crystal; open

[earthbones]

FORM: Sending crystal
SENDER: Brónach
RECIPIENT: Everyone
WHAT: A few questions about dragons and what you're fighting for, nbd
WHEN: current
WHERE: Kirkwall outskirts if you want to track her down
NOTES: TES lore/your brain is now on skooma

This thing, the Inquisition, it stands between the world and its breaking. Or close enough for an outsider putting pieces in place so let the question be asked after everything has settled and we aren't sweating out of our skins with our minds unravelling. A question asked by a very old one to me. Older than anyone here. [What is time to a dragon? A thing they can't comprehend, she's comfortable enough to count everyone here as younger than Paarthurnax.]

Do you like the world? I would think, if you don't want it to end. But if you don't--

What is an end? Do you think time is a wheel? That time is one thing? That the dragon eats his own tail and that's it? Time has never been flat, has it? So, do you like the world? Do you not want it to end? Why are you here to do these things if you don't like the world? Maybe you think it's destiny though...

[Destiny is where her laugh rattles out, all piss and vinegar because what is destiny but ash in your mouth and the weight of claws in your spine pressing your down in the dirt? Answers will be weighted accordingly, mostly in the Nord, Altmer/Thalmor, and Dunmer camps as appropriate. Those are the Loudest opinions she's found that she can put names to.]

Comments

[purered]

If I may posit a question in turn:

Why must one necessarily like something to consider it worth saving? After all, even if one does not like the state of affairs, they cannot change if there is no world left.

[earthbones]

There's the-- there isn't a good word here for it; time that lives and breathes and ends so some would say and argue that fighting the ending of a time is selfish. It's your world, maybe you would want it to end in a different manner without the unfurling of wings on wings on wings but there is the next.

There is never an ending.

[purered]

In the broader sense, I'd agree.

[That's just science after all - the universe expands and contract again and again over billions and billions of year - new matter cannot be made and nothing can be completely destroyed.]

Life goes on, as they say - most would just prefer it doesn't abruptly go on without them. Selfish as one might think it is to try to change things rather than passively let things happen. After all, we're as much a part of this world as anything else.

[earthbones]

Yes. It isn't selfish to love the world enough to want to keep it living, breathing, make it stay instead of breaking apart. We come from the world.

Better to stop it and keep it fixed than work to turn back the hands on the clock.

[circleprodigy]

The world...has a lot of room for improvement, but no, I wouldn't want to see it end. If it does, the parts that I would like to see changed never will.

I can't say I believe in destiny, however. Everyone has a chance to make their own fate.

[earthbones]

That isn't an answer, city elf: do you like the world? I expect a more learned answer from your people than a Dalish. [No mockery but truth, and the Dalish are a mistake in her eyes.] You don't know what the end would be, what would come after.

I read part of destiny written on a stone wall ages past before my part in it, maybe all your silent lost deities here change it. There are hands at the wheel. They spin. How many hands spun your wheel?

[circleprodigy]

I barely qualify as a city elf, you must understand. It has been a very long time since I lived in an alienage. [Circle-raised and trained, since very young. She remembers even less of her heritage than most city elves.] And I'm not sure what you expect, but the answer would never be an uncomplicated one. The relationship between elves and Thedas at large simply doesn't allow for that. I can't say I like or hate the world without also keeping in mind the other side of it, good and bad.

Most of my life has not been under my own control, if that's what you mean. But that was due to shem politics, not fate. The Exalted March on the Dales created the alienage situation that exists to this day, and the Circle of Magi was set in place for centuries.

As for what 'the end' could be, I don't know for certain but I can venture a guess. We've had five Blights, but not all of the Old Gods are accounted for. There is always a chance that the next Blight could overrun the world. As a Grey Warden, it's my duty to avoid that outcome at all cost.

[iceblade]

I like the world, aye! At least the parts of it that aren't overrun with Chantry nonsense. The world beyond that is so much more than what their clergy thinks, and I want to see more of it. The hold will want a lot of tales and I don't aim to disappoint.

Why would I want it to end, when there's so much yet to see and do?

[earthbones]

Nords liked their world I think in the same way you did, it makes sense it was their mountain high above it all. Younger than us, never had a thing ripped out of them. Same here I think.

Why does everyone think of ending as ending? Mortality is fixed in me too but what happened here to keep you so close looking to your own ending. That nothing beyond and beyond and beyond might be thought of?

[iceblade]

I don't pretend to understand the lowlanders' ways of thinking, but remember what I said before about Avvar and permanence being a foreign concept? It's true in all things, from our settlements, to marriages, to alliances to the gods themselves. Nothing ever really lasts, even an 'ending'. Some souls are reborn, clothed in new flesh. Others...well, the Lady of the Skies takes care of that and she isn't sharing details with those still living. The point is, change comes, whether or not we're ready for it. It's the way of the world, as long as we Avvar have known it.

What about you? Do you like anything about this world? What's an end, to you? What's beyond that?

[rowancrowned]

The sun's eventual setting ought not distract from the light it offers at its zenith.

[earthbones]

I gave the world my teeth to keep it in its place. [Mmm not an answer she wanted, but perhaps what she might have expected. Who else remembers the world and loves it so as Bosmer?] And if the next is the whole of the world within the great beast? Not ash, dirt, barren bone but all who live through swallowed down inside it?

[rowancrowned]

A thing so vast and intricate cannot be unmade except by its maker, however great the beast may be. The eternal cannot fear the end, for they have no way to grasp the concept.

[ gently: ] Who knows what the next might be? Great scores may never have to confront it, with thanks to your teeth.

[kecharitomene]

If I won't love the world, how can I ask the Maker to love it?

[earthbones]

You could still ask whatever you pleased where I come from but they would all be there to hear it and might not like the answer. It's why this place is...troubling. That the tales of the Dalish children have theirs shut away, the Maker turned his back-- when there is nothing Divine to listen the world is small.

[Says the one who might benefit if she did not look to every creeping thing that whispers, that leaves out a strange thing for her grasping greedy hands. But then that's what happens to her, what has happened, and so she takes what she will of each thing.]

You saw an ugliness I remember. Do you think your Maker will love it?

[kecharitomene]

I hope he'd grieve it—you have to love to grieve, I think, no? You can't feel sad for a thing you can't feel. So you love, so you grieve.

We must be very hard to love. I have to practise.

[tactical_alert]

Are you...quite all right? [Listening in, it seems she's been touched with a madness.] You seem particularly troubled.

[earthbones]

I have questions, are questions not allowed? Debate is...the nature of things with many where I was from. [Not: where I come from. Not: home. Not: with my people. Too much time up a mountain with Paarthurnax.] I wish to know if people like the world, it's a simple enough question and yet--

Don't you think it's troubling? When the world is what it is, when the world is so wrong here that you became the same colour as a shade, when you forget yourself and have to be made to stay among the living, would you not be troubled by many things?

[tactical_alert]

[It's offputting. The rambling, yes, but the manner of it, the implications he thinks he gleans between and around words--that is the troubling bit. But unless she admits to something rather wild (or involving the use of certain plants), he might as well play along. It's a fair, if odd, question.]

I do not like the world. If I liked it so much, I wouldn't be fighting for something better. I'd be riding high in a mansion of gold somewhere, perhaps, or merely content to stay my place, whatever place that might once have been, but no. I strive for change, for betterment, to see that the world becomes something more likeable, if not by the end of my time then perhaps by the end of the next generation's time.

[faithlikeaseed]

There's some as would say I shouldn't like it as it is, being what I am. [Elf. Mage. Circle mage.] But the world's the Maker's greatest gift to us, and we to it. Putting right what's wrong with it extends His Making.

Time is-- The Maker's said to stand outside it, but beyond that we're taught it's a line, an arrow, always pointing forward into the future. Though there are places in the world, I've heard, where the past leaks through--so it can't be flat, can it?

[earthbones]

There's many who would say I shouldn't, being what I am too. [Bosmer. In a land that doesn't love her. Touched by fate.] Is that what you believe your purpose to be then, setting the world to rights, moving the hands on the clock or thrusting something through them to keep them from ticking onward?

I can split time three ways because time is Akatosh, dragon of time who is the concept of time. Then Alduin son of Akatosh, World-Eater, who is time ending so he is time in its linear way with a beginning and end. And since I'm mer or elf, I have Auri-El, infinite looping time because the circle isn't flat. There are places where the world has wounds through time.

[faithlikeaseed]

Yes--moving the hands forward, surely. The world's a living thing; something that's not allowed to grow or change isn't fulfilling the measure of its Making. And we're meant to change things, to create new things in the way the spirits weren't--so we can't spend all our lives simply maintaining what was.

[A pause, a beat.] If it's a circle but it's got an end to it, that means it's--ended before and will end again, doesn't it? Is Alduin always the end of it, every...time?

[limier]

One needn't like the world to live in it. I imagine this the most common thread through our motley Inquisition.

[ all survival comes at cost of another. still, there are differences of scale — a Venatori future leaves little for the rest — ]

What has brought the matter to mind?

[earthbones]

You should like the world in order to do the things that must be done to keep it as it is when the end is coming, otherwise what other right do you have to murder the unborn egg of the new cycle? The only reason that satisfied a dragon older than every beat of all hearts present.

[Even the immortal hearts, children if time are hands of the clock, the beats of their hearts are innumerable.]

I had time to think when I recovered. Time to read. Listen. I've talked to people since I came here, and sometimes my mind is troubled by them.

[limier]

What right do any of us have, to struggle toward life? It is living. What would you trade of that?