crystal

[arcaneadvisor]

FORM: Sending crystal
SENDER: Morrigan
RECIPIENT: All
WHAT: Let's talk about what god is aka so you found a troubling thing and need to address that one day
WHEN: Post-tourney
WHERE: Kirkwall/Kirkwall-adjacent
NOTES: If you want to push Morrigan on certain things you can certainly try but her finding Geldauran's Claim isn't public knowledge yet given the possibility for it to be highly inflammatory, especially with the rifter status and the Dalish in positions of power in the Inquisition

What do you believe gods are Inquisition? Do you indeed believe that there are gods? The Chantry that likes to press and to meddle might not be for all but there are many of those who will still have the name of the Maker upon their lips in a time of strife. The Dalish have the Creators. The Avvar have beliefs about spirits and gods, and the Chasind have gods of a fashion, men and women beloved of them.

Rifters need not be shy in answering, I ask about...what a god is. What it might be. If it is a thing indeed. Something far beyond the comprehension of any mortal being, shifting even beyond the Veil or Fade that we might never know what it truly is, or if it might something else. Something closer to flesh and blood fashioned long ago. Shaped in the way the world is shaped.

[That phrase turned over and over: There is only the subject and the object, the actor and the acted upon.]

Perhaps… [and well she might as well voice a possibility when they're in Kirkwall where the Veil was stretched so thin long ago] once 'twas possible to raise those of ambition and power as high as the magisters of old Tevinter, to leave terror and awe in their wake depending on the mood, the whim, the offering.

[Eventually...well eventually there will be a report, but until she can trust how to write it, can know what the reception might be when it dares to leave the small group that know even the truth of what lies deep in the Tirashan, she can't bring her hand to write it.]

Comments

[arcaneadvisor]

[So much of her life has been alone.

Alone with Flemeth in the Wilds to watch the world from outside. Alone at the camp with her own agenda for that year of the Blight. Alone in the Crossroads. Alone with Kieran. In the Court. Alone, alone, alone-- (Skyhold onwards, the first time to not be that way, to actually have more than she's had before.)]

Pain is a lesson of itself, and loneliness...loneliness teaches lessons also. There is much one learns when one is alone. Entirely alone. I have been alone but for my mother, and there was no Maker or spirit to reach out with any tale that might comfort me in that time. [No, all the tales were Flemeth's, and all the tales had a purpose, now isn't the time to be repeating them for all the choked bitterness that creeps into her voice.]

We might look to our history and learn a lesson from it, but that might require looking harder than most are comfortable with. For the ancient elves did leave roads but those roads are their bones, and that the earth of Thedas churns wetly, blackly, for we feed it all too readily with slaughter yet wonder why the Veil stretches thin. And the Mages in their Chantries before the war with all their books learnt not a thing of what happens when another holds the leash for you, walking blindly to the slaughter as they offered up their throats wondering why the wolves came time and time ago. Those are the lessons they might learn. If they are to believe anything, perhaps 'tis what they allow to happen will happen again, and again, and again, and that there are times when you do not escape a thing whole. Rarely, if ever, do you leave a thing that does not wish you to leave without some ragged strip left behind. You should count yourself lucky if that is the only piece of you it ever has to sate itself with.

But there are the wonders that were left, the things that people do, and have done, and will continue to do in the name of a thing they raise up. I wonder what it would be if the line were not: you are doing your best and someone cares. If it were that: behold, for I am here, I have the will, and that was enough. I believe there was something, but who can know what a god is, what we twisted things into with all that was lost or forgotten, through time and through direction.

[That, in truth, sounds more in line with getting Thedas to follow. The rest coming after the comforting story you tell to make it all better after.]

[elegiaque]

I'm much more interested in why people believe what they do believe already than what they should. Stories offer meaning and purpose; whether the meaning is correct or the purpose warped by years of slightly different retellings, it still is.

I don't give a fuck what people believe. I've never found any of the stories I've been told in that context particularly compelling or useful, so the comparative merits of different stories is...

( an indelicate noise. ) What do I care what colour the blanket someone comforts themselves to sleep with at night is? Conceptually that it happens at all is interesting.

( but, ultimately, she makes no real distinction between those beliefs. the avvar, maybe, with their spirits. )

[arcaneadvisor]

What if-- [Half a mind to change it to private but only three others know, and Morrigan is extending them a rare trust in the discovery to have stoppered their mouths, what Thranduil extends however is entirely up to him as the province of lovers and partners is an unfamiliar country to her, their borders skirted but not crossed, customs observed for the most] What if we look at faith as something else. The world is the stage, almost, there is the actor upon it, and those in the audience. There is something about their performance that captivates so greatly that they lean close when commanded, gasp at the right time. If long ago there were those in the world with power - magic in the world is not what it is now, not so small, not such fragments - that it could command.

[Is this too much, is this too dangerous? Well she has to continue now because there are times when a hunger for knowledge will keep you going when you know you should stop. Put down the book, the pen, put out the candle. Leave the ruin for another day. Down tools when the glassworks have shredded your voice to nothing only to find it's impossible.]

If the why is a lure dangled to those who would take it. The ones as you say who seek such things of which there have ever been many as there have been powerful forces throughout history. Powerful men, powerful women. Powerful enough, you think, that with skillful words, might be crafted in the fashion of a god?

[Morrigan might know her way around the elven language and her history, but unlike some, she isn't a poet, and she would welcome the input. This is more than the crafting of the image of the court (but where did all that come from, the Chantry and Orlais nestled side by side, and the Chantry from Andraste from the Alamarri and so it goes and goes)]

[elegiaque]

Andraste was a woman, once, before she was a statue or a story. Did the Maker raise her up, ( mmm probably not, if you were to ask gwenaëlle's own opinion, ) or did we? Trevelyan was a woman, too. Look what happened to her, the short time she was raised up in front of everyone - what might have done if she lived. That was the point of what I started doing, when I was writing; we had a symbol and she died. We needed something to fill the gap.

We still haven't. Bureaucracy doesn't inspire people, committees don't, divisions. Not the way gods do. People knelt before her in Haven, when this started. If we live, she'll live. People will remember that she started it even if it was the Hands of the Divine that made her, because it's a better story than these mages went on strike for better working conditions and the rifters didn't want to work at all and Corypheus just took a country from us.

If the Inquisition succeeds, it'll be her legacy. What if she'd been as powerful as history, then?

( gwenaëlle might not have read the words that troubled morrigan, but their echo is in her matter of fact assessment. )

[arcaneadvisor]

[One day, someone is going to find and piece together thrice-damned parts of Tyrdda's tale. More pieces to be slotted together, not necessarily of Andraste but the Avvar and involvement extending far beyond.

Morrigan wonders if her smile can be heard, somehow. This is the input she wanted here. The crafting, the creation, how a thing is put together just so it lasts far beyond. Not something Morrigan understands beyond the painful weight of passing shadows and her own watchful legacy, and that isn't what matters here and now.]

I wonder how many speak of her these days or if they wait. 'Twas rather...striking for the tavern in Skyhold to be named as it was. [The Herald's Rest. Was it meant to be a jest or had it become something rather heavier after, when they'd brought her body through the gates with their first group of strays?]

This is a thing of many heads. Many legs. I've said that before, perhaps not to you but you might teach a bear to dance, and this is far from a bear when it bites itself, trips over in public as it does for lack of direction. Homelands were lost in the past. Shattered. Sunk or ground utterly into nothing but shards bleached same as bare bones beneath the sun, or swallowed by dirt and vines. Emptiness...is easy to look to fill. [Why does Orlais look the way it does for all the people who raise their fists to the heavens? Because even little girls who smell of swamps will still want beautiful things, and there's something captivating, even when you're close enough to the rot to taste it on every breath.] Something bigger than life itself. We might live to see the question answered.

[Now...well, unsurprising she's wary of seeing how that comes about. There was a great deal of blood already. She can hardly imagine more. (She can. It's always worse when you can.)]

Who knows, perhaps they'll say some part of her guided all of this if it comes out well. She bore the anchor before anyone else. There's a way to spin it for someone clever enough to do it.

[Or not clever enough, sharp enough. Say that it split, paint them all as some part of her, the best parts, the good parts, or that times had her too far from them and left them without direction so without the one who bestowed the anchor to her in the first place. Someone can give it a story fit for some sad mage girl who died, and a Divine more shrewd than anyone else at the Game.]

[elegiaque]

( it takes gwenaëlle some time to quite put her thoughts to words—to order them, to look at them, to decide whether or not she really thinks what she thinks she thinks and if she wants to have said it aloud, let it fall where it may. it is obvious, when she speaks, that she is doing so carefully.

all the more obvious for how rarely that seems to happen— )

I don't know that it's entirely a coincidence, that there's this push to break rifters to the bit before someone clever does do that.

[arcaneadvisor]

There are always those who twist the Chant and all around it to suit their whim.

[You wrote of their ilk, she almost says but they're doing a careful dance, and to dredge up the name of Vivienne could be to summon her for there are times when what comes is called, and now? Well better not to got tempting fate.

Celene certainly does it. Even the Divine was doing it from what Morrigan heard and saw on the margins.]

A good thing to have a Provost among them.

[If a mouthful of a name. And not entirely by accident to name him, since she has to speak to him, and it won't be pleasant and she might slip away again so tiptoeing about the apology that won't come if it all goes ill.]