#this did not need to be as long as it ended up HOGFHGODFUGDF

[avrorean]

@valorcorrupt. 🎬 ↳ clips of the past (accepting!)

The girl had never truly felt cold before. Her house had always been a warm place, fit snugly on one of Nevarra’s layered hills with its bright blue door and the orange trees that grew outside her window, where she took naps to the sound of the rolling of the sea in the middle of the day. But there had been no orange trees once the Templars brought her across the ocean, and the sun had felt like it had lost all of its warmth.

Instead, it had just felt wet, which made the persistent cold even worse. It hadn’t rained, but the fog that had settled over the dark ground hadn’t lifted for days and had only ever grown worse once they reached the lake. The girl sniffled – whether from cold or the threat of new, miserable little tears it was hard to say – tugging the scratchy old blanket tighter around herself as another violent shiver shook her tiny body. That, at least, had garnered her the attention of the old man who had lent it to her, looking up from his place currently rowing the boat. 

(“Don’t you worry now, li’il one. Won’t be much longer now and that tower’ll have ya bundled up warm an’ proper. Promise from ol’ Kester.”) 

The little girl blinked her wide, wet eyes up at him. The old man’s smile was friendly, but it was no good despite his intent. The girl had barely started reading in her own language before she’d been taken, and she hardly understood a word of the common tongue as of yet. If she had caught one word in twenty when someone spoke to her mother or father, it was a success, and the old man’s accent was impossibly thick. The only person she could get any thought across to was her escort, Templar Alban; he wasn’t a cruel guardian, but he was cold. Cold as the lake and the wind and this hard green country, and despite speaking plain Nevarran, he didn’t seem to want to talk to her much at all unless he needed to. Not even to tell her what the old man had said. It had stopped disappointing her during the early days of the voyage, shortly after she’d finally stopped crying.

But the old man hadn’t been wrong, at least insofar as Alban would have known; the boat ride hadn’t taken too much longer before the knock of wood against the dock signaled their arrival, and the armored man lifted her out of the little wooden dinghy and, for once, carried her the rest of the way inside. His armor’s cold, too, the child thought as the large wooden doors parted before them.

Inside was indeed warmer, and reactively the girl shuddered in the Templar’s arms with relief as the warm air worked itself right away to combating the cold in her bones, but even that hadn’t dissuaded the rise of fear at the number of armored men waiting within the grey halls. There were only a dozen or so, but to her, it felt like a hundred. Cold and faceless in their helmets and still like statues. Just like the ones that chased mama, she thought, shrinking back into Alban’s arms. Even if he was a Templar too, at least he was familiar.

Alban clearly hadn’t felt the same, however. Gently, but unsympathetically, her templar escort peeled her off and sat her feet-first on the ground, pulling the scratchy blanket the old man had given her away and leaving her standing before two more old, bearded men. One was hard-faced and armored, the other in colorful robes that reminded her of the bright rugs in her house and laugh lines at his eyes beneath his long hair. 

“Hush now.” It had felt like forever since Alban had last said more than a few words to her, much less in her own tongue, so the girl stared up at him with a jump. “Do not cause a fuss. This is the last of it, so behave yourself.” 

(“Maker be praised for your safe return, Templar Alban. This is the mage from Nevarra?”) 

Though he addressed her escort, the Old Templar’s unflinching eyes had fallen firmly onto her, watchful and analytical, as though he’d found an animal in the woods and was debating on whether or not it would try and bite him. The little girl shrank beneath it and backed away several steps until she felt the light touch of Alban at her back, holding her in place.

(“Do not intimidate the poor girl, Greagoir. By your templar’s accounts, the journey has been an ordeal.”) The old man with a long beard chastised, which only made the Old Templar’s scowl deepen. (“Be welcome to your new home, █ █ █ █ █.”)

Alban translated the last part for her this time. The girl bit her lip sullenly, digging her chilled fingers into her muddied skirt and said nothing. The Bearded Man merely smiled in a way that seemed like understanding, before turning back to the Old Templar to mutter sharp words together. The girl didn’t think she wanted to know what they were arguing about. Instead her big purple eyes wandered the walls of her new environment. Tall and grand, yes, with its high walls that had no pictures or tapestries and bars on the few windows she could see. 

Colorless. Dull. 

She hated this. She wanted to go home, to her mother and father and her little baby brother, who’d just started to crawl. To take a nap by her window with the orange tree and sneak figs from the big bowl in the kitchen. She wanted to feel her mother’s arms around her. The feeling of her father’s tightly wrapped hair beneath her fingers when he sat her on his shoulders, and the way he’d securely hold her legs to keep her from falling. Every time she asked Templar Alban when they could go back, he ignored her, which had only amplified her cries and tantrums on the ship, which Alban had simply let run their course by herself until she was too tired to cry anymore. The girl didn’t think she had anymore tears to cry, but as these strange, cold people talked around her, she felt them burn the corners of her eyes again. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.

(“... the reidentification forms on my desk. Is that necessary? The child is-”)

(“Blame the girl’s family, Irving, not I.”)

Another sniffle, unbidden, snapped the attention of the Old Templar and the Bearded Man back to her. She shrank again. The two conferred again, quieter this time, and made a motion to the Templars she couldn't quite understand, but they clearly knew what to do.

Templar Alban nudged her again, giving a quiet command to walk to one of the vestibules by the door. As her tiny feet shuffled three steps for every one of his long, armored strides, she found herself distracted briefly by the intricate webbing of vine-line bars that caged it off from the rest of the room. It had been the first thing the girl might have called pretty.

But the hint of wonder was brief. When the Old Templar and the Bearded Man approached her again, it had felt as though all the coldness from without had come flooding back inside. She didn’t know why, but the Old Templar had begun to recite something; what it was, she couldn’t have begun to say, but she noticed that Templar Alban had stood straighter, his hands locked firmly behind his back in a soldier’s respect. And then they’d started pulling things out of a velvet lined box that another, faceless templar had brought them: a vial, a wooden medallion-like circle covered in strange writing, and something sharp. 

Terror seized her then, as the Old Templar’s recitation made the strange and scary objects begin to glow, but Templar Alban had a firm grip on her tiny wrist, keeping her palm stretched out no matter how hard she tried to wiggle free from his metal grip. She ignored the Bearded Man’s attempt to soothe her, thrashing and whimpering in the Templar’s hold. She could get out. She had to get out. If she could just run back out the door, the kind old man with the boat had to take her across, right? He could row her all the way back home, she bet. He had a boat and these faceless, armored men didn’t. But Alban held her firm. The words she wanted to plea wouldn’t come, but as the strange device glowed red, the whimpering was more than sufficient a plea to get across. The Templar was unmoved, but had the decency to look uncomfortable.

“Hold still,” he said quietly as the Bearded Man and the Old Templar approached her with their sharp and glowing things, finished with their chanting. “It will only hurt for a second.”