[IC/OOC] Fade Rift Inbox & Contact

[faithlikeaseed]

(( Need to get a hold of Myr? Drop him a line. Notes, in-person visits, sending crystals, spooky Fade dream shenanigans, you name it. Just specify the type of contact in the first comment of the thread and away we go.

Need to get a hold of the player? Plagueheart#0051 @ Discord or a DW PM is the easiest! ))

Comments

[faithlikeaseed]

"You did?" Myr can't help it; the smile he'd fought off earlier blossoms on his face. Not that there was any question in his mind that Simon would make good on the promise of a coconut, but it's always a delight to find an earnest hope fulfilled. "Bring it in here, then. I'll--"

Maybe he shouldn't be the one inviting a templar into his quarters. Maybe that should still feel like a breach of propriety, but this templar's his friend and in distress beside. Maybe he doesn't think of any of that as he hesitates, instead considering where in all his neatly organized room might be a good place to put a coconut. "--here. Trade. You sit down with her and start on your story and I'll find a place for the coconut."

The nuglet wuffles sleepily as Myr removes her--gingerly, so gingerly, like she's made of glass--from where she's resting against him, offers her out to Simon with both hands. She's soft and warm and too cute to be real; that's got to help with the bad mood.

[paladingus]

The facility with which Simon folds his volatile emotions back into a neat little box comes from years of childhood conditioning to control himself, never to be physical with his anger lest he harm his smaller peers, because it's far too easy to do an injury he can't take back, if he isn't careful and calm.

It's that long-ingrained training that makes him wary of the tiny little nuglet, as if afraid he might crush her in the palm of his hand no matter how gentle he is with her, and Myr's own tenderness makes him feel all the clumsier in comparison. This is why Wren doesn't trust him; this is why she could swap in any other big stupid brute in the Inquisition and serve her purposes just as well--

"I don't know," he says, twisting the coconut in his hands and finding some comfort in its inanimate sturdiness. "She's such a delicate wee thing. Where'd you get her?"

[faithlikeaseed]

"She is, isn't she?" Thinking of it makes Myr self-conscious; he adjusts his hold on the nuglet to something that feels a little steadier. "I'm half-afraid I'm going make a wrong move and hurt her, she's so small."

So Simon's certainly not alone in that; Myr might not be so prodigiously large as his templar friend, but he's always had a physical edge on other mages. (And Enchanter Philomela had wasted no time drilling it into his head that he wasn't to use it against them, either. No matter how tempting it sometimes was.)

"From Orlais, if you can believe it. Someone sent Seeker Darton a whole crate of them to give away." Though his tone is light, there's a flicker of unease on that name, that title. A Seeker. He'd spoken casually to a real Seeker, gotten a nug from that Seeker. It's still got that unbelievable cottony feel of a dream about it all.

The Inquisition is a strange place. Where else would he have forged so fast a friendship with a templar, though? Or gotten the mad idea it's not a total violation of propriety to invite one into his quarters--but it's easy to put that aside in favor of worry about Simon. "--Come on, though. At least come sit down for a bit, instead of looming about over there fussing with the coconut." He can hear that. "What's come and ambushed you, that's got you so unhappy on your first day home?"

[paladingus]

"You wouldn't," he says, with certainty that's far easier to apply to a friend than to oneself. Myr's a good, careful, responsible sort, he tells himself, willfully forgetting the way Myr had initially suggested sparring with live steel on their second meeting. The fond characterization still holds. Myr seems like the sort of person who is good at looking after everyone and everything but himself.

The nuglet's origins send an unwelcome and reflexive thrill of anger through his gut again, and on any other occasion, he might launch into a teeth-gritted explanation of precisely why Darton neither deserves his title nor should be trusted with any living creature in Thedas, but he doesn't have the energy for it now. Not when he can't avoid the direct question he was hoping somehow to sidestep. He's not going to lie to Myr, who only wants to help, and who deserves better than some bullshit excuse Simon's concocted on the spot so that he doesn't have to talk. Reluctantly, he comes inside, setting the coconut on the corner of the desk with a faint but audible thunk.

"Ser Coupe," he mutters, his tone nearly as dark and viciously sneering as it would be if he were talking about Darton after all. It's a far cry from the glow and warmth that's suffused all his previous mentions of Wren, to Myr or anyone else.

[faithlikeaseed]

“Neither would you; you’re certainly careful enough when we spar.” Blind though he might be, he’s not imperceptive.

With Simon successfully lured into his lair away from the door at last, Myr pads over to the spare bed and deposits the nug upon it; the little creature promptly winds itself a wallow in the sheets, peering over a ridge of fabric at Simon with bright black eyes. Were its owner capable of doing the same, he would when Simon names his tormentor in that tone.

"Ser Coupe?" An alarmed echo, not quite disbelieving, but-- It's difficult to think that someone he thinks of as highly as he does Wren Coupe might be responsible for his friend's ill mood. Hardly the first time, though, he's heard that his automatic good opinion of another person might not be warranted. (The eternal curse of the optimist.) "What's she done? What's happened?" You're not in some sort of trouble, are you? --But no, he can't entertain that idea of Simon for more than a split-second. He wouldn't--

Consider, though, how easily trouble found another of the Inquisition's templars when it came looking. Myr frowns but holds his tongue against further questions, instead seeking out one of the chairs in the room to rest his hands on its back. It keeps him from fidgeting.

[paladingus]

"The nug doesn't have magic barriers," he points out, but he is somewhat mollified, at least on that front. It's even more gratifying now than it otherwise might be, having Myr reassure him unprompted that he isn't just some dim and clumsy engine of destruction, that he does have judgment worth trusting. It weakens his resolve like water poured onto snow, and he relents, finally and all at once, sitting down on the empty bed with a screech of the mattress coils and offering his hand for the nuglet to sniff.

It's difficult to begin, feeling as though his chest has briefly crumpled in on his windpipe and cut off the words. There is some small mercy in the fact that Myr hasn't asked aloud if Simon's in trouble, with its attendant (to Simon, anyway) implication that the issue is something he's done to himself--but it hurts nonetheless, and more so when he thinks about having to repeat Wren's condemnation to the person whose good opinion matters the most after hers.

"She'll be looking for a new protege," he says, wondering now if it was presumptuous to think he'd ever been her protege in the first place. "Anyone else will do; she said as much, that I might as well be anyone else at all--"

He doesn't mention that he's the one who'd put those exact words in her mouth. It shouldn't matter.

[faithlikeaseed]

Politely--she is Orlesian-bred, after all--the nuglet extends her neck to examine the offered hand. Several moments of focus snuffling ensue, before she puts out one of her own tiny hands to pat at his fingers gravely. You are all right, large oddly shaped nug.

"She'll be looking for a new protege."

Myr's expression falls from worry to heartbreak at the words and the stab of painful empathy they evoke. "Maker's bones, s--" He catches himself on the title; it's never seemed inappropriate before--but to put Simon at such a remove now strikes him as rank cruelty. "Why? Did she say? What--what reason has she got for it?"

[paladingus]

The little nug is being of more help right now than she knows, and he scratches her gently behind the ears once she has indicated her approval, distracting himself with the repetitive motion.

He can't pretend Wren's rejection was unprovoked. If he could say, with a shred of honesty, that there was no good reason for it--or no reason for it that wouldn't make him the object of judgment--he would, because he couldn't stand for Myr to think him incompetent or unworthy of his title. (Even if it makes him uneasy now; even if that little slip is far from lost on him, and he's had the reflexive urge now for weeks to tell Myr he doesn't have to use it--had Myr not caught himself, Simon would have had to intervene on his own and beg not to be called ser anymore.) But he can defend his judgment to Myr as well as he'd defended himself to Wren, for all the good the latter had done him in the end.

Just...not with the particulars of the situation. To betray Cade's secret to Myr after sacrificing his mentorship to keep it from Wren would be unforgivable. It takes some careful thought to figure out how to talk around it.

"Cade trusted me with a personal matter," he says finally, "and Coupe thinks I ought to have gone behind his back and told her about it against his wishes." It is a day for symbolically forgoing titles, it seems, though it nearly chokes him to do it now, to tar Wren with the same blatant mark of disrespect he uses for Norrington when the man isn't around to hear it.

"I'm not to have made my own judgment calls, she said." Knuckling down on Fereldans in a bar, there's trust for you, her voice echoes sneering in his head.

[faithlikeaseed]

Nugs are good for many things--not the least of them being companionable. The nuglet tucks her limbs beneath herself with a contented burble, inkdrop eyes sliding closed as the attention to her ears lulls her to sleep. Not for her to deal with any moral quandaries or dashed hopes.

Those can all be left to her owner. He's markedly better equipped for them, after all, given so much of a Circle mage's life involves keeping personal matters close to one's vest. (Maybe it shouldn't surprise him that so much of this sounds familiar; it fits so neatly into his arguments that a Circle's templars weren't so different from their mage charges.

This is not the way he'd wanted to have been right.)

"Then why set you to the task of looking after him, if not to give him someone he could trust? Why have you do anything out of her sight?" They don't hold much with questioning at all, he remembers in Simon's voice, and it lends anguish to his questions. Ser Coupe is--if not a friend--someone he thought of as a better commander than that.

Someone worthy of the instinctive respect he has (they both have) for her. "Andraste's pyre--and that's sufficient for her to have done with you. Whatever it was he told you--it didn't make him a danger, did it?" Because that's the only reason he can conceive of that might justify any of this.

[paladingus]

"No, it--" The answer is reflexive, because he knows what Myr means by the question, in spirit. Of all the agents of the Inquisition, all the templars that have passed through the Gallows since the war began, Cade's the one who's been labeled the most likely to be dangerous to others and muzzled accordingly. And Simon knows, in an uncomfortable abstract sort of way, that the idea of a friend becoming a danger to others is one that Myr has always been far, far more obligated to take seriously than any non-mage ever has.

He can't actually, truthfully finish that sentence. He needs at least to clarify.

"Not to others. To himself, was the concern. That was the crux of it. I thought it would do him more good in the long run if I kept his confidence. Ser Coupe disagreed, and she's the one makes the rules." She's back to meriting the 'ser' again; he can't forgo it for long, especially not when finally and grudgingly giving an account that makes her seem more reasonable than he's been painting her thus far.

"I thought if I gave him good reason to trust me, it'd be easier to help him. I'm the only one in Kirkwall that doesn't come easy to, it seems. I don't know why she set me to be the one to do it. I'm the only one he ever does tell to fuck off, though not in so many words--but close enough."

[faithlikeaseed]

"...Oh, Maker."

Circles being what they are, the idea of a friend who was a danger to himself isn't so foreign, either. (Something's eating at him more than usual, he'd said to a Senior Enchanter, when asked about missed appointments and dropped obligations. I'm concerned-- that it might go beyond overwork and skipped meals and lost sleep. Should he have kept silent? he asks himself now, with perfect hindsight. What would have been the better ending?) Myr gives up on standing at last, slumping into the chair with his arms folded over the back of it.

He's at a loss for what to say once he's settled himself; it isn't so simple as "she was wrong" or "you were"--it never is. "I'd think," he finally ventures, "--and this is without knowing Ser Coupe so well as you do," and again that hesitation where he'd use Simon's title reflexively and keeps himself from it, "that if she'd truly intended only that you were to snitch on him, she's got cause to be upset that you didn't. But if she'd meant you to have his best interests in mind--someone who's been the subject of so much attention in the Inquisition lately deserves some shred of privacy, even if it means the rest of us will worry a little more about him."

A pause, as he stops to think over that, trying to drag his thoughts into order--away from an older breach of trust, an older failure. "If she truly wanted to ensure his safety above anything else," he continues at length, picking the words up and placing them down slowly, "she could put him in a cell and make you stand guard over him, without you having to make any difficult decisions that would get you crossways with her. That she hadn't says to me she does want you using your head--but she's had a nasty shock over something to do with him, and she's taking it out on you, because she can't, on him."

How easy a thing it was to do--how easily strong emotion one shouldn't feel about a soft and wounded target could get redirected onto somebody who seemed sturdier, with broader shoulders to bear the lash. (How often he'd lashed out like that at whoever got too close in those first few months, because he couldn't sharpen his tongue on Ser Jarom or Casimir.)

"Which isn't to justify it. But it might--Maker's bones." And he laughs at himself, raw and bitter. "I was about to say 'it might make it easier to bear,' but you put so much faith in her and she's done this to you. I couldn't be charitable about that--I wasn't, for years."

Still isn't, quite, if he's being absolutely truthful with himself, but he's trying.

[paladingus]

"Maybe that's what she assumed I'd do on my own," he mutters. "Lock him in a cell and stand guard, like I do all day anyway. Maker forbid anyone give me a task that requires a brain."

But Myr's right, no matter how much he'd rather wallow in self-pity, and he can put the pieces together at that suggestion--that bar brawl; how had she put it? 'Scraping him off the floor of a cell, beat to the void and back?'--and realize exactly why she might want to take out her frustrations on a bigger, more theoretically durable punching bag.

It still doesn't change what she'd said, nor the outcome. It doesn't make it any easier to bear. And it doesn't make his faith feel any less brutally wasted. Anyone else might get a bitter, snarled what would you know, but--

--not here. Not now. Even if Myr genuinely wouldn't know, Simon would be gentler with his friend, but this is an issue that must be so close and painfully personal that Simon feels almost as if he ought to apologize.

"Is that why you don't call yourself a knight-enchanter?" he asks, careful and quiet.

[faithlikeaseed]

It's the logical question to ask, after an opening like that. It's logical--but no one's ever had to ask it of Myr, because everyone around him knew. Word spread fast in a Circle; rumor had wings, even more so among a population cut to a third by rebellion and runaways, forced to draw in on itself for survival. He takes a sharp breath in before he can catch himself--but that's the only indication of emotion that gets away from him.

His answer is equally careful: "After I was blinded, my mentor declared I would be more a liability than an asset in battle. She decided--and I agreed--to cease my training."

It had been a matter of months. He'd been near enough to full-trained to stand the line with Hasmal's templars when the uprising began--hoping beyond hope even then that a violent solution wouldn't be necessary. (Thank the Maker he'd never had to learn whether he could raise blade or spell against one of his Circlemates. But for the rest--)

"I didn’t argue with her decision; she was right. But she'd have nothing to do with me after." There were reasons for that, he'd told himself. She'd other apprentices to rush through their training--to relieve their templars in guarding what remained of the Circle--and they'd all been stretched so thin with the needs of survival it was a miracle she'd found time to instruct anyone at all.

Yet it didn't explain her conspicuous avoidance--how she'd be polite with him and no more whenever he'd cause to speak to her. It didn't explain the chill in the voice that had once instructed him in duty and chivalry and tactics, the loss of the woman who'd had more hand in shaping him than his own mother--

(And then one night she'd gone with any apprentice who'd follow her--and not a word of farewell to him.)

He shakes his head, once, and shoves the thought away. "So. I don't claim the title I never earned--she'd be disappointed in me, I think, for clinging to it. But," and here he manages a smile, wry and painful all at once, "powerful as her disappointment is it's not like she can discipline me now; she gave all that up when she left."

[paladingus]

"No, she can't."

The strength of his own outburst surprises him, the force in his tone, the indignation--stronger than indignation, the offense on Myr's behalf. It comes without warning, that seething how could she that could so easily be projection rather than sympathy, could so easily be calling images of Wren's face to mind, and yet--isn't. Yes, Myr's reticence all makes sense now, every bit of it, but why should it have to? Why should this have happened to him, when Simon's seen him fight?

"She didn't give it up when she left; she gave it up when she was wrong about you and never even gave you a chance to show her. Blind or not, you can knock a templar twice your size on his arse when you're hardly even trying. It doesn't stop you. You're here, aren't you? It hasn't stopped you. She--"

Maybe he's getting ahead of himself here, pouring this out without thinking of what it implies about him, but there's nothing that eats at Simon now like perceived injustice, and Myr being cast aside without so much as a chance to demonstrate his worth--how could anyone?

"She owed you better than that. You don't owe her the benefit of the doubt in turn."

Especially not if she went and abandoned you right after, he would say, if he fully realized that's what Myr meant by that. As if Simon's ever been one to talk about abandonment of duty. If Myr were harmed by it, he'd account it an even higher sin.