open: something grabs ahold of me tightly

[faderifting]

WHO: Inquisition Forces
WHAT: Inquisition forces cross the mountains into Orlais to deal with Emprise du Lion
WHEN: Wintermarch 25 onward
WHERE: EMPRISE DU LION
NOTES: This is a mingle-style log for the Inquisition camps, local tavern, and general/open Inquisition work, etc.

This time they hike down to the west, but the trip through the mountains is no easier. The snow is heaped up about the road where wagons have pushed it aside, stomped into slippery pack beneath the feet and hooves that have gone before. Of the main track it is ankle deep at best and in places it drifts, waist-deep on a tall man and enough to bury a dwarf who hasn't come prepared with snowshoes. Everywhere the wind howls, biting cold, and the sky hangs low, a pale flat grey that makes it difficult to judge distances. Those who know winter weather call it a snow sky, and near-daily squalls prove them right.

They set up camp in Sahrnia, across the broad expanse of frozen river that has trapped the villagers here upstream. Tents pop up in rows and in the shells of tumbled-down buildings, fires blazing and thawing the ground to mud. When the supply wagons roll in they re-open the local tavern, brightly lit with flaking paint on the walls that might once have been colorful and patterned tiles on the floor that seems to swim like an optical illusion after too many glasses of the cheap red wine that fills the cellars.

Even deadlier reds hold the hills: Red Templar sightings have been frequent and it is said they are operating in several locations in the region in significant force. Some of these men and women have become hulking, crystalline beasts. Many others are in the earlier stages of corruption: red-veined and -eyed, aggressive and superhumanly strong, but still visibly human and coherent if spoken to. Red lyrium is even easier to find, jutting out of the ground or cliffsides, filling caves-- the Tower of Bone, a fortress that has stood for centuries, now threatens to split from the inside out. The area's wildlife was none too friendly before, but now the wolves and bears have begun to be corrupted by the lyrium and many will attack on sight, without provocation. (The snofleurs that bumble harmlessly around the river seem unaffected.)

Everywhere there are ruins: broken bridges, crumbling colosseums, and the great hulking mass of Suledin's Keep tucked between the distant hills. Scouts reported that Red Templars hold it as well.

RIFTER ARRIVAL - SAHRNIA - THE HILLS - TOWER CAMP - A HANDY MAP

Comments

[glandival]

[ No is ready on Sabine's lips, but it is enough of a lie that it dies before given flight, and recognition buys Araceli some time and credit as Sabine tips a look down at her from on high, and a speculative light shifts behind her eyes. Relative high, anyway. She, like Araceli, has to make do with what they have to work with, when it comes to finding preferable perches.

She tears another strip of bark, which curls into a spiral between her fingers, flicked away. Nostrils flare as she sniffs. ]

You are not a wolf or a demon or one of those Templar things, [ she says, a little dry. A little sharp, but that energy is concentrated in her stripping sticks of their skins and dignity rather than at the girl halted at her chosen ruin.

Araceli is also not a mage or a Dalish or a-- well she's a human, if not one of this world, which seems to mean something. ] You can stay.

[foxsays]

Some might argue the demon part. [Maybe if she had managed to keep smiling then the joke wouldn’t have fallen quite so flat but it sours in her mouth, has her looking away and longing to be a million miles from this place, to be somewhere by the open sea with salt air in her lungs, or to be so high up that all the world melts away into a blur of little consequence.

Instead she’s here, scrambling up to perch, to stretch out the ache in her legs and almost delighting in the fact that her fingers can feel that they’re cold, that there’s stone beneath them. Now she gets a better chance to look between Sabine and her work, eyes lingering on the knife a second or two too long.

A thief and a guard stays neither for long if she doesn’t at least look at such things.]

This is a miserable place, I can think of few places that could possibly be worse. Did you have a run-in with the Templars?

[Not that she knows Sabine well but upset is upset, the Red Templars monstrous. A fair enough guess around someone she barely knows.]

[glandival]

[ There is the tiniest hint of a smile at Sabine's mouth at this first part, tiny corkscrew tugs of wry that acknowledge this both as a joke and as a truth. It would be just her luck to befriend a demon in the form of a big strapping human who doesn't mind being called shem, or sit now with another as she takes her frustrations out on long stalks of wood. It would serve her right, probably.

They're not very good demons, if they're demons, is all she can say.

That question gets an odd look from Sabine, silently defensive, before she just shakes her head. The loose tendrils of red float along with the movement where they've struggled free of her twin braids, and she rubs her nose with the back of her hand before she sets them back into her work. ]

There was one of those-- stupid-- [ She pinches her mouth, struggling off a piece of stubborn bark. ] --éclatant chatte vert on the river. No Rifters, many demons.

[ Her eyes then stray, inevitably, to Araceli's hand. The one that is also éclatant and vert. ]

Does it hurt you?

[foxsays]

[Maybe some demons have to be caught slacking, to make up for the tryhards like pride or fear demons.

At least here she can joke about it, it feels like a little victory even if Baratheon has departed. Hopefully to be eaten by something horrible, she hopes they both choke if that is the case.

I hope there were not those despair demons, I had never been so frightened in my life when I watched the ice creeping up my blade when I stabbed it. Had it not been for my rescuer? We would not be here now.

[What she doesn't admit is that she hasn't ever had to be around one since she arrived. She's fought when rifters have fallen, or she's had other assignments, not exactly a conscious choice but if she can manage it then she'd prefer to keep her distance.]

It did at first. [There's no reason to lie about that part, not when she bumped into another new arrival at the tavern here already. What happened to Sina still weighs on her mind too as she examines her hand even as she fights the urge to pull her sleeve down, an almost childish urge.] Like I had been stung by something, just pulsing out from it. The more I tried to ignore it, the less I could but it settled, now I don't think it feels any different, not really. It's more distracting than anything else.

[glandival]

There was a wrathful demon. The ones formed of fire. Destroyed my arrows.

[ Hence, the peelings of bark falling to one side of her, the stripped sticks, the ones yet to be assaulted.

But her work halts as she listens, her flicking back up to Araceli's face and then down again to her hand. 'Distracting' is the word that has her jaw firm up and her eyes flicker, and she is silent for a moment where she sits. She'd never seen the Herald, only really heard her story in retrospect when the sky was sealed, but it's the description of the little green sliver of mysterious magic that continued on. ]

Perhaps they called Trevelyan demon too, ah? Walking from the fade, marked as that, well before she was a martyr. [ She returns her focus to her work. ] Somewhere in between these things, she was a hero.

[foxsays]

Ah, I heard about those before, I was fortunate that it was spindly things and the floating green ones.

[Fire is a whole other kettle of fish that has her wincing in sympathy before she looks at her hand again, sighing.]

Most of the time I can forget it but when I climb and it’s dark? Very strange. Or sometimes when I try to sleep and I can see light behind an eyelid because I’m trying to sleep with that hand on the pillow. I would be a shit thief now, they’d see me coming, or shadows and reflections, green light bouncing off things. [Not to mention her rapier hilts are elaborate things of twisted gleaming metal that catch the light from each and every angle.]

So is that it? Such a short time to be so many different things - are people ever just people here? There always seems to be so much attached; titles that ring with expectation or scorn depending on who you speak to. It’s hard to think about heroes, here, from everything I’ve heard since I came here they all seem to get lost one way or another.

[glandival]

You arrived in a place that is not like any other place. Most places are not so muddled. The nobles of Val Royeux, or the magisters in Tevinter. Dalish in their forests, my kind in our cities. The Inquisition has all of these things. We all have different notions of hero.

But most people are nobody.

[ She lifts a shoulder. ]

And sometimes, it is a lot of nobodies that do the work of heroes, when they lack them. [ And there's a note of certainty, in that, an idea that means something to her. ] Perhaps that is how the Inquisition will be, but you know. Shems, they like their stories to be neater than that.

[foxsays]

[Well that certainly gets her attention.]

The Dalish have told me much, the only elf I think I can name that is not Dalish besides yourself is Zevran. [Zevran is not most elves, she already knows that one.] How different is it? To be an elf and to come from the cities? I...I know something of the history but again, it is from the mouths of the Dalish.

[An oversight, she senses, but she's come from a place of nothing but humans to where humans have done such terrible things it makes her sick.]

Many hands are needed to crew the ship but in time all that is remembered is the captain, maybe his first mate and the quartermaster if they served together many years and accomplished much. The Inquisition certainly feels an awful lot like a ship in a storm except no one seems to agree on which way the wind is blowing or if we're about to run into the rocks or the shallows. Shems, that's the word for human, yes? [All these languages and accents, it's a lot to just be dropped into.]

[glandival]

Shemlen. The quick people.

[ It's not a nice word, really, but the translation -- a little inaccurate though it might be -- doesn't sound especially derogatory, Sabine's tone affirming that yes, this means human.

How different is it, she asks, and Sabine closes her knife. Her fingers have dirt beneath them, making little grey crescents beneath translucent keratin, and she fidgets with the knife like she's fidgeting with that question. It feels oddly big, the heaviness of a history putting pressure on conversation.

Still, she forges on. ]

In many cities, elves keep to their own kind in the alienages, small portions of city for them alone. Where I am from, in Halamshiral, it was once a city for the elves until Orlais' conquering. We may outnumber the humans, but we live away from them, and their guards walk our streets. There are laws, and restrictions, and in alienages, walls so high the sun never rests long on the ground. So, you see, we live among the shems, but also apart.

We are not properly elves, to the Dalish. We are something else, made human in association, forgetting what it is to be really elven. [ She doesn't literally roll her eyes, but it's laden in her tone. ] That is not how the shems would see us, in turn, you know?