strangetrip | EP - The Sweetest Blood Mage

Merrill knew where a handful of things were for sure. Her room. The kitchens. Anders' room. Rey's. The café. The pool.

Everything else was basically a coin toss, something interesting she'd found and then probably never see again. It was how she'd treated Kirkwall for the most part.

The day was lovely and sunny in a way Kirkwall rarely was. She sat int the middle of a manicured field, eyes closed as she sprouted flowers around her instead of just hacked off grass. She hadn't ever been shy about her magic. What was the point? People saw her vallaslin and assumed anyway even if she didn't have her staff on her.

This place was alive and healthy as far as she could tell. She wasn't a healer. She'd have to ask Anders and that would be a battle in and of itself.

She wanted to work on connecting better with this place, on figuring out what it wanted. If she knew what it wanted, maybe they could all get back home and she and Anders could help Hawke and the rest of the world. She didn't want Anders to get to the point where his hope started decaying and there was nothing any of them they could do about it.

Maybe... Maybe somehow she could figure it out...

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It was the footsteps more than the voice that broke her concentration from trying to sort out the varying threads of magic in this place. There was so much around that she ached for Bethany to be there just so she'd have someone to talk to about all of it.

"Hello," she said, looking up at him and smiling warmly. "Is everything alright?" She hadn't thought she was doing anything wrong, but... She was very good at finding trouble. Maybe there was a sign somewhere that said 'no magic' and she'd never know it.

"What?" His brow furrowed in confusion. Why would she ask... "Oh. Sure. Yeah." He gestured with his head toward the flowers. "A woman I know... a friend...does that sometimes." Usually when humanoids weren't making sense to her. "It caught my eye."

She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and ducked her head sheepishly. "I was trying to get this place to like me. If it does, maybe it might tell me what it needs from us."

She reminded him of an Avvar the way he'd just tromped up to her like that. She had always quite liked the Avvar. They had interesting thoughts and traditions about magic. The only thing she hadn't appreciated was the occasional promise to make a stolen bride out of her that she had to dissuade with force.

"Merrill," she said, extending her hand up to him.

"Yeah, that sounds like something she'd do." It took Kash a few to realize the hand sticking up was looking for a shake. It wasn't the most common custom at home. He took her hand and gave it a brief shake. "Kashaw."

Once she released his hand, he crouched and ran his fingers over the fresh flowers. Life's energy pulsed from them, strong and vibrant. He didn't smile, but his jaw unclenched another notch. "Are you a druid?"

Merrill frowned just a little at the question. "Druid?" she asked and shook her head. "I'm sorry, I don't know what that is. I'm Dalish."

He seemed so tense. Less like Fenris and more like Aveline in his way. From what she could tell anyway. Maybe he really was angry at everything like Fenris was and she was just so used to his brand of callousness that it was hard to see a different vein of it in other people.

"Plants are really the only thing I can make grow. Keeper Marethari always said I was a terrible healer." Maybe she would've gotten it one day. That wasn't ever going to happen now. At least Anders was here. He was the best healer she'd ever seen so long as he wasn't caught up in his own head.

"Druids have affinity with Nature. They use its power for their magic." That much he could say with certainty, and it was easy enough to offer that information.

Technically, his cure spells and restoration spells worked on any living thing, but he rarely used them on anything that wasn't at least semi-sentient. Too many aware-creatures got hurt to spend the magical energy on plants and trees. Especially when there were people like Keyleth in the world.

"I'm not one either. I'm a cleric."

"Most of the Dalish don't have magic..." she said, but the sentence trailed off and she withdrew a little. Cleric was a dangerous word. Cleric meant she was about to get another lecture on the benefits of Andraste or the evils of magic. Was there a templar nearby then? She glanced around, refusing to touch her magic more to draw more attention. If she had to, there were more powerful spells she could call on to get out of there, for a given value of escaping in this place.

No way to miss it when a chatty, bubbly woman like this one or Keyleth went quiet on you, Kash considered the situation. He reviewed what he'd said, what she'd said, and what the possibilities were. Obviously, something he'd said had upset or scared her. The only thing he could think of was "cleric."

"Let me guess. Cleric isn't a good thing where you're from."

"It depends on who you ask," she said. "Cleric and magic aren't two words that go well together..." She was going to give him a chance. She had to. They were all stuck here together.

"Will you tell me what it means where you're from?" There. That was a good starting point. She could figure out where he was coming from and then wouldn't have to explain anything about the war or the Chantry or the Chantry's history with the elves in particular or any of that.

Scared. Definitely.

"Clerics are magic users where I'm from. We fight, foster and heal," he explained. It sounded more like Pike than him, but it wasn't wrong when it came to him either. "We get our magic from our gods instead of from the Weave."

Hoping to stave off the inevitable, Kash added, "I'm a Life cleric. I believe in Life itself."

If anything in Kashaw's statement made Merrill relax it was the plural on gods. She didn't know what the Weave was. Probably something like the Fade. She nodded and let her shoulders release the tension she was holding.

"They're not, where I come from. They're higher up members of the Chantry, the church of Andraste. It's..." She pressed her lips together and shook her head. "The Chantry and magic have a painful history as do the Chantry and elves. When you happen to be both things get painful. I'm sorry. I shouldn't've jumped to conclusions."

Kash waved that off. "No harm done." He'd given worse offense for less reason. Honestly, he'd given worse offense because he didn't feel like talking to someone.

"Sounds like a real bitch." Which was the Kashaw conversational equivalent of sympathy. "We've got places where magic is restricted to the clergy and plenty of people who hate one or another kind of magic but when your world's full of magical beings and races that'd murder you as soon as spit, at most, it usually gets you a side-eye."

"Oh we have plenty of magical things that'll murder you as soon as spit," Merrill said casually, adjusting her seat. "Demons and dragons and darkspawn and..." She shrugged like it was no big deal. "The Chantry just has some...oppressive ideas. Really, the mage rebellion was a long time coming. I just hope it's over soon."

"Who'd they think was going to kill the magical threats?" Kash groused, because it was the kind of thing that would piss him the hell off if he lived in her world. He shook his head and shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers. "Anyway, you learn anything from the flowers yet?"

EP - The Sweetest Blood Mage - OTA

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