crystal;

[arcaneadvisor]

FORM: Sending crystal
SENDER: Morrigan
RECIPIENT: Open
WHAT: Spook podcast 3: Autumn edition
WHEN: Vaguely nowish
WHERE: Sundermount (Morrigan)
NOTES: Threadjack, share spooky stories etc just have fun 'tis the season (for us)

There was a tale mother told when I was a girl.

[Perhaps not unsurprising that her mother isn't so far from her mind. Not so easy to banish her just yet alas yet Morrigan sounds untroubled, a fire crackling behind her; Sundermount is eerily silent come evening at least where her humble abode has been for this long.]

A young woman of the court - she never said what court, let us say Highever for the sake of it - heard it so that there were none who might go into the wilds bordering the lands else they would not emerge with their reputation intact, a command laid down by a mysterious Tamlane. This young woman was not deterred by such a thing and so did she set out to the wilds where she did pick a wild rose; Tamlane revealed himself to her--

The young woman's father noticed, upon her return, that she was very much with child. You can imagine this was far from ideal for her and when she told him it was not even a man from his court… [Well times haven't moved on so far, or so Morrigan's quietly amused tone implies.] Away she went again to the wilds, to Tamlane.

When they met again, Tamlane told the young woman he had been taken by a witch, and no longer was he as he had been, instead possessed by a spirit though fearing he was to be offered up to the demon the witch had made her terrible pact with as she had to do every seven years. But she could save him! If she waited for the stroke of midnight on Satinalia when the witch would ride through alongside Tamlane, though she would have to pull him clean off his horse.

The witch, of course, would not give Tamlane lightly: she had magic far beyond that which the young woman had encountered, and in her grasp Tamlane's form was not his own. He twisted about her as a great terrible serpent to crush the breath from her lungs though as she thought she might gasp her last and then he was Tamlane again for a moment only to leap out of his skin as a wolf as monstrous as all those the huntsman told tale of in her father's hall, snarling with his jaws about her throat. An eagle shrieking, talons to blind her eyes. Stinging wasps and biting gnats. On and on it went as her arms struggled to hold him--

[Her voice is close to the crystal, so close, as if the world has melted away entirely and she's back once more in a simple hut with Flemeth who told this tale to a girl too small to hear it.]

Hold him she did. Marry him she did. The witch was not best pleased but knew she had been bested that day. I always thought this Tamlane such a trouble for but one man, I suspect mother saw herself somewhere else in the tale.

Comments

[arcaneadvisor]

[And for a long moment silence to put faces to the characters, allowing it to play out without this accented voice. There's a point where she can find where the tale would have veered sharply off had it been told to her in her childhood but her childhood wasn't the same childhood others shared.

(Morrigan has shared her most tame bedtime tales, nightmares are not for everyone.)]

A tale where the witch is the wicked one, I imagine even the Chantry would approve of such a story where a girl is tested in such a manner by the corrupting nature of magic yet resists. Though there would be no reward such as that for her but that she might keep living. [Someone might argue there's magic in that, it makes for poor storytelling but for the best of them at telling it. An unremarkable thing but to live until you come so close to having not.] I take it we are to imagine she did not live long, this daughter abandoned in the woods with her toads?

[One has to know all the details to make a proper judgement of these things.]

[ipseite]

Just desserts, as any church might say. I heard another version, years later, on the road—that I told my own daughters.

( it has been hard, coming to a place where she can speak of them only wistfully; where she can speak of them at all. )

In another story, the witch appeared first to the younger daughter frail and filthy, much aged, far too weak to draw water from the well under her own power. The girl was kind, and gave her water, and rewarded for her kindness. When her sister was sent to be rewarded thus, the witch did not appear the same way; she was beautiful and stately, and the elder daughter scorned her when she asked for aid, and she was punished.

A witch might know your true heart; you may not judge for yourself another's true worth.

[arcaneadvisor]

Does your church have the taste for making up as many stories as the Chantry does?

[Another mother though? How rare, there aren't so many of them here though an abundance of mages, of templars, of fools, none of them should be near children.

(Many of them have.)]

My mother oftens appears as an old woman - she is after all, she is a woman of many years - but that particular sort. A touch mad. A nutty old bat. The one who might be caked in filth eating the mud about her without another to care for her, who leads you down the path to the answers you seek. Yet she was beautiful once. Beautiful enough for a man to kill another over and chase after her.

Your version is wiser though a witch knowing your true heart is a dangerous thing is it not? There is no telling what that witch might do with it one day.

[How young we remain, Petrana, how Morrigan will still recall a campfire, alone in the dark, the book in her lap with her mother's writing upon the page with her fate laid bare before her. There is always one witch that you see in the stories after all, you can never change her face once you've seen her.]

[ipseite]

I cannot but think it is as dangerous to know as to be known.

( says a witch. )

[arcaneadvisor]

A witch is something more feared than a mage. A mage is afraid of itself more often than not because it has allowed itself to be but here a witch is a rare thing, passed down but to a chosen few.

[Yavanna we ride to Ser Jeremy of Kyle.

A pause but what comes is called--]

You have been known.

[And it did not end well for you to speak this way to a fellow and daughter of a fellow, mother to what might be the only boy of this bloodline.]