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

[dissolving]

It ought to strike familiar, striding the halls of a Circle, but the memory of Nevarra City is hazy; gone a little like a dream. When he thinks of it, he thinks of the high arch of a doorway. Couldn't tell you where it led.

A hand lingers on worn wood, heavy in dust. Different, yeah, strange. Stranger – he does not say – for the emptiness.

(His own dead Alienage was more ornate.)

"'S not all Cumberland," He admits. A shining door, cut into hillside. "But thought it'd be nearer town."

You row to the Gallows. It's still Kirkwall. Set apart, and yet a part, close enough to bleed for it. He glances Julius, tries to square the shape of a smooth tongue, a steady manner, and life on this frigid rock.

"Lot of work to keep it going this far out. You take a hand in that?"

Seneschal now, and he had to learn it somewhere. Fuck knows if Fereldens keep clergy for that.

[overharrowed]

It would make sense if he had, Julius can think now. He's a sensible and organized man, good with logistics. And he'd been trustworthy. 30 years in the tower and he'd never once made a break for it. Even so:

"Not especially. Mages in Kinloch Hold weren't permitted non-mage correspondents, much less in-person contacts. There'd have been no way to hand off any of that sort of work to us without putting us in touch with merchants and suppliers." See: Carsus's earlier point about not being near a town. The trading area on the shore of the lake had sprung up after the tower was built. When the site was selected, it was near nothing at all, by design.

Julius smiles, rueful, at something. After a moment, he decides to say it: "You'd never credit it now, but when I first left the tower, I found currency a bit hard to get the hang of. I mean, I knew the theory, but I had no real sense of what a normal price for anything was. I'm sure I was cheated several times while it was easy to do so." It was a little bit funny, as long as you didn't linger on why a mage in his mid-30s had never learned how money works.

[dissolving]

"Knew a kid like that," An answering tug at his mouth. "Went to the Chantry real young. Reckon half the barracks fleeced him."

But Declan's been dead a long time.

"We're all lucky you learn quick. Must've been a hell of an adjustment."

Forced into the world, and its sprawling wilderness of bodies, voices; of people entirely alien. It's a wonder there weren't more Abominations in those early days. Must've been mages enough never spied a crowd.

He creaks to a seat, the nearer to regard Andraste.

"S'pose I don't see the point," And maybe it's a bit ironic, sat there in blackened steel; the worked grooves of tendon and bone, "Of burying the world."

[overharrowed]

"It took some time," of the adjustment, a bit quieter. "I'd been out a little, during the Fifth Blight. But as you can imagine, that wasn't preparation for most of the mundane parts of life." He hadn't been afraid, exactly, but he'd been a proud man trying to hide, and every flaw in his ability to do so had grated once.

He comes to sit near Carsus, across the aisle from him. He's looking at the statue, too, as he asks, "Do you want what they told us the point of the isolation was, or my guess?" Maybe franker than he'd usually be, but whether that's where they are or Carsus's thoughtful tone is unclear.

[dissolving]

He can work out the tactics: You put Circles on water, under earth. Even Cumberland's heavy curtains and marble halls are good in a fire. Slow to burn. So, a lake. Smart. Limits the approaches, limits the exits, and that's smart too – keeps something like Uldred from spilling over –

But that's different from shut letters. From shut cities, hell; from no runs around the yard. There'd been gardens, in the Capital. Trees. A sky.

"If you're offering," Julius' guess. "Reckon y'know if it worked."

[overharrowed]

"Well. I imagine what they told us won't shock you. Contain abominations, keep everyone safe from mages gone wrong. Keep mages safe from fearful peasants, maybe, though I thought that argument was a bit weak even at the time. After all, they let some of us out to help with the Darkspawn. Stakes are high enough, they're willing to risk it."

His hands are folded; he absently runs a finger along the side of a ring he's wearing.

Quieter, he says, "But it's much easier, isn't it. Telling people that mages are dangerous if they've never met one who isn't a small child. If they've never met one at all. Easier telling people we're too different, that there's no practical way we can live with normal people. That it's better for everyone if we're kept apart and to ourselves. How many people were in a position to say anything different, especially here in Ferelden?" No Grand Necropolis that needed tending; no nobles eager to ensure their afterlives were shepherded properly. Just a population who heard nothing about the mages at all, or that some of the had inevitably become Abominations as expected, though even that probably made less of an impression than it otherwise would have if it hadn't happened in the middle of a Blight. Normal people had other things to worry about.

[dissolving]

"Lotta old magic in the hills."

Isn't disagreement: Those who could say anything different are their own breed of threat. Astrid's people, and the Chasind below; the Dalish tilting along Imperial wreckage. All of them ruled by mages, and enough who might've stepped in for the end of occupation, and its tenuous claims. Would've been easy then to take a fort or a field, call yourself warlord of a new, old country.

The trouble is, mages are dangerous. Only look at Nevarra.

"But I reckon that goes two ways," The trouble is, everyone's dangerous, if they try. "Telling folks we're too different. Why stick your neck out for someone you never met?"

He isn't asking a hypothetical. Julius fought the Blight.

[overharrowed]

He raises his eyebrows, involuntarily, at that. But he takes a moment to consider his answer.

"...two answers to that, too, really. For me personally, I imagine it's the same reason I joined the Inquisition and that I stay with Riftwatch. I feel like it's my responsibility to do what I can, regardless of how anyone feels about me." And that is true. However.

"The other answer is that when Kinloch Hold was an operational Circle, it was very much not optional. If the Templars tapped your shoulder, you went to the front with them." He doesn't assume Cedric knows as much. He's learned enough to know that Nevarra was different in a variety of way. But in the tower they're sitting in, there were decades and centuries where why mattered very little for most mages.

After a moment, he adds, "Seems strange, sometimes. I would have volunteered, and here I am years later. A lot of people didn't come back from Denerim who probably wouldn't have gone if they had a choice. Picked for loyalty and how unlikely it was they'd run off, I suspect, not for magical strength." Not bitter, just tired.

[dissolving]

Julius' brows lift, and Cedric thinks: Stupid question. Half a second's reflex, the impulse to equivocate. He doesn't. Sometimes, the stupid question's worth asking. It's not every mage came to the Inquisition, to Riftwatch. One war writes the next.

"I'm sorry," Honest. Orlais took a lot of conscripts, it's no kindness. "Things get bad enough, they get... blurry. Dunno that anyone chooses, by the time 's in the streets."

And a broken bargain to find themselves there. Freedom for safety. Alienage walls, tower walls, they keep the danger out much as in. To be dragged from them -

"Means something different, when you do." Julius has now. He'd know. "Deserved t'have that."

[overharrowed]

"I suppose it does," a little bit quieter. "The Fifth Blight was ... I suppose I don't want to say better or worse than the current potentially world-ending threat. But there's something visceral about fighting Darkspawn, especially when they're in your home. It's hard for me to imagine not doing anything about it in a world where I have the capability."

He'd wondered, before, if in another world he'd have ended up a Warden. Certainly it wouldn't have fed his ambition, but on the other hand, there's something uniquely unsettling about the Blight that has lingered with him decades later.

"Still. Some people face danger in the streets and run. I think everyone in Riftwatch has passed that test, at least." All of them have put their lives on the line to oppose Corypheus, even if some divisions do it more directly than others.

[dissolving]

"Yeah," The thin quirk of a smile. Not pleased, not really, just sometimes you look a way when you're tired. "And 's always a new danger."

There will always be Darkspawn. There will always be a world to defend, or leave behind, or sit on your hands waiting for the news.

"It still feel like home?"

In here. Out there.

[overharrowed]

He doesn't say his first thought: More than Castle Selywn did, at least. He's not close enough to Carsus to say it. Possibly he's not close enough to anyone but perhaps Marcus or Petrana. It would open up a lot of questions he's not keen on answering.

Instead, he lingers over the question Carsus did ask for a moment or two. Eventually, he leans back in the pew. "It feels like a ghost of a place that was home once, if that makes sense. I don't know what it would feel like if I'd left, but I came back and it was still operational. Full of other mages and templars, especially the ones I knew. Now it feels like..." He trails, looking for an analogy. When he finds one, he says it more quietly. "It feels like going through the things of someone you knew after they'd died. They're not here anymore, but there's something about the concreteness of the things they touched and wore and cared about that makes it feel heavier that they're gone. If that makes any sense."

[dissolving]

"It does," There's a pen-knife in his pack. There are footprints on the carpets, marks on the benches; nearly invisible. A dozen places where presence wears imperceptibly thin. Taken altogether in one great hollow. "Makes it real."

Death pushes on the Fade. Life, it pushes back. Heavy. Concrete.

"Never went back to Nevarra. Hill just collapsed."

Little funny, after all that. The capital, with a heap of dust; then Ferelden, and its tomb.