faderift | open: something grabs ahold of me tightly

open: something grabs ahold of me tightly

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

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If pressed, Leliana would admit to times spent wishing she did not dream, did not walk the Fade. Dreaming calls to mind so much of the past, echoes of failures and successes and so much that cannot be changed, for all that the Fade warps and twists about her mind. Perhaps Galadriel was not being so literal, but the thought raises regardless, and Leliana simply smiles through it.

She closes her eyes to listen, quiet and reverent, as though she might capture each word and note, treasure them and lock them away in her memory for darker times, when she needs to remember what hope is, what blessings she can count. To have heard an elven song from another world seemed a blessing indeed, and her eyes open only when the song is done, and silence has rested on them a while.

"It is very beautiful," Leliana starts, voice rather softer than before. "It seems... I think there are notes of hope to find in it." Careful and thoughtful, playing the words over in her mind. "It is like walking in a forest of light, I think. Light and shadows cannot exist without the other, really."

Thoughtful, perhaps too much so, and she nods to Galadriel, seeming to catch herself. "I thank you."

There was some conflict couched in Leliana's thanks and Galadriel's expression, peaceful as it had become as they sang at the fireside, faltered. It was an expression she had not meant to show, it was one she guarded carefully from mortal men, and she curbed it as quickly as it had come. For a brief moment, fleeting as a lick of rising flame, a look of deep, unending pity danced across her face.

Men were proud, a trait Galadriel understood well, and she did not know Leliana's heart with any measure of certainty. She couldn't say how the woman would react to pity, for the proud often rallied against it, and there was no need for their conversation to devolve in such a way.

"You are welcome," Galadriel replied, her tone just slightly too measured. It evened out quickly enough, but the slip had occurred, if damage was done it had already happened.

The bow rested beneath her hands and the fire crackled quietly in the stillness. The prospect of silence, with nothing beyond the old song to occupy her mind, was deeply unappealing. Fortunately, another topic rested just within reach, and Galadriel grasped it without pause.

"My lands are often called the Golden Wood, for there are few Men living who bother with their proper name," Galadriel said and tried to regain her ease. "The trees that grow there are of a kind--Mallorn, they are called. They are echoes of a lost time and a distant land. They grow tall and beautiful, bearing leaves of silver and blossoms of gold; they breathe light into Middle Earth, even as the shadow encroaches.

"To walk below the mellyrn is to walk the ancient world, to linger in what was before darkness first fell." It was a dramatic description, that she would admit, but not incorrect. "If that song conjures the idea Lothlórien, even in one who cannot have seen those trees, nor their like, then I am glad. I can think of no goal I would rather achieve."

Ten years ago, Leliana understood pity better. She felt it in great measure, welling up in her with all her compassion and trust and mercy. So eager to help and so desperate to offer light and redemption to all. No one would be turned away from the Maker's light. Of course, she has experienced for herself how badly pity can be taken, how a kind hand can be slapped away or scorched sooner than accepted. In those days, she persisted and persisted. It was that persistence that lead to a good many squabbles with Alistair and teasing from Zevran, that earned Shale's grudging affection and Morrigan's utter loathing.

She sees pity and she understands it, and it makes her throat stick. Galadriel does not know her heart, nor her mind, nor her actions. Galadriel does not know how little she deserves pity, and how wasted it is on one who does what they must do, who throws themselves into necessity and forsakes the light.

Pity is not for the likes of her, and it makes her look down for a moment. Not sharp or sudden, not so reactionary as to set Galadriel ill at ease (or so she hopes). Not all things are in her control. She learned well how to control herself and to mask as a bard, and yet there are times and things that strike you so truly as to make masks slip or seem less perfect, and there is a persistent sadness in her that she dreads coming to the for if people looked too closely. She must be the Nightingale; there is no room for Leliana, here.

"They sound... I am not certain there are words that could do such a place justice," Leliana concedes, and that rawness edges her voice, quite without her permission. To hear Galadriel speak of it alone makes her wish to take up her lute again, to weave notes and words together, and that is one of the many things she no longer has time for. "It makes me think a little of the Golden City, although I do not doubt they are entirely different in both concept and reality."

A moment, a breath. "Lothlórien, that is the name of your homeland?"

She was not the first who had asked that question, nor would she be the last, and each of them who did wore away at her. It was not their fault, they could not know, but such questions had been rare in Arda; here they washed away the illusions she tried to erect, laid her bare as easily as the tide shifted sand. Every answer she gave was a reminder of how distant Thedas truly was.

Galadriel smiled, though, as she regarded Leliana across the fire. The expression was kind but distant; it was a soft smile, gentle and welcoming, but impersonal. It was an archaic smile, the sort of mask one perfected over thousands of years, and it felt as old as it was.

"That is the name of the land that I steward, and it is where my heart lives, but it is not my homeland as you mean it," Galadriel explained. "The land I hail from, before all others, is called Aman. It is the home of all elves, a far green country in the distant west. The mellyrn have always grown there and they grow there yet...but it has been long years since I saw the trees on those shores.

"I love them best in Lórien, I think," she said. "In Aman they did not sparkle in the light of dawn, and I have a great fondness for how that golden light that dances through their leaves."

"It is strange how things dear to us change as our circumstances do." It is simplistic, she suspects, compared to how Galadriel speaks. Something in her breathes of Ages, not of scant decades. Leliana wonders if, perhaps, that is nothing more than her own inclination to fancy and the craft of tales, if she might be imposing her imagination on a woman who, while ethereal, is but flesh and bone as much as Leliana herself. "Perhaps better put... they change as we do. The eyes that look upon them once might not see them again, no matter how often we behold them."

If she were inclined to being absurd, this would be a prime opportunity to lighten the mood by speaking of nugs. She is not, so Maker be praised, Galadriel is spared.

"To hear you speak of it," the filter of light through the treetops and the way dust twirls and pirouettes, "I would think there are precious few sights to be beheld that could ever be so precious. As if it were a feeling to be captured, in that light." The fleeting memories of her mother's embrace and the scent of Andraste's Grace, of the Maker's blessing, of... of peace and contentment that she has not known since Lothering.

"Aman and Lórien both sound beautiful."

"They were," Galadriel replied and caught her error as she made it. It stole her words from her, for that brief moment, and in her silence she considered the woman alongside her, then the dark forest beyond the firelight. How their conversation had come to this, she could not say; thoughts of the creator, of watchful deities and distant lands, all of them tumbled together to the tune of the crackling flames. Lothlórien was little more than a feeling now, if a precious one. It was no different from Aman save that, Valar willing, she might see Aman again should she perish.

It was a grim thought and her smile passed with it.

"Forgive me, I dislike change and thinking overmuch about Aman all but demands I ponder the differences between what is and what was." And what would come to pass. Galadriel stared off at the woods for a few seconds longer and then let out a short sigh. Her attention returned to Leliana, fixed as it had ever been, and she leaned toward the warmth of the fire.

"But I admit, I do delight in your regard for my home. I have not been in Thedas long, but I find I miss Lórien terribly. If I can only linger in it in passing thought, then I shall when I can."

Leliana had asked her a question. It was some time ago, by her measure, and the topic seemed senseless now. It was easier than speaking of lost homelands, though, and Galadriel resigned herself to it.

"You wished to know how I found this Inquisition? I fear I have no insights that will aid you. I have known no army that behaves as this one. Your fortress is a clever thing, and easily held, unless Thedas has a great many creatures that can take to the sky."

And there it is, a bitter truth that she is sorry to see exposed. It should not surprise her - perhaps it should not even grieve her, and yet she finds that familiar feeling in her gut, a sinking feeling that yet rises, as though a void was opening up within her that would consume her as effectively as the Breach might have swallowed the world. It is familiar and, she suspects, ceaseless. Some days and some moments the reminder of it opened it up afresh, echoes of all the horrors she has seen and inflicted reaching out with vicious fingers that would pry her apart from within, sinking in and pulling - indefatigable.

To open wounds afresh in another was not something she even took pleasure in, and especially so when it was done without any kind of deliberateness.

"I understand," Leliana finally replies, a little more quietly. "Dwelling on change can be a painful thing, for want of another word. Even so... I think sometimes that change is what we must think on. What is and what was may not suffice. I would not wish for what was to be the way that it will be in the future. Not for mages, nor elves - not for any person here. What was did not work. What will be... that carries some breath of hope."

There is a tightness in her chest, stretched as a bowstring, pulled far with her own anticipation and desperation that has spanned years. "No forgiveness is necessary, I assure you."

But that she could offer some... respite, perhaps, even if it was only little and only through her own childish wonder, then that she can be glad of. Her wonder is rarely lingered in, either, though that hardly needs to be mentioned. This conversation was never intended to be about Leliana.

A slight smile, just a little wry. "I do not know that any army has behaved quite as this one. We are a little unorthodox, in some regards, but I greatly appreciate your candour. We will gather strength as we go."

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