faderift | closed | and the past is a bastard.

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closed | and the past is a bastard.

WHO: Astrid Runasdotten & Gwenaëlle Baudin
WHAT: Sometimes you see Hakkon’s Wrath with your own eyes and just gotta follow up on that.
WHEN: Drakonis
WHERE: Training yard, the Gallows
NOTES: Foul mouths, probably. Memories of animal harm.

Astrid’s settling in. Scouting missions have been carrying her far afield — just the way she likes it — but all roads do eventually lead back to the Gallows, and her restless feet often carry her to the training yard.

Today, though, someone else has beaten her to the archery range. Astrid’s head pops up over one of the low walls like a curious groundhog, watching goggle-eyed as Gwenaëlle practices, squinting one-eyed and sending frosty arrows across the field. To get a better view, Astrid eventually winds up perched on the brick wall itself, one leg swinging beneath her as she stares at the other woman’s giant bow, the one of unmistakable Avvar make.

And in any other context her reaction would just be hey that’s sick as hell,

(except she remembers what it looked like during that first fight at the rift, ice crackling in the air. She had picked up one of the arrows out of sheer curiosity and the cold had practically bitten her, fingertips burning with the brief nip of frostbite. If Astrid had questions, they’d died on her tongue shortly after, vanished when she was scoured empty during the battle. That pile of bloody fur lying heavy across her, suffocating dead weight, the people from Riftwatch had had to haul her loose—)

But that was weeks ago. Blinking, Astrid watches Gwenaëlle’s scrutinising arc. She waits until the next shot goes clear, before deciding to approach. (Some of the first lessons drummed into her: don’t fucking surprise someone when their arm’s currently holding back all that tension and lethal weight, an arrow ready to leap for your throat if you jolt their aim.)

She finally slides off the wall, boots hitting the ground as she walks closer.

“Hi,” Astrid says, behind the other woman. Let’s just get this over with. “I’m sorry, I don’t really— remember your name? But meant to say thanks. For the other day.”

The other week. Month. Who’s counting.

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“Ástríður Runasdotten— Astrid.” It’s always a crapshoot whether or not she’ll mention her full name in front of her new colleagues, having now learned through frustrated experience that northerners can’t really wrap their tongue around the vowels and roll the Rs properly, but she often finds herself trying anyway. (Yearning to someday hear her own accent echoed back at her: the way she perks up at the sight of a face tattoo in Lowtown, searching for a familiar gruff brogue, even if it’s just some asshole down at market.)

But although that’s certainly an Avvar bow, Gwenaëlle Baudin ain’t an Avvar name, so something in Astrid’s shoulders slopes.

“I’m working on it. Done a few jobs, stabbed a few bandits, I think it’s going alright. Just having steady food on the table is a decent improvement, tell the truth.” When her dark brown eyes settle again on the bow in Gwenaëlle’s hands, there’s more of that glint in her gaze, a hunger for these shattered pieces of home.

Quizzical, “Your bow’s not got any string.”

It's not an Avvar name, but she echoes, “Ástríður,” back to her, making the effort that she always wants to receive for Guh-nayl that's nearly so hit or miss, outside of Orlais. She still sounds Orlesian, saying it, but there's a familiarity there; the fond echo of one of the two people in her life she's ever allowed to call her Gwen. It's not perfect,

but she doesn't butcher it. It sounds like she's saying Astrid's name with an accent, not as if she can't manage it at all. She shapes the name like she might be going to practise it, nodding along as Astrid tells her about the bandits, about settling in. Stability, or what passes for it in times like these.

The bow in her hands, she tilts: no, no string at all. Now.

“She's called, I'm told, Hakkon's Wrath,” she says, after a moment. “The crows brought her to me and she has a string when she needs to.”

Now, that's kind of an unhinged thing to say to a person—

the sort of thing that she would ordinarily, perhaps, not say. Or pull the punch with a joke. Or something. But she remembers the way that Astrid came to their company, and there's something about the way that she holds her gaze, head tilted ... do you understand? you seem like you might understand.

Despite the fact that Gwenaëlle’s just said a bunch of interesting shit, it’s her own name which catches Astrid’s attention like a thorn burying itself in her coat, this very valiant effort at pronouncing it correctly. Others have given up on trying but here is—

Enough familiarity that it doesn’t sound completely alien, at least, on that foreign mouth. Enough habit that the Orlesian has perhaps heard something similar before, and knows what those shapes are supposed to sound like. And it’s just a silly fucking name and it shouldn’t matter this much, she didn’t even realise it mattered this much, until something lodges and catches in the back of her throat. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this woman, this complete stranger, has already seen Astrid flayed open. It leaves her wrong-footed, off-kilter, vulnerable.

But meeting her gaze, that other piece of information dangles like some juicy bait, a hint. Astrid takes it in one easy snap.

“Hakkon’s Wrath. Big claim for a name,” she says. Then, as simple and straightforward as if they were discussing the weather: “But if the crows brought her to you, then the Lady of the Skies must’ve had a thought to give her to you, no?”

Edited 2024-03-10 07:30 (UTC)

The shift of Gwenaëlle's expression is a slow bloom — the relief and delight of hearing a quiet belief of her own echoed back to her, relatively unprompted, from someone who might fucking know about it more than she can fumble around in the dark by herself — and sure, it was bait. Purposeful, even. But even so, she might have anticipated dismissal, not acceptance of that kind of claim,

it would have been fair, she'd even say. There's a lot of reasons she doesn't, often, talk about this.

“His namesake,” with a tip of her head towards the great shaggy beast of a dog sitting sentinel not far from them — back out of range of the arrows, close enough to be at her side in a breath if she drew it in, “told me he'd put in a good word for me. With the Lady. His sister and I write, sometimes; she's a spirit warrior, from Honey Badger Hold.”

(The badger is the only missing piece in a set of crystal animals in a cabinet in her wall of curiosities and keepsakes, in her bedroom.)

“She was the one who told me about Hakkon, when I wrote about my bow.”

She remembers: she felt as if she were dying. She was so warm, in cold swamp water, surrounded by her own blood. There were crows screaming overhead. She put her hand on the bow in the water and an arrow through a wyvern's eye and couldn't recreate anything like the feat again for a long time.

Maybe there is a world where she should be more credulous about this: an outsider, laying claim to a name so sacred. A foreigner, owning this precious piece of Avvar culture. Other people might have been pissed, and it would have been valid.

But to Astrid, it seems simple enough: why would this woman lie? Why would anyone lie about something so untouchable and inviolate as this? The spirits are everywhere, the spirits give and take, the world works in strange and unpredictable ways.

And so she finds herself nodding along to Gwenaëlle’s explanation, attentive. “Wulfhold’s traded with Honey Badger,” she says. This isn’t earthshattering news, most of them trade with each other, they must in order to survive; yet it still means there’s cachet here, a connection, a stamp of approval from a real honest-to-gods spirit warrior.

—and there’s more she meant to say about spirit warriors, the Lady, this fabled bow, but realising the existence of Hardie instantly spins her attention away. The hound isn’t a wolf, but large enough and shaggy enough that something still twists in her chest, still makes her face light up at the sight of him. Without even thinking about it, she automatically hunkers down on her haunches to drop herself to a lower level. “Can I say hi?” she asks, shooting a quick glance up at Gwenaëlle, rather than meeting the dog’s eyes directly.

A warmth for her animals is always a quick way to easy approval from Gwenaëlle, and this is no exception: the hesitant way that she'd been warming up the short duration of this conversation so far settles into something more willingly open, relaxed, as she says, “His name is Hardie,” by way of encouragement. “For Asher Hardie.”

A mercenary, in life; the previous leader of the Boneflayers, though they still exist and operate in southern Thedas, down a handful of their company. His mother had married out of the hold and he had gone the other way, embracing his Avvar roots— as had Aura Hardie, the spirit warrior in question. At his funeral, she'd gifted Aura with a small bag embroidered with a scene of her brother laughingly fighting off one dwarf standing on another dwarf's shoulders underneath a bear slanket

filled with gold, and the promise that she would be as family, always. Only ask for anything within her gift to give.

Hardie himself is attentive to the new person— alert but not hostile as he draws nearer to investigate, now the arrows aren't being loosed and his mistress has summoned him with a look and a gesture. He's well-trained, clearly; he investigates Astrid with reserved friendliness, cautious but willing.

Astrid has instantly folded into crossed legs, now sitting on the ground unheeding of dirt and twigs and a large wet nose looming closer. She’s slow, patient, a hand out and waiting for the dog’s investigation at his own pace. She should start carrying treats in her pockets at all times, she thinks: to make friends.

Eventually, as he comes close enough and permits it, she combs her fingers into the thick ruff of his throat. “He’s beautiful,” she says, and there’s a warm awe in her voice. This is not what it was like with Raskmodig — no matter what little girls might have dreamt of, their hold-beast was wild, and would never have allowed a child to perch on his back or nap with him — but there had been hunting hounds, working dogs, and they had been very much like this.

She scratches him behind an ear.

And from her low position, she peers up at Gwenaëlle. The mountains are small and tight-knit, but not so much that she directly knows the people she’s referencing. “You have many friends among the Avvar, then?” There’s a rising lilt of a question there: not dubiousness or skepticism, just curiosity.

“Not many,” carries a note of real regret— less than she'd like, maybe, if she had her way. Sometimes she thinks about what sort of life she might carve out for herself, if there's an after in which to do the carving; she always imagines building on that, if she could. So often it feels like a missed opportunity, a glimpse into a life that she didn't live,

that Asher didn't live.

“These days, it's mostly Aura.” And it's been a long time since they've seen each other, but that doesn't make it any less significant to her; there are a lot of people she hasn't seen so much of. She isn't the only one. Frankly, after a beat, “I'd have liked that to be different, but I don't have so much say in where I go as everyone in Thedas,”

with a tilt of her hand, where the anchor-shard glows a sickly, dull green.

“I can't pretend to be an expert. Only,” she thinks about it, settles on: “Respectful.”

Most faiths of Thedas leave her cold— the glimpses she's been allowed of Avvar worship have fascinated her in a way that's difficult to talk about, so removed.

For a girl who is so terrifically homesick, Gwenaëlle offers a balm.

Respectful is a breath of fresh air; respectful is a nice change of pace from merchants in the Kirkwall market accusing her of pickpocketing, or the curl of someone’s lip in a tavern remarking on the barbarian stinking up the place. If Astrid were feeling charitable — which she is not — there are a lot of refugees in the country these days. And unlike the rabble from Starkhaven, she doesn’t even have a Marcher accent to recommend her. She is decidedly foreign, that tattoo on her temple making her stand out.

She doesn’t give a stinking shit.

So, instead: her on the dirt ground next to Hardie, looking admiringly up at the dog’s mistress. “I didn’t expect to meet anyone up here who knew anything about anything. There’s one Avvar lad in Lowtown, he’s my cheese guy,” said offhand, everyone needs a cheese guy, “but most think we’re just like… you know, they’ve described these romance serials, the hunky man with no shirt sweeping some Fereldan noblewoman over his shoulder and fucking her in the woods on a pelt.”

Which is sometimes the case, but, like, not all the time—

Edited 2024-03-21 00:25 (UTC)

Gwenaëlle sinks down beside Astrid and Hardie, and she breathes out something like a laugh as she does —

there's something soft around her eyes. Ah. He's been gone years, and still, Asher's legacy, “As he's not here to do it himself, and he wouldn't besides, I'll apologise on Asher's behalf,” she says, “a good half of those were about him. I heard, last I was in a position to hear, that Sibylla wore black for a half year after she heard he'd passed. I wouldn't have even had the heart to tell her to her face she was derivative.”

Though, from her tone, not for lack of thinking so. And probably, given that, it wasn't a secret, anyway.

“Yngvi,” or big Yngvi to people who only know her cat, which is funny because he's a dwarf, “would read them around the campfire, he told me. For critique.”

Astrid squints at the other woman, as if trying to deduce whether she’s pulling her leg — but there’s no mistaking that warmth in Gwenaëlle’s voice and face, so she just breathes out a little Huh, before, “Oh you’ve gotta be shitting me. That was a real guy? And you knew him? That’s… I feel I’ve just met a fucking celebrity by association. I’m not much of a reader but I had a friend was addicted, would barter her last pelt for each new volume when they finally reached the mountains seasons too late. She’d summarise the good bits for me.”

There’s something equally gentle and fond in the way Astrid remembers that, too: the runes swimming and rearranging themselves in front of her eyes but so she’d burrow into her best friend’s side; closing her eyes and simply listening instead.

“I’ll have to—”

Do what? Laboriously write home? Tell her what? That now Astrid knows why the series suddenly shifted and started featuring a rotating cast of heroes instead: templars breaking their vows, a tragic doomed tryst with a Grey Warden, a salt-soaked romp with a Rivaini pirate. The Avvar man was a real man, and he was Gwenaëlle’s friend, and he’s here no longer.

Funny, though, how a legacy lives on.

There’s a pause, before she offers, her voice softer, “No one’s ever really gone so long as someone still remembers them. Which means I think this Lady Sibylla made your friend basically immortal.”

“What a way to achieve it,” she says, with a sigh only slightly exaggerated for comedic effect. Really, truly,

but he had been the most alive person she thinks she'd ever known. Didn't he fucking deserve to be immortal, if he could? Any way that he could? Maker knows — and his Lady of the skies, and her better probably — he'd get a kick out of leaving behind a legacy of furious masturbating across southern Thedas. Slankets made from bearskins and stories of his sexual prowess and a dog named Hardie because he'd been meant to guard her and who had, til then, done the best job of it?

(Guilfoyle. But that's neither here nor there.)

After a moment, “He had a great deal of faith in the spirits. I saw crows, when I put my hand on the bow, and I still don't know if they were really there or not. I'd lost a great deal of blood. But that worship was so important to him and it is to his sister, and I always thought it made the most sense of anything. I didn't want to be overbearing with you about it, but you know. We don't all assume you're furry sex-perverts. If that helps.”

The corner of Astrid’s mouth flickers; she buries her hands deeper in Hardie’s fur, a nice distraction and something to focus on as she continues to scritch his throat. Swallows the emotion which keeps rising up in her own, steadies her voice. “It does, actually,” she says. “I’m homesick as all fuck but it’s nice to hear from someone who gets it.”

There’s a pause. Another tilt of her head, ruminating over the question Gwenaëlle hasn’t directly asked. “If you saw the crows, then I think they were there in the way that mattered. And the bow itself is real, innit? So.”

Which is a very simplified equation for a very complicated existential philosophical religious matter, but that’s always been her approach, her family’s approach, her hold’s approach in general: boil it down to what matters. Brass tacks.

Maybe (there's no maybe about it) that's exactly what Gwenaëlle finds so appealing about the Avvar approach to worship. It is complicated, existential, it is still a question of faith— but there is a degree, too, of certainty. Spirits exist. Spirits can be encountered, entreated; spirits touch the world in a way that is perceptible, in contrast to the distance of the Maker, who has sort of made not responding to prayers his thing.

She remembers crows, and Hakkon's Wrath is so real it's literally in her hands. Believing in that isn't complicated.

“And so's the string,” she says, thoughtfully, tilting the strange bow, “when it matters.”

Real, in all the ways that matter. She knows the string will be there when she needs it, and it is.

Her lips twitch, a smile: “You find things when you need them, no?” is a gentle way of turning it around on Astrid: maybe Riftwatch is that, right now, when she needs somewhere to land.

Ugh that is so rude to turn it back on a girl when she’s already in a very emotional spot actually—

Astrid’s eyes glimmer and she finds herself blinking quickly, watery. She has to reach up with the back of one hand, wiping the tears away. Her emotions have always brimmed close to the surface, her whole life, and this place is no different even if she’s now surrounded by strangers.

“I got lost in the Kirkwall night market,” she starts, obliquely. “Got completely fuckin’ turned around, those aisles and stalls are a maze down in the old quarry. And then right when I was on the verge of just climbing some scaffolding to get the fuck outta there, I thought I smelled fårikål. Cabbage and mutton stew. I mean, cabbage’s not got a very appealing aroma but you definitely notice it. And so I followed it and turned a corner and I found the cheese guy. So, y’know.”

You find things when you need them. A gap-toothed merchant with some black market food smuggling connections isn’t as grandiose or romantic as a mythical magical bow, but the premise holds, and as for Riftwatch—

“I hope that’s the case.”

“I don't think much of fate,” she admits. The idea of some great woven destiny, that the Maker or any other god might be pulling strings and placing people— it all seems, at best, profoundly unlikely. The gods of elvhenan are a fucking scam; what else is just bullshit? But: “I do think there's something to your own momentum. To... everything's only done with you if you're done, you know?”

It feels like there's something to that, maybe. Finding things when you need them in part because you are, in some way, seeking them out.

“This is a fucking absurd place full of ridiculous people trying to do impossible things. But that seems like a good place to be, if you need a broader idea of what's possible.”

She wears the ghost of a smile, hearing that description. It’s a good one.

But which does beg the question: what even is Astrid after? Learning more about the rifts and if it’s ever possible to fix a Fade-touched animal, sure, but she’s not one of the bigwigs in Research; she won’t be the one to crack it or even know how to help someone else get to that information. She doesn’t even have a shard to help close those rifts. So she’s hanging around here trying to be helpful, like the way she used to hover at her mum’s elbow when Runa was cooking; waiting to get to chop some vegetables, chip in any way she could. To be of service.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m all momentum. Like I landed here ‘cos it was the next possible step and it sounded like a good idea,” and Gwenaëlle had been the one to kindly suggest it, had helped scrape the abject grieving mess of a girl into the boat and swept a Riftwatch cloak over her shoulders to keep her warm, she hadn’t been able to stop shivering, her wolf’s blood on her hands—

“And I’m like that coyote from the periodical cartoons, y’know? If I ever stop moving or signing up for jobs or missions then I’ll realise I’m not standing on solid ground anymore and I’ll fall.” Beat. “Does that feeling ever go away?”

Someone else might have a better answer, a more thoughtful one, a more experienced one, an answer that's more reassuring—

Gwenaëlle says, “Not so far, but I haven't run out of things need doing, either,” sort of philosophically. “What I found...”

Hm. She studies Hardie, although not as if she thinks he holds the answers; he's just comfortingly familiar, while she works her way through how she wants to say the thing she wants to say. Finally,

“If you do enough, I think it becomes clear what you're doing that matters and what doesn't. And how much is— now and needful. There's no better you without you, now. You know?”

Maybe? Maybe that sounds mad.

A little, yes.

Astrid’s literally echoing her, her mouth silently forming the shape of There’s no better you without you, as if saying it back will make it make sense and waiting for the moment it clicks. It doesn’t fully — she doesn’t know Gwenaëlle well enough yet to follow every step of her thoughts — but it does enough, like a hook snagging on a loose piece of thread, pulling just enough to leave some food for thought.

Because at least she’s not the only one wrestling with questions like this.

“So just keep doing the things,” she says slowly, “one step at a time, and then you’ll figure out what’s actually worth doing and what’s just spinning your feet above the crevasse, like. Something like that?”

“About the shape of it,” she agrees, ruminative. “I suppose, I don't know where it ends, I'm only certain — if you try something it might fail. If you don't try anything, you've failed right out of the gate. So why not keep moving, then? What's the alternative?”

Stillness. Failure. A life dictated not by your decisions but by the way you are buffeted about by the decisions of others—

“But,” after a hesitation, because this is true too but she likes it less: “you learn nothing from never falling, either. I don't know. I imagine,” more cautiously, “that before that day we met, what happened then,” oblique, but it isn't as if they don't both know where her mind went, “might have been the worst thing you could imagine happening. And you're still here. So you aren't the same person you were, in a way, anyway.”

There’s a careful stillness which settles over Astrid as Gwenaëlle touches so gently on the topic of what happened then. Astrid is still-fragile, her whole existence a still-healing bone; walking wounded even though there’s nothing, outwardly, to show her as battered and raw as she feels. She’d come out of the fight remarkably unscathed. A few scratches. That was it. (It had felt like she should have gotten more injured during the battle, to make her outside match her insides. It would have been fair.)

But it’s true. She’s still here.

She bites her lip, until, “Yeah. You’re right. And I don’t really know what anyone gains if I’d just laid down flat on the ground and stopped. And every other option of what to do seemed like shit. Like what, go become a mercenary? Nah. You’ve all got griffons.”

Which isn’t the main reason she said yes to joining, but it is a reason. And a safer one to mention, one which doesn’t have her feeling quite so jagged and off-kilter.

“Well, and we didn't have griffons when I came here,” Gwenaëlle says, her smile lopsided and lovely, rolling with the lighter-hearted pivot smoothly— maybe not so gracefully as someone else might make it look as if a pivot hadn't even happened, but with enough ease that she'd probably been very purposefully leaving enough space for that heavy thing to be stepped around, if stepping around it suits better.

It warps the space around it, a thing like that. They both know it's there. Isn't this the point? It isn't everything.

“Keep moving and who knows what else we'll have.”

Astrid flashes Gwenaëlle a fragile smile in return; not entirely firm around the edges, not as brilliant and beaming as she’d ordinarily be, but it’s an attempt and that’s what matters. There’s the sense of their mutually-accepting the shift, grasping for something a little easier and a little gentler.

And yet she feels lighter for having stepped closer to it, today.

She finally ruffles Hardie’s head and then unfolds her limbs in one go, smoothly swooping back to her feet. “More shooting, for one,” she declares, and that is what they’ll have, because she’s not gonna miss the chance to see more of that legendary bow in action — and to hone and practice and show off more of her own skills, as well.

Just keep moving.

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closed | and the past is a bastard.

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