hlif | ooc: inbox/plot with me

[ Kaisa would have preferred Asher come pick a fight with her, like that excitable little elf. She knows how to deal with that. Asher's message was foreboding in that it wasn't angry. Most people, she'd just shrug and cut loose--but she liked Asher.

So, dressed casually, without any armor to guard her, Kaisa attempts to do something scarier than fighting. She goes to talk. She winds her way through the refugee camp, until she stops at a familiar tent with familiar chickens, and she sits. ]

...It's not like we're just going to shrug off what he's done. He's committed a crime, and he's going to answer for it. It's just going to be done through Warden channels.

[ No sense in dancing around the issue. ]

[That he isn’t angry is surprising to Asher. He’s got a temper, he is very aware of it and maybe if he had everyone else around he’d be angry. Angry on their behalf seeing as there are times he has to speak for them all but honestly, he’s not. Not yet.

He’s never really expecting guests at the camp though he’s got a few ‘neighbours’ of sorts that he gets on with. People that want a story, people that want to spar, others wanting him to place orders for stuff from the farm though for now they’ll settle for a share of the fresh eggs every so often.

Bronson is ‘guarding’ the hens. That mostly means licking their heads and getting pecked every so often as Asher continues feeding them, glancing over when Kaisa takes a seat and starts speaking.

And that’s meant to make it easier to swallow? [He doesn’t even sound angry. Tired, just tired.] Do you know how many funerals some of us went to? How often you’d ask after someone and find out they were dead? Not just Kirkwall folk but people who made it through the Blight? Three of my crew used to call Kirkwall home. They can’t anymore.

[ She lets him work, waiting patiently. Or trying to wait patiently. She fidgets and shifts around as she waits, because holding still isn't really something she's good at, but she doesn't nag after Asher, not until he finishes speaking. ]

Uh, yeah, it was, actually. The issue everyone is having with this is that it looks like he's getting off scot-free, yeah? Or do you just want us to execute him?

[ She looks up at Asher, eyes steady. ]

I knew him, before Kirkwall. He was...different. He was a good man. And I think that good man is still in there, and I'm not killing him for the actions of...The man that blew up that chantry. You were in Kirkwall, then you oughta know that he spent most of that time running a clinic and never asked for a copper from anyone.

You have a right t' be angry, Asher, I'm not telling you that you don't. And I'm not excusing Anders for what he did. But I am telling you that he's ours. The Wardens will take care of this, and we'll make sure that it doesn't happen again.

I can't hand over one of my brothers to the Inquisition, Asher. Not when I know we can fix him.

There's a great yawning chasm between execution and getting off. He's still walking around, Skyhold has cells, it'd be a gesture at least.

[Asher snorts, upsetting Bronson; the hackles go up because the dog knows Asher, knows his moods, and he clicks his tongue so a huge head comes to rest on his thigh, the one working eye watching Kaisa as Asher's rough hands busy themselves with scratching behind his ears.] So I ought to know then that people who thought they might have had a second chance - I was one of the lucky ones, I didn't sell everything and scrape my way in because of the Blight - ten years later only for something like that to happen. You know what happens, you're not stupid. People get blamed. Kirkwall didn't want them there, and they were harbouring an apostate for a long time. None of them had a Champion.

This isn't like a broken bone you're going to reset, and the only way it's like a rotten limb you lop off is if you kill him. Hercules Hansen is worth of a hundred of that thing but one of them is here, walking around and the other one is locked up somewhere, possibly dead. And trust me, the Avvar way with mages and spirits is different to anything the Circle teaches, after what he's done, he would be exiled from the hold. We consult the spirits differently, they're more, they're our gods Kaisa, and the augur goes between the hold and them, between them and the hold; it's balance. If an abomination becomes corrupted, then they sleep and never wake again, that's how it should be. Not this. This is unnatural. There is no fixing something like this.

[It is fleetingly rare that his voice gets that quiet when he isn't talking about the dead. But then he remembers Liadan when the news came, the scream, the month of her silence and the traded watches, that isn't something to talk about though, not when he doesn't know how she'll take this, if he'll have to do it again, sitting in his mother's house, surrounded by his living family when her parents are dead and gone in Kirkwall now. He doesn't even know if he has that in him to do it again after seeing it the first time, when it was living day to day until at last it broke, the first day of sun after winter. And sure as Asher is no mage, his respect for the augurs is immense, his respect for any mage in their community be they one of the Avvar, one of the Dalish, even the local wise woman that has strange coloured flames burning at all hours is immense. There are things you don't do with spirits, what Anders is said to have done with one goes beyond, lashes against every story his grandfather, his aunts, his uncles, his hold, and every other hold ever told him. It makes his throat tight, has him dragging one hand through the tangle of braids at his scalp for something else to do; he knows what the augur of his grandfather's hold would say, he knows that anger, the soft quiet horror.

Asher feels a shame that isn't even his, a lingering remnant from fifteen years dragged to the Chantry where he was told that believing what felt right was wrong, a squirming wrongness one feels when what they know to be true in their bones can be tipped sideways so easily and cast aside because it's old, because it doesn't matter, because it's backwards and it doesn't matter, hillfolk rules for hillfolk people.]

[Action]

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bloomingtide 20

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Sending Crystal

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Crystal, mid justinian

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end of the month -- LET'S DO THIS!

[JOHN CENA THEME INTENSIFIES]

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Backdated to the beginning of the month

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for melisende;

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