therookery | crystal;

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There were expectations. I was her daughter. Daughter of Flemeth. Daughter of the Witch of the Wilds. All that she did and had done was expected of me one day when the time came: I was to do as she did, it was to be there in me, the seed planted, nurtured, fed and watered, grown alongside me in some dark place.

[Growing in her heart or her bones, somewhere deeper than that, nurtured by Flemeth's particular hand which knew such arts as they had known for so very long, in the Korcari Wilds where dark and terrible things grew. Morrigan can still list every plant that would kill a man in the swamp.

There are marks left by a maker. Some intended. Some not.]

How else was a child to learn to read or write but with tales? Granted they were old, we were not the sort who might venture into a village without bringing the Templars upon our heads [though that was a merry chase, she has tales of that too] but that was how I learnt. From old books. When men and women wrote in verse. Not the dry dull ramblings of some self-important odious creature the shelves are stuffed with now. My mother taught me two things then: that survival has meaning, that power has meaning. That was what she had me look for in everything in my life.

[There is always a part of Morrigan that is a girl with the mud soaking into her toes, Flemeth's wrathful face above her, her cheeks hot. There is always a girl with that face reflected back a hundredfold in a gilded mirror swallowed up by the Wilds, reclaimed, forgotten except by her. And perhaps there are things too small and too large to explain to someone not there for them.]

Right.

[ Kitty understands, like, half of that. But still charging along and trying to engage: ]

So maybe those stories were about survival and power, then.

[This is a girl.

Morrigan was a girl and yet Morrigan was never a girl. Her childhood was never what a childhood might have been, her girlhood a tangle of briars to ensnare, entangle, to bite.]

Tell me: do you have the like of these tales or would mine be so very different? If a mother expects a very specific thing of her child raised far from others would she not teach her only that which would be of value? Why teach her of a world she was never to see? Or is that what they do where you come from?

I - don't know, honestly.

[ A little hesitantly. ]

I never knew any families that lived far from others or anything like that. Or were raised in isolation. We were all - you know - crammed in together. But - I mean - I got told stories of places that were far away from me, I guess. Not by my mum, but by others.

You are a town girl, a city girl?

[Enough of an uptick to turn it to a question, just.]

There are ever those to be found in a place that would surprise, with their own ways of keeping prying eyes far from them, of evading any they don't wish to catch up to them. Did you enjoy the tales of far-off places when crammed in? You must have bee packed close. Little enough room to breathe, even our cities seem that way for those not born to money.

And believe me, I certainly wasn't born to money.

[ Kitty thinks for a moment on her question, then says - ]

But...yeah, I liked hearing about them. I love London - that's my city, where I'm from - with all my heart. But there's always something about dreaming of far-off places, isn't there? Imagining lives you might have lived if you'd been born in a different place to different people. What about you? Did you ever imagine being - you know - a normal girl?

[ She realizes belatedly that might have sounded rude. So - ] No offense.

I had my forays into a civilised world at times for what mother couldn't teach. When there are but two of you in one hut when does one learn how to sit properly at the table, when to look at another when they speak. All the touching others do - the hand shaking, the-- the way people were so casual with it all.

[Ten years ago Morrigan still would have taken offense to it, she still had her bitterness even with a small boy tucked up under the arm.]

There was little I knew and I returned each and every time to the Wilds, I don't believe normal was ever for me.

Oh. So you're a country girl at your heart, then, are you?

I come from a place deeper than the country. The Korcari Wilds lie at the edge of the map for the only place beyond them are the Sunless Lands where no one knows their true extent. I did not live in the frozen forests but in the shrouded mists of the shrouded mists of the swamp.

[ Man, the people of Thedas are so dramatic. ]

Well, I imagine cities would be quite the adjustment, then. Sometimes I get frustrated with Kirkwall, and - well - London's easily a hundred times the size and ten times denser than Kirkwall. So for someone who's not used to it...It's good of you to stay on in spite of the frustration.

[Morrigan finally laughs at that, glancing about at a place that is decidedly not Kirkwall.]

I have a home in Sundermount and come to the Gallows when I must for Inquisition work then return each evening for peace and quiet. But once have I set foot within a Circle of Magi, that is what the Gallows is, hollowed out perhaps but 'twas a prison once and once again, I imagine that they shall seek to reclaim it in time.

Oh - who will? Seek to reclaim it? The...Templars?

The Chantry most likely, they are the ones who control the Circles and whatever Templars and those loyal to the Circles they might muster. There will be more than you might imagine.

crystal;

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