open & closed.

[wildered]

WHO: Siorus + You; Bastien & Byerly & Benedict & Vega
WHAT: Warden intro, dinner party.
WHEN: Spring 9:50
WHERE: Various
NOTES: Catch-all for some open and closed stuff.

i. Enter Siorus.
ii. Bastien, Byerly, Benedict, and Vega have a nice meal.

Comments

open.

[wildered]

i. the gallows

He arrives more than a week after the attack, when the dust has at least literally settled. Some of the rubble has been organized into piles. Walking here to there only occasionally requires climbing over an enormous piece of stone that used to be a wall. This is one such occasion, and Siorus has paused his exploration of the Gallows on top of the stone instead, taking advantage of the added height to look out over the gaping hope in the outer wall where one of the towers crashed down through it. The grey sea, the grey mountains. Spring has tinged the grey green.

Footsteps turn his head. He smiles, nods his head, looks back out at the sea, but second later overcomes it all—shyness, hesitation, the faraway distance of his interrupted thoughts—and turns more fully to say, "I think I'm lost," or maybe, "Can I help you with that?" if their hands look too full to add helping him to the pile, or only, "Hello," with some of the hopeful awkwardness of a new kid hovering at the edge of a ball game, if the kid were tall and brawny and bearded.

He sounds a little Fereldan. A little not. A familiar ear will hear the Chasind at the core of it. Whether or not he's underdressed for the weather, thin materials and rolled-up sleeves, depends entirely on one's opinion of whether mid-spring Kirkwall weather is cool or warm.

ii. the mountains

It's not a secret that he's a Warden, or was a Warden, or can't help being a Warden despite his best efforts, or however any given person would prefer to think about it. Familiarity with darkspawn and the ability to handle a few things that would kill other people are, openly, the main things he is here to offer Riftwatch and its Research division. But it's also not something he advertises, either—no armor, no title when he introduces himself, no picking up Blight-coated stones and licking them as a party trick.

So it may or may not be new information, heavily implied, when he holds up a hand to encourage stopping where they are on the trail that winds and switchbacks up the mountain.

"We could go around," he offers first. And it's probably true. But ahead, somewhere out of sight, between them and the griffon nest they're trying to reach to check on and count eggs: "Darkspawn. Just a few."

closed to byerly, benedict, & 𝒱ℰ𝒢𝒜.

[cozen]

Lady Vega Arany's invitation might have been left mysteriously in her pigeonhole, if the towers were fully accessible and structurally sound. But they aren't, so it's delivered by a mysterious go-between instead—a man of average height and pudgy build, polite with a faint air of humoring someone, somewhere, by presenting the little card with flourish and a bow.

The invitation itself is less mysterious. Luring young women to private residences until false pretenses is questionable behavior even when no one's in the middle of a war. So there are names—Byerly's, Bastien's, and Benedict's—to accompany the time, day, address, and indication it's for dinner.

Benedict's invitation, meanwhile, comes in the form of a finer dinner than he's usually provided being brought home from an assortment of merchants and street vendors, and the table being dragged to the center of the room the way it is when company is coming and they need more room for chairs, and Bastien holding up two jacket options to silently ask Byerly to pick one out for him. Him Bastien, not him Benedict. Benedict is on his own.

"Oh," he says. "We should use a table cloth."