genessia | Action | Bay and Exterior

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Action | Bay and Exterior

[Disorientation was not unknown to Fenris. He’d experienced it several times in his past, but never quite in such a way. Uncertain what the pamphlet suggested aside from images of the device included in the box, he grumbled and shoved the pamphlet, the red papers included, along with the phone, into a pouch at his waist and strode through the water without hesitation. He’d faced demons and worse before, and while he was alone, he certainly wasn’t going to allow the weakness of fear show, and the spiked armor and large sword lashed to his back went a long way to help the image along.

When he approached the stand on which Weiss’ Transmission played, he glared at it but did not balk. Magic, then. Of course. He’d never heard of this Genessia, but at least the necklace was familiar. So, their kidnappers have pretty chains, then. It didn’t change what they were and he grimaced at the thought. This was all a grand deception, to be sure, even for a former slave as valuable as himself, so he had no reason to doubt the image witch’s integrity.

Still, as much as it pained him to do so, he needed more information than her repeating message supplied. Surely he wasn’t alone in this place, for this witch would not have seen fit to spend the energy to place this message here for only his benefit, and so he took up a spot leaning against the side of the map booth and would address anyone who happened past.]

You, there. I...require assistance, if you've the mind.

[He’ll not force anyone, but manners aren’t exactly his forte.]

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"I'm not sure if he actually teleported, or if everyone just forgot where he was," Alley mused, "honestly, one's as likely as the next. Cole is a spirit, one possessing no one's body but his own. When he became more human, to be safe against blood magic binding, he lost some of those stranger abilities; became less of a part of the Fade and more... permanent. Less malleable in general, I suppose."

He blinked, confused clearly. He'd never heard of such a thing, but if Alleyana's expression was anything like his own, neither had she. "A spirit with its own body? I...don't understand. And no mage did this?"

Honestly, at a certain point Alleyana had reached full saturation on the strange people and things she'd encountered on Thedas. Cole didn't seem all that odd anymore, not after all the rest.

"No mage did it, he came across on his own. A spirit of Compassion, he was trying to comfort someone as they died and ended up manifesting entirely. Even he doesn't know how it happened, and apparently he spent the first year or two not even remembering he was a spirit. He thought he was the ghost of the boy who'd died."

The Ghost of the Spire.

"We know lyrium still has strong attachments to both sides of the Veil; if it's letting you imitate the reality on the other side, temporarily going incorporeal suddenly doesn't sound that weird, does it? The Fade's quite the bizarre place. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if you could walk up walls and across ceilings, for that matter."

Fenris had seen his share of strange occurrences, many of which he couldn't explain. It wasn't, of course, for always for lack of attempt, though. He simply never tried. He had little interest in the crossing of the veil, magical or mundane, and even less in the profane rituals the Magisters most likely used to accomplish it. It made sense in a vague sort of way that the spirit had come across and thought itself a ghost, but he wasn't familiar enough with the nature of spirits to assume much more than that.

"True. It's only something I've never heard of." He takes a breath. "I'm not exceptionally experienced with the Fade, nor have I tried to be."

"I wasn't either, but shit happens," Alleyana would have left it at that, but, considering Fenris' markings she continued with an attempt at some minor commiseration, "I ended up with a chunk of the power that made the Veil embedded in my left palm for a few years. It let me repair the rifts and seal the breach twice. Between that, and somehow ending up physically walking around in the Fade a few times, I had to learn."

It hadn't been done to her by some nasty Tevinter slaver, no, but magic had still been shoved under her skin and into her veins by some fuck-ass mage's experimentation with ancient Elvhen power.

And they were both warriors, to boot. Not exactly built for magic, elven heritage aside.

Edited 2017-10-18 21:03 (UTC)

He blinked at her words, eyebrows raising. It was more expression of interest than he'd given most of the people who'd stopped to help him.

"You've...physically entered the Fade and survived?"

"More than once," Alleyana knew full-well how big of a deal it was; it had nearly earned her an execution until the people at Haven had decided she must be their holy damn savior instead. Still, she'd had a few years to really settle in with the facts of it all, and walking back out of the Fade had certainly been a fact.

The Inquisitor reached up with her right hand and pushed the dragonhide leather of her sleeve up just enough to expose a bit of skin where it met with enchanted stone. The scarring was like lightning had gone up from the wound, following her veins-- but she didn't raise it very high. Just enough to show the sickly green, faint glow still under her skin.

"That green stuff's the residual Anchor. After a few years it destabilized and got... bad."

Considering the largely stoic woman actually flinched a little when she said it, 'bad' had to be a hell of an understatement.

"Its creator neutralized it, but by then there wasn't much arm left. Considering I was glowing out the eyes with this shit near the end, I'm probably pretty soaked through with it even if the main bit's gone. So if I seem a bit too morbidly interested in the Fade and lyrium and magic... my life's been revolving around all that for a while now. And it shows no signs of stopping being a required focus."

Fenris watched her motions with his large emerald eyes, confused at first. Not much of what Alleyana said made sense, but he listened nonetheless. Strange magics? Experimentations? These were things he understood well enough, if not a working knowledge, enough to know they were dangerous and often cost the lives of innocent bystanders. Like Alleyana and her arm, for instance.

"You called this...creation an 'Anchor'. An anchor for what?"

"The Veil, presumably," Alleyana slipped the edge of her sleeve back down into the bracer of her gauntlet again, over the stone. "It's what Corypheus called it and it stuck, although... I think Solas may have always just called it the mark, now that I think about it."

Huh.

Well, 'Anchor' worked just fine in her mind. It had certainly felt like one, dragging at crooked and damaged bones and sinew as it lit her on fire from within.

"You wanna go to a bar or something, if we're going to keep chatting? Feels weird having this kind of discussion standing around outside the Bay."

"And it...grants you power over the veil?" No one should have that power, if you asked Fenris. It seemed dangerous to even toy with. "Granted." It had, after all, been forcefully removed, or so he supposed.

He looked around at her comment, as though that thought hadn't even occurred to him and he nodded slightly. "If you prefer."

"To seal it back up, yes. Remember, it was torn wide open for a while in my time," Alleyana gestured vaguely up at the sky with her real hand, the other once again just held stiffly at her side. The craftsmanship was perfectly tuned, but she wasn't used to having that hand again just yet. The lack of sensory feedback made it easy to sort of forget it wasn't still the dragonbone bar, when she didn't actually need it.

The Inquisitor started walking along toward literally anywhere that wasn't basically the doorstep of the world.

"The person who was trying to get it meant to go into the Fade and up to the Black City... again. I just happened to grab it first, quite literally. It sucked me into the Fade and I came back out through one of the rifts."

Such a simplistic way to describe that chaotic start to everything.

Fenris' brow only knitted with concern the more she spoke, but that gave him pause. "...again?" He'd only recently been exposed to the teaching of the Chantry outside the Imperium, thanks to Sebastian, and he had very limited knowledge of history, but he only knew of one account in which anyone had physically entered the Fade.

"...what do you mean again?"

"I mean out of everything the Chantry's gotten incredibly wrong, sometimes intentionally," Shartan, Ameridan, and even Alleyana herself, "they managed to get at least part of one fact right. The guy I fought was one of the original Magisters who went up there."

Even a stopped clock was right twice a day.

"Good thing I had no interest in going up there myself, considering how many times I had the chance."

Of course, everyone had heard the Chantry's teaching of the evil Magisters who'd breached the Black City, even he, and Sebastian had told him more, of course.

"And so, Tevinter's evil finally spills again."

Alleyana might have argued that everywhere was fucked up, but... she'd seen something of how those ancient Magisters had gotten into the Fade in the first place, reflected in the place itself. So much blood...

"Yeah, he was an asshole. And now he's inside-out."

Opening a Rift inside a person had been a hell of a finishing move, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

"So, I'm going to connect some super obvious dots here and assume we have a mutual friend in Varric."

He almost questions what she means by that, but he can puzzle it out well enough without the aid. His markings gave him a similar, if not as violent, means of turning a man 'inside out', after all.

He nods again, though there is a sort of fondness in his gaze, his expression doesn't change much.

"We do. You know Varric?" He wonders if Varric ever started writing the books he's been going on about.

"He was one of the first people I met after stumbling out of the Fade the first time who didn't want to execute me on the spot," Alleyana snorted very faintly, remembering her first encounters with Cassandra for example. "The Seekers dragged him to Haven and then everything exploded, and he stuck around to help fix it. He was just made Viscount of Kirkwall in my time."

"Seekers?" It wasn't a term he'd heard of before, and it was just as alien as the thought of Viscount Varric Tethras...though he imagined it would make his own ghost stay in the city a bit more comfortable. He wasn't surprised Varric was welcoming when others wanted to take her into custody and potentially kill her. He was good people.

"They're what the Templars started out as, and the Inquisition. A small sect of them were still around in our time, though now they need rebuilding just like everything else."

Even the Inquisition, if in a new and more... covert, way.

"A lot of crazy shit, as Varric might put it, went down in Kirkwall after your time. It caught their attention."

Varric did have a way with words, certainly. "Enough to catch the attention of the Chantry, and two sects no one knows of. That's...troubling."

"Don't worry, the rest of Thedas is quick to out-pace Kirkwall in crazy."

Which was... saying something.

"Or do worry, I guess. Not that it'll do you any good."

Alley, no, that's not helpful.

Edited 2017-11-16 05:05 (UTC)

He scoffed, frowning and shaking his head. "If it is this Corypheus you mentioned, it is a madness Thedas brought upon itself for allowing the Imperium to fester like the wound it is."

"Corypheus was just the pawn of a bigger threat," Alleyana noted a little wryly, and pushed the door open to a bar that they totally had walked to ~~very slowly~~, shush. "And that bigger threat isn't from Tevinter."

Fenris stepped inside the bar blinking as his eyes adjusted to the low light indoors, still frowning.

"Even still, I find it unlikely they helped. Their only interest in lands beyond their own is the flesh they might harvest there."

"A few helped, but you're right about the bulk of the country doing little else but either loudly renouncing Corypheus to save face due to that whole 'we didn't invade the Fade and start the Blights!' thing, or... joining the fanatical Venatori and serving Corypheus directly. He promised to restore them to their ancient glory, so... you know. Fun bunch."

People like Dorian and Krem had been exceptions, not even remotely the rule. There was a lot for Dorian to try to clean up, up there.

Assuming Thedas lasted that long.

Alleyana led the way to the actual bar, and the bartender didn't seem the least surprised to see her, wordlessly moving to fetch something strong.

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