SATINALIA

[incaenstrix]

WHO: Everybody!!
WHAT: SATINALIA!!
WHEN: Backdated to the first day of Firstfall
WHERE: Gallows courtyard
NOTES: Drunkenness and shenanigans. HALLOWEENMAS!!

This Satinalia is, perhaps, less grand than in years past. Blockades are still limiting access to luxury goods, after all, so the fine liquors and dainty foods that have been featured before are nowhere to be found. And Tertia, the temporary Morale Officer, doesn't have the connections or deft touch of organizers past, so things are rougher than they've been before - the musicians are less polished, the ale a little more watered-down, the decorations somewhat haphazard.

But you know what? It's still Satinalia. Nothing can really screw up Satinalia. Especially because there are some rather lovely touches, the best of which might well be the ice skating rink. A section of the Gallows Courtyard has been roped off and frozen over with magic, leaving a (largely) smooth sheet of ice covering it. Skates are available to borrow if you don't have a pair. Of course, some injuries are definitely going to result (if you skate off the edge, you're smacking into stone instead of a soft snowbank, which can be disastrous), but hey, it's fun.

Other perks are the bonfires, with mulled wine and cider being served out of cauldrons around them, where people might sit and reflect while watching the flame. There's also dancing, of course, with the musicians basically being any band that's been recommended by members of Riftwatch - so there are lots of half-competent cousins-of-friends playing here. What they lack in skill they make up for in enthusiasm; this is the first gig for a lot of them, and they're thrilled to be here.

One thing that's missing is the Satinalia fool being named ruler. Tertia wasn't familiar with this tradition and didn't arrange it - so there's a last-minute campaign being held, in which people can either nominate others or self-nominate to be named Riftwatch's greatest fool to be celebrated.

Enjoy yourself. Exchange presents. Get drunk. Have a blast. Don't lose any teeth.

Comments

[armd]

(Abby shakes her head slowly. That is one way to put it. It's an easy thing to trudge along with any complicated feelings balled up and stuffed down into some hollow, convince herself she's the only one who has ever had them. Has it ever fucking worked out for her, even once?

She looks at him, catches the edge of his eyebrow raising, and the tiny bit of humour sitting in his expression makes her snort.)

Do you have a landmark?

(It is a personal question, she can acknowledge that (however silently), but an example might do her a bit of good. At least she's gone loose where she sits, neither clenching her cup or her jaw, shoulders slumped, no longer tense. Content to listen to him, if he wishes to speak.)

[katabasis]

[It is—a personal question. Despite it, and in defiance all the black kohl smudged bleakly about his eye sockets tonight and the blunt braced quality of his frame that he so often adopts in every other theater, there is never a point during the pause which follows the inquiry where it seems he might outright refuse her an answer.

Perhaps instead, somewhere out on the horizon there is a shape he has so committed to memory that it's been some time since Flint actually noted any of its features in detail. Being prompted now to describe its shape first requires some examination.

Yes, maybe that's the reason he lingers before producing an answer.]

I've decided that eventually we will arrive at the other side of this war. When that happens, I would like there to have been a place reserved where someone might go should they wish to live outside the whims of Empresses and Divines. Better, if that place's security has been so assured that it's unlikely to require a sword working in its defense.

[It's not without humor that he says,] I'm tired of war, and I would like to go home.

[He'd told Petrana some similar thing once. It hadn't been a lie then.]

[armd]

(Abby spends her half of this lingering silence not looking at Flint again, because she thinks if she turns she'll see him sitting there, giving her a look for asking that. He surprises her by answering. He's been doing a lot of that this evening.)

That's a pretty good landmark. (Simple– not as easily achieved for Abby, but for the first time in her life her purpose does not have to be the same as her faction leader's. Maybe that's why she can't think of anything for herself?

And trying to imagine his home is interesting to her, do pirates have those? When her and Lev were on that boat sailing down the coast it felt like they could have come from anywhere. Home was the cabin, and each other's company. It gives her a brief mental image of Flint turning away from the Gallows as soon as the final sword falls, and walking away into the ocean without looking back.

A lick of cooler air across the back of her neck has her flipping the woolen collar of her coat up to block it.)

... I hope you get there. (Hope it hasn't changed too much, become something unrecognisable.)

[katabasis]

So long as we all do what's required of us, I will. [This has the kind of easy confidence of a legitimate belief. Why else would he be here—in Kirkwall, operating out of that gloomy room on the sixth floor of the Gallows' central tower, and all of them killing themselves in service to a war which presently seems to measure its success by giving ground only very slowly instead of immediately and without significant resistance—if not for that?

He levels a sideways look in Abby's direction; it threatens the imminent surfacing of some fragment of bone dry wit.]

But it's a little late for that to happen tonight and I believe good behavior is somewhat counter to the spirit of the holiday. I would advise you go make some use of the idle hours we have left.

[Surely there are better ways of frittering away the evening than sitting on some rickety box at the elbow of one's division commander.]

[armd]

(She chuckles at that explanation coming off as a thinly veiled order: just do as you're told, so I can get to where I'm going. Okay, okay. And as much as she has genuinely liked this bit of time spent keeping her division commander's company, he is right in telling her to take off for the rest of the night. Maybe she'll go check out the dancing, and the music swelling in the background.

She drains the last bit of her cup.)

Okay.

(Before she pushes herself to stand she tacks on,) Thanks, Flint.

[katabasis]

[The tip of his head is an easy thing, made faintly ridiculous by the kohl blacked into the sockets of his eyes; the black fur mantle and the snarling wolf mask propped up on the top of his head and well out of the range of interfering with his drinking. It isn't Your welcome, but rather—]

Happy Satinalia.

[A small raise of his half empty cup. The gleam in Flint's eye among all that black suggests he knows how improbable those words sound from him. Don't tell anyone; they won't believe you.]