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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What little warmth and cheer the tavern had managed to accumulate was sucked out of the room as the door flew open. It crashed against the exterior and a cold draft snuffed the candles throughout the room. Only the hearth was left and, shit, didn't that just cast a macabre red glow across the remaining few moments of his life? The people who'd gathered to hear his tales scattered as Cassandra approached and, in a few second flat, he was left alone at a table, staring up at the Seeker.

To say she looked thunderous was to say that dragons could be a bit cranky.

Varric was guilty, he knew that, but a very important question arose as he stared at her: what did she think he was guilty of? He wanted nothing less than to confess to crimes she didn't know about...and that really only left him the one option conversationally.

"Well," Varric answered in a tone that was somewhere between placating and glib, "You know I always have time for you, Seeker."

His conciliatory, casual tone did nothing to pacify her. Cassandra's eyes narrowed in suspicion, and she stepped forward to the now-empty table, looming over him.

"I am in no mood for jokes," she warned him, and then gestured to the door. She was well aware that the entire room was watching, that conversation had died off as soon as she'd called Varric's name and that every eye was on her. She would not have this conversation in front of an audience. "Come with me."

"No guards?" Varric asked, entirely nonplussed. "Why, Seeker, how forward of you--"

This was, perhaps, not an entirely solid idea, but Varric had been drinking for the better part of the day. He was already on precarious footing and this sort of thing? Probably not going to help with that. Still, with Cassandra looming over him, expression grim and furious as a wraith, how much worse could this really get?

Well, he could get stabbed, he supposed--it really depended on what she was angry about.

Varric pushed off and stood up, a short and stalwart figure in Cassandra's long, harrowing shadow, and casually motioned toward the front door.

"--I must say, I greatly approve, though it's a bit cold out for 'private conversation'."

Cassandra flushed red, her expression growing ever more annoyed. He was not supposed to approve of this, and the suggestive tone behind his teasing did not go unnoticed.

Somehow, she managed to hold her tongue rather than telling him off again in front of the entire tavern. In truth, she wasn't entirely sure what she would say, and so she simply turned on her heel, marching out the front door and trusting him to follow. Once the door was safely shut behind them, she rounded on him, as forbidding as ever.

More so, perhaps, if only to make up for her momentary loss for words back inside.

"You were supposed to have told me everything about Hawke," she said, vicious and raw. "Did you not think it worth mentioning that the Champion had fought Corypheus?"

He really shouldn't have been surprised that Cassandra rounded on him the moment the door closed--the only surprising thing about this situation was that she hadn't pinned him to the door with a dagger, really. Unfortunately, between the alcohol and everything else, Varric was in a bit of a mood, himself. He answered before he could think better of it, which was always a terrible idea.

"Really?" Varric asked and let out a dramatic, put-upon groan which he punctuated with a sharp huff. "You didn't expect me to list every single weird thing we ever killed, did you? I mean, shit, in ten years we couldn't walk five steps without tripping over some strange adventure."

He scrubbed a hand over his face and, in a belated effort to keep from exacerbating the situation to actual violence, he added:

"We fought Corypheus, we killed Corypheus, it really seemed pretty cut and dried until he invaded Haven."

He actually had something of a point, it could be argued, even if the tale he had told her had at times seemed to last ten years itself. Why had he seen fit to tell her of every nameless mercenary that had ever attacked in Lowtown, every worthless piece of junk Hawke had looted from abandoned crates on the Storm Coast, and failed to mention this -

It did not matter. What mattered was that he had not told her, and she sneered, voice low.

"And after Haven?" she asked, and now her voice broke, despite itself. "When he came back from the dead and attacked the refugees who had gathered there for safety and protection? When he came back and killed Evelyn?" She took a moment to collect herself, breathing deep. "You did not think it relevant to mention him even then?"

"Yeah, because strolling up to you then and announcing that I know the guy? That would have ended well, right?" Varric asked and his voice took on a thread of waspishness that it hadn't had in years. He hadn't felt this offended or petty since Bartrand had been around to goad him. It was a bad attitude to combine with alcohol.

"Besides, I was a little busy worrying--see, unlike you, I had a friend die that day."

It was as if all the air had been sucked out of her chest - as if he'd struck her with a blow as strong as any from a dragon. Cassandra stared at him, stunned and silent, for a long moment.

And then her face changed, all at once, shock and disbelief overcome by hurt and unbridled rage. She did not think. She merely raised her hand, bringing it hard across his face - hard enough to rock him on his feet and leave a stinging mark he would feel for days.

"How dare you," she whispered, her voice raw. "How dare you suggest that -"

But the words would not come; the grief of losing Evelyn was still too near. And now, to have this insult on top of it - she turned her face away, hiding the tears pricking at the corners of her eyes.

Contrary to popular belief, Varric didn't deal with a wide array of women. He didn't have dalliances of any kind, really, and so he was more accustomed to getting punched than slapped. If pressed, he never would have guessed that Cassandra Pentaghast would have pulled a punch aimed for his face--that she'd slap him was so outlandish a thought he could hardly entertain it, even as his head snapped to the side and pain radiated across his face.

If he hadn't been practically leaning against the door already, he probably would have teetered on his feet and fallen back. As it was, he was frozen, mirroring her shock and, in a painfully cliche move, he lifted his own hand to his face. Prodding his cheek resulted in a sharp sting and Varric blinked dumbly as he looked back at Cassandra.

She was in overwhelmed silence, absolutely livid, and blinking a little too frequently for comfort. It took him longer than he'd like to put the situation together and, when he finally managed it, the only reaction he could conjure was a deflated huff.

"Shit," he replied eloquently. "Look, Seeker--" Varric started in, his tone stern, but faltered. When he continued he sounded as uncomfortable as he felt. "Cassandra--there's nothing to tell that the Wardens don't already know, alright? Hawke killed him, we killed him."

He should have stopped there, maybe appended it with an apology, but the next sentence was out of his mouth before he could stop it. Unfortunately, even he didn't sound like he believed it.

"Haven wasn't my fault."

Cassandra looked stubbornly away as he spoke. There was one upside to Varric being a dwarf: avoiding eye contact with him was easy. She did not regret slapping him, and she would not apologize for it. Not after what he had said.

It still hurt, the suggestion that Evelyn was not her friend, that she had not felt her loss as deeply as Varric or anyone else. But she shook her head as he spoke, as he pleaded for understanding.

"No," she agreed. "It wasn't." She could not pin that on him. Despite her anger, despite how badly she wished that he had said something, anything, at the beginning, she could not blame Varric for what had happened at Haven. There was no way of knowing now whether his speaking up sooner would have changed anything at all, and she would not allow herself to dwell on regrets and what-ifs.

Besides, she knew the truth, and she drew in a ragged breath before admitting it.

"It was mine."

It was she who had declared the Inquisition reborn; it was she who the Herald had followed, had trusted from the beginning. And it was she who had let her die.

Her friend.

She looks down, meeting Varric's eyes at last, but her own are cold and hard. Unforgiving.

"If there is anything else you are keeping from me, you should tell me now."

Varric would have made a joke about Cassandra absolving him, if only to lighten the mood. How often was it that Cassandra Pentaghast admitted he wasn't guilty? Unfortunately, before he could come up with one, she'd blamed herself for Haven and his desire for levity died. She looked down at him, all hardened resolve and long-suffering (vaguely threatening) nobility and Varric just stared back. He only half heard her warning, he was so taken aback.

"Your fault?" Varric asked, as confused as he'd ever been. His mind rolled over her comments and tried to find the logic in them--when he did, because it wasn't that much of a stretch to follow Cassandra's hard-line caravan of thought, he was livid.

"Bullshit," Varric snapped at her, lifting a hand to jab a gloved finger at her chest. "Step off the pyre, Seeker, you don't get to play martyr with the Inquisition. We already have one of those and she wouldn't have put up with this, either.

"If anyone is at fault here it's that asshole who came back from the dead and blew up the conclave; the rest of us are bystanders, tops." Varric was ranting, he knew it, but he'd already gotten slapped and shoved against a door. In for a copper, in for a sovereign. "You and Nightingale have done more to pull this wreckage out of the harbor than anybody could have imagined--shit, I can't even write a book about this because nobody would believe it."

He lowered his hands and crossed his arms. It was a poor impression of her posture but, hey, he was known for his writing not his acting.

"Get pissy with me all you want, Seeker, Maker knows I've done enough to actually deserve some comeuppance, but I'll punch a dragon in the face before I let you..." This went a strange direction and, as the words form, his sentence slows and his tone loses the anger lacing it. By the end of it, he's almost surprised at himself, but there was no taking any of this back, either.

In for a sovereign, right?

"Blame yourself."

There weren't many people willing to stand up to Cassandra Pentaghast, and fewer still who would dare to do so after she had physically struck them. (Mostly because those she struck usually met the edge of her sword rather than the palm of her hand, and were in no position to stand up at all.)

When Varric snapped right back and actually shook his finger at her, all she could do was blink in surprise. He dared - he dared to bring up Evelyn again, and sick bile rose in her throat, but Varric plowed on without so much as a pause to allow her to interrupt.

She opened her mouth to do so anyway, her brows already drawing down in indignant anger, the automatic denial already on her tongue - and then the actual words he was saying finally registered, and her vicious retort died in her throat.

She stared at him wordlessly for a moment, and then turned away, face hard and shoulders hunched with tension.

"She is dead, Varric," she says at last, but the fury is gone now. She feels...tired, and sad, and helpless. "She is dead, and it is -"

She stops herself before she can say it again, before he has to insist once more that it isn't true, and swallows.

"She is dead, and she should not be."

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open: something grabs ahold of me tightly

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