{ OPEN }

[serannas]

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.

Comments

[serannas]

There is also the fact that Ellana is a waif who won't be able to absorb the alcohol fast enough too, so the water is wise.

"And for us, we have always been chased off our land, or pulled from it in chains," she says, explaining where the difference may lie. Her hands curl around her mug and she pulls it towards her, looking inside like the rum has some secrets to reveal to her.

"Oh, yes. When we established our home in the Dales after escaping slavery in Tevinter, we decided to isolate ourselves from humans once more. It was thought perhaps we could regain our immortality that way. And so we had brave knights who patrolled our borders to keep humans away."

[foxsays]

A little practice and she'll teach all the Dalish girls. But it's easier when you really did start as an infant.

"Zimevur tried that. Their land is rich in stone and great military minds, they are good at the art of war. Or were. They swept through two countries – one where so much of our fertile lands are, another of great sprawling forests – and into a third rich in ores and gems. When they came to us, well every native is a sailor. There was never a war after that." There are things like slavery, she's seen enough as a guard but that's saying too much, something she could tell Zevan or Korrin, a few others too but Ellana doesn't need to know about the less savoury parts of Araceli's life that aren't funny or daring.

Shaking her head, she sighs quietly at the very concept of knights, how strange and elaborate the whole concept seems even compared to the Grand Game. "That was the true thought? That just being near to humans would make you live long again? Like a quarantine in a plague?" There's no judgement, just curiousity, how bizarre a notion that is but she's had a lifetime to know that eighty is a good age to live to, that they always go back to the sea in the end.

"Good health to you and the year ahead," Araceli toasts, raising her glass.

[serannas]

Ellana shrugs, lifting her mug to take a cautious sniff. She'll take it easy with this, having never been one to go overboard on her birthday.

"The humans came down from the north, and immortality was lost. It wasn't so strange to think if we stayed away from them, that we would gain the ability again. But by then, so many years had been lost in slavery, that it was hard to recall the old ways. We've preserved what we could, and continue to pass it on. As for myself, I don't think I'd enjoy immortality. I wouldn't want to see such a passage of time. Waking up from Uthenera, I'd probably feel completely lost."

But she's stalled long enough. Lifting her mug, she clinks it against Araceli's and takes a cautious sip. She makes a slight face of displeasure, but tries to hide it.

[foxsays]

It's only through effort and practice that Araceli doesn't laugh. "It won't bite, I swear it. There are no sharks in the rum."

As if to prove the point, she takes a long healthy swallow of her own as she listens, still scarcely able to wrap her mind around such a thing. "We used to be able to go between water and land easy as we pleased, then whatever caused the sundering? Anyone on the land was on the land then and could only dive for as long as they had breath in their lungs and enough to get back to the surface. Those in the water...we see glimpses. Merfolk that come when a person is drowning to take them home, storm hags that lash the land and water with lightning, sirens that sing so sweetly you won't shed a single tear when the hull splits on the rocks. I don't think we ever had immortality, not like you. When we die we go back to where we truly came from and we'll live out the rest of our lives beneath the waves."

What happens after that is less clear, Araceli wants it to be a surprise.

"You're doing better than Sina and we tried her on watered down honeyed wine," she teases, "but it's an acquired taste. I started as an infant so my mother could get some sleep unless it was a rare night when my father's ship was in the port."

[serannas]

Ellana sets her chin in her hand and listens to Araceli's tale. She's always loved listening to this world of Araceli's, so different to Thedas. Though maybe there are places by the sea here in Thedas where they have tales as she does. It all sounds so beautiful.

"Merfolk breathe the water as fish do, don't they? And here lightning is my favorite tree of spells to use. I hope you won't think me a storm hag for it!" She's joking of course, and after a chuckle, she takes another sip.

"It will take some getting used it, that's for sure. You must not get drunk off rum at all, do you?"

[foxsays]

"Yes, they have gills like fish do on their necks and on their ribs," and she says this as if she has seen one but she believes, and belief makes things real. "They can breathe above the water too though, we came from them, and some will still come up to ships or on the rocks to sing and comb their hair, the men too."

Absently, she spins the bracelet on her wrist, a slender silverite band with a mermaid at either end, Korrin's gift that means perhaps even more than the other woman realises. There's more to mermaids than that but they're things that go so deep in her people, things that just are, and that makes it more difficult to explain.

"Oh I do. On a ship it's watered down plenty so the sailors can do their duty, we've got rationing on board too for all other alcohol. We all grew up with a little wine at dinner too, this stuff? I've got a good tolerance, true, but I'm not the biggest person, if I don't space it out I'll end up legless." Fortunately no one but Korrin saw her after the maraas-lok because she'd remembered she had legs, just not what her legs did, or where she'd apparently left them.

[serannas]

Ellana raises a hand to rub at her neck, imagining what that would be like. Though, knowing her, if she were a mermaid, she would probably wish she could live on the land instead. That's her; always wanting more, wanting to experience so much more.

Her eyes are drawn to the bracelet and she smiles. She now has a new piece of jewelry herself: a gift from Sam, though he told her about it before her birthday actually arrived, because he's in Emprise right now and she had to go to his room to retrieve it. A silverite ring with halla etched into it sits on one finger. Obviously silverite is a very good metal for jewelry.

She laughs at Araceli's description of losing her legs to the drink. "I wonder if the sailors on the ship we used to come across from the Free Marches drank watered down rum too. The journey wasn't very long, and we had wine to drink along the way, so I never found that out.."

[foxsays]

A shame she hasn't told Ellana about Leandra, how Araceli had spent so long wondering if there truly were gills hidden somewhere because she was so like the ideal, so like the paintings and the statues, the fountains, like everything her people believe. One day she'll find the words for more than just Korrin but she doesn't want to lie to her friends and saying 'a friend' will only carry her so far.

Perhaps one day she'll get to the sea in Thedas and she'll find shells and stones, old worn rope to weave them together to give her friends gifts but it's a welcome reminder and it serves well to help ground her the days that she feels lost.

"Water doesn't keep. Remember in the Mire? How the water stank? Well you try to keep water in a barrel and it does that before you get very far, rum's pretty cheap and it waters down better than other stuff. Wine is for paying passengers, though I hope they treated you better than Sina."

[serannas]

"Well, we weren't thrown overboard, so I suppose that's something," she says, and her tone of voice suggests she's joking, but in that way people do when they're hiding the sting in something. "We kept our heads down and Merrick spent a great deal of time with his knives out, so everyone gave us a wide berth."

She sips her drink, and it goes down a little smoother this time. It also steels her for her next question.

"Do I want to know about how they treated Sina, or will it end with me crying?"