[Open]

[freedomscall]

What| Anders trying to adjust to a new environment.
Where| Around the capitol.
When| Now?
Warnings/Notes| None at the moment


Everything was too big. He should have felt relief: this city was larger than anything he had seen before. There was so much grandeur, all glittering and beautiful and so easy to focus on. A man like him could have been swept away, swept under the rug, swept up in everything and easily forgotten. He could hide in the crowd. With so many people, no one would notice just another man.

Anders, however, felt nothing but suffocated. Every glance caused him to flinch and bury himself deeper within himself. The knot in his stomach pulled tighter, and tighter with every turn he made and every person he passed.

He had no idea how long he had been walking, or even where he was anymore. A heavy sigh escaped him as he rubbed his forehead.

"Andraste's tits...What is going on?" . For a moment he let his situation consume him, let the whole Capitol consume him.

It was the sound of footsteps coming up behind him that snapped the mage out of his stupor.

Comments

[freedomscall]

Anders wasn't sure how to answer the man. Sebastian and he had never seen eye to eye. It wasn't that Anders didn't believe in the Maker. He did- once. He believed all of it when he was young, before the Chantry and the Circle began to erode his faith. After seeing so many innocents crushed under fear of the Templars and wrath of the Chantry he lost his faith. The Templars abuse, seeing his friends turn Tranquil, made his love of the Maker abandon him.

Sebastian was almost as opposite to Anders as one could get, besides perhaps Cullen.

The man's question hung in the air and he had no idea how to respond. He had not seen the world Cullen had described, and yet he could not quite think of a different way to spark change. Anders had left a world where good intentions were paving the way for injustice to continue. There were talks of doing the right thing, and yes it had been a step in the right direction.

That was all it had been, though. One step, and then a stand still. He had waited years for something to give and nothing did. It was too long to simply stand by and let those forced into the cage of the Circles simply continue to be used, abused,deny their freedoms.

“If I changed any opinions on the Circle, if any Templar opened their eyes to the corruption they were enforcing then yes. It was worth it.”

His eyes closed tight against the world. He could hear his blood pumping.

“No one deserves to live as we mages do”.

[andrastian]

No, they never had, at that. Sebastian had, through the Hawke in his world, through seeing the man slowly changing his own behaviors if not his views, come to sympathize with the position of the mages. He would not have said the circles were wrong themselves but the things that he had come to realize went on in Kirkwall's, well, they had been in his thoughts, at the least. Coming here, too, being treated as something to be locked up and at the mercy of others, well. It had brought him, in a short time, to at least gain some understanding, not that it could ever be complete, of what life must have been like there.

Still, he would never have believed, and still could not believe that violence, or inviting demons, which Justice would always be to him, into your spirit, your very self could be an answer. The Chantry was still not wrong for him, but the ideals of the system could, and did fall short at the hands of mortals, given reason to hate and fear.

'Reason' anyway, in the form of what others believed and were told, which lead to giving mages all the reason in the world to strike back, which continued the cycle further until fate, and horrible, irrevocable decision had reached the point at which they could not be stopped. The point at which others had been dragged into the mess, and now, well, look at what had stretched before them in the world he'd not seen.

Sebastian studied Anders a long moment, waiting, and then, yes, actually listening as he began to speak. He supposed that he could not be surprised at the answer, but the true force of his convictions, that stood out there was surprising in and of itself. He had imagined, well, something closer to the self righteous way of responding to heavy questions that had once been Sebastian's own, and that he still, instinctively reached for, even as he knew that he must push them back. Unfortunately, for the moment, he could not quite hold back the first, judgmental, angry thing that spilled out of his lips.

"So innocents deserved to die to make your point? To become nothing more than collateral damage on your path to revenge?" He asked, the words still quiet but for the sharper tone they'd taken there. "Would it have erased the suffering, taken it back, do you suppose?"

But who was he really asking, in the end?