I saw an old movie still of Gary Cooper and Fay Wray from The First Kiss (1928), a lost film, and had a deep need to put my blorbos in the pose for a coming chapter. I do not know what I will do about the background but it’s in the Western Approach. *slaps vague deserty color down*. Also trying a painted plus ‘lined’ (lol it’s real sketchy) look on for size. But I may get bored one day and just finish painting until the lines can just go away.
Now that I'm looking at it, I might just give Rose her messy braid after all. No chance she's leaving her hair down in the Approach 🥵.
(These are my turkeys Garrett Hawke and Rose Trevelyan from my longfic In the Shattering of Things)
Tagging artistes and writers alike any fandom: @leggywillow @rowanisawriter @samseabxrn @greypetrel
Al ser el día internacional de la llengua materna, he pensat que podría publicar aquest post que porta a les drafts des de fa.... mesos??? És una mini-recopilació de paraules que diem en català nord-occidental (o fins i tot sols en lleidatà!). Algunes paraules poden, obviament, estar compartides amb el valencià o altres dialectes occidentals.
Since it's international mother language day, I thought it would be nice to publish this post I've had in my drafts for probably months. It's a short list of words we say in the northwestern Catalan dialect (or even a sub-dialect of it). Some words might be shared with other western dialects such as Valencian.
nord-occidental -> català normatiu
acotxar-se -> ajupir-se
bolitcec/bulitcec (aproximació a la pronunciació) -> ratpenat
Cillian, once the First of Clan Ralaferin, set out to find ancient knowledge of the elven people. He discovered the path of the Arcane Warrior by meditating for many years in an ancient ruin; when the Breach appeared in the sky, he felt called to lend his skills to the fledgling Inquisition. That's all we know of his path, as a background NPC in Dragon Age: Inquisition, who appears solely in a war table mission and in the Multiplayer addition.
But how did he really get trained as an Arcane Warrior?
Honestly. This was Divine Inspiration at its finest. It was summer; I was missing my college town, where monarch butterflies go as a colony on their migration, stopping there to rest. I kept seeing a few of them flying by my current location on their way south. And I had the whimsical thought: isn't that magical?
I thought about how the inner sea region around Val Royeaux/western Orlais gives me California vibes, and the further south you go, the closer you get to the warm, nearly tropical Arbor Wilds. And I thought: sure, butterflies would work. But what do they lead to?
It was the Arlathan Exchange, and I had also been playing a lot of Multiplayer recently, and we were discussing Cillian one day and I said OH.
And the whole story just appeared.
It's my belief that "meditating in ruins" is either code for: Cillian read Elvhen writing and learned Arcane Warrior spec that way, OR, he communed with Spirits either directly, or by watching them reenact memories in the Fade. And honestly, teaching yourself to read a dead language with hardly a cypher to go off of, in a ruin, and teaching yourself this dead, historical martial-and-magical art that is like NOTHING ELSE IN EXISTENCE, seemed way more farfetched than "he found a cool Spirit."
@rosella-writes had just written a drabble of Valor, an ancient contemporary of Solas (Pride), being slain in a combat between Champions for the Evanuris. The way Rosella described Valor's body falling and lying in the center of the arena, dying, made me think: this must be immortalized, this must have left a scar, the very earth would remember, if not the denizens of the Fade.
Rosella and I have also often discussed how "pieces" of Valor might be left over, fragmented, and need to get pieced together again. How Solas might search for Valor after he awakens from uthenera, how he might miss her. So I figured, hey, I could leave a piece of Valor to be found.
Cuz boy, a spirit of Valor sure seems like a great teacher for this magical combat specialization!
Then it was just a matter of sprinkling in the luscious visuals in my mind, of giant hosts of butterflies and ghibli forests, of ruins that might be found in The Fall (2006), and of a magical circle of life and death worthy of Guillermo del Toro. Bring Valor back to life just as Cillian pieces together what the ruined temple is, and then handwave the fact that Valor teaches him as a ways to recover her own memories.
Chapter Summary: Rose and company slog their way to the Western Approach to deal with the mystery of the Grey Wardens. Brushing with death again and again, she's never desired Hawke's comfort and support more.
Fic Summary: Lady Rose Trevelyan's idle, aristocratic life blinks out in a haze of irrelevance when the breach destroys the Conclave. She may be soft and coddled when she joins the Inquisition, but there's a fierceness inside her she's yet to fully recognize. Armed with only a few relevant skills and the mark that makes her a legend, she is thrust onto a path delivering hope where it’s long been scorched away and finds comfort in the grumpy, handsome stick in the mud charged with her protection and training. As she stumbles her way across southern Thedas, she begins to realize she's tangled at the center of machinations she barely understands, and she's not alone in that. Enter Hawke.
Excerpt and art below the cut 👇
The air is thick and itchy, hanging over us all without the slightest stirring of breeze. The caravan moves through the Dales slower than I’d like, but it’s impossible to push the pace in such oppressiveness. Instead we’re at the mercy of sudden carrion odors that are almost never animals and voracious flies and mosquitoes that dwarf anything we ever had outside Ostwick.
Maker, how the Dales wear on us.
I entertain myself by tuning into snippets of conversation here and there, enjoying all the ways everyone seems to have become more comfortable with one another, though petty grievances and irritable moods are amplified by the summer stillness.
“Do you feel anything traveling through these parts, Sera?”
“Yeah, sweat dribbling down my arse crack.”
“Great battles have thinned the Veil here. The sky above. What color is it?”
“Hold on… blue. No! …Blue.”
“And beyond that?”
“The sky wants to say something. It’s trying, tempting, words in the wind, whistling, wandering, wasted.”
“Exactly, Cole,” says Solas.
“Piss off, you two!”
With so many of us— my crew and a full complement of our soldiers, not to mention a half dozen of Leliana’s scouts— there’s an unavoidable low thunder to the caravan, wagons and oxen, the crunch and clop of hooves against the road, complaints and occasional laughter. Just about everything else is drowned out by the chittering of cicadas, including rational thought.
The snap of a branch in the woods sets Juniper searching, her ears twitching around to the source. She dances and hesitates so suddenly that I scan the thick underbrush, lush with bilberry and high laurel beneath a dense canopy of oak and alder and then soothe her with my hand on her neck.
But it’s not only her. All the animals pull and grumble restlessly. A scout’s mabari is coiled with tension, a terrifying growl like a tremor deep within its chest. I search all around for the source of their fear. It can’t be a rift: there’s no hum or pull in the anchor.
We all trade wide-eyed glances, our progress slowed by hesitating steeds. Bull swings down from his enormous Shire behind me, slipping his greataxe from his back. He holds a fist in the air, commanding silence as he scans the greenery.
A strange hissing shriek accompanies the thwack of bushes, a low streak of crimson and then the scream of a horse ahead of me.
“Ambush!” roars Bull, as a horse collapses beneath one of our scouts.
The underbrush to our left erupts with red. Enemies thrash toward us, breaking the caravan into a fragmented mess. I expect a cascade of blue to flicker around me, a barrier to buffet projectiles, but it never does.