The grunt from Marcus implies some amount of agreement—likely there was always a mouser in the kitchens, and it's more likely he could name them now rather than say with certainty if his family, before, ever had a dog. A thing contemplated but not said out loud, summoning a small flame between his fingers and dipping the end of his cigarette into it.
A fine white trail of smoke lifts, more delicate than the great gusts of black clouds that mark his presence on a battlefield, but just as sharp to the nose.
(That smell in the air tempts some prickle of the senses; it had lingered for a long time in the bed linens of that apartment adjacent to the division offices.)
Despite soaking in the water, the biscuit is slow to separate into two pieces between the hand.
"By twelve," he says, catching crumbles across his thigh. It's a throwaway remark, as if this is the simplest question ever put to him or as if the answer is very easy to supply. These are distant, uncomplicated truths and he is more concerned with the mechanics of chewing through the soggy biscuit than eschewing this line of inquiry he'd started. "Which is typical, unless you've the money to false muster straight into the wardroom."
The smoke is good for discouraging an appetite, supposedly, and there is nothing about soggy biscuits that stir his hunger, but Marcus finds himself watching Flint's hands anyway. Maybe for their task, or maybe it's just a good place to rest his focus at this angle, sitting in the sand. He is just near the warming runes, settled on the inside of the circle, the air prickled warm where, a few feet away, it's sharply cold.
A pause implies either a silent wandering off the topic or a contemplation—it can truly go either way—but shows his hand as he asks, "Did you want to be?"
Less a contemplation and more an imagining, of that world at that age.
Flint's answer is, at first, a low hum of acknowledgement. The answer is more complicated though, and less readily to hand—not because he's reticent to give it, but because he must consider and decide on the correct answer. Because:
"I can only assume my answer would have been reliant on the events of the day when you'd put the question to me." Twelve year old boys being, notoriously, somewhat difficult and changeable with their opinions on most things much less the trajectory of their professional careers.
Had he been happy always in the service? No, certainly not. To say nothing of the complications that has dogged the latter half of his commission, those first years had been difficult and often bitter, homesick and lonely. But they'd also been remarkably free, even if the boy who had gone from that seaside village had cried when he'd left it.
"I'd some understanding that I should be proud of it, and mostly was."
(Is, maybe. Though that's stranger to contemplate.)
This first part gains a sharpening in Marcus' expression—less objection or annoyance, but something skeptical, as if he might accuse Flint of evading the question. Ever subtle by a matter of instinct, and disperses when Flint has more to add.
Accepts it, rotating cigarette in fingers, focus dropping down to the boots Flint has resting on the glowing runes. He can move his own just a little, and touch the toe of it into the outside arc near the heel.
He does so, when he says, "You owe me a story of the Imperial navy," as he leans back, weight resting on a hand. Potentially a loose interpretation of that exchange.
So loose that it takes him a moment to recall exactly when he might have promised such a foolish thing. Recalling the circumstances—in which he is firmly certain he'd come out being owed something as well, if they're counting—prompts his brow to lift by a few degrees.
"Ah." Is that so?
He takes a bite from a soggy biscuit quarters. Chews slowly. Doesn't withdraw his heel.
Marcus settles his foot there, a conscious nudge of contact turned negligent as he brings his cigarette up again to breathe from while Flint eats. Comfortable and confident in his interpretation of events, meeting eyebrow lift with a faint tip of his head. That is so.
Salve has dried chalkily on the side of his neck. Gotten in time that he no longer itches, at least for tonight.
"Mm," he rumbles right back, a tinge of mocking humor in it and eyebrows still at that elevated altitude. A conversation made up of grunts and single syllables. Isn't this riveting?
He finishes the quarter. While he studies Marcus, he wipes his fingers at the knee of his trousers and washes the too dense biscuit down with a sip from what night chilled water remains in the little tin cup.
"What do you know of the Tevinter soporati?" he asks.
Mockery is taken well enough, a crinkle of humour reflected back somewhere more at his eyes than mouth. No move to amend or add to it. He stands by monosyllabic grunt.
The next question demands more, though, Marcus pausing over it. "They're those without magic, in Tevinter," he offers. "But not of the slaves. Commoners, merchants, military."
It's a sight more than he knew not just before Riftwatch, but before the rebels had almost crossed that northern border with promises of a homeland. He'd learned a little, then.
Yes, something like that, suggests the tip of Flint's temple. He drops his eye from Marcus to the biscuit; takes to turning it into smaller pieces between his fingers in lieu of devouring it.
"Above them the Laetan, and below the freemen and slaves. The Imperium at sea is much the same as it is otherwise. A soporati might reasonably aspire to be a petty officer aboard, but if he's in the wardroom then it's likely because he has indentured himself to a commissioned mage. But let's say that by some miracle, he has the good fortune to obtain his letter of passage when he's eleven or twelve."
Entirely hypothetically, of course, is punctuated with a brief and sidelong glance.
"Then he need only survive two years to earn his temporary rank. From there, if he wishes to be a Lieutenant, he requires a commanding officer willing to submit him to a board and the head with which to pass their examination. Unlikely as those circumstances are, these are measurable requirements and therefore perfectly attainable should someone find himself in such a position regardless of where he might come from or who he might be otherwise."
The pause as Flint works his way through a bite of another soggy biscuit corner implies a However—
There is a breath in from Marcus that might betray the early kindling of impatience as Flint launches into an explanation that sounds, first, broader than a single man's story, but it doesn't resolve into words. Listens anyway, dropping his gaze aside almost in time as Flint, dispersing ember and ash from the end of his cigarette onto sandy, before returning focus to Flint's face.
Entirely hypothetically, he tries to imagine a younger James Flint in uniform, attending to examinations. Maybe it is just as easily imagined as himself in robes, awaiting written verdict as to whether he'd be named Enchanter.
There is a however implied. He is expectantly silent for the other side of it.
"Obtaining a captaincy is something else entirely. There's no official examination. It requires the captain in command to afford said lieutenant opportunities to prove themselves capable, and asks that same captain to endorse them as a sort of protege. In the case of a soporati, it begs some risk to one's reputation. And even if that did happen, and if this lieutenant did prove himself and his commanding officer was willing to make a place for him, then there are the naval lords in Minrathous who must come to some consensus on the promotion and underwrite it. Those men and women have never met this lieutenant. They see only his name, and that he is a soporati; and they see the names of other junior officers and that they are not."
He has stopped shredding the hardtack biscuit in part because he has turned it into glorified crumbles and reducing it farther would only render the thing entirely inedible. Instead, he makes himself hold the softened pieces in his cupped palm and shifts the set of his boots in the sand away further into the arcane ring and off the gently heated circle itself. The heat has leeched all the way up through the leather, and convinced him temporarily that he is warm and doesn't require to cling so close to touch of magic to be comfortable.
Flint turns his offhand in place of a shrug.
"There are soporati captains in the merchant service, but I didn't want to be one of them. I determined to become someone who couldn't be passed over. In the process of becoming that someone, I simply came to resent the thing which required that of me." (Simply, he says.) "But I suspect they resented me too," he says, playing that this is in any way a pleasure comparable to whatever specific disappoint it was that he had suffered in exchange for it.
Marcus glances down, instinctively tracking that shift of movement where he feels Flint nudge his feet forwards off the glowing magic and away from where he'd pushed his own boot near. Back up, considering him, serious in the gentle glow of runic light and almost only that, by now, given it's his back to where the sun has set.
He could ask after it, that resentment. That word, simply. He is curious about it the most, he thinks. What does this process look like? What does it resemble?
Shifts his boot. A less subtle slide until his ankle settles at Flint's heel. Almost playful, though the rest of his demeanour doesn't match that, nor his response. Something else.
"Did you make it that far, before you left it?" he asks, instead. Designed in part to afford some room if there is more to it that Flint would willingly speak of, would wish him to know, but Marcus finds that in spite of that curiousity, he has no appetite for worrying at the thing like a bone, cracking it open.
Because it's familiar in a way where he knows he wouldn't appreciate it, in return. "The captaincy."
Something else. Had he either hand free really free, he might lean forward and reach out to catch that pressing ankle; run his fingers across dusty leather and see the shape of the thing altered from what feels a little like pity into another shape. He doesn't particularly care for the former. Not because of who it is doing it, just that the thing itself pricks a little at the surface of his pride. Instead, he fixes his attention on the ambient warmth of the rune band across the backs of his calves.
(It's chill there, the air at his back. Though the cliff face hanging above and the scrub about them wards off the desert wind, at least. Opposite that, the two griffons have reached a kind of accord. Buggie has settled for preening Monster's soot free feathers rather than yanking at them.)
"Close," he says, It had been. Managing an Altus with controversial opinions, and seeing his strange proclivities turned into profit would have done it. "But no."
Despite his intention not to feel it, there is some power left in it that grips him. Slants a line in his face slightly crooked. So. Lighter, as if this is a story that has been designed to reach this fact rather than any other and he now sees a way to his punchline:
"This may come as a surprise to you, but pirates are remarkably less particular about promotion."
The boot stays where it is, resting comfortably while Marcus smokes. Whether until Flint's hands become free or until one of them needs to take a piss or some other thing that pushes them in the few directions currently available.
The punchline is accepted as it ought to be, a slight ripple of humour—no, not surprised—and perhaps an opportunity to let the story, such as it is, drop anchor there.
It's not unconvincing. A Naval officer who struggled under the yoke of an oppressive system saw what he would need to become to become what he was meant to be, and left it behind for fair wages and deadly democratic processes and harassing the merchant sailors he didn't want to become. Perhaps that man develops sympathies, had harboured them already. That sounds containable within a dry aside about promotions.
If there is a prickle of feeling that there is more story beneath it, then that's an instinct borne of knowing there always is. And that Flint, in specific, would elect to edit.
"I imagine they're not very particular about most things," Marcus says, smoke escaping between his teeth as he considers the progress made on cigarette. "Including the state of the Magisterium, so long as there was trade to plunder."
"It depends on the man," he says, attention sliding to what remains of the biscuit with its soggy exterior and portioning out what remains of the water left in the little cup. He polishes both off. Wipes his hand on his knee.
"Some were happy with whatever fell into their lap without a thought for what would tomorrow. But then there are the escaped slaves, and those who left because of some dispute with the Magisterium's rule, or who had no care to be folded in under it again when the Imperial governor came calling on the island."
A tilt of the head, faintly red rune light touching across the fine bristle of hair at his temple. A faint spreading of the hands from where his elbows have hooked across knees. It's a complicated business.
Marcus picks up his waterskin, takes a swig somewhere in the midst of that. Offers, after Flint's gesture.
A beat of silence, after, no further questions to follow immediately. The occasional croaked avian-feline purr from Monster under the attentions she is getting, heavy head resting on talons with a wing angled to permit Buggie getting at the crumpled feathers beneath.
"I know there are some among Riftwatch, and out of Riftwatch," he says, tapping cigarette, "who think those that broke from the Circles only did so because we knew nothing of what would wait for us outside of it, when we were afforded warm beds, consistent meals." Like a dog might hope for is only unsaid because it is too easy to level his bitterness in that direction, even when it's not the subject at hand.
Between the splay of his knees, one hand crosses gently across the other's wrist, the different metals of Flint's rings flattened to a uniform glow under the influence of the glyph's band. The small cup hanging in the hook of an idle forefinger. Though it remains closest aligned, he fails to reach for the ankle of Marcus' boot—the impulse, too, made flat by the not-fire light and the darkness all around them and the attentive pressure of observation has slipped from off the point on which it had threatened to fix.
Consequently, the shape of his own attention has narrowed to a fine point. He watches Marcus, patient and not fully dissimilar from the animals across from them only that neither of them have any feathers to smooth.
"Why did you go, then?" is the question that's been invited. It would be discourteous not to ask it.
It's the invited question. It would be discourteous to bristle at it.
He does, a little, and not outwardly. Reflexive, and already given for little lapses in conversational patter as a habit, it's not so remarkable when Marcus is quiet for a span of some seconds where that feeling is measured, and smoothed back. There are Circle mages for whom Marcus would find that question suspect, and almost everyone else who has lived beyond them.
Almost. "A mage is brought into that place, most times, a child," he says. "And then for all of their life thereon, until they're old and feeble, those in charge of seeing to that bed and that meal will do all they can to ensure he stays one, in all ways that matter. A bad child in need of punishment or a sick child in need of care or one that is obedient and deserving of reward and praise. And perhaps he grows to love scholarship and arcane theory and politicking for promotion and finds some measure of progress that way."
A shrug. "Or he doesn't." A beat, there, to breathe from his cigarette so he doesn't burn it out uselessly between his fingers. Tone tempered, quiet. These aren't new ponderings, even if they're altered to fit the shape of the conversation.
The low murmur of sound in reply to this is a kind of agreement, a signal of understanding. Though for a moment after there is no particular thing he seems eager to say. Instead, Flint studies him for a measure. Cold night air; the faints sweet-acrid taste of the cigarette smoke. They are both less grimy than they ought to be, sweat stripped from skin by the rush of flying and remarkably little in the way of clinging viscera given the day's work. By no means bearing no mark of the evening's violence, presently suffering the consequences of Flint's own ambition to see this particular loose thread tied to the Venatori scouts resolved, but all in all: significantly less battered than might be reasonably anticipated.
No, he decides. It is difficult to picture Marcus comfortably shut up in a Circle tower library. Not strictly an impossibility; only somewhat ill fitting.
"I suppose we can't all have a natural affinity for maths."
Under Flint's study, Marcus' focus folds back down to cigarette end, the ashing of it. Says mm at that, and undergoes an adjustment in posture.
The foot that isn't enjoying that point of contact is drawn in, knee lifting. Listing forwards rather than slouching back, these minor changes reminding him of the physical toll of the day that isn't so readily apparent on the outside but tugs at sore muscle and wearier bones beneath. It is satisfying. He has no complaints.
"And then, if your affinity for maths," he's seen Flint write numbers down, and there's this talk of exams, it doesn't seem unlikely, "amounted to only the written theory of those things it calculated and counted. The imagining of navigation, and not going anywhere."
It isn't a counter so much as an extension of the thing. This would be a different kind of conversation if he had suspicion that Flint viewed the Circles as capable of providing any real sort of satisfactory existence. Another breath of smoke before Marcus goes to put it out between fingertips. Too little left to comfortably handle, but he'll keep the remaining scrap of unburnt leaf for later.
"I taught a bit. Illiterates, some who'd never learn if not for the Circle. But even that came to feel a little like sharpening knives and then putting them in a locked drawer forever."
"It's clever," he says, fishing up that tin cup from the hook of his finger. Moving to position it so he might turn the thing idly about between the fingers of both hands. "To have afforded any Circle mage an education to begin with. I imagine it lends the Southern Chantry a great deal of latitude in any argument. To say nothing of what they gain from having the labor of an army of scholars at their behest."
The cup's surface catches and glints dully in the glyph glow, too dark and scratches and weather-beaten to really constitute as reflective.
"The worst disciplinarian I knew in the service was a Laetan mage. The first of his family, getting on and anxious for his children which I gather had yet to show any similar skill. The illusion of advantage makes for strangely familiar adversaries."
He's been privy to some of those inter-mage 'debates' on the crystal.
Marcus retrieves his cigarette case, arm balanced on a knee as he carefully cracks it open. Some rearrangement of its contents to put the twist of finished cigarette inside, a glance up towards Flint as he speaks. Thinks, briefly, for how the promise of Tevinter had seemed like a restoration of dignity, first and foremost. How little that would have been true, in hindsight, even if they'd gotten all else they'd been promised, and not the indentured servitude they'd have entered into instead.
And he isn't so confident in his rapport with the man sitting on a rock, idle game of footsies and all, that Marcus wishes to test it at this hour by raising that point. It it still a small source of pricking shame for which he's yet to determine a solution.
"I almost came to appreciate the Gallows for that," he says, palming closed the case in his hand. "It didn't pretend at being anything other than itself, what they all are, in its practices. Just raw stone and chain. Even what few mages had excelled in any position weren't protected from its elements." A wry slant to his expression. "And then it was the first to crumble."
"As we discussed, all things in the correct measure would seem to have some bearing when it comes to guaranteeing what men and women are willing to indulge with complacency. Maybe if no one in the Gallows knew otherwise, or if the Knight Commander had made some effort to creating division within the ranks of the mages—"
Well, allows the tilt of his head. Maybe Kirkwall would have been the third or fourth to crumble.
His attention skirts, then, to the emptied cup between his fingers and it's black emptiness. Considers, briefly, fetching his own waterskin but decides against it. All this in a flicking glance, hardly a pause, before he shifts his heel. Bumps Marcus' boot where it's aligned with his.
"I'll mind the first watch, when it comes time for that."
Even a quick glance in the direction of an empty cup in the desert is enough to compel Marcus to collect up the waterskin, moving on lazy delay in conjunction with stowing away the case before uncapping it.
A return to business could be—well, that. But there is still something familiar about silent assent, very well, and listing further forward to insist water into the held cup.
"We might have anticipated an overnight stay," he suggests, a flick of a look upwards. "Brought with us a real drink."
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A fine white trail of smoke lifts, more delicate than the great gusts of black clouds that mark his presence on a battlefield, but just as sharp to the nose.
"Were you on ships as far back as that?"
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Despite soaking in the water, the biscuit is slow to separate into two pieces between the hand.
"By twelve," he says, catching crumbles across his thigh. It's a throwaway remark, as if this is the simplest question ever put to him or as if the answer is very easy to supply. These are distant, uncomplicated truths and he is more concerned with the mechanics of chewing through the soggy biscuit than eschewing this line of inquiry he'd started. "Which is typical, unless you've the money to false muster straight into the wardroom."
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A pause implies either a silent wandering off the topic or a contemplation—it can truly go either way—but shows his hand as he asks, "Did you want to be?"
Less a contemplation and more an imagining, of that world at that age.
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"I can only assume my answer would have been reliant on the events of the day when you'd put the question to me." Twelve year old boys being, notoriously, somewhat difficult and changeable with their opinions on most things much less the trajectory of their professional careers.
Had he been happy always in the service? No, certainly not. To say nothing of the complications that has dogged the latter half of his commission, those first years had been difficult and often bitter, homesick and lonely. But they'd also been remarkably free, even if the boy who had gone from that seaside village had cried when he'd left it.
"I'd some understanding that I should be proud of it, and mostly was."
(Is, maybe. Though that's stranger to contemplate.)
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Accepts it, rotating cigarette in fingers, focus dropping down to the boots Flint has resting on the glowing runes. He can move his own just a little, and touch the toe of it into the outside arc near the heel.
He does so, when he says, "You owe me a story of the Imperial navy," as he leans back, weight resting on a hand. Potentially a loose interpretation of that exchange.
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"Ah." Is that so?
He takes a bite from a soggy biscuit quarters. Chews slowly. Doesn't withdraw his heel.
"You wanted to know why I'd left."
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Salve has dried chalkily on the side of his neck. Gotten in time that he no longer itches, at least for tonight.
"Mm," he says, a rumbled sound.
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He finishes the quarter. While he studies Marcus, he wipes his fingers at the knee of his trousers and washes the too dense biscuit down with a sip from what night chilled water remains in the little tin cup.
"What do you know of the Tevinter soporati?" he asks.
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The next question demands more, though, Marcus pausing over it. "They're those without magic, in Tevinter," he offers. "But not of the slaves. Commoners, merchants, military."
It's a sight more than he knew not just before Riftwatch, but before the rebels had almost crossed that northern border with promises of a homeland. He'd learned a little, then.
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"Above them the Laetan, and below the freemen and slaves. The Imperium at sea is much the same as it is otherwise. A soporati might reasonably aspire to be a petty officer aboard, but if he's in the wardroom then it's likely because he has indentured himself to a commissioned mage. But let's say that by some miracle, he has the good fortune to obtain his letter of passage when he's eleven or twelve."
Entirely hypothetically, of course, is punctuated with a brief and sidelong glance.
"Then he need only survive two years to earn his temporary rank. From there, if he wishes to be a Lieutenant, he requires a commanding officer willing to submit him to a board and the head with which to pass their examination. Unlikely as those circumstances are, these are measurable requirements and therefore perfectly attainable should someone find himself in such a position regardless of where he might come from or who he might be otherwise."
The pause as Flint works his way through a bite of another soggy biscuit corner implies a However—
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Entirely hypothetically, he tries to imagine a younger James Flint in uniform, attending to examinations. Maybe it is just as easily imagined as himself in robes, awaiting written verdict as to whether he'd be named Enchanter.
There is a however implied. He is expectantly silent for the other side of it.
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"Obtaining a captaincy is something else entirely. There's no official examination. It requires the captain in command to afford said lieutenant opportunities to prove themselves capable, and asks that same captain to endorse them as a sort of protege. In the case of a soporati, it begs some risk to one's reputation. And even if that did happen, and if this lieutenant did prove himself and his commanding officer was willing to make a place for him, then there are the naval lords in Minrathous who must come to some consensus on the promotion and underwrite it. Those men and women have never met this lieutenant. They see only his name, and that he is a soporati; and they see the names of other junior officers and that they are not."
He has stopped shredding the hardtack biscuit in part because he has turned it into glorified crumbles and reducing it farther would only render the thing entirely inedible. Instead, he makes himself hold the softened pieces in his cupped palm and shifts the set of his boots in the sand away further into the arcane ring and off the gently heated circle itself. The heat has leeched all the way up through the leather, and convinced him temporarily that he is warm and doesn't require to cling so close to touch of magic to be comfortable.
Flint turns his offhand in place of a shrug.
"There are soporati captains in the merchant service, but I didn't want to be one of them. I determined to become someone who couldn't be passed over. In the process of becoming that someone, I simply came to resent the thing which required that of me." (Simply, he says.) "But I suspect they resented me too," he says, playing that this is in any way a pleasure comparable to whatever specific disappoint it was that he had suffered in exchange for it.
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He could ask after it, that resentment. That word, simply. He is curious about it the most, he thinks. What does this process look like? What does it resemble?
Shifts his boot. A less subtle slide until his ankle settles at Flint's heel. Almost playful, though the rest of his demeanour doesn't match that, nor his response. Something else.
"Did you make it that far, before you left it?" he asks, instead. Designed in part to afford some room if there is more to it that Flint would willingly speak of, would wish him to know, but Marcus finds that in spite of that curiousity, he has no appetite for worrying at the thing like a bone, cracking it open.
Because it's familiar in a way where he knows he wouldn't appreciate it, in return. "The captaincy."
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(It's chill there, the air at his back. Though the cliff face hanging above and the scrub about them wards off the desert wind, at least. Opposite that, the two griffons have reached a kind of accord. Buggie has settled for preening Monster's soot free feathers rather than yanking at them.)
"Close," he says, It had been. Managing an Altus with controversial opinions, and seeing his strange proclivities turned into profit would have done it. "But no."
Despite his intention not to feel it, there is some power left in it that grips him. Slants a line in his face slightly crooked. So. Lighter, as if this is a story that has been designed to reach this fact rather than any other and he now sees a way to his punchline:
"This may come as a surprise to you, but pirates are remarkably less particular about promotion."
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The punchline is accepted as it ought to be, a slight ripple of humour—no, not surprised—and perhaps an opportunity to let the story, such as it is, drop anchor there.
It's not unconvincing. A Naval officer who struggled under the yoke of an oppressive system saw what he would need to become to become what he was meant to be, and left it behind for fair wages and deadly democratic processes and harassing the merchant sailors he didn't want to become. Perhaps that man develops sympathies, had harboured them already. That sounds containable within a dry aside about promotions.
If there is a prickle of feeling that there is more story beneath it, then that's an instinct borne of knowing there always is. And that Flint, in specific, would elect to edit.
"I imagine they're not very particular about most things," Marcus says, smoke escaping between his teeth as he considers the progress made on cigarette. "Including the state of the Magisterium, so long as there was trade to plunder."
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"Some were happy with whatever fell into their lap without a thought for what would tomorrow. But then there are the escaped slaves, and those who left because of some dispute with the Magisterium's rule, or who had no care to be folded in under it again when the Imperial governor came calling on the island."
A tilt of the head, faintly red rune light touching across the fine bristle of hair at his temple. A faint spreading of the hands from where his elbows have hooked across knees. It's a complicated business.
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A beat of silence, after, no further questions to follow immediately. The occasional croaked avian-feline purr from Monster under the attentions she is getting, heavy head resting on talons with a wing angled to permit Buggie getting at the crumpled feathers beneath.
"I know there are some among Riftwatch, and out of Riftwatch," he says, tapping cigarette, "who think those that broke from the Circles only did so because we knew nothing of what would wait for us outside of it, when we were afforded warm beds, consistent meals." Like a dog might hope for is only unsaid because it is too easy to level his bitterness in that direction, even when it's not the subject at hand.
Shrugs a little. "Depends on the man, too."
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Consequently, the shape of his own attention has narrowed to a fine point. He watches Marcus, patient and not fully dissimilar from the animals across from them only that neither of them have any feathers to smooth.
"Why did you go, then?" is the question that's been invited. It would be discourteous not to ask it.
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He does, a little, and not outwardly. Reflexive, and already given for little lapses in conversational patter as a habit, it's not so remarkable when Marcus is quiet for a span of some seconds where that feeling is measured, and smoothed back. There are Circle mages for whom Marcus would find that question suspect, and almost everyone else who has lived beyond them.
Almost. "A mage is brought into that place, most times, a child," he says. "And then for all of their life thereon, until they're old and feeble, those in charge of seeing to that bed and that meal will do all they can to ensure he stays one, in all ways that matter. A bad child in need of punishment or a sick child in need of care or one that is obedient and deserving of reward and praise. And perhaps he grows to love scholarship and arcane theory and politicking for promotion and finds some measure of progress that way."
A shrug. "Or he doesn't." A beat, there, to breathe from his cigarette so he doesn't burn it out uselessly between his fingers. Tone tempered, quiet. These aren't new ponderings, even if they're altered to fit the shape of the conversation.
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No, he decides. It is difficult to picture Marcus comfortably shut up in a Circle tower library. Not strictly an impossibility; only somewhat ill fitting.
"I suppose we can't all have a natural affinity for maths."
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The foot that isn't enjoying that point of contact is drawn in, knee lifting. Listing forwards rather than slouching back, these minor changes reminding him of the physical toll of the day that isn't so readily apparent on the outside but tugs at sore muscle and wearier bones beneath. It is satisfying. He has no complaints.
"And then, if your affinity for maths," he's seen Flint write numbers down, and there's this talk of exams, it doesn't seem unlikely, "amounted to only the written theory of those things it calculated and counted. The imagining of navigation, and not going anywhere."
It isn't a counter so much as an extension of the thing. This would be a different kind of conversation if he had suspicion that Flint viewed the Circles as capable of providing any real sort of satisfactory existence. Another breath of smoke before Marcus goes to put it out between fingertips. Too little left to comfortably handle, but he'll keep the remaining scrap of unburnt leaf for later.
"I taught a bit. Illiterates, some who'd never learn if not for the Circle. But even that came to feel a little like sharpening knives and then putting them in a locked drawer forever."
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The cup's surface catches and glints dully in the glyph glow, too dark and scratches and weather-beaten to really constitute as reflective.
"The worst disciplinarian I knew in the service was a Laetan mage. The first of his family, getting on and anxious for his children which I gather had yet to show any similar skill. The illusion of advantage makes for strangely familiar adversaries."
He's been privy to some of those inter-mage 'debates' on the crystal.
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And he isn't so confident in his rapport with the man sitting on a rock, idle game of footsies and all, that Marcus wishes to test it at this hour by raising that point. It it still a small source of pricking shame for which he's yet to determine a solution.
"I almost came to appreciate the Gallows for that," he says, palming closed the case in his hand. "It didn't pretend at being anything other than itself, what they all are, in its practices. Just raw stone and chain. Even what few mages had excelled in any position weren't protected from its elements." A wry slant to his expression. "And then it was the first to crumble."
So.
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Well, allows the tilt of his head. Maybe Kirkwall would have been the third or fourth to crumble.
His attention skirts, then, to the emptied cup between his fingers and it's black emptiness. Considers, briefly, fetching his own waterskin but decides against it. All this in a flicking glance, hardly a pause, before he shifts his heel. Bumps Marcus' boot where it's aligned with his.
"I'll mind the first watch, when it comes time for that."
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A return to business could be—well, that. But there is still something familiar about silent assent, very well, and listing further forward to insist water into the held cup.
"We might have anticipated an overnight stay," he suggests, a flick of a look upwards. "Brought with us a real drink."
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