(no subject)

[thunderproof]

FORM: Sending crystal
SENDER: Adalia (and dragon son Charis)
RECIPIENT: Errybody
WHAT: Don't kill the dragon! Adalia can make you stuff! She has welcome packets for new rifters! HUZZAH!!!!
WHEN: Day after the Rifters show up
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: I don't have actual ooc writeups for the welcome packets. Yet.

( the voice that comes over the sending crystal has quite a bit of pep, though it may be manufactured pep. either way, the girl sounds energetic. )

Hello Inquisition, and hello especially to all the new Rifters who showed up yesterday! My name is Adalia, and I have a few points of order I wanted to let everyone know about.

First off, you will periodically see a baby dragon out and about in the Gallows! That would be my charge, Charis. Say hello, dear.

( there's a trilling call from the crystal this time, the sound going up and down in pitch — like an imitation of the word "hello" from a creature who can't actually say it. )

Please don't try to kill or otherwise harass him. He isn't a native dragon, I brought him through the rift with me as an egg, and the dragons where I'm from are both intelligent and rather friendly! He'd love to meet you, if you come say hello in good faith, and I promise you will not leave the meeting worse for wear.

Secondly! I have welcome packets for new Rifters I've been working on. They aren't particularly fancy yet, but included is a glossary of terms you need to be familiar with in order to carry on conversation here in Thedas, a map of the world as it is currently understood, and a short introduction to the various factions and politics at play at present. In the future I'll try to do more, but it's only been two months since I got here so this was as much as I could get done when I'm making the things myself. If you would like one, please stop by the Gallows library, look for the lady with curly blonde hair accompanied by a dragon, and simply ask! I will provide.

( a clapping noise, and she sounds even more excited now. )

Lastly, and most excitingly personally, I've figured out how to make a couple of the things I could make in my home here in Thedas! If you have need of a sleep aid, perimeter alerts, or a hangover remedy, I'd be happy to provide, either for money or trade. Feel free to find me in the library or get in touch with me over crystal if you're interested!

Comments

[earthbones]

Two things. [A breath...how to do this--right there's no way to do this.]

Is there a place we can talk about the dragon? There are no infant dragons but dragons where I'm from, but more and more I'm realising how difficult a thing that is to explain. Secondly, I can trade meat, pelts or anything you might want smithed but I need to know what you put in whatever you make; there are things I can't have.

[An emphasis on that, to say that it isn't out of simple preference but more and since the rift parted her from her own stash...]

[thunderproof]

Depends on why you want to talk about the dragon, ( adalia says, wary — anyone with preconceived notions of what a dragon is or should be will be difficult to talk to, and she'd rather save her breath for people who can be reasoned with. ) If it's to tell me how dangerous and untameable he will grow to be, I'm not interested.

But as far as what I put in these things — well. They're all mostly plant-based, with a bit of alchemy thrown in. I may be able to accommodate allergies and the like, it'd just be a matter of finding substitutes. That could take a while, though. What can't you have?

[earthbones]

Dragons don't have young where I come from, they're linked to time itself and explaining it over these where I can't make the shape of things is clumsy. I know dragons. Some older than I could say that I've spoken with.

[What Paarthurnax would make of any of these things, she doesn't know, less so again for Odahviing.

Still, she finds her laugh, hollow as it is because what did she expect? Why would anything be simple.]

Plants. There are rules I follow, no plants is the heart.

[thunderproof]

But — that's —

( how. adalia makes a frustrated noise — she doesn't like things that don't make sense — and huffs. )

You can come meet us in the Gallows courtyard, he likes the snow.

( no plants at all is... challenge. one adalia will take on, because of course she will, but geez. yeah. a challenge. )

That's going to be harder to accommodate than just a couple allergies, but I'll work on it. What did you want made?

[earthbones]

[This is her whole life now, and she still to a degree resents that it's her life.]

Right, I'll meet you there but it was just something to make me sleep, I don't drop off easily here. I'll come meet you out there.

[Anyway, the crystal is shut off for as long as it takes Brónach to get to the courtyard, cowl of her armour pulled over her head to keep the snow off even if she's more than used to it. Used to has never meant liking. Has never even meant accepting. Tolerating at best most of the time.

Even in the snow, her tread is near-silent without trying, waiting. She's good at waiting.]

The dragon devours his own tail [quiet, to herself if she's there before Adalia or hasn't spotted her (a bad habit when her head is too full these days)] and the dragon is the child of time.

[thunderproof]

❰ adalia is sat on a bench in the courtyard, her elbow resting on her knee and her chin on her hand as she watches charis make tunnels of snow to wander through, then bust up from beneath a drift to take to the sky and flit around with the falling snowflakes. she hears a quiet murmur behind her and turns, attention diverted from her dragon for the moment — ❱

Hello goodlady, are you the one I was speaking to? No plants?

❰ that'll be... confusing... if she's not... oh well. ❱

elder scrolls lore is me apologising with my brain on fire

[earthbones]

Yes. Brónach. [Names are-- she could use her titles but it'd catch up with her, instead a strange thing to hear herself called what anyone else gets called. To be no one again. Only they give her names here: knife-ear, rabbit, rifter, demon.

(I'll give you my teeth and the embrace of the Void, she might say, but there's a time and a place, and the Night Mother is silent as the first days of her coffin in the old Sanctuary.]

There aren't young dragons where I was, which is Skyrim. No dragon eggs. None of it. Dragons aren't simple flesh and blood things as the beasts of Thedas are that they thought were gone but aren't because someone failed to stop the next eggs from coming to be. [Down comes the hood, she settles a careful distance away on an opposite bench; a person still not so comfortable with people but getting better, a tired face but she said she doesn't sleep well so that's to be expected. Fill up the hours, work to the bone, don't dream, don't dream, don't ever dream.]

This is—There are stories you hear as a child where someone says: listen close? So I'm saying to listen, and Paarthurnax who was the secondborn of the dragons and general to Alduin who was firstborn and World Eater says elder speaks first, and if I'm not then forgive me but I have lived enough that I feel old in my green bones.

Dragons and time are linked. That can't be broken. [An arrow is drawn from a quiver, deliberately. Not a threat, enough that Adalia might see it.]

There is Akatosh who is the Dragon God of Time; he is the concept of time, and all dragons are from Akatosh, with Alduin his firstborn as I said. Alduin is the World Eater. He is time ending. Time may only end when time is laid out from end to end, laid flat. So he is time made linear. And there is Auri-El who Mer like me worship and he is infinite looping time as we once lived before death was fixed in us as the moons in the sky. And the world? The world is an egg, each cycle of time must hatch, must be born, must come to life, and we must choose if we allow it or not, those of us who give it shape.

[There is always fire burning under her skin, too close to the hunt that took the shapes of those she loved--] Do you understand? Why I have questions about this dragon? When such a dragon wouldn't exist where I come from? Cannot exist? Is he mortal? Does he age? Does he speak for himself or does he mimic only what he hears as some other creatures?

[thunderproof]

❰ this is all a bit... Much. for adalia. but she listens dutifully, only looking away to watch charis swoop and dive through the falling snow, puffing his cheeks out and blowing out snow of his own on occasion. she tries to imagine a world where a dragon couldn't be a child, and it — it just doesn't make sense, to her, but probably charis makes no sense to brónach, so in that they're matched.

she opens her mouth to answer each question, but they came one after the other, crowding in until brónach is done, and adalia laughs. ❱

He is mortal. Everything is, where I'm from, unless they turn to necromancy, but he's too young to know how.

❰ and that just makes her think of alacruun, and all the terrible things he's done to make it through the ages like he has. would he have been happier, unstuck from time in this skyrim? allowed to study and amass knowledge for millennia unending? ❱

He does age. He'll grow quite big as he does, I'll have to leave the city at some point. And he... Well.

❰ she sighs and holds her hand out, calling for charis. his head pops out of a snow drift and he bounds over to her, half running, half flying as he does, chattering nonsense words as he goes. there is a spark of true intelligence there — much the same as there is when one talks to mabari — but no true speech. ❱

I think coming through the Rift hurt him somehow. He should be capable of full speech, like you and I, but he's never said a word since we've been here. I can understand him well enough even so, he's very expressive, but. He should talk.

[earthbones]

[Using the arrow, a circle is drawn, a line through it. Maybe she's meant to draw the tower but that-- No. Enough to split time this way and the snow falls, the snow falls as scales from wings overhead as the mountain stands aloft.

Necromancy and how her mouth curls on it, sours, twists as scales before her will when the dragons are dead, done, gone.]

We weren't. Mer. Altmer, Bosmer, Dunmer, and then the trickster god of men came to steal divinity from the gods and so now we live as the rest but spooled out, longer but not long. This is a thing fixed in us now that wasn't. The dragons remember a time when even the word mortal was their servant as much as mortals.

[It's a setback to find nothing that she knows, that this thing will live, age, die, that it will comprehend mortality instead of being lashed to the wheel with a shout.]

Dragons have their own tongue, an understanding of it in their souls at the moment of creation. Mortals can learn if they practice long enough. [Or fate spits on you, says here you are and your soul is not your own but a dragon's.]. They can speak ours but theirs...well, a voice is power. Having. Not having. The rules of it with them.

[Jaw working - Paarthurnax is old, Odahviing bore her to the eyrie but cannot be much younger and she looks at Charis. Not a shout, but a greeting. Elder speaks first.]. Drem yol lok.