#evirsor

[mercysought]

grief does not exist in linear time. / iollan, to anora

meme archive // selectively accepting // @evirsor @cennan

They butchered my father in front of me. I had to scrub his blood from my face.

Is what the Queen wants to say. She wants to have those words rip out the small hint of a smile from his lips or the easy way that he seems to walk through this world - with seemingly little to no care in the world to push him down beyond the weight of the passing clouds. She doesn't know if his words are meant to soothe her or prickle her - and whatever the intention may be, the result was simple and pure annoyance.

She didn't need his platitudes. The Queen needed him to give her an advantage at taking back what was hers. She cared not about grief. Her father was dead and hadn't been burnt. Her father was dead, like a petty criminal, without trail and she had been ousted from the crown that rightfully belonged to her. It was about her getting back what she was owed. It was about repaying the unkindness with another flicker of a blade.

Anora dreamed of the day that she would march back to Denerim, cross the bridge onto her throne room and would put the bastard through the same justice that he had shown her father. She would do him the favour too, of allowing his traitor guardian (uncle, he would have called him) with him.

They had killed her father and locked her away in a tower while they fought the darkspawn. Until they decided how best to put her through the sword with minimal revolt. But they had forgotten that she was not without allies, even if they were fewer than that of Eamon's slippery lies. They had killed him, his blood on her face; she had stayed with the blood for days - on her skin until it could be peeled off. On her hair until it turned into a paste that she would never be able to forget.

Weeks later, even as she washed herself, she saw the darkened lines beneath her fingernails that had little to do with the cold dirt that she slept over.

Instead, however, the Queen remains silent, poised. Light eyes remain cold when they meet Iollan with a clipped, annoyed smile "Speaking from experience?"

[inquistior-a]

' And love without trust, what of that? ' from solas

EVER AFTER SENTENCE MEME   /   ACCEPTING

      𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚀𝚄𝙴𝚂𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽, 𝙰𝚂 𝚂𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚂’ 𝚀𝚄𝙴𝚂𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽𝚂 𝙾𝙵𝚃𝙴𝙽 𝙳𝙾, 𝚂𝙾𝚄𝙽𝙳𝚂 𝚃𝙾 𝙷𝙰𝙻𝚆𝙽 𝙻𝙸𝙺𝙴 𝙰 𝚃𝙴𝚂𝚃. A test and a curiosity at once. Halwn leans his forearms flat across the work surface, body bent like a broad bow, and plucks a pear from an open bushel on the table to roll it between his hands. Its skin is tender and almost over-ripe. When he presses it, the smell of the white flesh beneath seeps out like a green perfume, and juice wells beneath his thumb. The lines of his face are easy, relaxed, in the low light from the kitchen hearth. He is speaking softly, leaning softly. Soft in his expression. It’s the middle of the night, and the scullery has gone to sleep. The kitchens are empty but for the two of them—casually crowded around the center block at either side. Philosophizing. Wasting time. Perhaps not, for there is something in the strange hour, or the strange light, or in the candor of their conversations that often makes time seem to stand entirely still.

      “When I was a boy, my tutor, a Chantry Sister, told me that fear was the food of a righteous love. That love without fear would go on, unchecked, to inevitably become perverse. When I asked her what she had done to fear the Maker so, as I thought it must be equal to her love for her notion to carry weight, she gave me five strokes across my palm with a willow switch—”

      He turns his hand, displaying the same palm, where the Anchor is nestled now. A mildly unpleasant memory, yet there is a strange nostalgia in the Inquisitor’s smile. 

      “Fear and love don’t live together, Solas. I am not very old, and I am not very wise, but I know that. They cannot sleep beneath the roof. To have one, to really have it, we must cast the other out.”

      Halwn covers his hand with a tea towel before he passes the pear into his palm and brings it to his mouth, so that the juices catch in the fabric, and his chin stays clean. It’s polite. Neat. As he was raised to be. The fruit is sweet, and he chews the first bite slowly, swallowing it completely before he speaks,  “If we wish to love, we must be willing to trust. We must choose to put faith in what’s beloved. It is a risk. I acknowledge that—but whosoever told us that risk always leads to loss...  had a very narrow vision of the world.”

      The way that he brings his thumb to his mouth to draw the juice from it with a short, sharp sip is considerably less genteel.

[inquistior-a]

@evirsor said:  𝚃𝙷𝙴𝚈’𝙻𝙻 𝙺𝙸𝙻𝙻 𝙼𝙴 𝙸𝙵 𝙸’𝙼 𝙻𝚄𝙲𝙺𝚈, 𝚃𝙷𝙴𝚈’𝙻𝙻 𝚃𝙾𝚁𝚃𝚄𝚁𝙴 𝙼𝙴 𝙸𝙵 𝙽𝙾𝚃. 𝙵𝙾𝚁 𝚁𝙰𝚈

      𝚂𝙾𝙼𝙴𝚃𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙿𝙰𝚂𝚂𝙴𝚂 𝙱𝙴𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙳 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙴𝚈𝙴𝚂, usually pale, jade-colored, that now are drawn in a dark, tense light. The fire is low in the hearth, and the candles were all snuffed out many hours before. Only the wicket gate is open, but the night beyond it is lightless and still, seeping a bitter cold. Everyone else in the castle is abed. It was no shock to find her waiting beside the door to his chambers when he had hurried to descend. No news is ever fresh for Raynne.

      Halwn’s mouth is set in a hard line—harder than is natural to its shape, and the dark of his eyes in the dark of the hall is shaded further by the low-drawn furrow of his brows. The knot inside of him is visible. Even aware of how little he truly knows of her, he has trusted her. Even aware of this, now, he trusts her still. But he does not love to be lied to. This is an omission large and dangerous enough to make a lie.

      The Ambassador is wringing her hands at the other end of the hall, standing alone beside their late-night visitor. The man that Halwn had been roused from bed to greet. Marcel de Gèllant, some small noble of little note, with a suspiciously scant retinue and a flushed, almost lusty expression. Smug and righteous, as a man who has seen the snake before it’s had the chance to strike him and now cannot wait to demonstrate his triumph. There is no altruism in it.

      The stone steps are cold beneath his feet, and the sensation reminds Halwn that he is barefoot, shirtless, skin still warm with sleep. The anchor cuts sharply through the dark as it arcs in a dangerous expression of his mood. Raynne, he notes, is dressed for scouting, so fresh from the outside that her cheeks are coloured still. Snow beads slowly to pearls of water in the long, black wildness of her hair. She smells of the wind—their guest must have been far less a surprise to her, and yet she has allowed him to arrive.

      It is a crooked way of allowing me the truth.

      And still, even if crooked, a profound permission. As is typical of Raynne, it is a gesture akin to the too-late offer of an already empty hand. Halwn’s heart gathers up that thought, and decides;  though his brow is still hard-knotted, something barely loosens in the wide line of his shoulders. He knows from Josephine’s breathless warning in his chambers who ‘they’ are, and he knows, from what he has seen over the course of the last many months, the full breadth of what they are capable. His mouth hardens further, and he looks past Raynne to the Orlesian, the decorated shape of him, waiting expectantly in the dim slant of the dying fire. Waiting to be acknowledged.

      When their eyes meet, Gèllant raises his chin.

      How strange is the sudden urge that Halwn has to hit him. A man he doesn’t know, has never met. It’s such a foreign impulse that he feels as though his body hardens around it, isolating that aggression inside itself. An uninvited mass. The Anchor spits energy and, for perhaps the first time, he feels the allowed reverberation. The way it strikes her and reflects back in sudden form. Light seen only when it’s caught in the slant of a once-invisible mirror. This is the physical sensation of nearness to a mage.

      Whatever she has done—

      The Inquisitor’s exhale is tight, visible, as he says:  “They won’t.”

      A simple, deliberate statement, allowing no debate. Halwn’s voice is soft and steady, a little rough from waking still, though firm enough to carry not only between they too, but to Josephine and Gèllant as well. Full of an old, poised politeness that he pulls out of himself from childhood, when it had been so endlessly reinforced, the Inquisitor adds,  “Please wait for me upstairs.”

      He says no more, and looks at Raynne only once. He is angry, yes, but still he wants to touch her. To lift her chin, and look full into her eyes, but now is not the time. Halwn’s feet pad on the stones as he steps around her and the sound of his bare footfalls is an almost surreal thing, giving and naked, in the icy grandeur of the empty hall. The way the cold raises Halwn’s skin in gooseflesh is plainly apparent, his tawny hair uneven from his pillow. All his exposed throat, his naked shoulders, even the tender skin of the belly that an animal would nervously defend. There had been no metaphor in his decision to come down even before dressing, given the urgency of the sudden request, but when Halwn reaches Gèllant, who is done up in all his finery, it is strikingly visible that there is very little that the Inquisitor feels naturally compelled to hide.

[inquistior-a]

@evirsor​ said  :  ' 𝚈𝙾𝚄’𝚁𝙴 𝚃𝚁𝚈𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝚃𝙾 𝚂𝙴𝙳𝚄𝙲𝙴 𝙼𝙴. ' 𝙵𝚁𝙾𝙼 𝚂𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚂, 𝚂𝙾𝙵𝚃𝙻𝚈 𝚃𝙴𝙰𝚂𝙸𝙽𝙶

   𝙰 𝚂𝚄𝚁𝙿𝚁𝙸𝚂𝙴𝙳 𝙱𝚄𝚁𝚂𝚃 𝙾𝙵 𝙻𝙰𝚄𝙶𝙷𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝙶𝙴𝚃𝚂 𝙲𝙰𝚄𝙶𝙷𝚃 𝙰𝚁𝙾𝚄𝙽𝙳 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙰𝙿𝙿𝙻𝙴 𝙸𝙽 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙼𝙾𝚄𝚃𝙷,  so that Halwn has to take a bite from the fruit to dislodge it after he’s freed his hands by depositing his burdens on the space that Solas has cleared for him on the desktop. He has a tray stolen from the kitchens, laden down with fresh shoots from the second crop of tender young asparagus that is just starting to grow in the garden, raw and lightly salted, a few hunks of cheese and loaf of white bread still warm from the oven. Two bottles, one of wine and one of oil, and two stemmed goblets, are cradled delicately all in a single hand. A mess of stems and necks. Luckily for the stemware, Hal has large and quite capable hands.

   It’s a rare thing that he isn’t wearing gloves—but then he never does, in Solas’ presence. The Anchor does not disturb the mage. He doesn’t stare, doesn’t jump when it spits light. They argue about theory that is often just outside Halwn’s reach and Solas occasionally orders the Inquisitor to hold out his hand so that he can silence the Mark when its noise becomes disruptive to the conversation. Perhaps he finds the meal that Halwn has dredged up for them disruptive, too—but the Inquisitor doubts the sincerity of it. This is fast becoming their tradition. He has no way to repay Solas for the labour he does in instructing him in magickal theory. No way but this:  the currency of attention, of care.

   Halwn takes another bite from the apple, and produces a second apple from the pocket of his trousers. Golden and sweet and soft in texture. He sets that on the desk, too, until he will have time to section it so that Solas might eat it piece by piece, layered under slices of cheese. It’s only as he’s fished the corkscrew from his other pocket and is working to cut the wax from the neck of a bottle of Montclair white, cold from the cellars, that Halwn realizes how it does look—and a seduction is not far off. He hasn’t spread the food out on a blanket on the floor, at least. Surely Solas is relived at that.

   There was a time in his life, perhaps twenty years on now, when such a little tease as that, harmless and inert, would have frozen him still in an instant. Fear, or only apprehension, perhaps dread—all coiled in his throat, as his mind raced to supply a range of excuses that would sound plausible, unplanned. But he is not that boy anymore, nor is he a young man by any means, and the panic simply isn’t in him. Instead, he chuckles low in his throat and pulls the cork free from the bottle of wine with a flourish and a sharp pop.

   ‘ I know what you think of me, Solas. In this capacity, at our lessons, I am so ignorant as to border on incompetent. You are patient with me, perhaps because you must be, but I know that my lack of experience astounds you, even disturbs you, on occasion. I’m sure you think me harmless, inept and somewhat pitiful, but let me be clear—there are some things to which I am naturally attenuated. I have no skill for magick, that is true, but I do have talents elsewhere— ’

   Hal holds the bottle easily and turns his wrist as he pours in a motion that seems discordantly graceful. The smell of the wine is immediate, woody and clear. The glass condensates attractively, and Hal leaves it there on the desk for Solas to take as he moves to pour his own. There’s a little seen slant to his brows, steady and assured, an edge to his smile, that reveals an angle of the Inquisitor’s personality that few could ever boast of seeing. He is a modest man by nature—but modesty is only one virtue of many, and sometimes he has no use for it. Sometimes it is out of place. Halwn glances up, and meets Solas’ eyes that seem bright with patient mirth. Something of the same mirth is in the Inquisitor, too, and thick in the air between them. Solas is long-suffering, Halwn must afford him that. But even the smartest of men is bound to enter an arena unprepared once or twice in his life. More often—if he is always facing up to confrontation.

   Halwn is smiling as he does:  small, chin drawn down, toothless but for the way he closes teeth over the inside of his cheek, creating a momentary dimple.

   ‘ I can assure you, Solas...  assuming that you were receptive to it, and I had come here with the intention to seduce you—you would not stand a chance against me. ’

[inquistior-a]

@evirsor​ said   :    𝙼𝙴𝙳𝙸𝙲𝙰𝙻 + 𝙰𝙵𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝙰 𝙿𝙰𝚁𝚃𝙸𝙲𝚄𝙻𝙰𝚁𝙻𝚈 𝙽𝙰𝚂𝚃𝚈 𝙵𝙸𝙶𝙷𝚃, 𝚂𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚂 𝙷𝙴𝙻𝙿𝚂 𝚃𝙾 𝙷𝙴𝙰𝙻 𝙵𝙾𝚁 𝙷𝙰𝙻 𝙰𝙽𝙳 𝚃𝙷𝙴𝙽 𝚂𝙸𝚃𝚂 𝚄𝙽𝚃𝙸𝙻 𝙷𝙴 𝚆𝙰𝙺𝙴𝚂, 𝙷𝙾𝙻𝙳𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙻𝙴𝙵𝚃 𝙷𝙰𝙽𝙳 𝙰𝙻𝙻 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚆𝙷𝙸𝙻𝙴

   THERE ARE THREE SEPARATE SHADES OF LIGHT BEHIND HIS EYES.  Yellow, like the world as he last remembers it, a soft haze of pre-sunset punctured by the lavender flashes of blades, or spells, or purple flowers peppering the grassy hillside of the bank where they had been fighting. Yellow, and lavender, and then the soft, clear cutting green of fadelight, flickering like tallow candles on a table set for supper. The dream is beautifully precise. Mara, the farm manager, sitting across from him down the length of the table. She was always a deliberate woman, a little rigid, always resolved that they sit at the ends of the table, not elbow to elbow like travelers crammed into a busy roadside tavern. Hal misliked the idea of sitting that way, head to head, the way his parents had always been positioned---but Mara always insisted:  don’t complain, a little ritual makes the ordinary worth remembering.

   Had he the clarity of thought, or even the care, Halwn could sharpen the awareness that this was a house made of light, of memory, shaped by his memories---but not by him. The fish on the table hadn’t been caught hours before, while they tarried after their afternoon meal to throw a net over the stonebridge between the Dam pasture and the furrow road. Roasted with spring onions and garlic and steeped in malt vinegar, the taste of them as tangy and fine as it had been those years ago, with Mara, at the table they had dragged into the yard outside the kitchen. The wine is the same, a young white, a jar of fat white flowers between them. The candles, lit twice weekly. Getting low in the length of the night. And Mara, her clear, impatient voice, and the way she laughed one hard, sharp laugh, and then let her laughter quell into an easy smile. All of this and all the conversation is the same, except for the third person at the table, the third plate, the third cup of wine.

   No, perhaps not the same. A little richer, and more varied. Solas’ presence in the dream does not disturb it, but changes the cadence---what was lazy and familiar enlivened by the same half-impassioned intellectual bickering they often get up to at Skyhold or one the road. With Mara and Solas together, Hal feels outnumbered in a purely pleasant way. After all, Mara was a mage, too, though Halwn hadn’t known it yet at the time this dream is taking place. He hadn’t known it at all, for nearly five years of these twice-weekly dinners, until he had watched her purge a tainted well with a torrent of summoned fire when they had nowhere clean to drink during the height of the Fifth Blight.

   There is a moment, in this remembered dream, when Mara meets his eyes across the table---and he is looking back across fifteen years of her friendship, into these first years, into her, sitting across from him with her secret. There is a moment when he sees himself as she had seen him then, and all the past, the different pasts, all the secrets and the things they had not said to one another. How full of love for her he is in that moment. Full of love and a gratitude for having known her, in whatever way she had wanted to be known.

   It is so clear, this moment, a clarity so powerful that it sings. Clearer than life has ever been, he thinks, clearer than it was ever meant to be.

   A layer of memory on memory, he remembers seeing her summon the fire and asking, later, when they were alone in the shallow dark of camp:  would you have ever told me, if the world had not seemed to be ending?  The way her face had gone hard but remained open.  I care for you, that does not mean you are owed. My past and my future belong to me. We are only together now.

   In this dream, Mara rises from the table, just as she had done that evening, to bring a jug of last year’s cider up from the cellar on an indulgent whim. As she goes, Halwn feels the touch of Solas’ fingers soft on the back of his hand as the elf reaches across the table. His stomach flips with the unexpected pleasure of it, like a teenager in love. A ripple like the parting of a curtain when they look at one another, and he wakes with the notion that Solas had been smiling.

   They are in the humid dark of a red tent, backlit and glowing with the dawn. His body hurts sharply. Shoulder, back, and tender side. Where his hauberk has been stripped off and his shirt cut away from him, Halwn can see the the freshly-closed rawness that two, perhaps three arrows have left behind. At close enough range, chainmail opens up as easily as the body, splitting as a stone through the surface of the water.

   Solas has hold of his hand, though more firmly than he had in their shared dream. His thumb is pressed into Halwn’s palm, into the strange non-space that is both light and skin, his body and and a body beginning to be made of light. Pressed gently but with yielding pressure, as though holding him in place. Halwn’s arm feels loose, relaxed, and he knows that Solas has been drawing from him, easing the buildup of energy in the Anchor that so often causes him pain. Easing it, perhaps using it---using it to step across the threshold of his mind, to build that house, that house of light, to put his body made of light there, in the past, and to be with him there. The pain in his head returns with a sudden dousing, but the Inquisitor remembers the clarity that he had felt, the clarity of the love that he had remembered for Mara, how grateful he had felt---to have had her and been had by her, to know her. To see her, if only for a while.

   ‘ I think I would have given almost anything---to talk to her again. ’

   It both was and wasn’t her, Halwn knows. They have discussed such vagaries so many times that they no longer make his head spin. There is something profoundly soothing in accepting that complicated dichotomy at face-value. It was her. It wasn’t her. He had both visited an old friend, and made a new one. Loved the same person, and shared a moment of love with a spirit somewhere across the veil---a moment of palatial simplicity for them both. Mara isn’t dead, and he will see her again in the flesh. When he does, he will tell her of this, and she will smile and shake her head; just as Solas is smiling now. Just as he had been, at the dream’s end.

   The Inquisitor stirs and Solas releases his hand to allow Halwn to drag himself upright, hunched forward a little with what is both the tightness and weakness of his torso. They are so close that Solas’ knees are against the edge of the cot, and Halwn’s eyes crease with a smile when the apostate does not withdraw. He looks at him a long time, something vague and affectionate tightening in his chest. Solas, as ever, does not look away, though a quiet curiosity is growing tense between them. The Inquisitor shifts and his ribs complain---echoing the dull pain of breakage only recently reknit. Halwn has only recently begun to understand the strange, tentative quality of magickal healing, the way that it must set, the danger of it being dispelled too soon. He must have slept long, for Solas to have managed to repair so much of him.

   Halwn drags his right hand, caked still in blood and filth, across his sore nose and smiles,  ‘ You are different there, in the fade---younger, freer with your happiness. I imagine that it is how I feel when I return to the sea. When you touched me, I could feel your desire to do it. I felt it physically---as though it were the sun, warm on my upturned face. ’

  ‘ Thank you, ’  for the work done in healing his body, but moreso for the dream. For the three of them in that place, and for the fact that it had not been the nightmare it might have been if Halwn had been left to dream it alone.

[inquistior-a]

@evirsor​ said   :   ❝ 𝙸’𝚅𝙴 𝙿𝚄𝚃 𝙰 𝙻𝙾𝚃 𝙾𝙵 𝙱𝙾𝙳𝙸𝙴𝚂 𝙸𝙽 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙶𝚁𝙾𝚄𝙽𝙳 𝙵𝙾𝚁 𝚈𝙾𝚄, 𝙷𝙰𝚅𝙴𝙽’𝚃 𝙸? ❞ 𝙵𝚁𝙾𝙼 𝚁𝙰𝚈

   HIS MOUTH TIGHTENS,  but Halwn doesn’t dispute it. What could he dispute in good faith? It’s the truth. To deny it would be stupid, and a disservice to her, to himself. To the dead and those that they have made dead. He puts his boots up on the balustrade and acquiesces with a nod.

   ‘ Yes, ’  is the only way he answers, a simple confirmation followed by a soft snort.  ‘ You are very good at that. ’

   ‘ Your value to the Inquisition---your value to me, is not measured that way. I want you to know that, ’  he reaches across the space between their chairs and touches her cheek with his thumb affectionately, offering a faint smile. His joviality feels sour, now, gone bitter with the content of the conversation, or just with the excess of drink. Still, the Inquisitor jokes wryly,  ‘ We could look for other work for you. ’

   Knowing that she teeters somewhere between disliking touch and fearing the rapidity of a desire for it, Halwn drops his hand away and picks up his cup instead. He is a little drunk already;  eyes glassed, green and limpid, his face flushed. It had been their design tonight, after all. He leans, and moves too much when he speaks. He wishes, now, that he were sober, and rigid, and could hold his hands behind his back the way his father used to do without feeling ridiculous. That he could make the proximate impression of a capable and ruthless man, though he knows that a capable man would not say what he is preparing now to say.

   ‘ You could cook. Write missives, negotiate with Comtes---lead the singing of the Chant in the garden in the evenings. You could go... tonight, or tomorrow. Life is short. We laugh at it, because it helps us sleep, but killing is not what we were born to do. None of us. Whatever our duties are, you have a right to serve only yourself. ’

   He doesn’t feel that right for himself---but he has lived a life of that already. Thirty-seven years of freedom and relative peace. Of suffering only so much as he could bear without much despair. It’s his turn, now. It is likely to be his final turn, but he does not mind it in the moment. No, Halwn could no more ride home and walk the fields again than he could play at being his father here and now. No more than he could hold any soldier in place, and tell them that anything worth killing for was not also worth living for. Some things simply are not in him. If the Maker weighed his faults, then it must be accounted for already. 

   Halwn takes the last sip from the delicate, footed crystal cups that some noble or another had sent from somewhere, for some purpose, rim lipped in leafed gold, foolish in his large hand---and has a childish urge to let the goblet shatter on the stone floor. It’s brief, but it makes him smile again. Makes him feel young, when, in the past many weeks, he has begun to feel terribly old.

   He looks at her and inclines his head sincerely,  ‘ I would not blame you if you thought that you had done enough, as I do not blame you now. ’

[inquistior-a]

@evirsor​ said   :   ❝ 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙶𝙰𝙼𝙴 𝚈𝙾𝚄 𝙰𝚁𝙴 𝙴𝙽𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙸𝙽𝚃𝙾 𝙸𝚂 𝙰 𝙱𝚁𝚄𝚃𝙰𝙻 𝙰𝙽𝙳 𝚄𝙽𝙵𝙾𝚁𝙶𝙸𝚅𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙾𝙽𝙴. ❞ 𝙵𝚁𝙾𝙼 𝚂𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚂

   ‘ Has it been easy thus far? ’

   He is familiar with the low, round pain of broken ribs, sharpened to a sudden point if he breathes too deeply. It doesn’t manage to extinguish his humour entierly. They have set his shoulder back into place and now it only aches. The anchor is tucked against his chest like a child by the way the sling requires him to hold it---and the warmth of the veilfire seems stronger there, drawn to it, puddling palpably at the hollow of his throat where the restraint of the sling has forced him to curl his fingers. Pooling in his palm.

   What is it that Solas means to say---martyrdom, maybe, or the first entrance into sainthood which will lead inevitably to that martyrdom. If a saint accepts death, there must come a part of them that longs for it. A culmination of the last of their potential, and then the forfeiting of it as surrender. War, perhaps. Or just a long walk, lost in mean weather.

   Halwn thinks of stirring an hour ago under a thick coverlet on an uncomfortable cot, eyes closed still, and feeling a warm hand cradling his own. Pain like water around him but dispelled briefly by soft fingers across his brow, smoothing back his hair. Hadn’t there been a part of him that sighed? A part of him that longed to lay there in the dark forever---to sleep, until the distinction between sleeping and waking was no longer necessary. No dreams, just the ghost of a loving touch gradually fading into numbness.

    ‘ We always say that to suffer and to endure are the same, but that is not exactly right, ’  he feels a tightness in his throat, audible in his voice. Exhaustion makes him want to weep. The thought of the act of weeping alone---makes him want to weep. His green eyes are limpid with tears that, though he doesn’t press them back, never quite manage to fall. It is not grief, or it is not precisely grief. His jaw aches, and when he touches the tip of his tongue to his split lip is stings sharply with overbright sensation. The pain clears his head like a sharp smell clears the senses.

   ‘ It is not a game, Solas. It has never been---and never less so than now. The field spreads out around us now on every side, and we are going forward. We are not returning. ’

  Halwn turns his back to the blue glow of the magefire and starts to the dull orange lights of the camp instead. Fireflies clustered on white sand. He is only five or six tired strides away before he must stop and turn back, to look at Solas who has not followed;  who is standing beside the brazier still, hands folded thoughtfully behind his back. Features limmed in purple shadow. The Inquisitor’s face tightens but does not harden. He is tired. It is writ in every pat of him. It is palpable in the broken line of his broken shoulders.

   ‘ You are testing me, as you always are, and you think I do not know it. I do know it, Solas, and I accept it, because your fears and mistrust are plainly warranted, perhaps moreso than I will ever be able to understand. When we are safe, and warm, and our people are fed---then you may resume it without complaint from me. But not now. Now, we must be together. ’

   Snow drifts in the low wind around their knees. They look at one another, and Halwn has no succinct language for the flash of feeling that rises, almost as an echo. Almost as an echo, pooling in the palm of his hand. If they are going north, they are going north as one. Halwn is resolved of it and, like many stupid men before him, his resolve is strongest when he is in pain. His tone is somewhere caught between command and 

   ‘ You must help them---not only me. To save a thing, you must be in it. Come, Solas, ’  not pleading, but acknowledging.  ‘ Please. The time when it was possible to stand apart is past. ’

   The Inquisitor is nearly overcome by the urge to hold out his hand. Whether it would be taken or not feels irrelevant. Only to offer it would seem enough. Necessary, and more complete than language. 

[mercysought]

when do you feel most human? / raynne, to Émilie

meme archive // selectively accepting // @evirsor @scrics

   "Must there be a specific moment?" seems like the right question to ask instead, but that too was something that was a non answer - an easy way out for a much too sincere question. Light eyes met Raynne's and she feels that same rawness, the same tenderness and thinness when one pressed too lightly against a wound.

Like when one pressed their hand against where the Fade met the Veil and where the Veil met the air that they breathed.

   "I don't know." is a sincere enough answer, though one that feels equally inadequate "I guess when I sit in the Herald's rest? Before it becomes..." she frowns. Overwhelming "Too much."

There were times where she could simply not be there. When the Inquisitor came down to meet the Chargers, when Asharen played Wicked Grace with other members of the Inner Circle. The room glowed and everything became brighter, more intense, like a hot iron stuck constantly constantly held as a threat against her eye sockets.

It was beyond too much. And yet, still. Émilie smiles, glancing up to Raynne, pulling at the long straight hair behind her ear "It's nice, to be surrounded by so many people that are having fun."

And that they do not care. About anything except drinking. Their own problems. With attempting to convince the particular person beside them at the bar to come with them to their tent, to their room. It was simple, it was nice. The thrum of the guitar and Maryden's voice and songs helped to lull it all into a nice package.

It was good. It felt good that she should hold that choice in her hands. Even if the feeling was overwhelming, even if it all became too much. To choose where she was to feel that. And to be able to leave, if she so wished, for whatever reason, without justification. The feeling of the cold and stark air on her face, on her scars, it was a feeling that she could not truly put into words.

To be able to leave their presence for no other reason beyond the fact that Émilie wished to. Wanted to.

   "Being in the healer's quarters is also nice, it's... soothing."

She looks around. The beds were now empty but she knew that by the end of the hour they would not be. It was nice to be able to be there with some people who had no one else, who expected to die alone in their pain and despair. She could not do much for them beyond hold their hand, and sometimes that was more than enough.

   "What about you, Raynne?" the mage snorts, turning to the elf with a growing smile "For lack of a better term."