🌺 City Elves; ☀️ The Chantry; ( i can be Dead on my dai oc but u cant get rid of mE )
Eira grew up in Hightown, saw the countryside of Ferelden for a brief few weeks, and was immediately placed into the Circle for the next 14 years. She remembers bustling cities, but not the poverty that came with Lowtown, let alone the social structure of elves within society. Dust Town in Orzammar prepares her to enter the alienage, but it’s a shock when they cross the bridge from main square of Denerim, a human city. She reacts very much like Alistair, more likely to ask about the vhenadahl and if they should cover their pockets.
But the Circle has lot’s of city elves who came from that life, and continue to put up with a human-dominated Chantry. Oblivious and a little ignorant is what she is, too wrapped up in her own work to notice how they’re always the first to blame when a templar experiences difficulty with their charges and how harsh their punishment can be in comparison to human mages. A lot of her comments come out tone deaf in comparison as to how they are treated ( she thinks it’s the same ).
The longer she lives, the more the Chantry seems a monolith of her troubles. In the beginning, she knew Chantry Sisters and initiates, the many types of women who’d work in the Circle for periods of time. Some were good company, like Lily ( she knew Lily before jowan introduced them and you can never wrestle that away from me ), some stayed distant to the mages out of discomfort, some played up their importance before being knocked down a peg by the Knight-Commander, and others who worked their entire lives within Kinloch Hold were fully entrenched in faith. It was difficult to distinguish these women as working jointly with the templars, their methods were different, and they were, for the most part, kinder. Albeit interacting with them always left Eira with a vague sense of guilt ( Should a mage be talking to the Maker’s devoted? Does she have any right? ).
She keeps this attitude when interacting with Leliana in the beginning, on her toes as if being watched, the way she responds is always carefully chosen as though she’s keeping a tally on her. But after Kinloch Hold, she’s angry. She’s frustrated and furious all the same—That the Chantry’s first response was to kill, that they had been right in mages’ falling into possession or blood magic, but they choose not to investigate why or ways to reverse the damage, only to kill and slaughter and move on to the next batch of mages and pray these ones will last. She never fully grows out of this mindset, and moves away from religion as a whole. She takes revenge in deciding that the Chantry doesn’t deserve the urn of Sacred Ashes, and they don’t deserve the temple either. In the years where the Chantry finds Haven, but not the urn, she finds the reports and is grateful. They prove her correct when she hears of the Conclave explosion too. The only refuge she finds in acknowledging her faith is in Leliana’s practices and methods; her only glimmer of hope in the chantry.
