[open] beach episode volume 2: gallows edition

[altusimperius]

WHO: everybody who wants
WHAT: (lukewarm) BEACH PARTY (on rubble, in harbor)
WHEN: late Justinian
WHERE: the Gallows, amidst its newly-acquired sea view
NOTES: he's trying

I. Prep

He didn't ask for help overtly, but Benedict is clearly working hard setting up the space he's designated for the company to have their beach staycation: drapings taken from his own stash and salvaged from the Gallows' erstwhile guest rooms are drawn across glyphed-in-place poles to create shade. He's hauled out a table, onto which he proceeds to place a variety of whatever canapés he could afford to procure with his own wages-- it's not a feast, all right-- and beside which he rolls two barrels of decent-ish wine.

From the baths come a stack of towels piled high in his arms, hindering his vision to such a degree that he may crash into someone not paying attention; pillows and the like come next, in armloads that take multiple trips, by the end of which he's visibly out of breath.

Lastly, it's his very own water pipe making an appearance, which he arranges amidst comfortable ground seating mimics how his room used to look: in fact, most of the accoutrements here are his personal belongings.
As such, he knows just how to set everything to create an attractive, if minimalist, space for an afternoon's leisure.


II. Party?

It may not be an all-out bash like their excursion to the sandier shores of the Waking Sea some years ago, but this, if nothing else, is an opportunity for work on the Gallows to pause in palatable increments. One can be clearing rubble or cataloguing property for the morning, then pop over for an hour of sunbathing and a glass of wine; they're all within calling out distance of the courtyard, and the party likely bleeds into the day's work in a manner somewhat more comfortable than if it were sequestered.

That said: the early summer sea water is cold, the sun is out but meek behind occasional cloud cover, and the festivities are on clean-swept stone rather than sand. The view across the water is of mainland Kirkwall, and all that that entails.
But it's none of it so bad, for anyone looking to take a break. A few musicians even show up a bit later in the afternoon, and Benedict provides a bonfire in the center of the party space as the sun goes down.

Anything brought to share is met with effusive thanks from Benedict, who ensures its appropriate placement and distribution. He doesn't spend much time relaxing himself, instead making the rounds with the air of a fussy host, where he's quick to offer refills or alternatives in libations, or diversions for unsatisfactory activities.

[make your own starters, do your thing, go hog wild-- if you have logistical questions feel free to ask on plurk or discord]

Comments

[brennvin]

“Foraged the herbs and made it meself,” Astrid says, and there’s a thread of real pride in her voice, even if it’s kind of a horrifying concoction. Meant to be slugged down in a single quick swallow, like a punch to the jaw.

“S’a little too warm out here though. If you serve it cold, like near-freezing, then it mellows out and doesn’t taste so strong. In winter, we’d keep some bottles stored in the snow.”

She pours them another round — this is taste-testing, this is for science — and then considers Cedric’s answer. “Sculpture. You ever tried whittling? Carving.”

drinks and a salad

[dissolving]

"You and Talis, gonna keep us all drunk." Not complaining. A lone seed crunches anise-sharp under tooth. "Can't say I miss the snow. Guy at Skyhold got his tongue stuck to a canteen."

Or so the story goes. He swirls the new round under his nose to examine. Citrus and spice, and a lot of it — nose wrinkling to suppress a sneeze —

But it's good. It is. A good drink grabs the moment from you: Freezes time for all the summer heat, hands it back to you new. It's good, it's better like this; a moment. Shared. Given.

"My, uh," There's that sneeze. Cedric readjusts, "Sorry. My Captain was a hand at it, carving. Guess I never... y'know, it was his thing."

[brennvin]

“Just ‘cos it’s his thing doesn’t mean you can’t do it,” Astrid says, a blithe pronouncement. “People like to share their hobbies, y’know? Have something to bond over, or whatever. My uncle kept trying to get me into his but I was shite at reading and runes. I like to carve stuff, though, and made a few figurines but they were lost in the…”

She gestures to hunched rubble of the Gallows residential towers across the island. RIP.

“Anyway, so’s I could teach you if you wanted. Maybe not with the akvavit, alcohol and sharp blades and fine movements probably don’t go together—”

[dissolving]

His neck flops back to follow the Gallows: Half-blasted.

"Shit, I'm sorry," A common refrain across the last month. Even the ravens'll learn it. "Hard to lose a thing, when 's got a piece of you in it like that."

Does Broward have anything still to give? Didn't have much to begin with, not much wasn't shared. That's good, better - he believes that- but the candles on altars, the skeleton in its fine shroud. Her uncle's runes. Doesn't everyone want something, some memory of them left behind?

(Flames, his head hurts.)

"But I'd be grateful. Be an honour to learn from a real artist."

Something to bond over, or whatever.

[brennvin]

Astrid’s nose crinkles. “Not enough to be an artist. They’re like… I don’t know, toys? Good enough for a kid to play pretend with but no one’s going to put them on exhibit or whatever. But also, fuck that, I’d rather someone play with a carved horse and accidentally break off its leg and have fun, than have it sit on a shelf. To be looked at.”

The alcohol’s burning a hole in her chest, her stomach, but it makes the conversation pleasantly warm and fuzzy around the edges. Cedric, she reminds herself, his name was Cedric. One of the boys in Diplomacy; not a division she’s worked with much, not being her strong suit by far.

There’s a beat, a lag, before her thoughts wind back to the title he’d mentioned: “Your Captain. You were in, what, an army?”

[dissolving]

"Templars," He mumbles. "Inquisition, March. 'S armies all the way down."

Maybe it wasn't always going to be that way. The Inquisition meant different things, to different people; with its mage council, and its pilgrims, and its hope for a tighter solution. A clean end. Cedric rolls onto an elbow.

"Reckon kids care more'n collectors, anyway. Everyone remembers some toy they had," Did Astrid snap that leg? "Auntie what made it."

[brennvin]

And she goes— a little stiff, with the sudden self-consciousness of someone holding herself at right-angles while Cedric sprawls on the ground, informal.

The thane had been clear about his opinion of the Chantry (poor) and on templars specifically (worse). Astrid looks a little closer at Cedric, squinting in the firelight. He’s a nice lad; her own auntie would’ve liked him, probably, and he doesn’t look much like the bogeymen she’d heard so much about, out to get their shamans. Isn’t that always the way.

And that aquavit really does have a punch to it, loose lips, impulsive, because she just goes ahead and says it:

“We used to run you lot out of the mountains,” she muses. “I mean, not like, staking templars’ heads at the gates or anything. Just. Politely dissuadin’ you all from getting too close to the holds. Templars never liked our practices much. Spirits. Sky burials.”

[dissolving]

He’s sluggish for drink: Takes in tense shoulders, tense eyes. Scrutiny. Sight and understanding meet only when she speaks –

"Never liked ours much, either," Orlais would sooner shutter the Fade than tend His first children. "Almost been a few wars for it."

It isn't the same (the snapped leg of a horse). Nevarrans aren’t heretics, don’t harbor apostates; don’t fuck with false gods and blood magic. Cedric's eyes slip shut. If she'd put his head on a gate, that's half the work done.

(The funny bend in Broward’s shield arm, the one never healed quite right. Dalish, he’d said. Maleficar. Wondered at the force it must take, to make a man break his own bones.)

"How d’you bury someone in all this?"

The stars, poking through dusk; straggled lines of cloud. A horizon that stretches on, and on.

[brennvin]

“We don’t,” Astrid says after a moment, considering. “At least not the way you think of it.”

Their own practices had seemed so normal and everyday to her, until as children she and Kristoffer had accompanied their mother on a trading trip down the mountain, and happened to be present while the town conducted a cremation. The death of some village elder, the townsfolk out to pay their respects at the funerary pyre. Some Chantry brother overseeing the burning, that awful meaty smell, all that potential going up in ash, and Astrid as a horrified young girl not understanding: but how will the birds find them? They’re just gone.

She tilts her glass all the way back to catch some of the last drops from the bottom, and considers whether or not to refill it. “Our… I s’pose you’d call them priests? Our Sky Watchers, they use ritual weapons to separate a body. They lay the pieces out on the mountaintop for Our Lady of the Skies, as high as possible, where the birds can come to retrieve the pieces. You’ll feed the animals; your body returned to the cycle. Your soul’s carried up to the sky and you’ll be reunited with your kin on the other side.”

She sounds wistful; she hadn’t realised it meant so much to her until she was apart from it.

Then: “‘Yours’?” she asks, echoing him earlier. She painted the outside world in such a broad brush: Cedric wasn’t Tevene, and otherwise all Andrastians seemed much the same to her; she hasn’t known a Nevarran before.

[dissolving]

It's gruesome. Startling — as a child recoils from gore, bone peeking marrow, raw. Ungilded. Nothing so near a grandfather's leathered hand.

Ritual transfigures. Saws and hooks, flesh from cage. There are shapes that kill, and there are others that return. So it's a kindness. So he means it, when he says:

"Sounds nice," Sounds awful, too, torn apart by so many beaks. Obliteration. Nothing left to mourn; a thumb smeared through so much ink. He's never had the words to measure a pyre, the disgust of it. The appeal. "Guess 's not so different. Cycles and energy."

"When souls go to the Fade, to the other side, they push spirits out." He’s seen enough of thin places to believe it. Death draws them close; claws scratching at shroud. "It's... they need somewhere t'go. A body. So we keep them. Mortalitasi, they're not priests, not exactly. They guide the spirits in."

A breath out.

"But can’t everyone afford that. Gotta find other ways t'settle the Veil, remember your people."

There are bones under the Vhenadahl, he’d told Vanya. There were paintings in the market, too, oil and board and filled in to match: These eyes, that hair, for those gone too far to catch and hold. Dripping candles and bright paint. Autumn festivals, garlands on the high statues; flowers, bells. Kings, heroes. Teeth. Hunger.

Obliteration.

There are bones under the Vhenadahl, and he's always wondered if they crawled up beside the rest. Cedric shakes his head, as if for a fly,

"That what you'd want done? Th'birds."

They're both a league from home. Unlikely to die there.

[brennvin]

Cedric’s diplomatic enough to rein in his kneejerk reaction, but Astrid has no poker face to speak of, and so she gives away every last flicker of expression, all that distaste crinkling her nose. “Why? Any special spirits or is it just, like… anyone? Whoever’s nearby to get punted out of the Fade?”

The Avvar were startlingly comfortable with spirit possession, they did it with impunity, but it was always a living give-and-take. Learning, guiding, allying with the local spirits, a symbiotic relationship. Not— whatever this is, after death, some spirit maneuvering your corpse around like a meat puppet—

It’s at least less viscerally upsetting to her than the pyres, though. At least it’s engaging with the spirits (helping them?) rather than burning it all up. A kindness.

At his question, Astrid takes an indrawn breath. It hasn’t come up before (the Head Healer hasn’t done his survey yet), so she realises that until now, no one else at Riftwatch knew to do this part for her. It’s rotten work but someone’s got to do it.

“Yes please,” she says. “I dunno how the Lady would find me otherwise. Although I’m assumin’ if you die on a mission, you don’t want me to hack you into pieces.”

[dissolving]

Cedric watches her wince, and it's a little funny, it is; seen that face from half a dozen Orlesians. Shame the Chantry doesn't do masks.

"'S fine. Just do the neck first," A finger lifts above empty cup, draws a line across his throat. Shkt. "Only need my head. S'pose the rest could go to the birds,"

But reckon the others would have something to say for that — and whatever Astrid's lady is, it's not his own. A special spirit, punted from Fade. Long have they turned to idols, away from My Light,

"Or burn it. Bury it under an oak. Wish I could tell y'more, but Mortalitasi... they don't talk on it much. Keep their secrets, even from us."

A shade bitter, a shade too drunk to hide it. But,

"Promise you. If we can't get a Sky Watcher," Maybe the Inquisition would've managed it. "Find the highest spot we can. See 's done right."

[brennvin]

Warmth in her chest, bright behind her ribcage; it’s mostly from the alcohol but also partially not. It’s funny. She never expected to feel quite so relieved and grateful about a mutual dismemberment pact.

Astrid moves her glass over to her other fingers, spits into her right palm, and then holds it out expectantly to him.

“Thank you. You’ve a pact, mate,” she says, and there’s perhaps a little unexpected honour and weight and import laced laced into the words, considering her usual carefree manner. “I promise to cut off your head if I have to.”

[dissolving]

A mark of the moment — or an absence of germ theory — that sees him spit in his own. Cedric juggles an elbow to clasp palms.

"Thanks," Shake on it. "Find a good gate."

potential 🎀

[brennvin]

There’s blank non-comprehension on Astrid’s face at first, all wobbly and tipsy and What gate? before she remembers what she’d said earlier, and it shakes loose a small laugh.

“You’re a good sport, Cedric,” she says, and rolls back onto her knees closer by the fire; back to the warmth of the flames against the chilly night air, the warmth of the homegrown liquor, the warmth of someone’s company beside her, the awkward uneven patches papered over for now.