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Snippet #2137202

located in Thedas, a part of Dragon Age: The Undoing, one of the many universes on RPG.

Thedas

None

Setting

Characters Present

Character Portrait: Ethne Venscyath Character Portrait: Solvej Gruenwald
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The solid clank of shackles and chains is regular, measured. The prisoners are forced to keep a march pace, and the clanging echoes of their bonds jangle a counterpoint to the lighter clinks of Templar chainmail, polished to a shine. These men are proud of their work, and never is a sash or a mere link of armor out of place. Their shields are buffed free of scratches, their regulation swords keen and stainless, not for lack of use. Their line of captives is another matter entirely, the mages bound, gagged, and wearing almost universal expressions of stark hatred, leveling the glares of feral, half-wild dogs upon their upright, dignified jailers. Robes are torn in places, and dirty from days of living on the land as well as they could.

Not well enough, when the Templars employ trackers and even a Seeker. That man, she glimpses through the door, placing a foreign plant-leaf in his mouth and nodding to the Knight Captain before taking his leave. The apostates have been captured; their fate is not in his hands. They are herded inside he room she occupies, and for the first time, Solvej is aware of herself in some strange way. She feels palpable weight on her shoulders, armor like these men wear, and glancing down at her gauntlets, she knows that it is the most pristine and well-maintained of all. Her appearance, she remembers, is supposed to reflect the light of her faith, a beacon in the darkness to the faithful and the righteous. It seemsā€¦ strange, somehow, that she should be wearing this glimmering silver-white, almost as though sheā€™d expected something else instead. But the thought is ephemeral, and it leaves her almost immediately.

The mages are forced to kneel, heads bowed, and all but one appear bitter. One man does not protest, sinking gracefully to his knees. His eyes are fogged, his robes more well-maintained than the rest. His gentleness seems to pervade the air around him so thoroughly that even those others around him resist less than their brethren further away. Solvejā€™s gloved hand twitches; she wants to bring it before her mouth, to cover her face from shock, to refuse to see what is before her. But she cannot.

She looks to the Knight-Captain, the tallest of all these strangely-tall figures, and something is off about that, too, but it is trivial and she cares about only one thing right now anyway. ā€œKnight-Captain, ser, surely there is some kind of mistake. Enchanter Gruenwald is no apostate.ā€ Her tone is measured, formal; conveying the extent of her horror at the situation will earn her no favors with those that know no law but the Makerā€™s. She would not expect it to. Her voice is pitched too high, but she easily attributes this to the strain of remaining calm. For she knows better than almost anyone what will probably happen here if the situation devolves any further.

The Knight-Captain, an imposing man on the best of days, had never much cared for Ser Gruenwald or her mage-brother, and he'd also never made much of a secret about it. Seeing in this an opportunity to put the troublesome woman in her place, he sneered down at her. "And we're supposed to take his sister's word for that, are we? Figures; women really are too sentimental for this kind of work. He was found out there, just like the rest of 'em, and there's better men than you that can attest to as much." His eyes narrowed to slits, daring the impetuous female to challenge his authority on this. She'd never been one to be silent when there was something she had to say, but until this moment, she'd always been so thoroughly above reproach in her conduct that nobody was able to fault her for it. Her superiors had, on more than one occasion, been forced to acknowledge her unusual wisdom and devout faith, he more than most.

He also hated it more than most, and was quite looking forward to the opportunity to push her to something less than perfect.

Solvej is torn between the instinctive bristle and the inclination to laugh at this small-minded man. But where had the latter come from? The Knight-Captain was her superior officer; she respected that, didn't she? It might make her angry that he was refusing to even consider her brother's innocence, but never had she thought of his intolerance as some kind of joke. These are serious matters, gravely serious, so why does she feel like hiding the severity of her desperate frustration behind a troublesome smile? She isn't that kind of person at all!

...is she? No, no, of course not. She could lash him with her tongue if she chose, but she respects the rank of his office more than most things, and for that alone, she will argue on his terms. Nobody that wore the sword of Andraste would act from hate alone, and so regardless of he bad blood between them, they could surely conduct themselves in the best interests of the truth. "Did you even ask him? Did you ask any of them? Blood magic and escaping the Circle are very different crimes in the Maker's eyes; surely you must see the importance in understanding who did what here?" It is obvious. Perhaps he is simply tired, after the march. Perhaps it is just an oversight, one easily-rectified with a bit of outside attention. Solvej flicks her eyes back to her brother's face. She doesn't like that look on him; it was one he'd used when they were children, when he was giving into her will despite his best inclinations otherwise. That... there is no need for such acquiescence right at this moment, is there? Why isn't he trying just as hard to fight this?

The Knight-Captain was spared the indignity of needing to answer her accusations when one of the other mages forced himself to his feet. "Enough of this!" the man cried, struggling aginst his bonds. "What right have any of you to decide our fates at all? You understand nothing of our suffering!" The ranking Templar gritted his teeth, a muscle in his cleanshaven jaw jumping with the force of it. Stepping forward, he backhanded the speaker, sending the physically-inferior specimen to the floor. He was forcing his mouth to relax enough to allow him speech when the sound of soft chuckling carried to his ears. Startling sharply, he looked down at the mage he'd struck, watching as the man's knees convuled inward, towards his chest, as his laughter increased in pitch. Before their eyes, the man rose from the ground, reorienting until he was floating right-side up.

With a snap, the chains binding his wrists and ankles in place broke, the links scattering across the stone floor beneath them, and the Knight-Captain watched the characteristic first stages of the transformation that no Templar wishes to see. Even as their leader moved, the others rose up, all save the blind man at the end, and the distinct sound of spells being charged registered with every armored individual in the room. The man in charge took a deep breath and loosed his zweihander from its sheath, drawing the longblade.

"Kill them all."

Her gaze swings to the chained mage- and he is large as well, his floating form looming above her like the specter from a nightmare she's told they all have. She is not jaded- is she?- but all the same she feels what is to come in the pit of her stomach, and instinctively reaches behind her. Her hand meets empty air, and her brows furrow together. That, that of all things is surely wrong. It feels as though something should be there, must be there, ready-to-hand and as much a part of her as her own arm. For she has made it so, has she not?

The thought flees her mind when she witnesses the gortesque transformation, the boiling and curdling of skin, parting from bone in places to hang off like so much rotten fruit. His height is now such that she has to crane her neck, but she doesn't want to. Even as the other mages spring into action, she has eyes for only one, the one that does not move does not attack, and will not even so much as twitch from where he kneels. The Knight-Captain's order rings out clear as a bell over the din, and it paralyzes her. All? Surely, it is a mistake. Surely, he can see that her brother does not act, and yet... her muscles tighten, the weight of dread and sudden foreknowledge dropping leaden into the pit of her stomach. She knows, somehow, that the feeling will fester there, always, attracting more bitterness and rot to itself than she would have ever thought possible.

Her light will instinguish, her shine will tarnish, her righteousness will give way to tightly-controlled despair, but in the face of what she stands to lose now, in this moment, what comes after seems so trivial.

She acts without conscious thought, the instinct to protect what is hers older than any training she could submit herself to. It is primal, this simple desire to save but one life, and for her, all the rest of the world can burn if she but succeeds. Solvej catches sight of the Knight-Captain, sees where his vision leads, and she interferes, jumping forward, unarmed and burdened by unexpected weight, or perhaps she is simply slower than she expected, somehow, but even so she is at Efriel's side, pushing at him, pleading with him in low, keening words that she does not understand, tugging at the hem of his robes, because if only he would move, then he might live, and what happens to her is of no consequence next to that vainglorious hope.

But he is not moving, not responding to her at all save to lay one hand gently atop her head and smile, and the Knight-Captain draws closer.

The smell of burning flesh filled the air, mixed with the metallic tang of blood. The soundscape was a cacophony of clanging steel and the rush and and crackle and crash of magic. Voices shouted incomprehensible words, rage and desperation lending their yells volume if not clarity. Through it all, Efriel Gruenwald's breathing remained steady, sightless eyes fixed upon some unknown point in the middle distance. He was listening, feeling, and waiting for the moment his sister was hoping would not arrive. He knew better, had known better since he'd left to chase the men and women who had once been his friends. He wasn't going to leave this situation alive, blood mage or no, but Solvej... she would live. He would ensure it, even if it was the last thing he ever did.

She was still frantically trying to move him when he heard the sound he was waiting for: the whistling of a blade almost as long as he was tall. As he'd suspected, it was aimed not for him, but for his sibling's back. Efriel siezed Solvej about the shoulders, turning them both around so that the Knight-Captain's zweihander entered his back rather than hers. It kept traveling, but the plate mail she wore protected her from the reduced velocity. Efriel shuddered in a breath, breaking his moratorium on speech at last. His mouth opened, blood dripping out as surely as the words he wished to say. "Sol..." Despite his best efforts, the rest of his message was only traced by his lips, no breath able to give them enough power to form speech more truly. Efriel lost consciousness then, collapsing onto his sister, long past saving.

With a single well-calculated maneuver, Solvej finds her back pressed into the stone ground, her buffed mail bearing an ugly scratch that represents a swordā€™s near-miss. From above, something hot and sticky drips, falling onto the polished silver and running down the plates, seeping into the spaces between the links of chainmail. She watches this, horrorstruck and silent, before her eyes find the hands on her shoulders. Their grip grows gradually slacker, and with slowness forced by foreboding and dread, she follows the visual path from the hands to wrists, up yellow-clad arms, along the line of a jaw shaped exactly like her own, to cloudy irises she knows better than she knows hers.

The blood dribbles from between Efrielā€™s lips, landing on her cheek and tracing a multitude of red lines over the planes of her face- into her hairline, sliding down her neck, hot enough to burn. The single whispered word he manages tears a wretched sob from somewhere deep in her chest, and her vision blurs as she reaches up; to do what, she cannot say. But his muscles go slack before she has the chance, and Solvej is knocked back by the force of her brotherā€™s weight.

He is sprawled atop her, but she canā€™t bring herself to care that he is slowly making it difficult for her to breathe. His head rests just beneath her chin, and one of her gauntleted hands moves to brush its fingers through his hair. Saline tears mix freely with the traces of his blood on her cheeks, and her breaths come in tiny shudders as she fingers the silky locks she cannot feel through her damnable armor. Her other hand reaches down, taking one of his in hers. She smiles brokenly; lacing their fingers together, she lays her head back on the cold stone of the floor and presses her small palm into his much larger one. Her big brother, always her guardian unto the last day for both of them-

The thought brings not the utter devastation she was expecting, but rather a vaguely-troubled feeling. Why does that seem wrong to her? Her emotions are a swirling amalgam of guilt, fear, gut-wrenching grief and a faint underpinning of implacable fury: at the Knight-Captain, at these foul blood-mages, at the Maker and Andraste, but most of all at herself. But she is small, useless, she feels this- what about this could she have prevented at all?

Something in her mind urges her to forget, but she stubbornly pushes it back. Stirring, she struggles to rise, gently displacing Efriel and unable to look at his face. Itā€™sā€¦ itā€™s her face, she thinks, but how is that? Certainly, siblings are often similar, and close, but why does she feel as though itā€™s more than that? Like half of her soul has been torn from herself and thrown into some hellish abyssal place, leaving the rest of it broken and torn and blackened?

She looks down at her hands, covered in the red life-essence of her sibling, and her eyes go wide. The color darkens, and then seems to sink into the surface of her armor, staining it. The effect ripples outwards until not trace of its former splendor remains. His blood has dyed her soul dark, and done the same to her plate and chain. Blackā€¦ a Black Templar.

Something clicks, and Solvej suddenly understands. Her hands were never so much smaller than his because he is her twin. Efriel really is her other half, which is why she feels like less of a being without him. She isnā€™t powerless in this situation at all, or at least she shouldnā€™t have been. She remembers differently now. There was a spear in her hand when he died, and she used that familiar weapon to exact the vengeance he never would have wanted. She was not supposed to be defenseless, she was supposed to be mighty. Broken, used, and unworthy, but mighty all the same.

Rising to her feet, she casts her eyes around her with a mixture of fear- her natural aversion to the Fade- and carefully-controlled fury. This was wrong, all of it. Her empty hands curl into fists; she is without her weapon even now. But it does not matter. She will tear him apart with her bare hands if she has to. ā€œMorpheus!ā€ she shouts, the sound echoing even above the heedless battle still raging around her. ā€œStop hiding like a coward and show yourself!ā€œ

He had watched what made her, she intends to show him what it had made her into.

Now this one was interesting. It had certainly taken her a while, but when this woman had figured it out, she'd done so quickly, and moved right into calling him out upon it. Shrugging internally, the Darkspawn appeared, banishing the still-living partcipants of the fight and leaving the room empty, save for the woman (who was looking rather like a girl of no more than twelve at the moment; an interesing manifestation of insecurity) and her dear brother's corpse. "Ah, I should have known. You're cleverer than you look, and perhaps a smidge too attached to that weakling brother of yours, no?" He passed a disdaining eye over the body on the ground. Morpheus was categorically incapable of understanding sacrifice or love in any form. Which was why he'd underestimated Solvej, assumed she would be unable to discover the deception. Of all the dreams he'd conjured for this lot, hers was most closely linked to a real event in her life, which made reading the details from her memory a simple thing. Even the maliciousness of the Knight-Captain was no more exaggerated than it had been in reality.

"You called, Black Templar? I must confess I was rather surprised by you. Do your companions understand your wickedness, I wonder?" Relatively certain he'd not be able to tempt her with promises of a better dream, he resolved to break her into compliance instead. After all, there were those that went easy, and those that had to be forced. He almost didnt notice the troublesome girl flickering into existence behind him, but she was weak still, and he intended to make Solvej do the work of banishing the somniari herself.

"Weak? Weak?" Solvej repeats, almost incredulous. Her hands tighten into fists at her side, and for a whie-hot moment, she wants nothing more than to do as Kerin does and submit wholly to her rage, channel it into the tearing strength of something rabid and feral and honest. But this, she realizes, is not the person she has become. Her limbs slacken, the hard lines of her stance soften, and she folds her arms across her chest. "Do not pretend to know anything of strength, Morpheus. It makes you look stupid." Despite everything- her brother's blood drying on her face, the sinful black stain on her heart and her armor, and the hollowness inside her chest, Solvej feels the corner of her mouth tilt upwards into a sardonic smile.

And why not? Does the Darkspawn think this to be hell? She has lived her hell, and it was much worse than this hazy facsimilie of memory. It took her too long to realize it, but she has now, and the pain recedes into old bitterness once more, whitewashed by stubborn pride that ensures her agony will never make it to her visage, her body language. She will slay her demons when she sees them, and ignore them until that moment. The quirk of her lips becomes a full-blown grin when he strikes again, and misses completely. "You really think I would choose to make myself this obvious if I cared?" She could have ensured that nobody ever recognized her again, that Delacroix and Emil alike remained ignorant of her identity, but instead she wears it on her sleeve- and everywhere else, too. She is faithless, she is unbound, she is perhaps even completely untrustworthy, and she wants everyone to know it.

Catching sight of Ethne resolving into visibility behind Morpheus like some kind of diminutive shadow, she nods. "All right, magelet. I see you. Now get me the hell out of here. I'm done speaking to Darkspawn."

Ethne didn't really understand the tenor of the conversation. For her, the sight of Solvej smiling like that is an odd one, displaced. She didn't even look back down at her brother, and the mage wondered if there was perhaps something to this situation that she didn't understand. Nevertheless, the absolute certainty in the woman's conviction clearly took Morpheus off-guard, her deceptively lighthearted dismissal of his words weakened him and strengthened her ally, and the younger of the two women nodded sagely, taking advantage of the fact that the Darkspawn seems to be struck temporarily dumb. With a thought, Sovej first was returned to the world of the waking, and though Ethne slumped noticably with the effort, she too smiled.

Perhaps it wasn't so hopeless as she'd fist assumed.