faderift | { OPEN }

WHO: Ellana Ashara + OPEN (with closed starters for Sabriel, Sina, and Merrick)
WHAT: Ellana returns to Skyhold from Emprise to catch up with people and settle back into life here.
WHEN: Guardian 20th through the end of the month.
WHERE: Skyhold

{ open }
After Ellana fulfills her duties in Emprise du Lion, she's allowed the opportunity to return to Skyhold or stay and wait for more assignments. But after everything that's happened while she's been away -- especially to her friends -- she wants to see Skyhold in person again. The journey back is thankfully uneventful, and as she gets through the front gate, she already has a list of people to see. But over the coming days, she settles back into a routine around the place, namely: visiting the mounts in the stables and petting those who seem agreeable to it, taking supplies down to the refugees encamped down in the valley below, reading out in the sunshine, or practicing with her new lute, which is a birthday present to herself.

[ ooc: feel free to have your character know it's Ellana's birthday from a scout if they want to give her a present. it's on Guardian 22nd! ]

{ sabriel }
Ellana is looking forward to getting back to Skyhold and flopping back into the bed she shares with Sabriel. It's not that sleeping in a bed roll is tough, seeing how she's done it her whole life, but her bed is something new and wonderful, and she's actually missed it. Coming into Skyhold, she sees not much has changed after the event with the rift. She heads to her room, drops her bag, and flops back onto the bed, sinking her head into the pillow and sighing happily. She'll unpack later. For now, she'll rest until Sabriel turns up and the two can catch up.

{ sina }
Hearing about what happened to Sina made Ellana want to return home, but she couldn't abandon her duties to the Inquisition, and she was assured Sina was recovering. Still, after resting from her journey back, she goes to find Sina to see how she's doing. There's a quick stop to the gardens first, where she picks some flowers. Her eye catches the Dalish memorial in the corner and she kneels beside it for a moment, relieved that Sina's name doesn't have to be added to her clan's stone. Then she returns to her goal of finding Sina.

{ merrick }
First Sina, then Merrick. Sam had told her what had happened to him via crystal and she had burst into tears. But Merrick was strong and Ellana had known he could beat the poison in his system. She also knows that what Merrick likes doing with Ellana more than anything else is to sit and sing, so she travels down to the merchant stalls with coins jiggling together in her purse, hoping the lutes she once saw there haven't all been bought up yet. She's been saving up to buy herself a lute for her birthday, and now the time has come. Thankfully, there are several available in her price range, and she selects one, testing it out. It will suit her, and she pays, taking the lute and adjusting the strings until it sounds as near enough to Zevran's as she can get. She still doesn't know many songs, but it's a start. And she can play for Merrick. Since the lute has no strap (she'll have to find someone to make one) she carries it in hand as she searches for her friend.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"That's true," Sina muses, looking aside for a moment, but smiling when Ellana admonishes herself. "I do," she says kindly, "but it never hurts to be reminded." Pausing to cough a few times, she adjusts herself on the pillow to prop her head up a little better.
"I see them always, at the corners of my vision," she says quietly, "...I think they're drawn to me, but don't approach." Her smile begins to dwindle, her expression becoming increasingly tired. "..not yet, at least. I met a girl, the last time. She came right up to me, but didn't seem to want anything." She bites her lip for a moment, thinking. "We just... talked. And she looked familiar, though I'm not sure from where."

"Hmm," Ellana says as her friend speaks, but she waits until Sina finishes before replying. "Maybe a spirit looked through and saw her, so it recreated her in order to make you more comfortable speaking with her." Not wanting anything is a little surprising, but not impossible. Plenty of spirits are happy to stay in the Fade, but they get curious too.

"Did you like talking to her, whatever she was?"

Sina doesn't like the thought of that. But being in the Fade so much recently, it's gotten difficult to discern what's real and what's a dream; she worries she's more susceptible to spirits on account of spending more time on the wrong side of the veil.

"I did," she says tentatively, "she was kind. I think she tried to help." And, to be fair, she didn't attempt any possessing.

Truthfully, Ellana now worries about Sina's susceptibility too, not because of anything to do with her, but simply because of the unknown power within the shard.

"Some spirits are like that," she replies with a brief nod. "As long as you felt comfortable with her, then it was a good dream, right?"

"I suppose so," Sina agrees, laying her head back and looking thoughtfully at the fabric ceiling, "...I'm not... certain any of my dreams are good. They're all very much the same."

"All the time?" she asks, unsure what to make of that. Her dreams varied; sometimes she saw the clan, sometimes places she's read about in books. Now her dreams can take place in the other locations she's visited. But they're never close enough to one another to be thought of as the same.

"Would you be willing to tell me what happens in these dreams?"

Sina thinks about it, then decides there's no harm in it. She knows better than to consort with demons-- she wasn't born yesterday, and was raised under a responsible Keeper. Perhaps dreams are just dreams.

"I'm on the shore of a vast dark sea," Sina says quietly, her eyes going a bit unfocused as she pictures it, "and there are... rocks behind me, I suppose. Maybe mountains. I never pay much attention, I just look out at the water. Or I walk.

I'll walk for hours. And it's never... tiring, or bad feeling, though sometimes I get caught in the surf, and stepping becomes more difficult. But I think I'm... trying to find the way around. To the other shore. But the strand I'm on is neverending."

She pauses a moment, then looks back at Ellana. "And then, when I was asleep recently, there was someone else there. Only for that one time. I haven't seen her since."

"You just walk? Nothing else?" It seems a strange dream to Ellana, but then again, hers are so varied. Yet things tend to happen in hers. Things other than walking. She isn't exactly sure what it means, but she takes a moment to consider it.

"Do you think the dream reflects something in your life, like... wandering or searching for something?"

"Sometimes I'm still," Sina says, a tiny smile quirking up the corner of her mouth-- as if that's any more exciting. "Always looking across, trying to find the end." Thoughtfully, she tucks an errant strand of hair over her ear. "When I was..."
She trails off, falling silent, her expression grave and weary. Even thinking about the night of the rift makes her chest pang uncomfortably, and the things she experienced were almost too frightening for her to willingly recall. She hasn't actually spoken about it since it happened, trying to stay positive, perhaps hoping everyone around her will forget or assume she forgot herself.

Ellana can't read Sina's mind to understand what she means, but the way she stops leaves her wondering if she should press for more information or not. In the end, everything comes down to putting Sina at ease as she recovers.

"It's all right," she replies. "Maybe one day you'll dream of a meadow, or a tiny bear." It's her hope that she lightens the mood here.

She had drowned, and she remembers this vividly. After torturous minutes of fighting for breath, she had sunk into a dark green void, drifting ever deeper until she was... pulled back, by something so luminous and purely white that it could only have been a spirit. It had come to her, and it had pulled her back, and then it was gone again, but it was the first time she had ever felt a spirit touch her.
It's not a thing she's ready to share, not yet.

To Ellana, she'll appear to be staring off into space, a pensive and concerned look on her pale face until she snaps back into reality. "...yes," she says, and smiles distractedly, "a tiny bear. That would be nice."

Whatever has Sina so distracted, Ellana doesn't feel it's her place to dig down into it. So she pats her friend's hand and moves to stand.

"I'll let you rest now, lethallan. I'll come visit later."

{ OPEN }

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