Abelas
the Sentinel

Independent Dragon Age roleplay blog.

est. Jan 2015 !

prayers
swevenfox

Hello again! :D | So next scenario; thoughts and reaction on the first human cruelty over elves (including him) the first time meeting close up the reality of the place of the today elves and see the "respect" they get. It can be bandits or nobles wanting to have fun on a violent way. One thing to defend the temple against intruders - another to see this and experience first hand what the today elves have to endure and face sometimes even daily base. I suspect it can be a bit of a shock to him

The first time that he was called ‘knife-ear’, he did not understand.  There had been no such terms, in his time.  There was only the People.  Now, the lands are teeming with life again, but the People are gone.  Painted children bear his features, but they are not of one flesh, one spirit.  The Kossith are no more — or perhaps they are, but they bore children of a different fruit — colorful, but prickly, and these Qunari shadow the lands of the north.  The Durgen’len have emerged, blinking, into the light, their hammerblows on surface stone a fell and alien sound.  And the humans have spread as a sickness over the corpse of Elvhenan, their blighted, greedy presence metastasizing until they were irreversibly dispersed.

{ There would never again be a land where there were not also humans. }

Abelas had…difficulties…in accepting such a world.  Navigating it was a trivial thing.  He spoke the common tongue with fluency, and it did not take much to grasp the zeitgeist and minutiae of the time.  But it was never wholly real to him, not truly, and the surreal sensation was only heightened, like a lurid fever dream, when he witnessed the insidious violence which he had once known so intimately.

All it took was a roughspun traveler’s cloak, clasped simply at the front, the weave knotted by shaking hands upon the loom from whence it had been born.  It was an innocuous thing, and it aided in his travels.  His sentinel’s armor caught hungry, too-curious eyes.

He ventured nearer, now and then, to linger like a cautious wolf, his eyes hunted but his spirit weary, to the outskirts of human habitation.  He grew bold but never incautious, and in time, he was granted passage to the very hearts of the greatest human cities — but one more elf amongst a tide of faces that were - and were not - like his own.

Abelas could not say why he had come to look upon the great towers of human industry.  Perhaps it was open curiosity, wondering at the stunted architecture that was so unlike the gem that Arlathan had been.  Perhaps he was sick at heart of finding naught but ruins and dust, and sought life even in the empires of fumbling, ignorant shemlen.  For there was life here; Abelas could not deny it.  Tremendous, teeming life — the likes of which he had not walked amongst for true millennia.  It was both overwhelming and familiar, and it reminded him of an elvhen boy with sandal-clad feet, vallaslin fresh on his face, as he navigated the slave and servant pathways of the Elvhen capital, seeking to please the ranks of Mythal’s priesthood with his efficiency and devotion.

…It was like Arlathan, he came to realize.  Not in its layout but in the callousness of its people.  The time of the Elvhen lords had passed into memory — but what remained of their race fared as such a caste always had: trod into dirt because they had been born lesser.

Insidious violence.  Structural violence.  The knowledge that even a human laid low by his own society might turn upon an elf with an unjust blow — and the systems of law did not mete out blind justice, for they were blind to it all.

It was but an elven kitchen boy, a slip of a lad who faced the master’s wrath for some slight, real or imagined.  It mattered little.  No one would protest the beating of an elven boy in the public street — most would call him lucky, to be allowed proper food and rest, earning his keep - pittance though it was - instead of languishing in the Alienage like all the rest of his kith and kin.

The abuse of elves ran deep — old hatreds not fully understood, rumors spread with malignant eye - or unfortunate ignorance - and years upon years of poisonous thought — of the belief that elves were not this young new Maker’s chosen people — and that only in His Light might they be guided. 

Abelas well knew what it was to bear the slave’s brand; to live a life as One Who Serves, unworthy even of a name.  Only titles.  Vallasvhen.  Sulevin.  Abelas. He never questioned his lot nor bemoaned his fate.  He threw himself into his duties with a vigor matched by only few — and they had gone where not even Falon’Din might follow.

Never had he questioned the natural order: slaves were to be slaves, and society was all the better for it.  But they had all been one People then, and this human’s spitting vitriol he could not abide.

He surged forward, but heavy hands clasped down upon his shoulders.  City guards, who saw justice in the red welts that burst like bloody poppies upon the boy’s dappled flesh.

They thought him some interloper elf, and it was not for fear of their swords which stayed his hand.  Abelas eased, slowly, reluctantly, goldenrod eyes never once leaving the sight of the whimpering boy, raw and humiliated in this crowded and sunny square.  He might strike down these guards.  He might lay low that master.  And yet how many more would come to take their place?  Would blame elves for inciting trouble in the streets?  Abelas was no revolutionary, to risk such a thing.  Saving this boy would condemn too many others, and he broke from the heavy steel hold of the guard’s cautionary grasp, fleeing, like a shadow, the way he had come.

He knew that Elvhenan’s time had long ago been laid to rest.  He had not known that the People fared no better.
# swevenfox   # ✮ ┅ ❛ ʷᵃⁿᵈᵉʳᵉʳ ʷⁱᵗʰᵒᵘᵗ ᵖᵘʳᵖᵒˢᵉ ᵒʳ ᵍᵒᵈˢ { ᴠᴇʀsᴇ ¦ ʙᴀɴᴀʟ sᴜʟᴇᴠɪɴ }   # abelas   # gOD THIS IS WRETCHEd   # violence cw   # racism cw   # [idk just to be safe?]   # ✮ ┅ ❛ ᵃ ᵍⁱᶠᵗ ᵒᶠ ʷᵒʳᵈˢ { ᴅʀᴀʙʙʟᴇ }  
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