or are you emblems of truth?

[heorte]

WHO: Ellis, Ellie, Abby, Vanya, Marcus, Strange
WHAT: Road trip into the Hunterhorns.
WHEN: Cloudreach
WHERE: Hunterhorn Mountains
NOTES: Trying to find a Warden in a mountain range.

THE JOURNEY

Seeking a camp in the Hunterhorns is—

Difficult. To say the least.

In the eyrie, in the midst of saddling the griffins and strapping supply-laden saddlebags into place, Ellis had unfurled the map and spanned the likely places a hidden contingent might be found. It had not looked like such a formidable stretch of mountain range to search, bracketed by Ellis' thumbs.

In practice, it is weaving through high peaks, bundled against cold. It is alternating between dipping low to examine traces that may be tracks or signs of a past camp, and soaring high to avoid less than hospitable wildlife or weave through jagged peaks. It is painstaking work, seeking a trail within even this narrow strip of range.

Each night, they must descend. Find a ledge upon which the griffons can land without scrabbling for purchase and nearly toppling. Hope for a cave that might house them, or a flat ridge upon which the griffons can roost while they sleep in the saddle.

And in the morning, they must do it all over again.

THE CAMP

But eventually, the search ends.

Not in retreat, but in a small camp, cleverly hidden. We'd rather not be spotted by air, their leader says, a self-possessed, serious woman who introduces herself as Mila. She studies each of them intently, lingers on the griffon embossed on Ellis' breastplate.

Yes, they are permitted to stay. And to talk, mingle among the dozen or so Wardens within this camp. Ellis vanishes, first into a tent with Mila, and then later, when campfires are lit and a cask of wine is cracked open in a kind of welcome, into a second tent with a tall, dark-haired man, for a time.

The Wardens around the fire are pleasant enough. They answer questions. They speak frankly, if carefully. Some defer to Mila. Some prefer to speak in tandem with a partner. Some sigh through their recitation. But most speak of the same things when explaining what drove them away from their fellows in Weisshaupt—

Questions that piled up and up, with few answers. Some speak of Adamant and the binding of mage Wardens to demons, and how many of those mages died of it. Or how many of those mages disappeared into Tevinter to be treated and never returned. Some object to the use of darkspawn and demons by Corypheus' army, murmur darkly about the rumor that Corypheus is a darkspawn himself. Some worry after red lyrium, and the new strain of darkspawn that have been reported as fused with the substance. Many speak of their distrust of Tevinter.

One, Reynald, speaks of something wholly new, absent from Riftwatch's records until now: he was tasked once with guarding a portion of the Deep Roads along with an entire contingent of Tevene Wardens. Venatori mages came and went, he explains. He saw nothing of what took place, but he heard darkspawn, and the jangle of chains, and red lyrium had been maneuvered out past the Wardens in near-overflowing carts.

What have they been doing? This is a topic the Wardens speak more freely about.

Setting up a pipeline, they explain. A pipeline to help Wardens, and any others who oppose the Tevinter regime or draw the ire of the new authorities in the Anderfels escape, and join them in the mountains.

They're trying to spread word, they say. They want it to be known that the Wardens are heading in the wrong direction, following bad ideas into worse outcomes. But this is not going so smoothly, because they are still Wardens, and they are occupied with protecting local villages from increased darkspawn activity in the western Anderfels. They have contacts in Hossberg, and in Weisshaupt, and in other towns and cities, and they travel when they can to grow their network and spread word, but they are only a small company, and all this takes time. Sometimes they do not have any time at all.

We aren't leaving, Mila will inform them the next morning. But now you know where we are.

A send-off, of a kind: Mila's decisive answer to an unasked question and the implication of parting on friendly terms before shooing them onto griffon-back and out of their camp.

Comments

[portalling]

That twist at the corner of his mouth: it’s a smile, but it’s a little sad, a little rueful.

“Clarisse asked me what happened literally the first time I ever met her,” fitting for how blunt the young woman could be, Ellie would know far better than he does, “so I don’t mind. I wish I could say it was during one of those grand superhero battles, but pitifully, it was just a normal car accident. My own damn fault. It was a narrow winding road, I was speeding, I was on the phone at the same time, I was careless. The car went off a cliff and I barely survived, but my hands were ruined.”

It was a reminder. Each twinging stab of pain through his fingers, each bone-deep ache, each time he looked down at the ugly mangled shape of them, the stiffness and reduced range of movement: it was a stark reminder of what his hubris had done, and how he needed to do better.

“My career as a surgeon was over, after that. Hence: magic.”

[notathreat]

Ellie smiles immediately: if Stephen didn't know they were together before this moment then he probably knows now, there's no mistaking the warmth of her grin. Strange's answer tempers that, but Ellie doesn't look much thrown off by it.

"Glad you made it," she says, while the gravity of it lays itself down in stages. There's a lot of tragedy in mistakes, one off twists of what Ellie still refuses to believe is fate. "But it must've sucked hard."

Simple words for a whole life shattered in an instant and being left to pick up the pieces.

"I know magic's not a substitute or anything," she adds, "but it's still really fuckin' cool."

[portalling]

Strange’s smile brightens even despite himself. “It is, isn’t it?” he says, contentedly. Finishes unwrapping his food and popping another piece in his mouth, then shoves his hand back into his gloves to try to regain some warmth and sensation.

“I do miss surgery — I spent twenty-two years getting very, very good at what I do, and it’s a rotten shame to lose that — but you’re right. Flying, scrying, teleporting around the world, walking the astral plane, visiting the dream dimension… whenever I’m not sitting around feeling sorry for myself in the Gallows infirmary, I can admit it’s a more-than-fair trade. I could technically have gone back, even, and I still chose to keep the magic. Because it was more important, in the grander scheme of things. Also, cool points.”

[notathreat]

"Cool points," Ellie agrees. She knows it's far from being that simple. Even if you're happy now, even if you have more than you ever did, it's just not that simple.

Ellie looks down at her own hands, the stumps of her fingers, and rubs her thumb over the edge of one of them.

"I didn't have, like, decades of experience. I wasn't a professional or anything," she says haltingly. "But before I lost my fingers, I used to play the guitar."

She twists, like someone would a ring, a worry stone.

"Now, you know-" she gestures, curling her hand to demonstrate how she wouldn't be able to finger the notes on a board. "I can't."

She halts again.

"Joel taught me how to play the guitar," she says quietly. "And when I was finally ready to start playing his songs again after he died, I couldn't."

[portalling]

Strange’s gaze follows Ellie’s, down to that mangled hand. It feels like a chill wind just rippled through him, an empty shiver; it could be the cutting mountain air but, in all honesty, it’s her words. That halting, hesitant admission and the quiet pain waiting beneath it.

She’d mentioned Joel before — talking about being fourteen years old in Salt Lake City — but he’d neglected to push for context. Even in Seattle, their energy had been so focused on the singular effort of surviving the infected and finding a way out of Seattle.

“I used to be able to play the piano,” he says after a pause; an unexpected ripple of synchronicity and understanding. A thing which was taken from both of them. “With yours— Could you perhaps swap sides? People learned to play off-hand, back home. It might be expensive to purchase or commission a leftie guitar, but surely someone in Thedas has built one.”

He always snaps into problem-solving mode, instantly bending his thoughts towards a solution, but he also has to keep reminding himself: not all wounds can be healed. Not everything can be fixed.

“Joel,” Strange repeats, delicately piecing together that context, metaphorically walking around it. “Family member?”

[notathreat]

It's not something that she talks about often. Most people know she lost someone close to her, that the world she came from was shitty and violent, but most know bits and pieces, the way Strange does. Few have the whole story.

She shakes her head. "Tried, but it doesn't work like that. I'm working on learning the dulcimer, though."

She pauses, rubbing at her fingers for a moment before she looks down.

"Sort of," she says, haltingly. "Joel was this old grumpy asshole of a smuggler. And once, a long time ago, I was cargo. Turned out nobody was there at the dropoff point. So we stuck together. He taught me a lot of what he knew, and it kept me alive."

It's a very condensed version of things, but it works.

[portalling]

“I’m sorry,” feels pat and trite and inadequate, but it’s all he’s got. Even as a doctor, Strange had never really known how to handle condolences: it had always come across as too stiff and stilted when he’d been standing there in the cold and clinical hospital hallways. He’s trying now, though, hunkered into his clothes against that chill wind and offering up:

“He must have done a good job of it. You kept all the rest of us alive in turn, using what you knew. I’m indebted.”

Ellie and Abby and Ellis et al — all of them here on this mountain, they’d been there in Seattle and he’s too-aware that he owes them all for keeping his useless self breathing in that nightmare.

[notathreat]

The condolences are always awkward and never feel like enough, but for as stilted as they are, Ellie takes the heart meant behind them. Strange has lost, too. He knows what it means. She can see it in how he carries himself. It's a rare one in Riftwatch who doesn't understand that weight.

"He would have been pissed that we took all those risks," Ellie admits, pressing her lips together and look up at the sky. "But it paid off, and he's not here to lecture me."

It's said with false lightness, and she can almost keep her voice steady now, through it. Almost.

But even this much is a huge step from where she's been before.

"I'm glad I could keep you safe," she adds, this time more quietly. "It's a miracle we all made it out."

[portalling]

“If you hadn’t taken those risks,” Strange points out, and it’s you rather than we, since he’d had to sit on his hands at camp and let the others handle the artifact-hunting in his stead, “then we’d never have found the Sealing Stone macguffin to dissolve the illusion. Ipso facto, we’d still have been trapped in some Fade-crafted illusion of Seattle and having our faces chewed on by mushrooms, probably. I’m not sure if something special happens if you die in the Crossroads, but I can’t imagine it’s good.”

He wants to make a Nightmare on Elm Street reference; thankfully resists the temptation. There’s something to be said for seizing that faux lightness and batting the same kind of flippant humour back, but that quiet cast to Ellie’s voice deserves a bit more solemnity.

Just a little.

“Was any part of it good, being back there?” he finds himself asking, instead of deploying inaccessible pop culture reference #1282. “Homesick is probably an unusual description for a place like that, but…”

But surely it was still some kind of home. With Joel, with her girlfriend, on that ranch.

[notathreat]

Ellie lifts one shoulder, a show of modesty, but a smile streaks across her face regardless. She's not one to turn down praise when she actually feels like she's earned it, and fighting the Rat King was nothing small.

The next question deserves consideration, and Ellie quiets to give it that, letting everything rest in the back of her throat.

"I'm homesick," she says, haltingly, "but it's- for a time. Not a place. There's no going back."

Seattle wasn't it. And the last time she was at the farm, it wasn't it, either. Jackson would be crowded with ghosts. The mountains and woods with echoing emptiness. And Boston's good memories were buried in a shallow grave.

"Even with as fucked up as this place can get, I'd rather be in Thedas."

poss closed or yours to wrap?

[portalling]

“Then,” Strange says, “I’m very glad that you’re here instead.”

There’s some kind of slow-brewing realisation buried under the topsoil, shifting beneath his feet. Ellie’s been building a new life for herself here, and yet he can’t stop looking backward; this is a man who once burned up his entire life and all his resources to get back to what he had before. Now that he can’t do that any longer…

He looks at the griffons near them, where they’re shaking out their feathers and tucking their heads beneath their wings for warmth, settling in to roost.

“We make the best of it, I think.”