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]

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.