tevinter and the Anderfels. They're loosely helmed by Vieri Fontana, who already trusts a few members of Riftwatch, and in exchange for Riftwatch's assistance with a few sneaky favors and quick but rowdy demonstrations of disobedience, they'll promise a strong showing of angry common folk outside the palace when it's most needed.

And through all of this, Riftwatch members will need to be looking over their shoulders, watching their drinks, avoiding dark alleys, keeping an eye out for snipers on rooftops, and staying wary of alluring strangers, because an untold number of Antivan Crows are out for their lives and/or anchors.

The purpose of all of this hobnobbing and sneaking around and dodging of murder attempts awaits at the end of Riftwatch's stay: King Fulgeno the Merry and all of the Merchant Princes have agreed to give a contingent of Riftwatch diplomats a moment, the day after the king's largest birthday feast, to plead their case against continuing to trade with Tevinter and the Anderfels. Winning them over would strike a significant blow to the enemy, already cut off from trade with much of the rest of Thedas, and bring Antiva that much closer to actively assisting with the war effort.

Should this meeting involve the support of a few more Merchant Princes, the dramatic unmasking of a traitor among the Princes and a conspiracy among the Crows, and shouts of support from people in the street echoing in through the windows, there's a good chance they'll pull it off.

YOUR ACCOMMODATIONS

The canal-side palazzo where Riftwatch is residing during its visit is the summer property of Merchant Prince Amancio Vivas. Unlike some questionable accommodations provided to Riftwatch in the past, Palazzo Vivas is roomy and lavish, brimming with expensive decor and labelled artifacts and comfortable seating. Anyone needing space to work or plan will find multiple nooks and tables in the library, and Riftwatch has collectively commandeered a secondary dining room (there are several) for meetings.

For those needing a break from work, actually, Palazzo Vivas is well-stocked with books and all of the necessary equipment for parlor games, plus an echoing ballroom equipped with a pianoforte. There's a cabinet of decent wine and spirits available, or a locked cellar full of the very good stuff for the particularly enterprising. The palazzo encircles a central courtyard garden with enough tall hedges and trees that someone might disappear into it. Currently it's in full bloom, including some rare night-bloomers, and at all hours bustling with some combination of insects, birds, and bats. Also featured: two small fountains and a canal-fed wading pool.

The beds, unlike most of the Gallows', involve feathers rather than straw. The sheets are soft. Everything smells like lavender. Everyone can have a bed if they're willing to share with at least one other person; those who are unwilling will find themselves on the floor or a settee.

Everyone will be asked to take on some additional tasks in the palazzo. Most important is guard duty, including some overnight patrols to make sure there are no intruders or disturbances. But as only a skeleton staff is present in the palace, idle Riftwatchers might be sent out to Rialto's bustling markets for food and supplies and/or pressed into making vats of porridge, pasta, or seafood stew to keep everyone else fed while the single cook is attending festivities elsewhere.

YOUR LEISURE

Between assignments, Riftwatch members may find moments–or even several consecutive hours!--to enjoy Rialto. Cautiously, on account of the assassins. But still. In addition to partaking in the merriment, entertainment, and games purely for fun, there are street performances to watch, gondolas to hire for leisurely floats, markets and shops stuffed with goods from throughout Thedas, bath houses, and, only a short hike or shorter griffon ride away from the city, a pristine white sand beach on a calm cove, littered with sea shells, without a single decomposing shipwreck in sight. It's not something they're going to find in Kirkwall, so no one can be blamed for wanting a peek.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The immediacy of John's slanting grin carries a contradiction, even tinged with exhaustion.

But the bowl is accepted, balanced on one thigh with a hand to steady it.

"I'm thinking of the pillows," John replies, opposite hand loosely holding his place until dislodged.

Flint's snort is more laugh that inhale. For good measure, he presses his thumb once more into the taut line of John's calf. And then, with as much grumbling good nature as he may still possess here at the end of a very long and startlingly bloody day, he gingerly hoists himself back along the edge of the bed so as to be within arm's reach. The cloth, cool as it is, is plucked from John's leg. It too is passed over.

In a great show of something like faux-deference (because there's little good to be gleaned from John sitting back upright now), he bows his head and bares his bloodied face to him. Partly, its the cut's fault. But there is other spray there, flecked in places that make no sense unless you'd been there to see either the hardscrabble fight in the alley of the gout of arterial blood that had come from the last neck of one of the previous Crows.

It affords John a moment of study, reaching up to Flint's face. His fingers pass lightly over the neat slash cut into his cheek, eyes moving over the collection of blood spatter. Having wrung the cloth out once more, John's hand finds purchase at the slope of Flint's neck, while he draws the sodden fabric over the injury.

The blood comes away. The line struck into Flint's cheek remains, standing out so clearly now without anything to mask it.

It's a delicate business. John handles the cloth very gently, swiping blood from forehead, eyelids, the bridge of Flint's nose. Lingers at his neck, where blood had pooled and dried there in the hollow of his throat, before passing the cloth over it and taking blood and grit away.

"There," deems him presentable, or at least, beyond the possibility of stamping evidence of their hard-won victory across the pillows. The flex of John's fingers at his neck say something else, silently but clearly, as the cloth itself comes to rest back at the edge of the bowl.

It's the kind of attention that would be welcome even excepting the tacky sensation of blood on skin. Rialto is warm, albeit less humid than Kirkwall. Behind closed doors where there's no night's salt smelling sea breeze to speak of, the cool cloth makes for a pleasant relief as the water drips into his whiskers. There's a tang of copper when he wets his lips. In the shadow of John's hand and the soft application of the cloth, he absently wrinkles his nose in answer to it.

Otherwise, he's still for the duration—submits to being wiped clean with something like well schooled patience or with the temperament of an animal well acquainted with shearing. He breathes easy and low. When John has finished with the cloth, he is watching him with the methodical attention inherent in any study of the familiar.

"How does it look?"

John's thumb scuffs along the bristle of beard at Flint's jawline.

"Rakish."

Unfortunate third party associations to the word notwithstanding. The pull of grin says John is well aware, and finds inherent humor in the choice of descriptor.

"It won't need a bandage," is more resolute, andperhaps begging to be contradicted by a healer with any experience. But to John's eye, it is well-placed and shallow enough to be left alone.

And what use is it, if the only impression it makes is papered over with a clump of gauze?

"Small mercies," is a low grumble (third party associations being difficult to shake entirely, particularly when Silver has the audacity to grin over them).

With an easy sway of shoulders and a damp hand planting among the rare feather stuffed pillows, he leans further down. Into the shape of John's thumb, smelling of sweat and metal and the faint hints of whatever chalky substances had floated in the air of the apothecary and not been sufficiently stripped from the short flight by griffon back to the palazzo. The kiss that follows is warm, and rasping—bending in answer to the thing that John's fingers had written at the bend of his neck and shoulder.

The smile fades by degrees as Flint draws closer, observing intent in his descent. Humor shifts accordingly to a kind of welcome. John's mouth opens into the kiss, hand keeping place at Flint's nape.

How satisfying it is, to be so indulged.

"The bowl," John cautions, when some narrow space appears between them in which words might be spoken.

Other objections might follow. But chief among them, surely, is the danger of a sopping wet mattress should the bowl tip one way or another while John's attention is elsewhere.

The hum of his reply, low and largely blind in that narrow slip of space, has some chiding limn to it. Hadn't he advised it be set aside? But after a moment spent lingering there, the line of his own mouth twitching toward some wolf's grin, the joint of his elbow straightens. Flint levers himself back upright. He runs a callous-rough palm over the clean, unmarred side of his face and across the top of his bristly skull. The basin is fetched and set at the side table with the damp cloth draped over its lip still.

"That was clever, by the way," he says. His good leg shifts off over the edge of the bed and Flint rocks some of his weight up from mattress to heel. It makes working free of the scarred belt considerably easier. "Pulling the Crow into the open."

Freed of the basin, John uses his unpunctured arm to lever himself—not upright, but propped at an upward slant upon the pillows. There is roughened brocade upon one, discarded to the foot of the bed while Flint begins the process of shedding his own bloodied items.

"Had I thought of it sooner, there might be more of that apothecary shop left," John answers, though the truth was that he hadn't been entirely sure he'd manage it until he'd expended the energy. "But I'll remember it for next time."

Ha, ha. (They are not finished in Antiva, so how much of a joke is it?)

His laugh is a low exhale as the heavy studded belt is dropped away, and the shape of it lingers in the shape of him as he pulls free his short tails and dredges the article of clothing off over his head. This is perfunctory; comparatively little blood had found his shirt given the presence of his coat (which will warrant patching). But afterward, surfacing from the depths of the wine dark fabric, and before he fully extracts his arms from its sleeves—

"Does it worry you still?"

Some of the humor has come off him with the shirt, like paint transferred in chips from one thing to another. But there is still some easier, gentler thing living in the lines of his face. It's softened by the shadow of his brow and the figure of his beard as defined by the uneven cast of candle and lamplight both, the line of his mouth converted to suggestion more than rule and the pale glint of his eye gold as a coin.

He frees one arm and then the other, slowly unlayering himself in turn.

A momentary hitch along the way to the meaning of the question: John's thoughts slow to leave the promise of further scuffles with Crows and align with the topic at hand.

And then John takes a moment to turn over the question. He observes the shift of muscle in Flint's shoulder, takes in the expression on his face. Recalls the discussion in which they'd first broached the topic. John had been bruised then too, recalls that in equal parts to his remembrance of Flint's fingers pressing into his palm and the stillness of him across the table.

"Yes," John answers. "I do."

Is there any mage free from such a concern? (Has John ever truly thought of himself as a mage?)

"Do you?"

He recalls too, Flint's answer then.

"On behalf of other things," he says, turning the shirt slowly between his hands. Not folding it, just handling it. Thumbs shifting across the knots embroidered in neat repeating rows at the collar. "But not that."

The scorch mark left by the abomination had lingered at the apex of the dining hall's ceiling for far longer than the other damage had. The ruined walls had been patched and plastered. The floors had been stripped and resealed. The broken furniture cleared away and replaced by pieces scavenged from the unused parallel hall. But that black mark. The massive thumb print of a dead man ground in above all their heads—

A small gesture. The shirt is at last relinquished to the floor.

"I know who you are."

I know who you are.

What a strange thing, hearing Flint speak this aloud and knowing it to be true.

It is impossible not to be struck by the sentiment, to feel the words like a shock. It leaves John silent, watching Flint's profile for long moments.

There is a way in which such a thing could be said as a denigration. Or heard as such, simply because of all it encompasses. John's magic. The yawning void of his past.

But this is not that. It draws John upright, expression cracked open. Reaches out to catch hold of Flint's hand, at the risk of interrupting any further progress in his task.

"Yes," comes softly, at long last. Marveling at this truth, forged between them. "You do."

John's finger sweeps along Flint's knuckles.

"In this, perhaps better than I know myself."

(A long time ago, somewhere far away, a boy is learning how to read by applying himself to the single shelf of books which constitutes the library of a particularly modest Chantry. He's a quick study. He knows there are volumes missing from a collection he hasn't yet read up to based on the numbers stamped into the spines, and the inconsistency makes his fingertips itch.

'Don't tell anyone, but I misplaced them while traveling,' admits Brother Celsus. 'Though you're clever. You'll fill in the blanks yourself.')

Flint turns his hand under the shape of those fingers, square palm supple in their shadow. Undressed in the flickering light, made of raw patchwork injuries and the abrupt termination of his leg, John Silver is made legible by dog-eared pages and a cracked spine. Where did the rest go? What difference does it make. He fetches John's hand up. He kisses his knuckles.

"I've been accused of being observant once or twice before."

What is true now has been true for years: this man knows of him all that John can bear to be known.

More than that. An ugly, tangled part of him, dragged out into the road in Nevarra, this too Flint knows. The weakness that comes from the severing of his leg, that lingers still in spite all improvements otherwise, this too Flint knows. The pains that lives in his body, the things he flinches from, all this Flint holds together and sees what each part forms when set beside the other.

Once, John had thought such a prospect would be terrifying. (It is, but in a different way. In a sense of standing at a high point, looking down and knowing his footing to be too sure for him to fall.)

"Inconveniently so, some might say," is full of good humor, harkening back to the early days of his tenure on the Walrus. The line of something raw and tender is still working across John's face as he studies Flint's face, the sensation of his mouth lingering.

The flex of his fingers in Flint's hands, against his mouth, is a request too, even as John bends closer. Narrowing the space between them, even by a handful of degrees, is necessary still.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

MOD PLOT ↠ Wings of Death

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