sixthiterationlogs | § I'm starting to slip, I'm losing my grip

WHO: Fenris
WHERE: Around 6I village at night, the Inn at lunch and in the evenings
WHEN: October 13-27
OPEN TO: ALL
WARNINGS: ... nothing yet

Being barely tangible is, in fact, nothing new to Fenris.

It's one of the abilities his lyrium markings gave him, the ability to reach into their power to slip just a little out of the real world, to become a lyrium ghost, difficult to see and difficult to hit in combat. It's been a useful ability in the past, when he's used it to slip away from his enemies' attentions and allowing him to surprise them in an attack.

It isn't a useful ability when he can't control it. It came on slowly, the realization that his shadow had vanished and that it if he went into the Inn at night, it was difficult to get anyone to notice him. He's sturdily built, with silver tattoos across his visible skin; not being noticed is hardly a common concern for him.

But it is now.

He takes to going out at night, in part to avoid the feeling that Hawke barely knows he's there most of the time. He paces the streets of the village with the same barely contained anger that had sometimes seen him take on the gangs of slavers and thieves who tried to take the streets of Kirkwall at night. Nighttime holds few fears for him, even in this apparently uncontrollably magical state.

Some nights, he watches out for other people in the same half-there state as he is. He takes up a station by the crossroads at the heart of the village, at the edge of the park, and waits to see if anyone will come past, and then, if they'll even see him.

At times, he slips into the Inn, sometimes during the day and sometimes in the evening. During the midday meal, he has no difficulty getting people to see him, and he can take a place at the lunch table alongside others in the village, speak and be noticed, and carry on as normal.

In the evenings, though, he's barely noticeable, and it's only the one time that he accidentally knocks into a chair as he's dodging to avoid running into someone coming the other way that anyone seems to pay him much attention.

The chair does make a big noise as it tips over.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Taako spends a lot of time lurking in the inn, either helping (interfering) in the kitchen or people watching. He's been loath to find more permanent lodgings, still half convinced rescue is coming, or at least someone following from home. But, more importantly, he spent the day experimenting exuberantly with his own much more minor condition, and he's on the lookout for similar manifestations.

Any sign of magic gets him pointing like a hunting hound, honestly. He was all about the foxes last time around. If there's some magic, his has to be there somewhere, and he'll get it back.

"You okay there, bubbeleh?" The voice is somehow both shrill and syrupy, like a cat with allergy symptoms, and its owner matches neatly. He's not really sitting in the chair he's claimed, more draped across it like he melted slightly, legs propped over one arm and head on the other to let a thick, untidy blonde braid tumble to pool on the floor.

Bubbeleh is not something Fenris has ever been called before, and if he stopped to think he'd probably decide it was better than several things he has been called. But it still nets a sharp look back across the room to see who'd spoken.

"You can see me."

It could be just the noise that he'd made as he stumbled, but the man does seem to be actually talking to him and looking at him. Fenris doesn't let much of the relief at that thought enter into his voice or his expression, but he does stop walking and, after a moment, turn to look more fully at the man, who's lounging across a chair like he couldn't take the moment to sit more fully.

He'll take it, if he can actually see through Fenris' apparent half-hidden state.

"I mean, not great, but I know what I'm looking for." Without access to enough magic for children's cantrips, Taako can't really do a thing about really figuring out what's going on. He's reduced to half-blind clinical diagnosis. This kind of thing could be done with illusions, with his own transmutations, with evocation in the hands of an inventive practitioner. A simple spell would tell him exactly, but no simple spells here.

He turns over with an odd, liquid grace so he's abruptly resting his chin and hands on the arm of the chair, experimenting with a few angles to see if that brings this stranger into better focus. It does not. "Recently shadowless, myself." He holds out a hand to demonstrate the eerie way the firelight travels right through uninterrupted. "Give you good odds on related phenomena."

What unsettles Hawke most is that she can't keep track of Fenris as well as she might normally. She never has been the type to keep her friends on tight leashes, she isn't Danarius and never wants to be, but she likes knowing where their preferred places are. Fenris' are easy enough to find, even here. But lately he's become difficult to find.

Not that this is unusual, exactly. He's disappeared on her before in Kirkwall, but he always comes back. For whatever reason, this seems to be an exceptionally long time.

After scouring the entire house to no avail, she finally ends up on the porch steps, watching the streets with her arms resting across her knees, as though she might find some measure of solace in this. For all she can tell, Fenris is gone and that means she's alone.

She's not sure she's ready for that.

Fenris is fairly certain that he is actually growing transparent. It seems worst at night, when people seem unable to see him at all. He'd been out by the Inn until the people who don't live there had gone home for the night, and nobody seemed to notice him. He'd held his hand up to the moonlight and seen the glow through his skin, a strange effect when mixed with the lyrium's tracery on his hand.

There'd been many times when he wouldn't have minded this. He could have spent the nights in Kirkwall fading away from the threat of hunters, disappearing so that he could spy on apostates and slavers, kill them with no witnesses. He's used his lyrium to cloak himself on the battlefield to make himself harder to see, and it has its uses. But this is different. This is uncontrollable, unfamiliar, and with the magic of the lyrium inaccessible in this place, unintelligible to him. And it's not just the people here, most of whom he doesn't care about. It's Hawke, too, and when he returns to their house, it's to see her sitting out the front, staring across the road.

"Hawke?"

But of course, she won't hear him, will she? He's noticed that, already, over the past days.

He tries again, with a shout.

"HAWKE!"

Maybe it's the wind she can feel, light though it is, that makes her shiver. Maybe it's the cold and the lack of her normal armor on that has her on edge. Whatever it is, her body gives a shiver and she wraps her arms around herself. She will not weep for being the last one; it's a fate she expected when she woke up here. To be alone in her death. She'd accepted that when she told the Inquisitor to leave her behind. Why should it be different now?

Still, she glances sideways and it may as well be like looking straight through nothing. She doesn't see anything out of the ordinary or anyone she would like to.

"Stupid Observers," she mutters, fighting the hotness welling up behind her eyes. "Maker curse you all." Pause. "Whoever you are."

§ I'm starting to slip, I'm losing my grip | OTA

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