Post #2424613 in The City of Chains, a roleplay on RPG

Amalia’s black armor was piled neatly in the sand, close to a small campfire constructed from driftwood and lit with flint and a flammable oil she’d extracted from some local plants. There was something to be said for the slow burn of it, and if she could only make it a bit more viscous, she might be able to light a weapon on fire for her own use. A strange thing to be thinking about at a time like this, but if it wasn’t something practical, her mind would drift instead to that which she didn’t want to remember. A weakness, and one that was forever countermanded. She’d never be able to forget, not if she lived a hundred more years.

The sun was rising over the sea, shading the blue waters with oranges and reds and blush-pinks, but she stared at it only incidentally, not really seeing it. The morning was already quite warm, but the ocean’s breeze tugged at the sleeveless linen of her tunic, tickling over her bare arms and leaving faint gooseflesh on the interrupted dusky tan of Rivaini skin. With her boots similarly discarded some distance back, she was bare from her knees down, the same mixture of white lines, reddish discolored splotches and the occasional small circle of raised scar tissue marring the smooth contours of muscle and tendon. She sat on a large, flat stone, not ten feet from the lapping waves. High tide would come in soon. When she closed her eyes, it was almost Seheron, or the very edge of Par Vollen, when jungle gave way to white sand and turquoise water. The salt smell of the air was the same, the way it played over her limbs a reminder of sensations she’d allowed herself to feel all the time, when she was unblemished.

But people did not display openly what they were ashamed of, and Amalia was no exception.

She’d scrubbed clean her face of the red paint, and her hands of the Tevinters’ blood, yet she still felt dirty. Not because she’d killed those men—she was no saint, that she could feel much empathy for her victims anymore. She was a killer, born and bred to the task, but she was still thankful that it was not all she was. Sighing, Amalia looked to her left, where a jagged cliff face led up to a bluff, which overlooked the water at a much higher vantage point. With a small wince for the residual pain in her ribcage, she stood smoothly, treading over to the foot of the bluff and looking up the sheer stone. Eyes narrowed with determination, she took hold of a protruding bit of rock first with one hand, then the other, and afterwards curled her toes against more, scaling the wall as she had a thousand others, in childhood and beyond, her progress painfully slow due to lingering injury. Or perhaps just lingering guilt.

When she at last pulled herself up onto the bluff, she approached the edge of it and looked down at the water. Here, the waves beat against stone, slowly wearing it smooth with years of persistence. Amalia had the absurd thought that she sympathized with the rocks, then shook her head, reaching up to flick back a piece of her forelock that the wind plastered to her nose. “It’s heavy,” she murmured to no one, and indeed, her shoulders were slumped with it—the weight of doubt, the weight of living. But the wind and the water had no answer for her, and even the memories of a time before shame and burdens lifted her no higher. She was not a bird; she could not fly. Her life had been learning to keep her feet upon the ground where they belonged. Discipline, strength, and dedication she had been taught. She had forged these things into armor, and in such raiment, she could muster the lightness for no flights of fancy. Sparrow had flown away, and part of Amalia had always felt betrayed by that. The other part had only been jealous.

There is only one choice.

She knew this. She made it every day, with every action and thought, and in this… she was what? Free? Certain? Maybe once. No longer. Not when she watched other people make other choices every day. Not when she had grown to respect them, care for them, as much as she had. Her choice would break Sparrow’s wings and shackle her to the ground. Her choice would collar Aurora and Nostariel—the burdens on their shoulders would be literal. Her choice would deny Ithilian everything he seemed to want, everything he strove for. Choosing as she had would break them all, like glass dashed against stones. But choosing as she had was for so long the only reason she could function. The Qun had given her everything—and it had been her only anchor in a storm the like of which she had only experienced once. Sparrow’s betrayal had been the first, but not the most difficult.

If she gave it up… how could she? It was the only thing she had. Everything else was just hissra—just temporary illusion. He had proven it so. She was not meant to fly, not like they could. He’d proven that, too. She couldn’t believe he still had so much hold on her, after all this time…

Gritting her teeth furiously, Amalia backed up a dozen paces, intending to just climb down the bluff and try again to divert her thoughts from this useless circle, or perhaps to arrange how she was ever going to explain it to Ithilian if he chose to ask, but she stopped, one of her hands curling into a fist, and looked down at it. Pursing her lips, she abruptly turned on her heel and bounced into a sprint, gathering her legs underneath her and launching herself out over the rocks. Her momentum tore at her clothes and her hair, plastering it back against her head, and the sudden exertion had pulled at her sore muscles, but she didn’t care. Because she wanted to know. Needed to know, if only for one foolish, weak moment, what it must feel like to fly.

But then gravity took over, as it always must, and she tipped herself down into a swan dive, breaking the water of the ocean only a little as she hit it. The sea was chill, not warm as it was on the island, but it was not unbearably so, and she opened her eyes underwater, looking about her at the stones and the sandy bottom and the colorful explosion of a small reef, and she wondered why she’d never seen things like this before. She knew every medical and venomous use of urchins and coral and sea-plants and fish, but she’d never noticed how brightly-hued it all was, how beautiful, for its own sake.

Her head broke the surface, and Amalia gulped in air. She’d never thought much about how sweet it tasted, outside of the city like this. With sure strokes, she swam for the shore, stepping out onto the beach and retaking her seat on the stone, which was warm beneath her. Without her harp, she found herself bereft of something idle to do with her hands, so she shook her hair out and combed through it until the tangles were gone, trying not to think of anything at all but the sun on her head and her back, the free movement of air over her skin, and the fact that she was alive. She knew not what to make of it all, and none of her burdens lifted, none of her questions resolved. But the sun was warm and the air fresh, and that felt a little further away because of it.

Ithilian never expected Amalia to ask him to join her, and she did not surprise him. They never seemed to ask things like that of each other. It was always a request to deal with gangs encroaching on the Alienage, or assistance dealing with slavers and Tevinter magisters, the kind of day where their lives were on the line, not their happiness. The rest just sort of... happened. Even after every misstep they took in their efforts to work together effectively, they still found their way back into close proximity. And to think, he had once called her shem, as if it were the shape of one's ears alone that defined one as such. He'd been such a fool, for so long.

The Dalish hunter walked alone out to the coast. Amalia did nothing without purpose, and she would not have told him where she intended on going if she was not open to the idea of him joining her. His motivation was largely made up of concern for her. Her physical wounds, grievous as they had been, were well taken care of, and she would recover quickly, so it was not that which concerned Ithilian. It was the way she'd frozen in the face of a man last night, the way nothing about her had been calm and collected the entire time, at least by her standards. A stranger would still have thought her manner cold, but to Ithilian, who had spent so much of the past few years near her, the differences were obvious.

The road was calm and quiet, and as he neared the coast, Ithilian removed his shoes and placed them in his pack. The sand between his toes was no forest floor, but it was not the streets of a misery ridden city, either. He wore no weapons apart from Parshaara sheathed at his belt. He was dressed lightly, with nothing covering his face, his dark hair pushed back away from his forehead to rest at the base of his neck. Lia had thankfully not been awake when he'd departed, else she probably would have demanded to go with him, and he was terrible at refusing her. This time, though, he would have. This was something for Ithilian and Amalia alone. Perhaps it was a chance to say something that had needed to be said for some time now, though what that thing was, Ithilian did not know.

He found her dripping from the water of the sea, raking fingers through her hair, the motion reminding him strongly of... no, he would not say that. He shrugged out of his pack, setting it down against a nearby rock, which he then seated himself against as well, perhaps five feet from her. He said nothing at first, simply taking in the view, the smell of the salt sea, the warm morning greeting them and letting them know that they had indeed survived the ordeal last night. "If you don't wish to speak..." he said finally, "we don't need to." They'd spent many hours as such, just silent, under the leaves of the vhenadahl, or even side by side. But he sensed there was something she needed to figure out, and that she had wordlessly asked him to come here that he might help her do so. So much always went unsaid between them, and maybe that had become the problem.

Amalia exhaled through her nose, shaking her head faintly. “I don’t particularly wish to,” she confirmed quietly, “but I must. What happened yesterday was inexcusable. I was unfocused and unreliable, and while it cannot be justified, it demands explanation. He knows where I am, now, and he may well return because of that.” It was an outside chance, but still a chance. There was no mistaking that it would be difficult to offer that explanation, however—it was a story she’d told in full only once, and that through the medium of a written report to the Ariqun. She’d never been forced to speak the words, and though he would not force her, she would certainly make herself do it.

But… how to explain? There were implications beyond the actions, but they were not always easily understood by those who did not possess a Qunari’s worldview. Shooting him a sidelong glance, she let her hands fall from the curtain of her hair and flattened them against the warm stone. Even the fingers were scarred—dexterous digits that managed to look as though they belonged to someone clumsy, with dozens of tiny nicks along them. “May I ask,” she started, folding her legs beneath her, “how it is that you earned the scars on your face?”

Now that the subject turned to it, and now that he studied her more, he began to notice that her scars far outnumbered his, and Ithilian had a great deal. Without the robes, or the full body's worth of armor to cover her... he did not want to imagine what she'd been through to get all of those, though he had a feeling he was going to find out soon, regardless. Whatever it was... for her to have hidden them for so long and every day, she must have been somehow ashamed of them, which implied they were not earned in a manner similar to his. The scars they'd earned together while defending those who couldn't defend themselves were nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be hidden. Ithilian remembered the way his face had been marred fondly, actually. It had been a turning point in his life, as it was for every Dalish hunter. He only hid it often because the appearance was often seen as grotesque.

"It was a bear," he said, the left corner of his mouth quirking upward. "A mother of two cubs. Every Dalish hunter must prove themselves in the forest, on their own merits, and return with the pelt of a predator, before they can be considered an adult, and be marked with the vallaslin." He unbuttoned the collar of the tunic he wore that she might see his, though she had laid eyes on it many times before. "It was the first time I'd hunted dangerous prey on my own. I was fourteen. I found the cubs alone, and thought myself blessed by Andruil, that she had granted me an easy kill." Even if Ithilian was a fool recently, he had never been so great a fool as when he was a teenager, and the thought threatened to give him a smile.

"I wounded a cub, but no sooner had I than the mother surprised me from the side. Even for so great a bear, she was remarkably quiet. Her first swipe was what gave me these marks, and took my eye from me." He'd been certain in that moment that he was going to die, that his arrogance would kill him as his punishment for taking the gods so lightly, for simply assuming that they favored him. "She taught me the true face of Mythal, the mother and protector, before she died. It was the first time I had been humbled in my life." It was certainly not the last, and in his opinion, it had been the least of the corrections he'd received. The other three all came from people he'd known in his thirty-eight years, people who had made him into a far better person than he ever could have been on his own. His eyes fell to the medallion he'd made for her, that symbol of Mythal. It had been well-bestowed, he believed.

Snippet #2424613

located in Kirkwall, a part of The City of Chains, one of the many universes on RPG.

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