closed | road trip

[dissolving]

WHO: Cedric & Gwen & a skull sippy cup
WHAT: Road trip!
WHEN: Vaguely after Satinalia
WHERE: Cumberland
NOTES: I'll edit as appropriate.

The Abbey's an ugly scene.

Thick walls, massed bureaucracy; some clerk dredged up to speak with her in quiet, clipped Orlesian. They cannot make promises for the Spire, but he will pass whatever papers she has brought along if she will just wait here, in the hall,

And no further. Young, robed things watch her sidelong. Older ones watch the doors, shaggy with humped muscle; eyes faded, skin worn hard for sixty. The hours pass. Some shift exchanges, a new man led out by the crook-curved arm. Armored, and not armed. Mouth turned down in dull, unhappy line.

An ugly scene. That was before the door slammed. Glass shatters, a breathless shout: "Carsus — !"

Amazing, the ground he can cover in a skirt. Commotion somewhere behind. The guard starts. Their eyes meet,

He looks like he means to say something. And then they're both out the doors.

Comments

[elegiaque]

“The people in stories all started as people,” she says, more at ease with the nature of narrative than she is with what’s been going on, even if the further she gets from it the less those two things feel separate. There’s a cargo hold full of meticulously kept notes — a grasp for control of a tale that isn’t finished and hasn’t been told yet. A lantern against the encroaching darkness of surrendering your story to the people who tell it.

(Trust her to look at it in the bleakest fashion imaginable.)

They keep walking, beneath the leaves. She says, “I thought about Andraste when I was taken to Skyhold. Not— you know,” a vague gesture that encompasses the Chantry, because whatever they’ve talked about or not, no one comes away from Gwenaëlle with an impression of pious devotion, “but, the woman who was alive and died. What she’d have made of everything that came after her. We tell stories to tell each other what the truth is.”

And then we got on with it.

“I wondered if she’d even recognise what truths we tell with—” not about, a tool and not a person, “—her.”