We must resist

[arcaneadvisor]

WHO: Morrigan; open
WHAT: Checking in on friends, checking in on the mage and rifter situation and research. Wildcard and shapeshifter lesson discussions available!
WHEN: Post-rift opening in Skyhold onwards, basically a big catch-all
WHERE: All over Skyhold
NOTES:A few so please bear with me:
1) Morrigan is seeking out rifters since what happened to Sina, there’s a starter just for them
2) For the same reasons she’s seeking out members of the mage council
3) If you’re interested in shapeshifter lessons, there’s a handy sticky post here
4) The research Morrigan is doing is based on the Hinterlands expedition here

Library - artifact research;
Since returning from the Hinterlands, she’s devoted more time to the artifact that had returned with them, or rather to the notes that had been made about the surroundings. It makes a change to reading the book on the Veilfire runs and making her own notes from what Pel had directed her to, taking her deeper into history, into Avvar culture and Ferelden legends for a change. Each time Flemeth is mentioned she makes what might be a grimace or might be a smile.

Spread across the table are copious notes taken in the Hinterlands, including sketches of the artifact, as well as a symbol drawn on the floor in the ruin, a few more of the strange statues, the piles of bones.

Another perspective would be welcome, as would a distraction in all honesty.

Gardens;
Instead of the usual peace, Skyhold's garden is a battle.  Not a serious one to most but to the children playing Wardens and Darkspawn it's very much real, shrieking and lunging, hacking and slashing with swords.  One little boy holds Morrigan's attention more than the others; this is a rare moment of peace, when things have been on edge lately.  As it is, she's kneeling, planting the seeds she brought with her, a few she's carried around since she left the Wilds, others brought with her from Orlais and beyond.  Simple, quiet work, no devious plans some might think she has, just a break from researching out in the fresh air. 

And no, contrary to what some might have you believe, not a single one of the seeds will grow into something poisonous.

Seeking rifters;
She's met a rifter or two since she came to Skyhold, and talk of them has been everywhere but hunting them down to talk was never a priority until the rift had opened within the very walls.  Now?  Well she has theories, theories she cannot test herself but looking for them might help, and it's a different sort of magic, something new to draw her attention when not working on whatever scraps of elven lore they've uncovered thus far.

Wherever the rifters might be, she seeks them out eventually, appearing around a corner seemingly from nowhere, perhaps after a particularly intent crow or cat has watched them before disappearing.  The introduction is the same each time, for she only knows one or two in passing.

"Greetings, you may call me Morrigan.  I wonder, might you have the time to talk a while?"

Seeking the mage council;
That they've made a little Circle themselves here is still a notion that disquiets her, something that she keeps an eye on without joining in, unwilling to be held to whatever rules they've made but it wasn't just anyone who opened a rift in Skyhold.  It was a native, a native mage and when she arrived in the first instance it was after an Abomination rampaged.  It hardly helps matters that she's Dalish as well.

There are too many Templars here for her liking as it stands, unsure of what reprisals there might be.  So she waits, quiet and patient, seeking Adelaide LeBlanc in particular simply because they've spoken before but it is opinions she is after, a sense of how things truly lie.  She's lingered before, to watch, to listen, to judge silently and she never could abide things being caged.

wildcard;
[Or feel free to find Morrigan elsewhere!]

Comments

[fightingale]

You have sharper wits than that, says she, and Leliana moves away from the table, frustrated. Hurt, perhaps, but it is no hurt she does not deserve. Her wits should be sharper, better, she should be achieving more, should be seeing matters for what they are, rather than feeling that she were viewing them from beneath the water's surface, a drowning woman looking up towards the sky and making out the shadows of the world above her.

What is worse - that Morrigan stands and continues to argue with her, or that she does not agree, and does not turn her viciousness against her? It would be easier to be condemned. It would be easier not to argue. It would be easier if Morrigan were so appalled or so nettled that she would simply leave. Even speaking of Kieran did not spark sufficient rage to feel like a relief, or disgust to make her leave, though she would have to admit neither had been her intention. The sentiment that she would fight for Morrigan and her boy was genuine, even if it had caused offence. (And it would have seemed laughable, ten years ago, for Morrigan to offer her what could be considered a compliment, let alone to consider that Leliana would have returned to this life and become a master of it, that Morrigan had become gentle. That Morrigan was a protector, and Leliana was a knife in the dark.)


"Justinia was more than a friend," Leliana starts, though it lacks the bite of an order not to speak of someone she has no doubt Morrigan would only speak of with disdain. She saved me, Leliana thinks of saying. Her vision and her dreams might have saved us all.

Her voice is quiet, rough, and strained after a long stretch of silence.

"What do you want, Morrigan?"

So many she could be asking that question, perhaps even ways she should be. What does she want in Skyhold, in the Inquisition, with her mysterious items that need to be protected? What does she want in the Rookery, from Leliana? What has Morrigan ever wanted? Leliana leans against the railing, hands holding onto it and her head low, and it could be that she is an angry, dangerous thing coiling and controlling herself, with such a posture. She almost wishes it were so, because if she were then she would not be so exhausted. The railing would not be a crutch, and her head would not hang quite so low, she would not sound so tired.

[arcaneadvisor]

There is a rule you learn when you are a girl that has seen her own tear streaked face reflected in a shattered mirror hurled down in the mud and leaves: you never let someone hurt you if you can hurt them first, and Morrigan has gotten good at that, very good at it. She isn’t surprised that it can come back so easily even after ten years where she has pushed it down. Copy the soul of an animal and you never forget it, be raised by a hand as likely to strike you as to hold you and you certainly never forget it. Maybe that’s what has her thinking. Morrigan cannot copy the soul of a person, a question she’s been asked before about if she can become another person, as if it were so easy a thing. Yet here Leliana is, but at the same time she is not, she is something new and sharp in all the wrong places. Morrigan lives for her research and for Kieran, and one is enough to protect the other and though the offer (or reassurance) is welcome, she isn’t about to let Leliana see that.

“Leliana’s friend? Or the Nightingale’s friend? Could such a woman have friends?” It’s deliberate to not clarify that she means Justinia in the last instance, let Leliana take that how she will so Morrigan knows who and what she’s dealing with here. What Morrigan knows of the late Divine will always be less than what Leliana does but when Celene wanted her in the court for her perspective, she knows she can see it without being blinkered by whatever is instilled in little girls about what a Divine is, what a Divine should be, how she should be loved.

There was nothing unconditional in Morrigan’s childhood.

I want to know who you are. I want to know what happened to you. I want to know who let this happen, she thinks but does not say, instead just watching Leliana go because the other woman knows Morrigan likes her silences, like to pause and to wait. She follows a moment later, leaning herself to peer down, ignoring the eyes of the ravens she feels on her back because she knows such birds; if she has a favourite shape it has been such a bird, to flit as a shadow, to be the omen a person fears when one bird watches them for too long with eyes too sharp and knowing.

“Perhaps want is not the right word for it,” she admits at last, voice low and quiet after the shouting. “I wonder how any of it has come to this. After the Blight, I had thought…” There’s a moment where she falters, looking down so it’s harder to see the way her mouth twists, how it still hurts even when it shouldn’t. It’s an admission again but she had so much time when Kieran had to be kept close, when he slept or when she rocked him in her arms and she did wonder what the rest had gone on to do because one doesn’t spend a year fighting through the worst creatures imaginable and then forget about them utterly. “I had not thought you would return to a life that you freed yourself from.”

Freed sounds better than fleeing, than being forced out rather than die.

[fightingale]

And there it is, although she cannot flinch from Morrigan’s words this time, neither internally or so clearly that Morrigan would see it. Could such a woman have friends, and Leliana can’t help but find it a little funny, when they have never been friends in all these years. Morrigan had despised Leliana, and recognised her hypocrisy when she heard of the Nightingale, even if she had born no such name then. Both sides of her merited disdain. It was no wonder that she it would surprise her that Leliana would claim to have any friends at all.

“I have made many friends over the years,” she replies, calm, even and resisting the tightness that threatens to latch about her throat. “Allies and enemies are both an inevitability in such work.”
But ‘ally’ is the more accurate word than friend, she supposes. She met Josephine when she was a bard, yes, though those were still the days before she was the Nightingale, when she was freer than she has been in a long time. And now that she is the Nightingale, even Josephine was not trusted automatically, as a friend doubtless should be. Her integrity was tested before she was welcomed to the Inquisition, rather than her character simply being relied upon. (This is a lesson Leliana will re-learn, soon. She will remember that all must be tested, before they can be trusted.)

Friends feels like an imposter on her tongue.

(And there is that suggestion of softness, again, and Leliana feels certain she should pull away from it, lest she disturb this delicate balance, this concern within a heart that she had accused of being filled only with loathing, even for Morrigan herself. There is love there now, she thinks, and that is important. That is the very reason she must be as she is, why she cannot run from who she is. Better her than Morrigan. Better her than anyone else.)

"You and Zevran," Leliana breathes, and she cannot find it in her to be exasperated or amused. Instead, she is simply clear, blunt:
“You cannot be freed from yourself, Morrigan.” A sorry truth, that. “This is who I am, who I always was. You were right, you know. When you called me a ‘little deceiver,’ in Denerim. I did not know it at the time, of course... I believed Jonas so willingly when he assured me that Marjolaine and I were not the same, but he is but a man. He cannot know all, and he cannot see into our hearts.”

The Maker could, of course. He could see into her heart, and He knew she was not an innocent and loving child. She had walked a more virtuous path, or at least had tried, before falling back to what she was truly gifted at. She understands that well, now. Sacrifice in the name of the Maker is necessary, and Leliana’s sacrifice is herself. No matter what she must do, what becomes necessary, she will see it done and Thedas will be better for it.

Her pause lasts a moment too long, and though she does not turn to Morrigan, exactly, her body is more open in her direction. Close enough. "At least I no longer deceive myself, and I am aware enough that I might turn what I am to a greater cause."

[arcaneadvisor]

It might be that Morrigan will never have friends. She had Flemeth. She had encounters in the Wilds and in towns, villages, but she has never had a single person to rely on, to place her trust in; how easy it is to betray a person so close to you, doubtless Leliana knows it even better now than she did then but Leliana was there in the main camp. She sang at the camp. She seemed close to them in a way Morrigan couldn’t be, wouldn’t be. The same reason why she is glad Kieran can make friends of his own easily enough; it was easy to be spiteful, more difficult to say that some small part of her was envious.

“How many have you kept. Is there a difference, in your line of work?” They’re names to put on things, as if the whole world is a thing that can be neatly labelled and put in a box, as if the world has ever been that way; man is good at imposing its collective will on things but there are forces in the world that will always push back defiantly. “You call yourself the Nightingale; are Leliana’s friends the Nightingale’s friends? Are her allies Leliana’s allies?” Who are you, she wants to ask yet again because that is the crux of this, who and what Leliana has become when she said she was not Marjolaine and when Morrigan has been able to be herself for so long. Is this the way of the world, that when one walks free of the shadows and shackles another must enter them? Life is better with Kieran in it, life is better when she can see the joy in things, when she removes the armour she always wore out in the world to wrap her arms about him.

There was an envy of being able to be so free as Leliana once made herself, to sing joyfully, to love tales told a thousand times without looking for the ugly truths they masked.

“Well Zevran has spent far too much time around the imbecile Alistair, half his wits are likely gone.” Easier to put that buffer between them both now, because Zevran already sees too much of Morrigan so the twist of her mouth into a smile is sympathetic and annoyed. Some people see too deeply, she would prefer that they didn’t.

Leliana cannot know what it was like to break free of Flemeth, nor can the Nightingale but the words sting, they burrow into that place of her that doubts to feed something dark and hungry. Leliana cannot know that Morrigan has vowed to never let herself be Flemeth, to never isolate a child and bring them up with only what the mother wished for them to know. Bad enough that she had no plans to love him at first, bad enough that he was part of an escape plan. He is her son and she has walked through the fire to get to where she is now.

“No?” It’s hard to keep her voice level, to sound almost amused at the notion. “I remember what I called you.” I remember I was angry, I was jealous, I could hardly breathe for how easy it was for you to kill her and be done with it. “You pretended to be a Chantry sister for so long though men are so good at lying because all too often they like to pretend that they are so noble. That the blood doesn’t harden beneath their nails. Why must you look to others for who you are?” There is a reason Flemeth denied her a mirror, denied her something to see herself, something all of her own that hadn’t come from Flemeth’s hand or from her lessons.

Morrigan’s lies are often omissions. If she is not asked then that is not her fault, why should she volunteer more than is required? She is a different sort of liar to Leliana but she does not lie to herself, she does not try to twist herself into what is needed or required; she has always been helpful, but that doesn’t mean she has to be nice about it, or kind. Freedom comes in knowing yourself and caring less what the others might say.

The scoff is out before she can stop herself. “Calling yourself Nightingale. You are Leliana, there is a part of you that cannot be so simply hidden else you would not have pulled back your men at Haven.”

[fightingale]

Morrigan insists, as ever, at being far too cutting with questions that might be painless to some, but find their targets with swift brutality. Leliana is not so vulnerable or soft as to flinch, not any more, and she does not kick back with the childish name calling of a decade ago, though she is not without guards that raise and anger that coils and readies itself to strike.

"Their numbers are not so limited as to be instantly called to mind." Remembering Morrigan's self imposed isolation is not difficult. Imagining how alone she must be in the Winter Palace is not difficult, either, when Leliana has long since realised how very isolating it is to be a bard and to realise all blades are turned against you, in the end.

She seems the sympathy in Morrigan's smile, and she disregards it. It is not for her.
"Ah. Do you imply your wits are half gone, as well? That would be a merciful release from this discussion," she replies, far more lightly than she feels. It would be nice to step into simple barbs and retorts again, not these uncomfortable truths that Morrigan has no right to. But there is still a tightness in her voice. "I was a lay sister at the Lothering Chantry. That was everything to me, not some convenient pretence." She is angry, and she is certain she has no right to be. This-- Morrigan herself, it would seem, is clouding her judgment and her reason, making the clear argument warp and more difficult to grasp. Too much is slipping, and she cannot afford it to.

"Are you misunderstanding me? I do not look to others any more - that was the mistake, and I have learned it well. I look in the mirror and I see what I am. I remember the past and I know my present. Do not dare dismiss me as clay that is so easily misshapen, and do not think me the girl for whom you held so much disdain. I am sure there are other earnest young things for you to denigrate with your scorn."

She stiffens, holds herself sharp and straight. "What would the Inquisition stand for if there were no lives it treasured and protected? What manner of Spymaster would I be without spies? I am Leliana, yes, but that does not mean I am who you remember. Better you remember that and spare us both. If you have some point to prove, make it elsewhere. This," and she gestures to herself and to Morrigan in one loose motion that doesn't fit with the rigidity in her posture, "does not matter. Why act that it does?"

[arcaneadvisor]

Not quite a deflection, but not quite an answer, just a reminder of how much she hated the way Celene would insist on speaking so. At least Morrigan has always been honest with herself about her place in the world, and if she has to thank her mother for anything it would be that. She has never known how to fit in and so she doesn't, keenly aware of each and every on her, same as a wolf or hawk or hare might be.

"Oh don’t be absurd, or deflect the way the idiot does, you have never used a shield." If they are dredging up the past, there's no reason for her to not bring it up, choosing to save that first remark for later, when she has had time to think. It isn't fleeing if the retreat is tactical, time to consider before coming back. "If that is the truth then why did you leave to join Jonas? Why are you the Nightingale and not a sister once again? Marjolaine is gone, yet here you stand as spymaster." The pieces fit but not entirely right, though Morrigan only knows the Chantry from a position of scorn but there is a gulf between lay sister and Left Hand.

And she knows women. Powerful women. She knows mothers and how their hands can be; Orlais is Orlais, the only way to get anything is to play the Game. There is something uncomfortable about them all, about the influence they exert and how respect and love are expected, their decisions unquestioned. But she is not so foolish as to discuss that, she well remembers some discussions with Wynne, bruises still fresh that bloomed with pain when touched and this is worse, this goes deeper, goes down to the bone with who knows how many old wounds.

Her own aren't forgotten after all.

"What you were? Is a bard not what she is shaped to be? Tis a simple enough thing to shape a child into whatever you wish for them, I was meant to be a thing that Flemeth would possess in time, to be exactly as she wished for her convenience." What is a Left Hand if it does not move as the mind dictates after all? How is it that Leliana has become harder where Morrigan has become softer, how is it that one of them has learned to put away her claws at times?

"Have it your way," she says at last, turning to face the stairs. If Leliana wants to think of this as fleeing she is welcome to do so, to enjoy her small victory. It isn't that Morrigan is tired but this is going in circles, will continue to go in circles and it was her anger in the past that kept her going, when she was more spiteful and vicious. "I will send word of my work as it progresses so as to keep you informed, I have taken enough of your time Leliana."

[fightingale]

"Marjolaine was right," she replies, simple and to the point. "I simply denied myself the truth." No doubt some a part of Morrigan would be placated, would be pleased by her failure. "And finally you have learned," Leliana breathes, even as she chastises. Morrigan has fought for her freedom, for her son, and Leliana exhales her frustration, easy enough to pass for an even breath.

"As you will." Leliana has no doubts she is dispensable, but one of several that Morrigan would manipulate to serve her whims, had she the time and chance. Just because she would fight for Morrigan does not mean she will let herself fall without meaning, without serving this Inquisition.

She turns back to her work, and banishes thought of the Witch and all her wiles. The Nightingale has work to see to - better that, than allowing herself to be entangled in all this.