WHO: Siorus + You; Bastien & Byerly & Benedict & Vega WHAT: Warden intro, dinner party. WHEN: Spring 9:50 WHERE: Various NOTES: Catch-all for some open and closed stuff.
He arrives more than a week after the attack, when the dust has at least literally settled. Some of the rubble has been organized into piles. Walking here to there only occasionally requires climbing over an enormous piece of stone that used to be a wall. This is one such occasion, and Siorus has paused his exploration of the Gallows on top of the stone instead, taking advantage of the added height to look out over the gaping hope in the outer wall where one of the towers crashed down through it. The grey sea, the grey mountains. Spring has tinged the grey green.
Footsteps turn his head. He smiles, nods his head, looks back out at the sea, but second later overcomes it all—shyness, hesitation, the faraway distance of his interrupted thoughts—and turns more fully to say, "I think I'm lost," or maybe, "Can I help you with that?" if their hands look too full to add helping him to the pile, or only, "Hello," with some of the hopeful awkwardness of a new kid hovering at the edge of a ball game, if the kid were tall and brawny and bearded.
He sounds a little Fereldan. A little not. A familiar ear will hear the Chasind at the core of it. Whether or not he's underdressed for the weather, thin materials and rolled-up sleeves, depends entirely on one's opinion of whether mid-spring Kirkwall weather is cool or warm.
ii. the mountains
It's not a secret that he's a Warden, or was a Warden, or can't help being a Warden despite his best efforts, or however any given person would prefer to think about it. Familiarity with darkspawn and the ability to handle a few things that would kill other people are, openly, the main things he is here to offer Riftwatch and its Research division. But it's also not something he advertises, either—no armor, no title when he introduces himself, no picking up Blight-coated stones and licking them as a party trick.
So it may or may not be new information, heavily implied, when he holds up a hand to encourage stopping where they are on the trail that winds and switchbacks up the mountain.
"We could go around," he offers first. And it's probably true. But ahead, somewhere out of sight, between them and the griffon nest they're trying to reach to check on and count eggs: "Darkspawn. Just a few."
Isaac confirms, leaned on his staff and short for breath. Just checking that there’s absolutely no reason they need to go bother the nice, deadly, Blight-soaked monsters, and -
A deep inhale, exhaled as a sigh with, "Yeah," on the tail of it. "We'd need to go fast."
He gives Isaac a sidelong once-over. The calculation contains a hint of old man, very debatably warranted from anyone fewer than twenty years younger. Maybe it's thin man. Short for breath man.
How much would anyone miss a new face? How many griffon eggs can he plausibly invent? Four? Four is good, significant, but few enough that they won't overrun -
The chief question's this: How many darkspawn are on this mountain? And it's maybe one more, if he ditches Siorus.
"I’m not getting mauled without witnesses, they’ll only call it a heart attack," He saw that look. "Alright."
No armor, thick arms; if Siorus isn't planning swordplay, perhaps he'll pitch them off the mountain. Not the worst plan - the path breaks to cliff-edge, steep enough to skitter.
"Keep them off me," Isaac finally straightens, the staff angling out sharp. "And I’ll keep them confused."
This is a terrible idea. They all are; you pick the least, and hope for the best.
For a second Siorus' expression pinches, brow furrowing less with confusion—though his life has left him unfamiliar with the full scope and style of Andrastian mages' abilities—than with a desire to press for further information for the sake of it. He resists, and he smiles. "Deal."
The cliffside path ahead switches back to wrap around the mountain in the other direction. The darkspawn are both ahead and above, which would be fine if they were too stupid to use bows and projectiles, but Thedas has never been so lucky. They could hide, or back up and wait for them to come around the bend, or he could ask Isaac to climb, or.
Siorus stands there, thinks it through, says, "I'll be right back," and folds himself into a large bird, brown and charitably ugly-cute. Its eyes aren't made for the daylight, but neither are darkspawns', so they're even.
He leaves Isaac behind to flit up the cliffside, pausing here and there on scrubby branches to reevaluate his positioning, and disappears over the upper edge.
Then: heavy thudding footsteps, first only rattling rocks loose to skitter down onto the path below, then heralding four blighted bodies that go sliding over the edge. It's orderly: they're escaping, not being thrown, sliding down on their armored hips or backs with weapons in hand.
Isaac startles for the bird. You hear of these things. It’s just another to witness it, the strange, blurred moment where man becomes — owlet?
(He has questions, too. They'll both have to wait.)
So that takes a moment. One in which it occurs to Isaac that they haven’t exchanged either half of the plan in whole. The first crude body to barrel down comes a shock. The rest, a recoil: For all his time in the Approach, Ghislain, a half dozen skirmishes; it’s only intensified. Lips close, lungs shut, a struggling reflex against the unnatural.
But they haven’t seen him just yet. Isaac's knuckles whiten over his staff. Not a channel, here and now, but a talisman. It’s always a sign, He’d said. That something’s gone to shit.
Fingers flex. Fade ripples, thickens; drags the brood's momentum into strange, seasick spiral. Two hurlocks stall, a third staggers into open air, metal crashing down the cliffside. The last, though — taller, burlier, an arrow fletching its skull — shrugs the spell aside.
And turns to lay eyes on Isaac. It rolls an axe in hand.
"Hello," flatly replies the tall, angular woman below, who has had a similar aimlessness to her presence as she wanders the rubble, looking for familiar faces and finding them drawn and dirty. This one, at least, has the spirit to climb up on a piece of wall.
"You wouldn't happen to know anything about sleeping arrangements," she hazards, having made the astute observation that her old room has crumbled into the harbor.
Siorus considers her—and her armor—for several seconds more than such a basic question warrants before he gives half a shake of his head, chin jerking to one side. "I just got here," doesn't mean no. Only a caveat. "They told me I could set up a tent anywhere I found room."
And while he's been here a few nights, he hasn't done that yet. On the clear nights he's been happy to look up at the clouds and patches of stars between them. On the wet ones, a simple thing for a bird to shelter in a nook.
Then he probably doesn't know what befell the Gallows, and she won't trouble him with it. "Right then," Teren concludes, looks around, gives a little sigh, and unceremoniously drops her pack to the ground. This is as good a place as any.
The time he thought the Wardens might send someone after him, that's now long past. It mostly ended with Clarel. And any lingering paranoia proved fruitless over the years. He hasn't been horribly hard to find. The old Wardens who came to the Legion of the Dead, if nothing else, had some opportunity to send a message back if it were important. If someone meant to punish him, they'd have done it already.
But it's kind of awkward, you know?
He says, "I'm one too," with a jerk toward her chest plate. "A Warden. Kind of. I don't figure you're here for me, but just so you don't feel lied to if it comes up later."
The sound Teren makes in response is akin to a grunt, but with an interrogative bend at the end: ah, are you, interesting, etc. She almost smiles, a wry amusement in her more-open eye before it's overtaken by something else, and her expression goes flat again-- she's not here for him or anyone else.
"How long?" she asks instead, leaning one hip against the debris.
Shit timing, he doesn't say. That'd imply that the timing was an accident. In his view it wasn't. More mages for their insane plan. Was she there, at Adamant? He doesn't remember her. But every face there was a new one, equally resented, and then he was gone. So she might have been.
Only to mop up the blood after the fact, but the shrewd glance she offers suggests Teren is thinking along similar lines: there were the Wardens who ignored the false Calling, and there were The Other Ones.
"Missed the Blight, then," she observes, "always reassuring." Not that she didn't nearly miss it herself, but then, if she hadn't, she likely wouldn't still be here.
It occurs to Vlast that he's never actually repaired anything before. He's seen ruins, of course he's seen ruins. Even before Balthazar, even before his grandfather, Palawa Joko had laid waste to so much of Elona.
Be he never really thought much on it. Buildings rise, buildings fall. It seemed simply a thing that occurred, like the coming and going of seasons. He could chase the Awakened from a region, but he never stuck around to see if the people they'd been terrorizing would return or rebuild. He certainly had no inclination to help.
Standing in the middle of the wreckage of the Gallows, Vlast's perspective is rapidly changing with physical proximity to the bodies being pulled from the rubble. The concept of grief is becoming far less abstract as he watches people break down when they recognize missing loved ones by clothes or trinkets or tokens, but not their faces, never their faces. Not anymore. Necks don't bend liked that. Skulls aren't shaped like that.
Of course, standing around and watching people mourn isn't going to fly. People keep handing him heavy sacks or carts full of rubble like he should know what to do with them and sending him on his way with nary an explanation. Not that he's bothered to ask, of course, that would be far too straightforward and he has no desire to let his ignorance show.
Presently, his arms are laden now with a number of heavy looking sacks. He's not sure what's in them or where he's supposed to be taking them or why.
When the person atop what was once a wall asks if he needs help, Vlast gives him a long, measured, calculating look, as if trying read ulterior motives in the stranger's face. He can't, of course; facial expressions and their nuances are, at present, a closed book to him. But he tries.
"I don't know where these belong."
His voice is a low growl. It would probably be frightening coming out of a wall of a Qunari, but it's tinged with such petulance that it rather takes the edge off.
"I see. Maybe I can't help you, then," Siorus says.
He's new; he's disoriented by the high walls and the rubble; he doesn't have the faintest idea where anything belongs. But he hops down anyway, landing with as much grace as could ever be fairly expected of a man his size, and approaches to have a look at the sacks anyway.
There's no fear in the look he gives the fellow's horns. Curiosity, though, definitely. He's never seen a Qunari before.
I think I’m lost says the newcomer, and it’s that Chasind voice which draws Astrid’s initial attention and curiosity, like a hound hearing a familiar whistle. Rare enough up here, north across the Waking Sea. Her own Avvar accent sounds Fereldan-but-not, too — not precisely the same as his, but with enough similarities in the turn of the vowels — and she’s equally thin-dressed, enjoying this scarce spring warmth.
Southerners.
“Where are you trying to go?” she asks, sizing him up, but her expression’s friendly. His face is unfamiliar, but that’s not saying much. The woman’s hauling some firewood on a little trolley; bringing it up to the central tower from the ferry, helping to replenish stocks while brawnier labourers continue to work on the rubble.
His eyes light with recognition, the relieved smile of someone hearing something familiar. Kind of familiar. Siorus hasn't known any Avvar in his time. None came to his village, while the village was standing, and none to the Fereldan hills where they relocated. Maybe the Wardens had a few, but he was gone before he met them. But still—
"Wherever the food is," he says. "I was told meals are included but I haven't seen one yet."
“Oooh well. The old kitchens are out of commission, but we’ve some outdoors kitchens still. There’s food, though nothing fancy.”
Someone else, accustomed to finer fare, would probably turn up their nose at Riftwatch rations. But it’s nice not existing in perpetual starvation: not having to hunt your own game, scraping the barrel to use every last piece of the animal, food-stores fermented and salted to survive the winter, getting through the cold and unforgiving Frostbacks. Guaranteed square meals every day is an improvement.
Astrid drags her burden closer to him, before dropping the wheelbarrow’s handles. The palms of her hands are raw and red from the weight, and she flexes her fingers where they’ve been locked into the grip. “Strike you a deal: help me get this last batch over to the tower, and I’ll lead you to the grub.”
Siorus would have agreed, easy, but the glimpse of her red palms makes him agree even easier. "You could have asked for more than that," he says, taking up the handles in her place. "I'll do a dozen more if you want. After the food."
He hasn't eaten since he arrived in Kirkwall, due to—
"I thought pickpockets were partly made up," he tells her, more readily than he'd admit it to anyone else he's met here so far. She might be savvier than this, but he assumes she'll at least understand the concept of a man who's spent more time bartering goods for goods than storing up coins and learning how to handle them safely. "I thought they existed, but it was maybe one in a city? Two? And the rest was exaggeration. But it took about fifteen minutes."
“Ohhhh no,” Astrid says as she falls into pace beside him, starting to lead the way along the island walk, and there’s a wincing sympathetic dismay in her voice. That’s rough, buddy.
“I’ve heard Kirkwall’s even worse than usual ‘cos it’s so close to the front and we’re packed with refugees from Starkhaven? People are desperate.” Which is a kindly read on the city’s thriving criminal population, but then her tone shifts to the mutual grumbling of someone who’s been through the same thing:
“I made the mistake of lingering to stare at the big statues in the port and someone nicked one of the daggers right off my hip. Didn’t even feel ’em cut the belt. The pickpocketing’s practically, like, an art.”
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open.
He arrives more than a week after the attack, when the dust has at least literally settled. Some of the rubble has been organized into piles. Walking here to there only occasionally requires climbing over an enormous piece of stone that used to be a wall. This is one such occasion, and Siorus has paused his exploration of the Gallows on top of the stone instead, taking advantage of the added height to look out over the gaping hope in the outer wall where one of the towers crashed down through it. The grey sea, the grey mountains. Spring has tinged the grey green.
Footsteps turn his head. He smiles, nods his head, looks back out at the sea, but second later overcomes it all—shyness, hesitation, the faraway distance of his interrupted thoughts—and turns more fully to say, "I think I'm lost," or maybe, "Can I help you with that?" if their hands look too full to add helping him to the pile, or only, "Hello," with some of the hopeful awkwardness of a new kid hovering at the edge of a ball game, if the kid were tall and brawny and bearded.
He sounds a little Fereldan. A little not. A familiar ear will hear the Chasind at the core of it. Whether or not he's underdressed for the weather, thin materials and rolled-up sleeves, depends entirely on one's opinion of whether mid-spring Kirkwall weather is cool or warm.
ii. the mountains
It's not a secret that he's a Warden, or was a Warden, or can't help being a Warden despite his best efforts, or however any given person would prefer to think about it. Familiarity with darkspawn and the ability to handle a few things that would kill other people are, openly, the main things he is here to offer Riftwatch and its Research division. But it's also not something he advertises, either—no armor, no title when he introduces himself, no picking up Blight-coated stones and licking them as a party trick.
So it may or may not be new information, heavily implied, when he holds up a hand to encourage stopping where they are on the trail that winds and switchbacks up the mountain.
"We could go around," he offers first. And it's probably true. But ahead, somewhere out of sight, between them and the griffon nest they're trying to reach to check on and count eggs: "Darkspawn. Just a few."
ii
Isaac confirms, leaned on his staff and short for breath. Just checking that there’s absolutely no reason they need to go bother the nice, deadly, Blight-soaked monsters, and -
Ah. Well, they can’t all be so grim as Ellis.
"Can they tell that you’re here?"
no subject
He gives Isaac a sidelong once-over. The calculation contains a hint of old man, very debatably warranted from anyone fewer than twenty years younger. Maybe it's thin man. Short for breath man.
"Or you could go around."
no subject
How much would anyone miss a new face? How many griffon eggs can he plausibly invent? Four? Four is good, significant, but few enough that they won't overrun -
The chief question's this: How many darkspawn are on this mountain? And it's maybe one more, if he ditches Siorus.
"I’m not getting mauled without witnesses, they’ll only call it a heart attack," He saw that look. "Alright."
No armor, thick arms; if Siorus isn't planning swordplay, perhaps he'll pitch them off the mountain. Not the worst plan - the path breaks to cliff-edge, steep enough to skitter.
"Keep them off me," Isaac finally straightens, the staff angling out sharp. "And I’ll keep them confused."
This is a terrible idea. They all are; you pick the least, and hope for the best.
no subject
The cliffside path ahead switches back to wrap around the mountain in the other direction. The darkspawn are both ahead and above, which would be fine if they were too stupid to use bows and projectiles, but Thedas has never been so lucky. They could hide, or back up and wait for them to come around the bend, or he could ask Isaac to climb, or.
Siorus stands there, thinks it through, says, "I'll be right back," and folds himself into a large bird, brown and charitably ugly-cute. Its eyes aren't made for the daylight, but neither are darkspawns', so they're even.
He leaves Isaac behind to flit up the cliffside, pausing here and there on scrubby branches to reevaluate his positioning, and disappears over the upper edge.
Then: heavy thudding footsteps, first only rattling rocks loose to skitter down onto the path below, then heralding four blighted bodies that go sliding over the edge. It's orderly: they're escaping, not being thrown, sliding down on their armored hips or backs with weapons in hand.
no subject
(He has questions, too. They'll both have to wait.)
So that takes a moment. One in which it occurs to Isaac that they haven’t exchanged either half of the plan in whole. The first crude body to barrel down comes a shock. The rest, a recoil: For all his time in the Approach, Ghislain, a half dozen skirmishes; it’s only intensified. Lips close, lungs shut, a struggling reflex against the unnatural.
But they haven’t seen him just yet. Isaac's knuckles whiten over his staff. Not a channel, here and now, but a talisman. It’s always a sign, He’d said. That something’s gone to shit.
Fingers flex. Fade ripples, thickens; drags the brood's momentum into strange, seasick spiral. Two hurlocks stall, a third staggers into open air, metal crashing down the cliffside. The last, though — taller, burlier, an arrow fletching its skull — shrugs the spell aside.
And turns to lay eyes on Isaac. It rolls an axe in hand.
Ah. Ah, shit.
i
This one, at least, has the spirit to climb up on a piece of wall.
"You wouldn't happen to know anything about sleeping arrangements," she hazards, having made the astute observation that her old room has crumbled into the harbor.
no subject
And while he's been here a few nights, he hasn't done that yet. On the clear nights he's been happy to look up at the clouds and patches of stars between them. On the wet ones, a simple thing for a bird to shelter in a nook.
no subject
"Right then," Teren concludes, looks around, gives a little sigh, and unceremoniously drops her pack to the ground. This is as good a place as any.
"Shit timing." To both of them.
no subject
The time he thought the Wardens might send someone after him, that's now long past. It mostly ended with Clarel. And any lingering paranoia proved fruitless over the years. He hasn't been horribly hard to find. The old Wardens who came to the Legion of the Dead, if nothing else, had some opportunity to send a message back if it were important. If someone meant to punish him, they'd have done it already.
But it's kind of awkward, you know?
He says, "I'm one too," with a jerk toward her chest plate. "A Warden. Kind of. I don't figure you're here for me, but just so you don't feel lied to if it comes up later."
no subject
"How long?" she asks instead, leaning one hip against the debris.
no subject
Shit timing, he doesn't say. That'd imply that the timing was an accident. In his view it wasn't. More mages for their insane plan. Was she there, at Adamant? He doesn't remember her. But every face there was a new one, equally resented, and then he was gone. So she might have been.
no subject
"Missed the Blight, then," she observes, "always reassuring." Not that she didn't nearly miss it herself, but then, if she hadn't, she likely wouldn't still be here.
no subject
"I am from the Wilds. I didn't miss anything."
He comes down from his perch on the ruined wall carefully, crouching and using his hands for balance.
"Where were you?"
no subject
"Here," Teren replies languidly, "or. Skyhold. Caught up with this rotten lot, a fair few of us denying the False Calling."
i
Be he never really thought much on it. Buildings rise, buildings fall. It seemed simply a thing that occurred, like the coming and going of seasons. He could chase the Awakened from a region, but he never stuck around to see if the people they'd been terrorizing would return or rebuild. He certainly had no inclination to help.
Standing in the middle of the wreckage of the Gallows, Vlast's perspective is rapidly changing with physical proximity to the bodies being pulled from the rubble. The concept of grief is becoming far less abstract as he watches people break down when they recognize missing loved ones by clothes or trinkets or tokens, but not their faces, never their faces. Not anymore. Necks don't bend liked that. Skulls aren't shaped like that.
Of course, standing around and watching people mourn isn't going to fly. People keep handing him heavy sacks or carts full of rubble like he should know what to do with them and sending him on his way with nary an explanation. Not that he's bothered to ask, of course, that would be far too straightforward and he has no desire to let his ignorance show.
Presently, his arms are laden now with a number of heavy looking sacks. He's not sure what's in them or where he's supposed to be taking them or why.
When the person atop what was once a wall asks if he needs help, Vlast gives him a long, measured, calculating look, as if trying read ulterior motives in the stranger's face. He can't, of course; facial expressions and their nuances are, at present, a closed book to him. But he tries.
"I don't know where these belong."
His voice is a low growl. It would probably be frightening coming out of a wall of a Qunari, but it's tinged with such petulance that it rather takes the edge off.
no subject
He's new; he's disoriented by the high walls and the rubble; he doesn't have the faintest idea where anything belongs. But he hops down anyway, landing with as much grace as could ever be fairly expected of a man his size, and approaches to have a look at the sacks anyway.
There's no fear in the look he gives the fellow's horns. Curiosity, though, definitely. He's never seen a Qunari before.
"What's in them?"
i
Southerners.
“Where are you trying to go?” she asks, sizing him up, but her expression’s friendly. His face is unfamiliar, but that’s not saying much. The woman’s hauling some firewood on a little trolley; bringing it up to the central tower from the ferry, helping to replenish stocks while brawnier labourers continue to work on the rubble.
no subject
"Wherever the food is," he says. "I was told meals are included but I haven't seen one yet."
no subject
Someone else, accustomed to finer fare, would probably turn up their nose at Riftwatch rations. But it’s nice not existing in perpetual starvation: not having to hunt your own game, scraping the barrel to use every last piece of the animal, food-stores fermented and salted to survive the winter, getting through the cold and unforgiving Frostbacks. Guaranteed square meals every day is an improvement.
Astrid drags her burden closer to him, before dropping the wheelbarrow’s handles. The palms of her hands are raw and red from the weight, and she flexes her fingers where they’ve been locked into the grip. “Strike you a deal: help me get this last batch over to the tower, and I’ll lead you to the grub.”
no subject
He hasn't eaten since he arrived in Kirkwall, due to—
"I thought pickpockets were partly made up," he tells her, more readily than he'd admit it to anyone else he's met here so far. She might be savvier than this, but he assumes she'll at least understand the concept of a man who's spent more time bartering goods for goods than storing up coins and learning how to handle them safely. "I thought they existed, but it was maybe one in a city? Two? And the rest was exaggeration. But it took about fifteen minutes."
no subject
“I’ve heard Kirkwall’s even worse than usual ‘cos it’s so close to the front and we’re packed with refugees from Starkhaven? People are desperate.” Which is a kindly read on the city’s thriving criminal population, but then her tone shifts to the mutual grumbling of someone who’s been through the same thing:
“I made the mistake of lingering to stare at the big statues in the port and someone nicked one of the daggers right off my hip. Didn’t even feel ’em cut the belt. The pickpocketing’s practically, like, an art.”