you can't go home again because home has ceased to exist

[be_valorous]

WHO: Eldiana Surana, Wynne
WHERE: Camp
WHEN: Post-The Broken Circle and Redcliffe
WARNINGS: Grief, trauma
NOTES: TBA

---

Eldy sits by the fire. Leans is a better way of putting: she leans against Noble Beast, using the massive mabari like one might use the end of a sofa. Except this sofa breathes in and out, and probably needs a bath, and loves her. So many people over the past few weeks have called her good that Beast's simple adoration is comforting. Beast doesn't care if she's good or bad, just that she's around.

It's one of the many things she's trying to avoid thinking about, no matter that Jowan seems to have forgiven her for running to Irving.

Jowan.

Fuck.

She can't think of him, either. Not that she left her best friend in the cells under Redcliffe's castle. She can't think about Irving, shaking and bloodied and seemingly so frail as she helped him down the stairs. She can't think about the Circle, oh Maker and all His mercy she can't, she can't. Except she is. She can't escape it. Letting Zevran into her tent last night had helped, had let her escape, but sex isn't exactly a long-term solution. Besides, she's sore enough today as it is, and her life is now made up of walking over roads instead of well-worn flagstones and stairs.

No, tonight, there's nothing for it except to sit by the fire, looking at the flickering flames, and turn the golem control rod over and over in her hands as she thinks and tries not to think.

It'd been her home. It'd been her home since she was a small child, and there'd been bodies and blood and destruction where there used to be her friends, her teachers. Amice was crumpled in a pool of her own blood but Keilli was alive enough to say that they all should be dead. Sir Carroll was still being a jackass while Cullen was broken.

('Someone was quite the little heartbreak when they were an apprentice. My, my,' Zevran had said and faced with Cullen's tortured whispers, it's not as if she has any room to deny it.)

Over and over in her hands, the control rod goes.

She should talk with Wynne.

She's...

Politely avoiding Wynne. Carefully. You have to avoid teachers carefully, otherwise they pick up on it. But she's not sure what to say, so she sits, and listens to Beast' breathing, and tries not to think.

Comments

[vesselofthespirit]

No one would ever really be able to pinpoint who has it worse in this scenario. On the one hand, Eldiana had gotten surprised by the situation in the Circle when she had returned to ask for help. Nothing would ever be able to dissipate that shock. On the other hand, Wynne had seen it happen, from beginning to end. Nothing would change her memories and her inability to stop it all from happening.

Sometimes she can still feel the fear, smell the blood. All of those dead bodies and for what. Someone's experiment gone wrong? Someone's wish to be in charge before their time? It's all a little too much. The only saving grace is that at least some of the mages had survived. She had. Eldiana. And, of course, the First Enchanter. A few others, naturally, but not enough. Not everyone.

In its own way, this is worse than Ostagar. Wynne still remembers that, as well.

Wynne bows her head for a few seconds, a silent prayer to the Maker to lend them all strength, before she pushes herself to her feet and moves towards Eldiana's tent. This will be one of the few times where she actually seeks out another at their camp, but this time she feels it is warranted. Her former student needs guidance, or at least support. And to be honest, Wynne could use a distraction.

The dog still needs a bath and that smell is almost enough of a distraction. Almost. She makes a note to propose bathing the mabari later.

"How are you holding up?" she asks as she settles down on the ground nearby, wasting no time in getting to the heart of the matter.

[be_valorous]

Eldy glances at her. Just a glance, then her gaze goes back somewhere between the shadows and the fire. It's not as though Wynne is painful to look at, just... Just... Looking at anyone seems a little too much, in this moment.

"I'm still all together," she replies. Part truth, part automatic bravado: I'm fine, I can handle it, you don't need to worry about me, you don't need to tell the templars. But the only templar around is Alistair, she supposes, and he doesn't count because they are both wardens now.

It's that which prompts further admission. "Still a bit shaken."

She moistens her lips, glances over again.

"How are you?"

[vesselofthespirit]

There are many things Wynne could say at this particular moment, not the least of which involves the fact that she, too, is possessed. Not in the same way, certainly, but the fact remains that she is kept alive by a spirit inhabiting her body in some way. If that doesn't count as possession, she doesn't know what actually does.

At least it should not technically make her an abomination. Not that she is about to mention this to anyone without just cause.

Still a bit shaken doesn't cover half of what Eldiana is feeling, she knows, and neither does it cover much of anything for herself. So, she sticks with one thing in particular.

"I just watched my family burn to the ground," she points out, saying what the both of them likely feel. "Sometimes I wonder if I should have stayed to help the survivors rebuild." But she had felt that her place was traveling with a young woman she had seen pass from apprentice to mage. A young woman who might just be able to end this nightmare. If she doesn't, they won't have anything to rebuild.

[be_valorous]

The silence is tight for a moment, the words I just watched my family burn to the ground wrapping themselves around Eldy's chest, squeezing into her ribs. She wasn't there. She turned up in the death-throes of the rebellion, wading through blood and fleshy corruption to try and reach Irving. The storeroom had been locked: Please, please, by all the Maker and Andraste's grace, please let there have been more survivors who locked themselves in there to wait it out.

"I didn't even think of staying," she admits, finally. "And I'm glad you didn't. As... As selfish as that probably sounds."

[vesselofthespirit]

The fact that Eldiana had come at all is important. That she had stayed despite the carnage and the torture the blood mages were throwing out at everyone meant she cared. Having any "outsider" care about the state of the mages isn't something that's easily put to words, as Eldy herself likely knows well.

"Not at all," Wynne assures her. "We all have our part to play in the state of the world. You have to lead the fight against the Blight. They'll find a way to rebuild with or without us. You're the reason we had any survivors at all. We very easily could have lost everything."

Everything and everyone. If that had been the case, Wynne doesn't know what she would have done. The Circle, for all its unpleasantness and prison-like atmosphere, has always been her home. Despite some of her less than pleasant choices and memories wrought from those choices, the mages, and some of the templars, are her family. Eldy's as well, she imagines. Not having the assurance that "home" is safe and will always be there is a gut-wrenching realization.

[be_valorous]

"It's been my home for elven years." Eldy's voice quiet, almost apologetic. "Since I was seven. I- Andraste forgive me, but so much of what I'm doing now feels right. As if being a warden is what I was meant for. I couldn't-" Well. No one can take her back now. She's a warden, and wardens do not belong in Circles. "I can't imagine myself living in Kinloch Hold again.

But it's my home. Was. Was my home. If I can't save my home... Bah." She hits her thigh lightly with the control rod. "I think you know what I mean. Besides, Teryn Loghain is causing enough trouble. I couldn't let him destroy my home and everyone in just for politics, or whatever fool thing he thinks he's playing at."

Poisoning Arl Eamon. Dangling freedom in front of the caged. Part of her can understand that these are political moves designed for some purpose, but a larger part remembers Ostagar, remembers the devastation at Redcliffe which hadn't even had to happen in the first place. She remembers the refugees fleeing. Mama, when are the bad men coming? Daddy, where's my pet lamb? She has the stench of corruption overwhelming the comforting smell of books in Kinloch Hold's library and her friends lying in pools of blood, and she can't imagine anyone deciding that this is a worthy price for power. She can't understand how the Hero of River Dane is letting his own people die, and she doesn't want to understand. Childish of her, she knows. She needs to understand.

Slowly, Eldy starts to turn the control rod back over and over. Methodically. Thoughtfully.

"How did you think he was? Loghain, I mean. At Ostagar."

[vesselofthespirit]

The Circle has been Wynne's home for so much longer than that, and she's had more personal things happen here, but what Eldiana speaks of is something Wynne has felt as well. Very keenly. Except she has experience and the length of a lifetime lived in the comfort of the Circle. She hadn't been able to stop the chaos until Eldiana turned up to save them. Out of the blue. With no warning. Maybe it was the Maker's hand that brought her there at their time of need. Maybe it was just luck. Whatever the case, Wynne is grateful for it, grateful that any of them could be saved at all.

"Any one of us still living there should have seen it coming," she points out gently. "We couldn't stop the blood magic or demon summoning until you came. Maybe we all failed individually, but thank the Maker we could succeed together." Even if they did lose so many, the important thing is to think of those whom they could save. None of it is easy to swallow, but at least they didn't lose all of the mages. All of their family. Wynne knows they have Eldiana and her companions to thank for that. For their timely arrival.

The question about Loghain isn't entirely expected, but it makes sense, given everything else she's heard. Wynne tilts her head slightly as she considers. She hadn't been allowed much room at Ostagar. She was a mage and thus was forced to stay mostly in one place. But she had seen him a time or two and so she gives the answer the consideration it deserves.

"Disdainful. He didn't serve his king as much as he should have. I didn't like him, the few times I did see him, but I would have followed him if ordered." She glances back at Eldiana, wondering what the new warden recruit would have gotten out of it that she could not have. "What about you? I think you saw more of him than I was allowed to."

[be_valorous]

It'd been startling to see Wynne at the camp. Edly's warden recruit uniform gave her leave her wander around, to talk to whomever she wished (within reason of importance, of course), to just.... do nothing except get her bearings and then find Alistair. The templars couldn't touch her. But Wynne, a woman Eldy was used to thinking of as senior, with all the freedoms and respect that entails. But at the camp, Wynne had to.... stay here. Within sight of the templars.

It'd been disconcerting. She isn't used to thinking of herself like this, having more freedom than her seniors.

Well.

More freedom when there isn't a price on her head. It had been a day or so before all that started.

That, too, is something she doesn't understand. Why try and kill her and Alistair? They'd been too busy fighting their way up the tower to see the timing of anything; she had been prepared to think that maybe the teyrn had tried to save the rest of his army until she, Alistair and Morrigan had reached Lothering. Then, suddenly, it all looked... suspicious. Planned. Or panic. Maybe that's worse.

Eldy blinks, trying to get her thoughts back on the road to productivity. "He didn't like the king's battle plan," is what she says. "Throwing everything at once. And yet, he didn't want to wait for foreign aid, while the king didn't want to wait for his uncle. Or... so it seemed.

The king reminded him that he, Cailan, was king. It."

Well, the man is dead and Alistair is out of earshot.

"I don't think a king who is secure would need to remind people, let alone a man who served his father. I don't know, Wynne, it was strange, at the war meeting."

[vesselofthespirit]

Wynne has ever grown used to the lack of freedom in her life. Ever since the baby, she had learned that lesson hard. She might not like it and a part of her might rail against it and use every chance her seniority might buy her to leave the Circle, even for a short time, but she is used to it. Thedas doesn't seem equipped to change on that score. Still, it had been something of a slap in a way to see someone so young, fresh out of her Harrowing, walking around without a care to the templars. Wynne was, honestly, happy for her; Eldiana would do much better as a warden recruit than locked up her whole life.

Wynne might think of the Circle as her home, and a necessary thing at that, but she knows some simply never do see it the same way. That is a fact of life, for all that she might try to help them anyway.

"I suppose we'll never know, will we?" Wynne comments. They might never know King Cailan's real feelings on the subject, Maker watch over his soul. Now all they have left is to rely on each other and hope that Loghain comes to his senses soon. The whole thing makes her wonder about Queen Anora's part in all of this, but that is something she might never know, either.

"None of them are really working to stop this Blight now, as it is. Or they are not capable of such," Wynne points out. "I'm afraid that is your job now. Whatever you may have gleaned from that meeting you can use now. Be secure in your leadership and others will follow you."

Don't make the same mistakes as Cailan and Loghain is really what she means. She doesn't see Eldiana doing either of those, however, and that is partly why she decided to join the young mage warden in her quest. This is something worth doing, worth fighting for. After all, Wynne is living on borrowed time now. She may as well make the most of it.