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

[overharrowed]

"Most people traveled light," Julius says, gesturing toward the stairs they can take up to their destination. "I took a book or two, but I." A brief pause. "I wasn't going to war, at the time, so my priorities were probably a bit different. Granted, I can't predict how much looting has been done in the years sense."

Though anyone braving the empty Circle tower was more likely looking for enchanted items than academic volumes, given how remote they were. There were easier places to loot books.

Julius finds himself lightly surprised at how instantly he can lead them anywhere in the tower. It's been a long time, after all, but still not as long as he spent here in the first place. He could probably walk it blindfolded. That not being necessary, he leads them through the curved corridor to the library, the large arch as doorless as most other spaces in the tower. It's only a little smaller than the Gallows library, in truth, but it has a sad and lonely look to it. There are gaps in the bookshelves where fleeing mages took a volume or two, and a layer of dust muffling everything. The library occupies a high enough floor that the windows are wider than the slits on the lower levels, but they're still set well above the floor, giving the entire place a shadowy look even at midday with none of the candles lit.

"I spent a great deal of time in here," Julius says, as they come in. He realizes his voice is low, whether from habit or a sense of foreboding. There's no one here to disturb, presumably. And yet.

[portalling]

There are still enough books left that it still sounds like a library, at least: all that dust and those rows on rows of bound paper swallowing up noise, turning it strangely quiet and muffled.

“I’m not surprised,” Stephen says.

He wants to be respectful — Julius had been beyond respectful when they were in the sorcerers’ old stomping ground — but he can’t help but think the place sad and dreary. There’s not enough natural light. Both Kamar-Taj and the Sanctum Sanctorum had skylights in their libraries, making it as bright and cheery as possible, to escape the usual dim gloom and eyestrain. His heart twinges oddly at the sight of this gutted room, imagining all the mages and apprentices that must have come and gone. There’s mouse droppings in the corner.

“What was it like? Before.”

The normal Circle life, departing it, all of the above; whatever part Julius feels okay discussing.

[overharrowed]

"Cleaner," is more a gesture at a joke than an actual attempt at humor; a verbal placeholder while he thinks about what he'd like to say. He runs a fingertip along the edge of a shelf, pausing where a particular volume is clearly missing.

"It's a bit strange, trying to reconcile what it felt like, at the time, and what I can see in hindsight. But even with that aside, it was clean, actually. Orderly. Well-lit by torches and sconces, even if sunlight was relatively scarce in most of the places mages spent their time." He turns back to Stephen properly. "I think... it is easy to look at it, now that it's empty, as a prison. And there are ways that it was that. But it was also a school, and a community, and..."

Julius exhales, almost a sigh. "You have to understand, I came here when I was six. And suddenly I was told I was clever and special and that I had potential." And though Julius doesn't articulate it, it's fair to guess that he wasn't hearing those things before Kinloch Hold. "They were holding me here with things other than the stone walls and the lake, I can say in hindsight. But also, the bonds I made with the other mages here, those weren't less real for being partly due to forced proximity. People still had friendships and rivalries and love affairs here, hard as it may be to picture now."

[portalling]

“People have friendships and rivalries and love affairs in real prisons, too,” Stephen says; possibly a kneejerk rudeness if they hadn’t known each other so long and Stephen already liked the other man so well. It’s just stating a fact, not intending to start a fight.

But. A library is a library, and he can imagine taking refuge in a place very much like this. He unconsciously echoes Julius and runs a finger along one of the shelves closer to him, and wipes the dust off on his trousers.

“Considering,” he says, “that you did learn magic here, you did have teachers, and you did become a teacher yourself. It’s not absurd to think that this prison also functioned as a school and a community and a solace. Because, well, ethically, I imagine it’s at least simpler if your Circle’s named the Gallows and the flaws are more overt. Whereas something like this, you can’t see the forest for the trees.”

Especially when it’s all you know.

Stephen cocks his head, thinking. “What we discussed, about mage children these days. It’s not too far out of the realm of possibility to imagine a schooling system, a mage’s academy similar enough to a Circle. People do need to learn how to safely use their abilities somewhere.”

The rifter’s not a loyalist — far from it — but it is, at least, the extension of an olive branch. Some understanding, of the position Julius had once come from.