#vasrea

[ahvarchive]

@vasrea replied:

freckles !!!

SHE HAS SO MANY!

[brightflight]

Five times kissed!

five times kissed || @vasrea

ONE

The rains have stopped long since but the Fereldan air stillsmells of it, smells of settled dust and damp earth and something wet andgreen. You came here, to this hilltop, to be alone with the scent of home, butyou find you do not mind that she’s joined you.

Inquisitor is avery big word to lay on such narrow shoulders, you think. But then, you knowsomething about big words. Championhas some weight to it, too, and it’s a burden you’d set down if you could. Youlook at her and you wonder if she’d set down her own or if the momentum of it has her in its grip.

She looks like a bird. You’re meant to be the raptor, but she looks likea sparrow to you, all of winged shoulder blades and delicategripping fingers. Her bones must be hollow, you think. If they were laid out bare onthe grasses, the wind would whistle throughthem and play a tune. You feel a rush of tenderness which surprises you withits strength and think you’d do anything to make sure the wind doesn’t get itschance with her skeleton.

You wonder if you ever looked like that to anyone, like youwere far too fragile for everything you were expected to bear. You wonder if you were too fragile, in the end. You wonder if you’re broken and just too blind to see it.

She turns toward you then and there is a question there in her sparrow’s eyes. Her whole body is bent into it asshe leans toward you, so curious and so bright. You answer it the best way youknow how – a thumb to her cheekbone, a brush of your lips on hers. She stiffensslightly and you pull away at once, afraid of trespass – but her dark eyes arewide, her dark cheek is flushed, her lips are parted with something more akin toawe than fear.

She tastes like rainwater and mist, and so you kiss heragain.

TWO

She comes to you sometimes, here in this strange highfortress she calls hers. It is a place of ancient stone builded high and strong,cupped among the fingers of the peaks. The air here smells of ice, and the windhas teeth. But there are so many stars at night, so high, with air so thin andclear. So many stars. You like to sit upon the ice-rimed battlements and watchthem wheel. Sometimes you lay back upon the stony wall and the world flipsover. You feel as though you might fall upward, into the stars, and you takeher hand to ground yourself.

This time when she comes to you, you have a surprise waitingfor her. There is a glade outside the fortress and far from the churned groundwhere the soldiers have their city of tents and wagons and wains. Spring hascome at last, despite the snows which still feather the highest peaks white as bonyegrets; and when you walked among the trees there, you found them. Tiny, red asblood, and perfect; you pour the strawberries out into her cupped hands like asecret treasure.

She eats them with such slow solemnity and care that yougiggle with a girlishness you thought you had forgotten, and when you kiss hershe tastes like spring itself. 

THREE

She is a creature of a vast and untapped sensuality, youthink with no little amusement and no little lust. Like a girl, she delights insensation, in prettiness and in the novelty of pure experience. There is novanity in her and yet she drapes herself in swishing silks and soft linenswhich let the light shine through; they are not softer than her skin, nor finer.

She blushes pink as dawnstone when you tease her for it,sliding the layers of her garb away one by one and clicking your tongue againstyour lips; she laughs a little when you comb your fingers through her hair and sayit is as soft and heavy and fine as the raw silk of her shawl, when you touchher and you say she is a thing of luxury herself, that she is something to bekept and treasured. She is as gracefully shaped as any of your carvings offine-grained wood but more stirring by far; she lives, she breathes, she quiversas you draw callused fingertips along her bare skin.

You tell the knobs of her spine through your fingers like astring of polished beads; yes, there is a carnality to your appreciation of herbut under her patient tutelage you have become a creature of sensuality also,delighting in her. You touch her because she is there, she is there to betouched; and you remember suddenly that when you were a girl, you thought you’dbe an artist.

You knot the heavy rope of her hair around your wrist andhold it there, bound in her and bound by her, touching her now with lips andtongue instead of fingers. Her skin tastes like salt and sharp herbs, as wildand limitless as the sea. 

FOUR

You have known mages but you have never known a mage likeher before.

You remember one time, in her chambers high above theancient stony keep, you watched as she dusted her fingers together like a womansprinkling cinnamon upon a pastry; but it was tiny purple sparks which fellfrom her hand until, with a sudden flaring rush, the candlewick caught alight.

The delicacy of that movement had been an exquisite thing,so tiny and so perfect and so entirely unlike the way she is fighting now. Thisis raw, you think, as you weave between the enemies which would strike at herif they could and you slice into them, feeling your daggers bite deep intocorrupted flesh. The way she fights is unpracticed, is an outpouring of emotionchanneled forth into power unrefined and all the stronger for it. She is notclumsy, but she is unrestrained. The delicate flakes of lavender fire havebecome instead a throbbing indigo maelstrom, a sea-born tempest with her as itsmoving eye.

Your hair rises from your flesh with the crackling electricityas you move through her storm.

Exhilaration thrums through you in the aftermath. Wardenslie dead upon sand-swept stones and your blades drip black demon blood. Thehorror of it will catch you up soon enough but for now there is only triumph,the sheer animal joy of having survived. It surges in your veins in place ofblood, that wildness, and you meet her eyes and think perhaps she feels it, too.Her chest is heaving and stray tongues of purple fire still lick around herwrists and you think you have never seen anything so beautiful as her standingthere, alive, vibrantly alive.

It is only a few steps to reach her side; a spark of powerarcs between your mouth and hers and you learn the taste of lightning.

 FIVE

You tell her that once, so long ago it feels now though youknow it has only been months, you decided that you would put yourself betweenher and harm. You tell her that this, thisis harm, and this sacrifice is yours to choose. You tell her that a witch oncetold you that when you came to look upon the abyss, you must not hesitate toleap, and you tell her that the advice of witches is not to be ignored.

This is the abyss, you tell her. It’s time for you to leap,you tell her.

This is your sacrifice and you have chosen it, and you knowthat she will let you. She understands duty, after all. She of all peopleunderstands that. Her heart is the kindest that you have ever known, and youthink that you have lived a lifetime since you met her. And that is all thatanyone ever gets, isn’t it? A lifetime. You have been fortunate.

You know her so well now and while she is still your sparrowyou sometimes think of Merrill when you look at her, too. Not because of thedelicately tipped ears which peek through hair like a spill of glossy ink, no,but because both have a sort of wilting innocence belied by a core of metalstrength.  Her will is strong and pure assilverite, proof against all poisons. You are better now, for having loved her. You are cured of some aching bitterness.

And she is strong enough to let you go, like you knew she would be. You tie a bit ofsilk around her wrist, there in the sickly shifting greenness of this unwellplace; it is a bloody crimson, folded around itself many times into a long,smooth band. When she unfolds it later, if she does, she’ll find a black-wingedbird embroidered there. A hawk, or just possibly a sparrow.

You kiss her one last time before you go; and this time, shetastes to you like freedom.

[fenharelxenansal]

💧💧

Send 💧for my muse’s reaction to your crying or send 💧💧for your muse to find mine secretly crying.

It is the night of the ball at the Winter Palace, the night everything changes. She can feel the balance of power shifting; which way it will tip balances entirely on the Inquisitor, a woman she knows precious little about. Her spies had gleaned next to nothing, save that she was Dalish but raised apart from her clan, and a mage – practically common knowledge.

Everything, everything depended on winning this woman to her cause. And yet – she couldn’t focus, couldn’t breathe the moment she was told. Two of our agents were found dead in the servant’s quarters. What are your orders, madame?

She holds composure as long as she can, but the moment it is prudent, the moment she is certain there are no eyes on her, she steals away (through the palace she knows like the blood in her veins, from winters spent following Celene in the hallways–) to a spot she will not be noticed, and she lets the grief wash over her.

She sent them to their deaths. More innocent blood on her hands – in every war, there are casualties, but she is no chevalier. Each death wounds her like the severing of a limb.

The Inquisitor’s footsteps are light enough that she doesn’t notice them at first, not quickly enough to dry her eyes. Had she followed her all this way? “In…Inquisitor. My apologies…it wouldn’t do to show weakness among those vultures.”

[makerbound]

but picture this : ilaan and cassandra meditating together early in the morning, as the sun rises, before anyone else in the keep has stirred.

Time gathered and heaped behind an orange-crested horizon. It swirls, expands, a slow waltz in circles drawn to an ever-present centre.

Time is a speck of dust, a mote carving memories through air. With a mind tethered to the past struggling to break free, Cassandra tries to pinch a dash of now between forefinger and thumb. Cleansed by morning dew, her hands feel unsullied, but there’s blood seeping into the cracks called Regret, Responsibility, and Redemption.

Regret, like the teacher’s fear of failure becoming the student’s shroud, like the future steering the past through a tapered present, like a mentor’s sadness twanging the heartbeat in her chest.

Responsibility, worn like a badge of honour she prides herself on, like a thousand candles casting an altar in golden light.

Redemption. Redemption. She seeks it in the fractures of a broken boy’s legacy, and Maker knows she’s tried, she’s tried, but he had favoured order over truth. It was a dream that broke him, and he had the gall to hope that order would stitch him back together. Instead, she’s driven a sword through his chest, a clean thrust, a clean slate, time to start anew. Remember him, her brain screamed while her right hand burned (had it been right? had it been righteous?) and her chest heaved with lungs drowning in regret.

Regret, and for a precious short span of time (then? now? ever?) she wanted to forget––––but he had been a good student, an eager student, and she could not have wished for a worthier vessel to fill with an ideology she thinks pure and eternal. When the red horror sank its teeth deep into his flesh, it rid him of a future. Who is she to take it from him a second time?

No, regret cannot negate memory. And with every breath, with every rise and fall of her chest, she will remember.

Cassandra opens her eyes to fingers brushing against her knuckles; a placid touch that screams against raw, blood-caked skin. Andraste forgive her, but the light can be too bright sometimes. When Ilaan reaches out to grasp her hand, she pulls back, gently so. “No.” Tired, exhausted, a night’s worth of howling and sobbing and pummeling a wall; as if blood, sweat or tears would somehow weigh enough to compensate for a young man’s aspirations leading to his doom.

The stillness of this moment feels almost bought, fleeting––––but then Ilaan anchors it all with one simple, quiet touch, a tentative question bouncing back and forth between her eyes and the small furrow of her brow, and the face of the Seeker, an open book to read.

She shakes her head, and wills herself to smile.

“No. You’ve done enough for me.”

[ximisaari-blog]

vasrea replied to your post.

oh my g osh

did you see them did you look them up have you been enlightened

[brightflight]

@vasrea

Winds blew from the north. The rain had finally stopped and the hills high above Crestwood Village were saturated with rich color in its wake. Somewhere just beyond these hills lay the Waking Sea. To the north, where the wind was born. She fancied she could smell the salt of it, borne on the wind. Wishful thinking, maybe. Wistful thinking. On the other side lay home.

She sat in the lee of a stony outcrop, campfire shedding sparks into the air. The wind sneaked in and toyed idly with the small hairs at her nape; but she did not shiver.

[theeternalsun]

vasrea replied to your post:feeling like an old lady that needs her rest at...

10:30? more like wine & bed o'clock

*grabs the strawberry milk and hides it inside her pocket* WINE, SUUUUURE. tbh a small cup of baileys or carolans always feels great at night, not going to lie, especially in the winter.

[curufinwefeanaro]

♕ ( from dog son --- gaia i would actually have to /look up/ his login info isn't that s ad )

♕ for a kiss of swearing fealty.

          « They come from the south », his son yelled, a hand grabbing his horse’s mane and his hound running at his side. 

          Fëanáro’s horse reared, neighed, and a heavy wind, filled with ashes, blew in his face. He tightened the hold of his legs around his mount’s sides and turned towards Turcafinwë, now by his side, whose eyes were wild and urgent; the vanguard circled them in a cloud of dust.

          « The birds above screech of the horde that advances. They would flank us, father, but I know where they are, and Huan shall guide me to them. Let me take my people and captains with me, let us turn our enemies into prey. »

          He breathed the foul scent of blood into his lungs, and his son’s path shone in his thoughts, poured into his mind directly from Turcafinwë’s. A few seconds of understanding pulled together the threads of a plan and Fëanáro eventually raised his chin high and clasped his son’s pauldron that he himself had forged. « Marshal your troops », he ordered. 

          His son caught his hand before it could return to the horse’s neck, he caught it and held it, and then raised it to his face. Turco placed a kiss on his gauntlet, given with a solemn frown, with a wrinkle of tension at the root of his nose and with a light of pride beaming upon his face.

          Fëanáro’s breath quivered. One’s heart is uplifted when it recognises sincerity and yet his was caught in a tight hold. It was no night for soothing feelings, no. It was a night of war.

          « Go, my hunter child », he said, in a low, gravelly voice. « Bring me their heads as a trophy. »