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

[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.