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CLOSED | the perfect stormrider.
WHO: Erik Stephens, Gabranth, Diana, Benedict, Edgard, Tiffany, Dick & Jone.
WHAT: The Gang Fights A Dragon.
WHEN: Cloudreach.
WHERE: The Thenuviet estate on the Exalted Planes.
NOTES: if something looks wonky or is misspelled, please know I’m typing this on mobile & have mercy.
WHAT: The Gang Fights A Dragon.
WHEN: Cloudreach.
WHERE: The Thenuviet estate on the Exalted Planes.
NOTES: if something looks wonky or is misspelled, please know I’m typing this on mobile & have mercy.
GETTING THERE isn’t a short journey, and they’re hardly traveling in comfort. Most of the horses are carrying equipment, armor, weaponry, and anything else those volunteered for this expedition thought to include. And there’s camping equiptment. Anyone who said the travel overland involved staying at inns was lying. Inns are notoriously stuffed with murderers, anyway.
Every night, there’s a campfire and food. Sometimes it’s fresh caught, but if it is, Jone certainly didn’t catch it. Just as likely that it’s rations, salt pork and jerky and whatever dried fruits and nuts Riftwatch can spare.
There’s a STOP AT A BATHHOUSE in the town near the Thenuviet estate, however. It’s stupid, they’re just going to dirty themselves up later, but presentation is important to these people.
Surely all of you brought fancy dress and masks, because IT’S TIME TO SCHMOOZE. There’s a small party of Orlesians dressed to their finest, having a cozy little soirée on the edge of a cliff. Literally on the edge. Don’t indulge too much in the fine wines and cheeses, because there’s a dragon waiting, but for now? It’s never a bad idea to look good in front of rich people of influence. At least, not these days.
Eventually, it’s time to move forward, which means PREPARING FOR BATTLE. Climbing down the cliff is easy stuff, if you’re good with rope or have basic upper body strength. But now is probably the time to set up any traps, get in good positions... because it’s not long before the party on the cliff above begins to cheer.
...Because a few dead swine are unceremoniously kicked off the cliff to fall into the ravine now filled with you and yours.
The cheers from the cliff face only increase as loud thrashing, howling sounds start and become increasingly closer. How long have they been feeding the dragon like this?
But then it’s DRAGON KILLING TIME. You probably know how that goes. Stormriders are huge, dark scaled, and shoot thunder instead of fire. This one is angry you’ve interrupted lunch time.
AFTERWARD, it’s time to heal, take a breath, poke around the dragon bits for fancy heirlooms, and climb back up that cliff.
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But he’s far more disciplined than that.
“They’ll not lack for that.” He promises, shifting where he rests to reach for the nearest abandoned cloth.
“The others that we bring with us, how well do you know them.”
How well do you trust them.
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She considers the rest of them. Gabranth knows how she feels about Ben already.
"Diana, I've not had cause to speak with more'n once. I trust her in a fight. Don't know her other uses, but I reckon she's got some. Clever eyes, something behind 'em."
Which just leaves...
"Edgard's good people. He don't look it. He don't know how to... to show the best of himself. But he tries, he does, and that's more'n most manage their whole bloody lives."
The rest, unmentioned, she doesn't know.
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The sound of scrubbing slows, ebbing away for a gentle beat as Gabranth— no, as the man he’d been before that— steals a moment to sink down in warm water up to his chin. His ears. Just one second longer than he ought spare for the task.
The smallest possible indulgence.
“I might not have endured save for his intervention.”
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She feels more capable of fixing things in this moment, perhaps because she's just fixed something else. Remarkable, what that can do to a person.
"Good bowmen are a fucking blessing in a fight. Glad to have him. And you. That's about the size of the team I'm used to, honest."
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Asked as he shrugs off that brief lenience, head rigidly knocked back into the water to slick damp hair before it’s saturated with soap.
“Surely it isn't a matter of sympathy.”
...perhaps obligation? It occurs to him now he’d asked too little initially: she’d said come with me to slay a dragon, and he said, without so much as a breath between voices, yes.
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"You only need three or four fighters to down a dragon, true," she says, "but it don't look so pretty for Orlesians. They want a show. And we want the 'Watch to look impressive. That's the real point, innit?"
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The judgment that would normally make itself known in a statement like that— coming from a man like him— but in regards to Jone only carries with it the shadow of his own disapproval, and even that remains well-hidden: visible only to someone that knows him, someone willing to understand why he never cares for things done without a greater purpose.
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"Mate, I'm a mercenary," she says, trying to keep her voice from getting that sorrowfully defensive tone nobody wants to hear. "Whole life is just about getting paid. Working up Riftwatch, that's a new tack, but it's done the same way. I fight, I flirt with masked pricks who wouldn't notice if I died, I sleep and eat. Know what I'm good for."
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Those words are weighted, wrapped entirely in the sort of certainty that remains characteristic of Gabranth in general. He says this not out of kindness, not out of wanting or wishing or a hope of what could be: much like his view of Benedict, and a future that would be fairer than the one he now treads steadily towards, he says only what he believes with absolute judgment.
...and then rinses the perfumed lather from his hair.
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It takes her a moment to form a response.
"Mate," she says, a bit quieter than before, "I've not asked much of your home; I told you of my life freely, and if I ever learn more of you, I hope it will be given same, yeah? But I'm given to wonder, at times, how absolute shite life must've been, just a bouquet of fucking disappointment, if you think the monsters and cowards in this outfit are just heroes unsung."
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His forearms rest against the edge of the pool, the slow intake of breath steady as he considers what she says and how acutely she stresses it, as if walking the line between sincerity and pain— or perhaps something that only sounds like it to his ears.
"You think my judgment misguided?"
A pause, before:
"...or is that only when I deign to speak of you."
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Her silence stretches out for two moments, four, six...
"I could tell you what to think, but I don't want to. And so I'm stuck waiting for your bloody disappointment. Try'n be kind, when it lands. To our Ben, especially."
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“You are wrong.” About her own limits, about Benedict's potential; there is so much dwelling dormant, visible in the tread of their past— the way she speaks to him, the way she carries so little fear save for when he dares to tell her she holds worth—
He pulls himself up, palms flat against flooring, taking up a dry cloth left useless and crumpled behind the partition by its prior owner.
“But I’ll not fight you for it.”
Time will prove his words more adamantine, his beliefs more impenetrable.
He is certain of it.
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"I hope I'm wrong, luv, I really do-" then there's some thumping on the door, and Jone calls back, "hold a moment, my time's arrived!"
Jone sticks her head out the door, and various insults echo through the pass, mostly to the intruder's mother, lineage, and place of origin ("Serault, your accent is! How many sheep have you shagged, all the way over there?"). Finally, the door slams, and Jone can be heard laughing, pleased with herself.
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Still, neither have long to consider current circumstance before she's off and running to meet the clatter at the door.
He doesn’t have it in him to smile, not even as a distant witness to the littany of curses and slung insults— perhaps his brother would suggest he’s long forgotten how, were he standing here alongside them. But there’s an undeniable feeling of something akin to shared enjoyment lingering just beneath his ribs as he tends to the nuisance of his leathers, hearing her laugh echo like footfalls as she draws nearer to that room again.
“You’ll see us both barred from this city before nightfall if you continue to insult its inhabitants so."
His hair is still wet, one last rough toweling precedes giving it a furious shake for good measure, scattering droplets as best he can before resigning himself to armor once more.
Heat can be endured, cold as well, but there is something unbearable about pinned humidity that he has always found to be entirely maddening.
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"I'm a humble servant of the Maker," she says, "helping a great holy man, struck with leprosy, make his way about Orlais. On a pilgrimage, you are."
Maybe she ought to have run the story straight with him beforehand, but who cares? It worked.
"You need help tying anything? Thought I heard the helm back on."
She hasn't noticed yet, that she's stopped calling it a bucket.
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That metallic echo chasing his voice proof enough, though he’s yet to begin with the rest of his armaments aside from what’s already strapped to his legs, his forearms.
“I did not realize you were so familiar with Archadian armor.”
Mild, more of a teasing provocation rather than any real demand of her experience: ties are ties, buckles are buckles— neither demand the rigorous wealth of experience of Draklor and its studious associates.
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Fuck, she hopes it is.
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“It is necessary. Nothing more.”
Translation: it fucking sucks.He reaches to lift the heavy span of his breastplate, that uniquely compressed shirt beneath with its high collar clinging tightly to shoulders that are far, far more slender than what his armor typically suggests.
“Come here, if you intend to assist.”
It’ll go quicker between the two of them, and that will hopefully equate to less trouble— or at the very least less undesirable attention— aimed their way.
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To think, this started with a bloody pebble. (Or had that pebble been thrown with the same urge, to see his armor off even then?)
It's that thought that keeps her from commenting on the smallness of his shoulders, the slightness of a frame usually encased in so much metal. Instead, she begins buckling buckles.
"Take it back," she says quietly, "this armor ain't like nothing I ever seen. But it has clasps all the same, I reckon."
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And in truth, tedious as those corded leather laces are to cinch tight enough in the gaps between his breast and back plate (at their tightest they yet leave a good four inches of exposed leather around his ribs on either side; a glaring point of weakness that might have been utterly intentional in the eyes of his former masters), they're a simple enough task to take to.
"The buckles hold little on their own."
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They'd talked of knights and causes, more than once. He must do all this for something. He doesn't strike her as vain.
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“I served as the hand of Emperor Gramis Gana Solidor, and as blade and shield for his sons Vayne Carudas Solidor, and Larsa Ferrinas Solidor alike.”
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If asked, Jone would say emperors are bad and kings are (can be) good, but the difference seems murky at best. An emperor is just an especially rich king, isn't he? And it isn't as though whatever emperor Gabranth served is here. Who knows, maybe they didn't keep slaves, maybe they never invaded mudpit countries covered in rain.
And even if they did, well... she doesn't want to know. She wants, selfishly, to keep believing in him.
She finishes lacing. "Fancier than most Orlesians, then. Fancier than the one's we're soon to meet."
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He does nothing to react to how she briefly drops those laces, though surely it doesn’t go without notice.
“Only in former station.” It’s deflective, really; the truth is, in essence, yes. But he isn’t so coarse as to say so, either. “Such things hold no weight here.”
“I am as I ever was, Daughter of Denerim.”
The very same man she’d thrown a rock at, in fact.
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