semi-open | spirit surveys.

[exequy]

WHO: Kostos & Mostly Mages
WHAT: Surveying spirits at Circles and battlefields
WHEN: Throughout the winter
WHERE: Various
NOTES: This is for rebel mage tasks. Involved mages are so so invited to toss up top-levels for their Circle/battlefield of choice, which can be exploration or spirit stuff or something else entirely. You're also free to bring an uninvolved/non-mage buddy along, with excuses made for the visit and the spirit aspect kept secret as needed, if you want to do your own CR stuff about visiting old haunts. And if you want to be involved but don't see a clear way in or need more preliminary planning first, hit me up and I will see what I can do.

The network of eluvians makes this prospect—visiting abandoned Circles, surveying battlefields from the Mage/Templar War—less daunting than it might have been before, but many of them still need to wait for some other work to carry the right people within a day's ride. Others need to wait for snowstorms to pass and roads to be cleared. The timing winds up erratic.

But the work itself follows a routine. Address mundane problems first, going around them rather than through them whenever possible. The Circles in the cities might have posted guards who need to be bribed or convinced or snuck around. Those in the wilds might be under occupation by vagrants or highwaymen who require the same. And any of them might have roving shades or veil tears to avoid while Kostos follows a more familiar former occupant through the halls, terse questions about where the fighting was worse, where the Harrowings occurred, or where the troublemakers were tossed emerging from the hood of his heavy coat.

Battlefields are easier. Most of them open spaces, many of them still sporting scars.

Sometimes nothing needs to be summoned; it's already there, running down a corridor in terror, and only needs to be persuaded to stop. Other times Kostos lays out summoning stones.

Comments

[exequy]

"Carefully," comes the immediate non-answer, most of Kostos' attention taken by staring up at the tower.

Ghislain disabused him of any notion that Southern Circles were anything like the gilded campuses in Nevarra, decades ago. But from a distance this the arches and spires on this one had given the impression of a middle ground between the oppressive prison fortress and the hammered gold dome. Some elegance to it, maybe.

But coming closer has not done it any favors.

He tears his eyes away from the tower and musters a better response. "We should start with something we can verify. Something you saw. Or something someone reliable has written down."

[overharrowed]

If he were privy to Kostos's thoughts, he might bleakly point out at least it's not literally named The Gallows. As it is, though, he nods his understanding, glancing up the tower thoughtfully.

"What sort of thing? A detail about the place itself, or where a particular event happened? I can probably provide a tolerable amount of either. I was here just shy of 30 years, so I can focus where you think it will be most helpful."

Given the nature of their mission, he suspects it's mostly likely to be "memories he'd prefer not to dwell on" but they're here now and there's no sense in flinching away from it at this point.