Given the option, it would be better to lay no path at all into Orlais.
The trouble of course is that he is well familiar with the road as it lies between where they come from and where her assignment must take her. If they mean to make their way subtly through those old battlegrounds to gather intelligence from the shards of shattered lordlings forces, then better that it be just two and best of all that it be a woman with one arm and a fellow who knows the way to so many secret places hidden away. That he only knows the direction and not the requirements of the road - the rough living they will need doing - is nonessential. That is, Marcoulf assumes, her job to tend to. He is here to act as their compass and to say the right words (about battles or men he knew or heard the names of) when they come to pass rough soldiers gone feral on the road.
Though so far they have been lucky and have found no trouble at all except that the horses don't get along and must be tied at opposite ends of the string at night to save the heartache of so much squealing and stamping. And also that the weather is grim - rain drizzles even here in the highlands, slate dark sky over dry golden hills - and all day they walk or ride with their oil cloth hoods drawn up over their heads. But there are worse things and so far they have seen not even a trace of the Empress's forces on the road, so he can only be relieved by each day that passes so gray and unremarkable.
This morning too dawns steely, the cold penetrating the decrepit tower where they'd made their camp the night prior. Marcoulf is up early, fretting now over stoking the fire up from its embers so some breakfast might be made.
"There's a storm at our heels," he says when he realizes she's awake. "Coming up out from the sea no doubt. It may catch us on the road yet."
It's late summer now and the winds blowing across the Waking Sea and driving it hard along the rocky, blighted coastline are already sharpening in anticipation for the changes seasons. It's dank and stormy here. The white sun is a smudge in the overcast sky and there is so much salt in the sea air on the Pilgrim's Path that he can taste it on his lips. But most of all, the air here seems unnaturally dense as they wind their way down from the marshy roadways to the stony beaches, picking their way carefully along the grim coast in pursuit of their assignment. He imagines this is what magic must feel like - a strange combination of primal dread coupled with the cotton mouth sensation of lighting on the verge of striking.
Light, it's no wonder they all go strange.
Marcoulf's hand hasn't left his sword all afternoon. It had started as an idle drape of the fingers, his wrist balanced idly on the pommel, but now as they scramble across shale covered beaches wind their way through beaten passages of crumbling basalt he finds his grip has secured itself. They're far from the walls of Amaranthine and in pursuit of a cave where smugglers have been dropping stores of what's rumored to be tainted lyrium. If it isn't darkspan, it will be bandits.
So he makes no move to alter the lay of his fingers when at last they work their way around a promontory by way of a slick, narrow footpath and there in the inlet below them he spies the dark mouth of a cave. Instead Marcoulf simply jerks his elbow toward it, says "There," and spiders his way further along the face of the stony outcropping in search of some way down.
"Got it," is Athessa's reply, and she immediately hops off of the slick, narrow path they'd been traversing and starts skid-hopping from basalt ledge to basalt ledge, a few of her more fluid, immediate hops being more a matter of slipping off the rocks than skill, but she covers for it well. The only thing to do when the roof tiles slip out from under you is to get off the roof, da'len.
In no time at all, she's near the entrance of the cave, but she's not stupid enough to traipse in alone--or, more likely, she's not actually looking for a cave with lyrium in it. What does she care about lyrium? Nothin', 'cept what it'll sell for.
Still, no point in doing nothing while the shem takes his time. Athessa crouches, examining the faint signs of foot traffic to and from the cave entrance. None of it seems particularly fresh.
"And it is you, who has been hired to guard me on my journey?"
A first ventured question that echoed in the marble halls of the villa. She sat, with her hair behind her and the small pup of a hunting dog, in her lap. It's sleek fur made it silken in her lap. A curiosity and a gift, as the man in front of her, now was. To be taken to Naples to see over the wedding of a beloved daughter - though not her own, too important to be left to anyone else's eyes but the ones closest to the heart.
A mistress, decked in gold with lowered eyes. A demure expression. Carefully drawing her hands along the Dogs sleek fur as the man responsible for the animal's true keeping stood off to the side with a maid. Alone - or as along as anyone of any standing ever was.
His Italian is fair, though the accent is crooked enough that it may be half of why the man before her says so little. Surely in combination with his looks, it can be no reassurance. He has washed his face and hands, spent an hour in the evening working the dirt from under his fingernails, and has combed his hair as neatly as he knows to and concealed the worn edges of his doublet under a sturdy cloak with a lovely braided edge, but there can be no denying some sharpish quality there. Too much limb and too narrow a face coupled with too easy a hand at the pommel of the very fine sword at his hip.
But surely the man can't be as unsuitable as he looks standing there in the marbled villa. After all, he has been hired for the work by people invested in her care and wears the second place ring recently won in the torneo there on his first finger. And he stands straight enough. No uneasy shifting or faltering, though she is exceptionally pleasant to the eye and he has had little work in the way of minding women.
("Could you make this ride and see to it that no harm comes to her?" had been the question, not "Would you stand in front of her and see how she cares for you?")
"The road should be easy. It's been a warm spring."
"Yes, I am told that taking the path now, would be a fair trip."
Her hand settled on the greyhound's back. Laying ringed fingers in even spaces to curve across its soft coat. Its head turned at the tone of a new voice, ears flicking before it moved back to settle in her lap, sniffing at her hand to look for a treat, perhaps. Something sweet as the animal went to lip and lick his mistress' fingers.
"Forgive me, it seems I have not been given the name to who will as the length of my shadow, these coming days."
- and the darkened halls that Lady Katarina wondered, felt that rain pour down on them. Though no water soaked the floating skirts she wore. No flood that caught in the rooms without rooves like a bucket swept her up. Dripping down from what had been a great house, with a great purpose. It did not matter that unlike the other ruined houses that littered the forest, it had been destroyed long before the burning of a city.
Now it was empty, and not but a ghost who disturbed not the dust nor the peeling paint of a beautiful woman's face, eaten up with moss, limescale and the damage of summers and winters come and gone. Exposed walls of a once greater hall that now roofless, tables and chairs knocked over, steadily eaten in the vines and gross, knotted into the roots of great trees that replaced thick wooden beams as covering and supporting the rooms. Not much left but corridors of a second floor that overlooked what was remnants of a courtyard. Silver cutlery, gold embellishments fallen from walls, left behind where no one had even bothered to ransack the place after the death of it and somewhere mingled with it all, was the bones of a woman. Her head sitting a little off her shoulders, lifeless, now no more than a skull. Limbs outstretched, skirts and flesh rotted away into that order. As bound into the roots and plants that now were a particularly verdant patch of flowers, that grew healthily from her remains.
Lady Katarina looked down at them and sighed - it was all picturesque, in its way.
But more than that, it was boring. A lifeless existence had become her death - the dying had been more exciting than the death. It had at least been painful. She had at least been -
- more than this, floating. Unable to leave. Unable to do anything with this new form. For there could be not telling what might become of that. That had to be the only thing worse, to die, a second time. So here she stayed, with her bones and ruined castle. From time to time, a beggar would come and seek solace in the ruined houses, and she would leave them be. Other times, a looter, and she would grow claws, she drew up an unholy form and she would rip them to pieces with claws and teeth more corporeal than they believed until that moment.
Then she would take their bodies and dump them outside the grounds and the excitement over: she would shift her way back up the rooms, to once more to wander up and down the corridors, waiting, looking. Less and less came now. Looters or otherwise.
The Emerald Graves is filled with all kinds of tombs - burial mounds and crumbling fortresses a lovely decayed houses like this one ruined by plenty but most recently war. It's that one (and the weather) which chases him over the mess decked threshold and into the overgrown home. If there is any thought for some danger inside the old structure, he ignores it in favor ideas like warm and dry even as he leans on the roan mare's reins to coax her through the doors into the great foyer after him. She's loathe to stoop under the crumbling mantle of the entry, but eventually Marcoulf says enough sweet things that she jumps through the passage and lands with all four hooves on the rotting carpet. After he promptlyunbridles her, sets the door back in its frame to see that she doesn't wander back out into the sheeting rain, and turns his attention to the house stretching out around them.
It's dim and and dank, smelling strongly of green things and earth. Rain works its way through cracks in the lovely frescoed ceilings and moss climbs the grand stairs more easily than any human foot might. But most of all it is still, quiet as the dead, and after a moment's long listening he can't help but approve of it. Good. He'd rather not cross paths with any other soldier fleeing the collapsing war or scoundrel looking to slit the throats of those tired men that might be found in the road.
With a pat to the horse's side, he ranges off from the grand entranceway to the foremost room. He's in search of furniture - a chair or small table or anything that might easily be shattered and remade into firewood. Building a camp here can be no different from taking shelter from the rain in some roadside shed.
It's an excited, enthralling thought - as she hears the sound of a horse and rider downstairs. Hearing them move through the old walls, clicking and clanking of metal on damp eaten carpets. It must have been too long - she swears that dead and all, she could have just shivered in anticipation.
Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy - who would it be, who would it be? Her form shifts incorporeal, fade-thin, shifting through walls and floor as she searches for him. A shape that isn't there, sliding between stones no man could pass through were he still living and possessing of all limbs and good wit.
Happily, she possessed none of them anymore. Moving slowly, until she finds him and his horse - a pretty mare. Matching, weren't they? - oof, so red, did he mean to match his horse so well? A little warn, a little faded.
Oh, a soldier. Hard and hardy. How long would he last, then? Perhaps as long as his horse. Granted, the horses always knew her presence first, over men, animals always had better sense. So she moved towards it first. The chains and manacles on her wrists clanked, a heavy sound against the whisper of skirts. A floorboard aching out the sound of its soul that wasn't her, in all fairness, just wind creaking above them.
But she waited, letting the horse feel the presence before the man - watching it build with the pressure. Sliding closer and closer, up into vision from the side until she was close enough -
- and the horse let out a scream.
Katarina couldn't help it, she laughed, high and maybe a little mean. Before she realised she was doing it out loud, and her hand clapped over her mouth, quickly fading back into the wall before she could be caught.
As they make their way North, they will find their way through autumn and into the wet cold of the Emprise du Lion, but they haven't yet traveled so far and here in the southern valley the rest of the Dales still lives green and gold in late summer. That camp should already be made when there is still so much light in the day is due entirely to the work of the afternoon - tracking and closing a rift in the hills, the associated work of which has left sword arms and horses exhausted.
So the tents having been pitched, the string of horses watered and fed, and with hours yet in which a real meal might be prepared so Marcoulf takes it upon himself to wander up the length of the meadow toward the treeline where he might find some firewood or mushrooms. He instead finds an apple tree with some fruit still ripe and undisturbed by birds on its lowest branches and spends his time shoving them into his bag. After-- well, the quiet is easy and the camp is well in sight from this higher vantage, so he has no qualms about sitting in the sun and eating a few apples before making his way back. Which, thanks to the stress of the morning and the warmth of the day, transitions nicely into taking a nap laid out in the yellowing grass.
Surely no trouble has ever been caused by wandering off and not coming back in a timely fashion.
[There is tension in the air these days. It knifes sourly through every conversation, every lingering stare, and Ambassador Casterfo is no fool: without military support, Orlais will be crippled long before it stands a chance at surviving the coming storm. His colleagues do not believe it, the Empress is almost permanently occupied and those closest to her only seem to look inward for solutions.
Short-sighted fools, all of them.
Fine boots sink into the mud of the mire, upsetting his balance, and making him look all the more out of place at the fringes of a camp filled to the brim with those displaced by their own hopes and principles— one hand fixed tightly on his horse's bridle for support, his other raised and gesturing rapidly for attention as he nears what must surely be the camp's stables.
Or on second glance, a smithy? In such a state of decay, it's impossible to discern.]
You there, sir! A little assistance, if you please.
[A little of both might be the more accurate way to look at the thing. It's a mud splattered tent with its front panels pinned open like a flayed carcass inside of lay an assortment of tools and what dry feed the camp likely is in possession of. A number of the camp's horses themselves are on a string pinned between two trees, looking miserable in the mud and wet and drizzling rain.
But there is indeed an anvil and Marcoulf himself has a horse's leg between his knees and his ear against the animal's side. He's muttering to himself as he trims the toe of the hoof. Blighted weather. Every horse in the camp's feet will rot out from under them and the mud sucks shoes off at a rate that's impossible to correct--
Snap. The clippers snip through the edge of the foot. He drops it and straightens - Light, his back - in time to be shouted at. With the heavy farrier tool in his hand still, Marcoulf turns and regards the man and horse making their way in his direction with a blank, briefly uncomprehending expression. The man is so wildly out of place in the mire that for a moment it's difficult to say exactly what he is beyond Bad at walking in this terrain.
Only, there are a finite number of options and all of them are 'Better than you, strictly speaking' so Marcoulf quickly moves to catch the man's horse under the chin and push the animal to a halt.]
Yes? [...Ser? Absolutely not. Lord? Maybe. No telling.]
[ She crawls up from the sea dressed in tattered leathers, spitting water from her lungs in gurgling hacks. Her dark hair obscures her face and she brushes at it impatiently as it tries to go down her throat on one of her desperate inhales for air.
[The Waking Sea pours all manner of things out onto the rocky shores of the Free Marches, bodies included he's certain. It's just that they're not usually still breathing and hacking out whatever water's been living in their lungs.
Marcoulf is so startled by the sudden appearance of the woman from the churning sea that for a moment he forgets entirely the reason he's up on this hill overlooking the stony coastline and the road winding near it up to Kirkwall (which is: not important for this thread probably but fundamentally not Looking After Unsuccessful Drowning Victims). He stands straight up from the cluster of big red stones he'd been lying about the obscure his position on the hill, in full view of the tattered woman there on the beach should she raise her face to look.
But he doesn't make his way down the hill to her. Not yet. She doesn't look like darkspawn or a demon, but there can be no helping superstition. Marcoulf instead shields his eyes from the sun and waits-- for her to stand or collapse or call out maybe.]
[The stableboy of a Nevarran inn shadowed by the Imperial Highway recognizes him as the Inquisition bound for Kirkwall. It's the fact that Marcoulf has no idea how the boy knew it that bothers him still, sitting between the shoulder blades as an itch he can't quite reach. He'd been wearing no sign, there had been no obvious trace of the place in his belongings except the still sealed reports in a bag he'd been careful not to leave unattended, and he'd overnighted beside the road on his way first through this place-- So what had given him away? That's the mystery which plagues him all the way to the border; the letter the boy had given him and who it should be delivered to were plain enough to be of no immediate concern. Worse still, the weather turns the minute he crosses into the Free Marches. The rest of the journey to Kirkwall is beset by so much miserable pouring rain that he hardly thinks at all about the additional packet in his care.
It's only once he's returned to Kirkwall - its streets as flooded and grim as the muddy roads which lead there - that Marcoulf considers it again and this only after the discovery of the notch in one of the mare's shoes while seeing to her feet and legs in the musky Inquisition stable. It's not the first time he's seen it, really. It's only some incidental irregularity of the metal from a hammer set at a slightly wrong angle while forging and only the shoe on her right hindleg shows the clumsiness. Only so does the right hind shoe of the neighboring beast. And so does the shoe of the gelding across the aisle and every inquisition animal fit for the road there.
So Marcoulf delivers his collection of sealed field reports, then sets out directly through the torrential rain in search of Caspar Parakis.]
[It isn't the constant whirr of noise outside the row housing or the fact that the city never goes fully dark that bothers him. He can manage the traffic and the rail lines and every screen that wants to be touched talks to him so he doesn't need to know the shape of letters like he might otherwise. No, the world may be a dazzling place but the technicians responsible for the integration of the refugee population have made all kinds of overtures at seeing that the transition is made as smoothly as possible. And besides, Marcoulf is adaptable. He can manage these things. What is harder to parse, more difficult to manage, is so much freedom.
All refugees are given room and board (for a time) and a meager allowance (within reason and with the expectation that one fund gainful employment in The City of course). And he looks like people do, which means no one native is wholly interested in hassling him in the street like they do to the uplifted population. So he has been at liberty, riding the train from one end of the city to the other and back again for weeks and feels progressively untethered with each switchback.
'What do you do when there's no point to doing it? he asks the folding screen in the middle of a half dark night. It types the letters for him then sends them somewhere else.
He doesn't expect an answer-- or at least not a useful one: the refugee network is inundated with all kinds of questions like this one and silly people who answer them before they're as bored or uneasy as he must be to ask it. There will be piles of one sentence answers, short videos of people's faces at strange angles, bits of audio. What he doesn't anticipate among them is what at first appears to be a single still frame. The minute shifting is the only indication it's a recording and not a picture, as the subject gives nothing away: it is an anonymous blood red door, a silver knocker with a lion's head reflecting the glow of a street sign.
The video is paused. Is zoomed in. He turns the folding screen over in his hands to study the warped reflection: an electric blue eye in a circle stares back at him. Oh, Marcoulf thinks. He knows that sign.
Which is how he arrives at getting off the train line four stops early, following the mazelike streets to the alley in the shadow of the unblinking eye visible from the station platform and spied during one of his many trips to and from. He combs along six flights of stairs, keeping the eye always in view and eventually his persistence is rewarded with a ruby red door.
The knocker seems strange from this angle - a twisted snake instead of a lion's head -, but he thinks nothing of it (or has spent too much of his time in pursuit to he discouraged by the inconsistency.) Instead he sets his hand to the knocker, banging one of the serpent's dripping coils against the base.
Knock, knock. Curiosity killed the cat.]
4 lily - sorry just deal with the lack of fancy pictures
Prior to falling into a pit, he'd been after her for nearly a full two week's time.
See, there are just two motivating forces in this world. They are survival and curiosity and, Marcoulf thinks, they are directly opposed to one another. When he'd fetched the work, he'd been thin on coin and the woman had been in the same city. Tracking her down, catching her by the neck scruff and hauling her back to the sort willing to pay for her had seemed simple enough. But then she'd slipped through his fingers, made her escape, and led him out into the blighted wilderness. He should have been done with it then - gone back to the woman who'd hired him for the work and told her her prize had slipped free and found some merchant wagon to tend as it made its way inland. Instead he'd followed and now the two of them find thenselves at the bottom of a hole in the ground.
How they'd survived the fall, he isn't certain. The glimmer of sunlight from the opening of the mineshaft is just that - a distant pin prick, half hidden by the uneveness of the channel they'd tumbled down. --That must be it. The grade leading down had been slight enough that for most of the fall, they'd slid instead of dropping. Only these last meters had really been a fall.
That certainly explains all the cuts and scrapes on the back of his hands, he thinks. There must be more on his face. He can feel the soft sting through the muffled cotton stuffed sensation in his head. He might have banged that too while coming down. Sitting upright, he touches all round his skull until satisfied that nothing has cracked open or leaked out. After, he looks to the woman his leg still seems to be across. She appears to be just as alive he is.
If this was how she died, she swore, she hoped her bloody spirit crawled back from the fade to find the Lord Pratap and play wicked tricks upon his house for this. For all of this. Until he never could know rest again.
Which wasn't much of a comforting thought, as her eyes cracked open to look at the distant light up above of where she had landed. But it was the one she had. Her back heavy, not least of all because of the armor that no doubt saved her on the fall. But she couldn't mistake it - she was bleeding, something had caught her jagged on the way down, that ran from her knee to her ankle. A long cut that soaked blood through her hose and boots. Should have taken her father's advice. She have bought the greaves that were reinforced with plate. But here she was, a the bottom of a pit, bleeding, not sure she could stand up, with -
Her hunter.
Was it too much to hope he was dead? Apparently so. His voice called to her, asking after her as she gingerly moved herself. Pressing up against the wall. Where was her sword - a dagger - for pity's sake -
Lakshmi, Lady, wife and dragon slayer swallowed. Perhaps this would be it. Perhaps there was no comfort. She would end regardless of all else she had achieved, here and now. She took a deeper breath against the pain. Felt the dirt under fingerless gloves that caught under her nails. Cool. Different against the sting of sweat on her brow. She could barely make him out in the dark, but nor did she want too. Instead she took calm in the quiet, readying herself.
"If it is time for my death, I wish first to say my prayers." The assumption simple, she didn't think he would be too affronted by it.
War is a season unto itself. If spring in Orlais is made by growing things, all those would-be supple branches have been cleared for a league in the name of arrows and crossbow bolts for spending, and axe hafts and shields, and the new lengths for broken pole arms. If the summer sky is blue, then on good days it is obscured from the smoke of cook fires and on bad by the smoke from hot tar pots and the murderous storm clouds of arrows. And if autumn is meant to be the start of burnished coppers, grey skies, and mud for growing mushrooms in, then this year it simply melts into all which came before it. There have been fires dotting the Exalted Plains for weeks, visible when the sun dips low. The sky has been grey. The ground is beaten into mud every time the Duke and Empress's forces meet.
One might be forgiven for thinking here, in some mist shrouded encampment at the edge of a wood where the trees have already shed the bulk of their leaves, that time has simply folded back on itself. Today they may be a small contingent of soldiers on their way back from destroying a bridge to a village the Empress's forces had been using to resupply their line (and that the villagers had presumably been using for all manner of other things), but tomorrow they will merely be soldiers returned to Fort Revasan and the food will be the same and the smells will be the same and the weather will be the same and all the faces will be identical until they are dead or someone decides that the war is finished.
So when Marcoulf wakes, he cannot say what hour it is, just that it is night and a chill has set in where the campfire has been allowed to burn down to its embers to avoid the risk of being seen. He lays for moments, willing himself to return to sleep and instead listening to the dark. After some minutes, when it's clear nothing much will come from either endeavor, Marcoulf untangles himself from his cloak-turned-blanket, rises from his patch, and slips toward where the horses have been picketed. It will do him some good to stretch his legs, and there is no guarantee when last someone checked on the mule who enjoys untying her neighbors' leads from the line.
The animals are just gray shapes in the thin moonlight, and as he approaches they are quiet save for the soft sounds of living things - some huff of breath, the shift of hooves in yellowed grass, the gentle clink of some metal bit of headstall hardware or the low rasp of some leather strap being cinched tight--
It's that last one that draws him up short. He stills a few paces from the picket line. There is some shadow, he thinks, moving among the horses.
Blood. That’s all Edgard sees. The blood that oozed on the ground, the blood on his own hands, but not his blood. His hands in the river, clouds of red flowing out and down over stones and around lily pads. His chest heaving, the blood pumping in his chest. It’s still there on his hands though he scrubbed them raw almost seeing his own blood. His own blood pumps hard reminding him of the life it gives him that he doesn’t deserve, reminding him of those who do.
Night fell and Edgard finds himself walking, running anywhere or nowhere. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. He must keep moving before—a body lifeless on the ground. He shakes his head, shoving it down.
He has to keep moving. This isn’t far enough, he has to get farther away. He hears a soft crunch of hooves on the ground and put his hands out finding a soft side moving in and out. Horses. He keeps his hand there a moment feeling the blood pumping in this animal. He moves his hands up to the withers and down to the shoulder with familiarity. He rests his arm on its’ neck and finally still notices his hands shaking. The horse’s nose finds him and snuffs him lightly. Edgard makes a decision.
Edgard still sees the blood when he places one foot in the stirrup and swings his other leg over. His chest quiets momentarily as he points the horse away from camp and takes a breath.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
just let me know if this is too vague my dude
counterpoint: let me know if this is nothing like what you wanted
The trouble of course is that he is well familiar with the road as it lies between where they come from and where her assignment must take her. If they mean to make their way subtly through those old battlegrounds to gather intelligence from the shards of shattered lordlings forces, then better that it be just two and best of all that it be a woman with one arm and a fellow who knows the way to so many secret places hidden away. That he only knows the direction and not the requirements of the road - the rough living they will need doing - is nonessential. That is, Marcoulf assumes, her job to tend to. He is here to act as their compass and to say the right words (about battles or men he knew or heard the names of) when they come to pass rough soldiers gone feral on the road.
Though so far they have been lucky and have found no trouble at all except that the horses don't get along and must be tied at opposite ends of the string at night to save the heartache of so much squealing and stamping. And also that the weather is grim - rain drizzles even here in the highlands, slate dark sky over dry golden hills - and all day they walk or ride with their oil cloth hoods drawn up over their heads. But there are worse things and so far they have seen not even a trace of the Empress's forces on the road, so he can only be relieved by each day that passes so gray and unremarkable.
This morning too dawns steely, the cold penetrating the decrepit tower where they'd made their camp the night prior. Marcoulf is up early, fretting now over stoking the fire up from its embers so some breakfast might be made.
"There's a storm at our heels," he says when he realizes she's awake. "Coming up out from the sea no doubt. It may catch us on the road yet."
Or drive Maker what knows to them.
two words: GHOST PIRATES
one word: yikes
Light, it's no wonder they all go strange.
Marcoulf's hand hasn't left his sword all afternoon. It had started as an idle drape of the fingers, his wrist balanced idly on the pommel, but now as they scramble across shale covered beaches wind their way through beaten passages of crumbling basalt he finds his grip has secured itself. They're far from the walls of Amaranthine and in pursuit of a cave where smugglers have been dropping stores of what's rumored to be tainted lyrium. If it isn't darkspan, it will be bandits.
So he makes no move to alter the lay of his fingers when at last they work their way around a promontory by way of a slick, narrow footpath and there in the inlet below them he spies the dark mouth of a cave. Instead Marcoulf simply jerks his elbow toward it, says "There," and spiders his way further along the face of the stony outcropping in search of some way down.
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In no time at all, she's near the entrance of the cave, but she's not stupid enough to traipse in alone--or, more likely, she's not actually looking for a cave with lyrium in it. What does she care about lyrium? Nothin', 'cept what it'll sell for.
Still, no point in doing nothing while the shem takes his time. Athessa crouches, examining the faint signs of foot traffic to and from the cave entrance. None of it seems particularly fresh.
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A first ventured question that echoed in the marble halls of the villa. She sat, with her hair behind her and the small pup of a hunting dog, in her lap. It's sleek fur made it silken in her lap. A curiosity and a gift, as the man in front of her, now was. To be taken to Naples to see over the wedding of a beloved daughter - though not her own, too important to be left to anyone else's eyes but the ones closest to the heart.
A mistress, decked in gold with lowered eyes. A demure expression. Carefully drawing her hands along the Dogs sleek fur as the man responsible for the animal's true keeping stood off to the side with a maid. Alone - or as along as anyone of any standing ever was.
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His Italian is fair, though the accent is crooked enough that it may be half of why the man before her says so little. Surely in combination with his looks, it can be no reassurance. He has washed his face and hands, spent an hour in the evening working the dirt from under his fingernails, and has combed his hair as neatly as he knows to and concealed the worn edges of his doublet under a sturdy cloak with a lovely braided edge, but there can be no denying some sharpish quality there. Too much limb and too narrow a face coupled with too easy a hand at the pommel of the very fine sword at his hip.
But surely the man can't be as unsuitable as he looks standing there in the marbled villa. After all, he has been hired for the work by people invested in her care and wears the second place ring recently won in the torneo there on his first finger. And he stands straight enough. No uneasy shifting or faltering, though she is exceptionally pleasant to the eye and he has had little work in the way of minding women.
("Could you make this ride and see to it that no harm comes to her?" had been the question, not "Would you stand in front of her and see how she cares for you?")
"The road should be easy. It's been a warm spring."
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Her hand settled on the greyhound's back. Laying ringed fingers in even spaces to curve across its soft coat. Its head turned at the tone of a new voice, ears flicking before it moved back to settle in her lap, sniffing at her hand to look for a treat, perhaps. Something sweet as the animal went to lip and lick his mistress' fingers.
"Forgive me, it seems I have not been given the name to who will as the length of my shadow, these coming days."
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- and the darkened halls that Lady Katarina wondered, felt that rain pour down on them. Though no water soaked the floating skirts she wore. No flood that caught in the rooms without rooves like a bucket swept her up. Dripping down from what had been a great house, with a great purpose. It did not matter that unlike the other ruined houses that littered the forest, it had been destroyed long before the burning of a city.
Now it was empty, and not but a ghost who disturbed not the dust nor the peeling paint of a beautiful woman's face, eaten up with moss, limescale and the damage of summers and winters come and gone. Exposed walls of a once greater hall that now roofless, tables and chairs knocked over, steadily eaten in the vines and gross, knotted into the roots of great trees that replaced thick wooden beams as covering and supporting the rooms. Not much left but corridors of a second floor that overlooked what was remnants of a courtyard. Silver cutlery, gold embellishments fallen from walls, left behind where no one had even bothered to ransack the place after the death of it and somewhere mingled with it all, was the bones of a woman. Her head sitting a little off her shoulders, lifeless, now no more than a skull. Limbs outstretched, skirts and flesh rotted away into that order. As bound into the roots and plants that now were a particularly verdant patch of flowers, that grew healthily from her remains.
Lady Katarina looked down at them and sighed - it was all picturesque, in its way.
But more than that, it was boring. A lifeless existence had become her death - the dying had been more exciting than the death. It had at least been painful. She had at least been -
- more than this, floating. Unable to leave. Unable to do anything with this new form. For there could be not telling what might become of that. That had to be the only thing worse, to die, a second time. So here she stayed, with her bones and ruined castle. From time to time, a beggar would come and seek solace in the ruined houses, and she would leave them be. Other times, a looter, and she would grow claws, she drew up an unholy form and she would rip them to pieces with claws and teeth more corporeal than they believed until that moment.
Then she would take their bodies and dump them outside the grounds and the excitement over: she would shift her way back up the rooms, to once more to wander up and down the corridors, waiting, looking. Less and less came now. Looters or otherwise.
Who knew the afterlife would be so dull?
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It's dim and and dank, smelling strongly of green things and earth. Rain works its way through cracks in the lovely frescoed ceilings and moss climbs the grand stairs more easily than any human foot might. But most of all it is still, quiet as the dead, and after a moment's long listening he can't help but approve of it. Good. He'd rather not cross paths with any other soldier fleeing the collapsing war or scoundrel looking to slit the throats of those tired men that might be found in the road.
With a pat to the horse's side, he ranges off from the grand entranceway to the foremost room. He's in search of furniture - a chair or small table or anything that might easily be shattered and remade into firewood. Building a camp here can be no different from taking shelter from the rain in some roadside shed.
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It's an excited, enthralling thought - as she hears the sound of a horse and rider downstairs. Hearing them move through the old walls, clicking and clanking of metal on damp eaten carpets. It must have been too long - she swears that dead and all, she could have just shivered in anticipation.
Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy - who would it be, who would it be? Her form shifts incorporeal, fade-thin, shifting through walls and floor as she searches for him. A shape that isn't there, sliding between stones no man could pass through were he still living and possessing of all limbs and good wit.
Happily, she possessed none of them anymore. Moving slowly, until she finds him and his horse - a pretty mare. Matching, weren't they? - oof, so red, did he mean to match his horse so well? A little warn, a little faded.
Oh, a soldier. Hard and hardy. How long would he last, then? Perhaps as long as his horse. Granted, the horses always knew her presence first, over men, animals always had better sense. So she moved towards it first. The chains and manacles on her wrists clanked, a heavy sound against the whisper of skirts. A floorboard aching out the sound of its soul that wasn't her, in all fairness, just wind creaking above them.
But she waited, letting the horse feel the presence before the man - watching it build with the pressure. Sliding closer and closer, up into vision from the side until she was close enough -
- and the horse let out a scream.
Katarina couldn't help it, she laughed, high and maybe a little mean. Before she realised she was doing it out loud, and her hand clapped over her mouth, quickly fading back into the wall before she could be caught.
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if you don't want another quiz, just assume reg tal-vashoth its basically the same thing
this is a useless starter and I'm sorry
So the tents having been pitched, the string of horses watered and fed, and with hours yet in which a real meal might be prepared so Marcoulf takes it upon himself to wander up the length of the meadow toward the treeline where he might find some firewood or mushrooms. He instead finds an apple tree with some fruit still ripe and undisturbed by birds on its lowest branches and spends his time shoving them into his bag. After-- well, the quiet is easy and the camp is well in sight from this higher vantage, so he has no qualms about sitting in the sun and eating a few apples before making his way back. Which, thanks to the stress of the morning and the warmth of the day, transitions nicely into taking a nap laid out in the yellowing grass.
Surely no trouble has ever been caused by wandering off and not coming back in a timely fashion.
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the weirdest AU mashup known to mankind, Star Wars/DA:I go
Short-sighted fools, all of them.
Fine boots sink into the mud of the mire, upsetting his balance, and making him look all the more out of place at the fringes of a camp filled to the brim with those displaced by their own hopes and principles— one hand fixed tightly on his horse's bridle for support, his other raised and gesturing rapidly for attention as he nears what must surely be the camp's stables.
Or on second glance, a smithy? In such a state of decay, it's impossible to discern.]
You there, sir! A little assistance, if you please.
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But there is indeed an anvil and Marcoulf himself has a horse's leg between his knees and his ear against the animal's side. He's muttering to himself as he trims the toe of the hoof. Blighted weather. Every horse in the camp's feet will rot out from under them and the mud sucks shoes off at a rate that's impossible to correct--
Snap. The clippers snip through the edge of the foot. He drops it and straightens - Light, his back - in time to be shouted at. With the heavy farrier tool in his hand still, Marcoulf turns and regards the man and horse making their way in his direction with a blank, briefly uncomprehending expression. The man is so wildly out of place in the mire that for a moment it's difficult to say exactly what he is beyond Bad at walking in this terrain.
Only, there are a finite number of options and all of them are 'Better than you, strictly speaking' so Marcoulf quickly moves to catch the man's horse under the chin and push the animal to a halt.]
Yes? [...Ser? Absolutely not. Lord? Maybe. No telling.]
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because i know nothing about DA:I I am just having her wash up
Sup sellsword.]
perfect
Marcoulf is so startled by the sudden appearance of the woman from the churning sea that for a moment he forgets entirely the reason he's up on this hill overlooking the stony coastline and the road winding near it up to Kirkwall (which is: not important for this thread probably but fundamentally not Looking After Unsuccessful Drowning Victims). He stands straight up from the cluster of big red stones he'd been lying about the obscure his position on the hill, in full view of the tattered woman there on the beach should she raise her face to look.
But he doesn't make his way down the hill to her. Not yet. She doesn't look like darkspawn or a demon, but there can be no helping superstition. Marcoulf instead shields his eyes from the sun and waits-- for her to stand or collapse or call out maybe.]
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?????????
¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿
It's only once he's returned to Kirkwall - its streets as flooded and grim as the muddy roads which lead there - that Marcoulf considers it again and this only after the discovery of the notch in one of the mare's shoes while seeing to her feet and legs in the musky Inquisition stable. It's not the first time he's seen it, really. It's only some incidental irregularity of the metal from a hammer set at a slightly wrong angle while forging and only the shoe on her right hindleg shows the clumsiness. Only so does the right hind shoe of the neighboring beast. And so does the shoe of the gelding across the aisle and every inquisition animal fit for the road there.
So Marcoulf delivers his collection of sealed field reports, then sets out directly through the torrential rain in search of Caspar Parakis.]
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you wanted a uhhhhhhh nasty monster demon friend right?
let's go with make believe cyberpunk sol jamjar??? [eyeballs.emoji]
All refugees are given room and board (for a time) and a meager allowance (within reason and with the expectation that one fund gainful employment in The City of course). And he looks like people do, which means no one native is wholly interested in hassling him in the street like they do to the uplifted population. So he has been at liberty, riding the train from one end of the city to the other and back again for weeks and feels progressively untethered with each switchback.
'What do you do when there's no point to doing it? he asks the folding screen in the middle of a half dark night. It types the letters for him then sends them somewhere else.
He doesn't expect an answer-- or at least not a useful one: the refugee network is inundated with all kinds of questions like this one and silly people who answer them before they're as bored or uneasy as he must be to ask it. There will be piles of one sentence answers, short videos of people's faces at strange angles, bits of audio. What he doesn't anticipate among them is what at first appears to be a single still frame. The minute shifting is the only indication it's a recording and not a picture, as the subject gives nothing away: it is an anonymous blood red door, a silver knocker with a lion's head reflecting the glow of a street sign.
The video is paused. Is zoomed in. He turns the folding screen over in his hands to study the warped reflection: an electric blue eye in a circle stares back at him. Oh, Marcoulf thinks. He knows that sign.
Which is how he arrives at getting off the train line four stops early, following the mazelike streets to the alley in the shadow of the unblinking eye visible from the station platform and spied during one of his many trips to and from. He combs along six flights of stairs, keeping the eye always in view and eventually his persistence is rewarded with a ruby red door.
The knocker seems strange from this angle - a twisted snake instead of a lion's head -, but he thinks nothing of it (or has spent too much of his time in pursuit to he discouraged by the inconsistency.) Instead he sets his hand to the knocker, banging one of the serpent's dripping coils against the base.
Knock, knock. Curiosity killed the cat.]
4 lily - sorry just deal with the lack of fancy pictures
See, there are just two motivating forces in this world. They are survival and curiosity and, Marcoulf thinks, they are directly opposed to one another. When he'd fetched the work, he'd been thin on coin and the woman had been in the same city. Tracking her down, catching her by the neck scruff and hauling her back to the sort willing to pay for her had seemed simple enough. But then she'd slipped through his fingers, made her escape, and led him out into the blighted wilderness. He should have been done with it then - gone back to the woman who'd hired him for the work and told her her prize had slipped free and found some merchant wagon to tend as it made its way inland. Instead he'd followed and now the two of them find thenselves at the bottom of a hole in the ground.
How they'd survived the fall, he isn't certain. The glimmer of sunlight from the opening of the mineshaft is just that - a distant pin prick, half hidden by the uneveness of the channel they'd tumbled down. --That must be it. The grade leading down had been slight enough that for most of the fall, they'd slid instead of dropping. Only these last meters had really been a fall.
That certainly explains all the cuts and scrapes on the back of his hands, he thinks. There must be more on his face. He can feel the soft sting through the muffled cotton stuffed sensation in his head. He might have banged that too while coming down. Sitting upright, he touches all round his skull until satisfied that nothing has cracked open or leaked out. After, he looks to the woman his leg still seems to be across. She appears to be just as alive he is.
"All right?" The money will be less if she dies.
How dare tbqh
Which wasn't much of a comforting thought, as her eyes cracked open to look at the distant light up above of where she had landed. But it was the one she had. Her back heavy, not least of all because of the armor that no doubt saved her on the fall. But she couldn't mistake it - she was bleeding, something had caught her jagged on the way down, that ran from her knee to her ankle. A long cut that soaked blood through her hose and boots. Should have taken her father's advice. She have bought the greaves that were reinforced with plate. But here she was, a the bottom of a pit, bleeding, not sure she could stand up, with -
Her hunter.
Was it too much to hope he was dead? Apparently so. His voice called to her, asking after her as she gingerly moved herself. Pressing up against the wall. Where was her sword - a dagger - for pity's sake -
Lakshmi, Lady, wife and dragon slayer swallowed. Perhaps this would be it. Perhaps there was no comfort. She would end regardless of all else she had achieved, here and now. She took a deeper breath against the pain. Felt the dirt under fingerless gloves that caught under her nails. Cool. Different against the sting of sweat on her brow. She could barely make him out in the dark, but nor did she want too. Instead she took calm in the quiet, readying herself.
"If it is time for my death, I wish first to say my prayers." The assumption simple, she didn't think he would be too affronted by it.
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War is a season unto itself. If spring in Orlais is made by growing things, all those would-be supple branches have been cleared for a league in the name of arrows and crossbow bolts for spending, and axe hafts and shields, and the new lengths for broken pole arms. If the summer sky is blue, then on good days it is obscured from the smoke of cook fires and on bad by the smoke from hot tar pots and the murderous storm clouds of arrows. And if autumn is meant to be the start of burnished coppers, grey skies, and mud for growing mushrooms in, then this year it simply melts into all which came before it. There have been fires dotting the Exalted Plains for weeks, visible when the sun dips low. The sky has been grey. The ground is beaten into mud every time the Duke and Empress's forces meet.
One might be forgiven for thinking here, in some mist shrouded encampment at the edge of a wood where the trees have already shed the bulk of their leaves, that time has simply folded back on itself. Today they may be a small contingent of soldiers on their way back from destroying a bridge to a village the Empress's forces had been using to resupply their line (and that the villagers had presumably been using for all manner of other things), but tomorrow they will merely be soldiers returned to Fort Revasan and the food will be the same and the smells will be the same and the weather will be the same and all the faces will be identical until they are dead or someone decides that the war is finished.
So when Marcoulf wakes, he cannot say what hour it is, just that it is night and a chill has set in where the campfire has been allowed to burn down to its embers to avoid the risk of being seen. He lays for moments, willing himself to return to sleep and instead listening to the dark. After some minutes, when it's clear nothing much will come from either endeavor, Marcoulf untangles himself from his cloak-turned-blanket, rises from his patch, and slips toward where the horses have been picketed. It will do him some good to stretch his legs, and there is no guarantee when last someone checked on the mule who enjoys untying her neighbors' leads from the line.
The animals are just gray shapes in the thin moonlight, and as he approaches they are quiet save for the soft sounds of living things - some huff of breath, the shift of hooves in yellowed grass, the gentle clink of some metal bit of headstall hardware or the low rasp of some leather strap being cinched tight--
It's that last one that draws him up short. He stills a few paces from the picket line. There is some shadow, he thinks, moving among the horses.
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Night fell and Edgard finds himself walking, running anywhere or nowhere. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. He must keep moving before—a body lifeless on the ground. He shakes his head, shoving it down.
He has to keep moving. This isn’t far enough, he has to get farther away. He hears a soft crunch of hooves on the ground and put his hands out finding a soft side moving in and out. Horses. He keeps his hand there a moment feeling the blood pumping in this animal. He moves his hands up to the withers and down to the shoulder with familiarity. He rests his arm on its’ neck and finally still notices his hands shaking. The horse’s nose finds him and snuffs him lightly. Edgard makes a decision.
Edgard still sees the blood when he places one foot in the stirrup and swings his other leg over. His chest quiets momentarily as he points the horse away from camp and takes a breath.
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jk doing this now so I don't forget. scoops this back onto my plate.
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