closed.

[cozen]

WHO: Bastien + Byerly & Gwenaëlle; Redvers + Barrow
WHAT: Working hard or hardly working
WHEN: Winter/Spring 9:50
WHERE: Various
NOTES: Catch-all for a war table mission + some jobs. Eternally available to plan additional things! Just hit me up.

CONTENTS
I. Byerly & Bastien deal with an Antivan problem (and take a detour).
II. Gwenaëlle & Bastien escort a Chantry Mother.
III. Barrow & Redvers fetch jellied pigs feet.

Comments

[cozen]

Gwenaëlle's choice of description curls his shoulders inward—the only sign of a laugh, suppressed because if loosed it would have been loud and sharp and attention-grabbing, and because her poor mother.

Which mother does she mean? He could just ask. He thinks she wouldn't mind, even with the company and non-zero chance of multilingual eavesdropping—

"The way I imagined Antiva and the Amaranthine Ocean."

He swipes a wandering fly away from his horse and himself. It buzzes over to Gwenaëlle, Bastien's mild apologetic grimace following.

"The Chantry fed us if we came to services. And if you came often enough they knew your face, you were first in line for new shoes and things when they had them. I wasn't pious," is what he meant with Antiva and the Amaranthine, whose existence he accepted with equal ease and equal impact on his behavior, "but it took me some time to realize it was up for debate."

[elegiaque]

The practical matter of self-preservation makes a great deal of sense; Orlais is not, she knows, a gentle place to be without. That the Chantry is often the only place a person might turn is — she has been coming to think — half the problem. In those half-formed thoughts of solidarity between elves and mages and maybe more than only them, too, she'd begun to envision, what if they weren't? What if people could work together, what if there were other avenues, what if,

it has been clear, every time she is kindly dismissed on that front, that it's thought naive. What do they have in common? Why should they help each other?

Well, maybe so people like Bastien have somewhere else to turn, and the people who are less like Bastien has turned out to be are less minded to cleave to the Chantry all of their lives, the only place that had helped them. It's so large a thing, though; not something she can reshape Orlais into with only her own hands, and unlikely to move anyone to pull alongside so long as it sounds like no more than fancy and presumption. Mulling that over, spinning out from the moment of just one little boy with a familiar face, she isn't— downcast, exactly. Just thoughtful.

“I think I took it all for granted a bit like that, I only thought it all seems a bit ... the faith part, I mean, doesn't it seem a little desperate? Running after someone who's deemed us all unworthy already, and spread that desperation around with a sword.”

Hm. Maybe there'd been something personal in what she hadn't liked about Andrastianism. Probably better not to examine that altogether too closely.