[open] The things we leave behind (Leliana, Any)

[leliana]

I rise from my scars. nothing hurts me now.

Adria tastes of the island; it is something in the sound of her accent, in the honey richness of the words that fall from her tongue. There is a beautiful in the other—a shyness, perhaps—that draws her eye, that leaves her lingering, studying the Nereid with a thoughtful eye. She is not used to others looking at her. In so much of her life, she has been the quiet sister. She has been the one who observed from the side. She was the calm waters to her sister’s raging oceans. She healed and helped, but always in the background.

Now, others stare or avert their gaze and both are unsettling.

That is, they would be if Leliana was capable of feeling unsettled.

Instead, she merely observes with that apathetic way, her lips pressing together in thought. “I would not ask that you pledge yourself to me,” she finally responds, her voice as calm as the rivers that wind through the Tephran soil. “Only that you pledge yourself to what is good and kind.” These are still the concepts that she can understand, that she can clutch close to her breast, even if they feel so far.

But she is not just a healer any longer.

She is a Queen, and a magician, and she has breathed the word war—as just as the cause may be—into the Beqanna realm. So she cannot stand aside when such matters are brought to her doorstep. Instead, she thinks on what she has already thought on, what she has used her magic to find out, and she finds the gaze of the water-woman once more. “Isobell has done me no offense, but she is also the full sister to Castile, and I do not trust her allegiance or motives.” She drops her chin slightly in thought.

“You have my support in taking your homeland, and you have my protection should you ever need it.”

A strange thing to say for a woman who has never once been capable of protecting those things that she loved (healing, yes, but protecting? preventing the harm in the first place? never.) But now she can.

She can, and she fully intends to wield it to see women such as the one before her shielded.

@[Adria] - okay! send the request. <3