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]

"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.