What measure is a mage?

[watchesandlistens]

FORM: Sending Crystal
SENDER: Corvo
RECIPIENT: Everyone
WHAT: Corvo's not like the other girls mages
WHEN: Now
WHERE: Everywhere
NOTES: is a mage an animal, vegetable, or mineral?

[ The voice that speaks is low, gravelly. Not one often heard over the crystals, or around Skyhold in general. He's not the chattiest guy around. But he's curious. ]

I can use magic, but I would not consider myself a mage.

[ Pause. ]

Not that I have anything against mages. I simply...do not identify as one, particularly within the context of mages in this world.

[ Another pause, to let that sink in. Then he gets to the point. ]

How would you define a mage? Is everyone that's capable of magic truly to be considered one? Perhaps there should be a label for people who do not so easily fit into those categories--if one does not already exist.

Comments

[inagutterson]

D'you feel like whinging all the time? Because that's a big thing with mages. Speaking as someone from the one race that can't do any magic at all and has to listen to them going on and on and bloody on.

[watchesandlistens]

[ Oh hey it's potato man. ]

I...don't think I 'whinge'. I try to avoid complaining, generally.

[ He just broods internally, thank you. ]

[inagutterson]

[Dwarf, fuckin' rude you gross human also those were his family members.]

But do you really? Isn't this a stealth whinge? I've lived around humans, I know how you do.

[Better watch, Wardens like to think they've got the market cornered on that one.]

[watchesandlistens]

[ Sounds like something a potato would say. ]

Why ask for my opinion if you're not going to listen to it?

[inagutterson]

[Says the person that goes around shooting potatoes.]

Lots of mages lived in Circles, right, so their whole thing is tied up in Circles. Either running from ever having to be in one or ever having to go back in one if they get out and if you get talking to one then most of the time it's going to be about 'oh but it was so terrible'. Or some of them now cry because they need to wash their own undergarments. So. [By the way, that 'so' is his way of saying 'context is important' but he isn't the sort to say that, good luck.]

That's just for humans because you look like a human so I'm going to call you a human. The Chantry'd probably try to stuff you into a Circle if you did something they didn't like the look of and it was normal times and they could say it looked like magic.

[Or smelled like magic. Sounded like it. Tasted like it. Felt like magic in their condescending Chantry bones. All the senses like to get in amongst it.]

[watchesandlistens]

I'm a human. [ That, at least, is one thing he'll admit to. ] I suppose if it was...how it'd been previously, they'd certainly be trying to put me in a Circle, if they knew. [ Trying being the operative word here. ]

But things are different, and I've never been near a Circle.

[inagutterson]

Well yeah, didn't hear about an elfblooded rifter before now and I know plenty of elfblooded folk to know them. [Liadan is somewhere with her popcorn at the ready for the next dispatch from Skyhold from him about this.] So what can you do because the company I'm with, we have a mage, and she can use knives since when is a knife not handy? But I saw what you did.

[You dick.]

D'you want me to tell you about them? I worked with one of the most famous of them all back in the day.