Soooo, changing eye color. A “subtle” show of magic.

  • So I was thinking about how magic can manifest as “subtle” as a change in eye color and like…that’s so crazy. Yeah, it’s more subtle than, say, accidentally freezing a lake or setting a house on fire, but…at least with the “extreme” showing, you don’t see anything outwardly different from the person until after the fact. Can you imagine how the people around the mage, or even the mage themself, would react to that change?

    A little boy wakes up from a nightmare and runs to his parents’ room. They can only stare at him in horror as he’s sobbing by their bed, golden eyes shimmering with tears.

    The daughter of a nobleman and her friend are busy chatting away in the estate’s garden. A blink, and suddenly the conversation ends with a shriek as the young girls eyes changed from blue to crimson.

    A Templar has accompanied one of the Sisters of their Chantry to the local market for provisions. Out of habit, he scans their surroundings. His gaze immediately locks onto a little girl with violet eyes, clutching on her mother’s skirts.

    A Templar recruit stands before a mirror, preparing to shave his face before presenting himself for training. The razor slips from his hand and clatters nosily onto the table as he stares numbly at his reflection. His brown eyes now a bright, vivid green.

    An Elven couple rush to their Hahren in a panic. They know what should be done, what needs to be done. But if there is another way, any way… They speak to the Hahren as quickly and simply as they can. Hazel eyes just don’t turn silver in any kind of lighting.

    A teenage girl stares at her little sister. Her eyes were always pale. She had their Da’s green eyes; they were the lightest thing. Her eyes were always pale. It was nothing, they were always light- Her sister must have felt her staring and turned to give her a small smile. It, surprisingly, reached her snow white eyes. It did nothing to calm her as she felt her stomach lurch. Their parents would be back from the Chantry at any moment.

    A woman proudly presents her daughter to their village’s seer, the young teen looking bashfully at the floor. The seer motions the girl over with a gentle smile. She comes forward, slowly looking up to meet the Seer’s gaze. Her rose colored eyes meeting the Seer’s piercing blue as she gently returns the smile.

    The Magister and his apprentice were hard at work, scouring over texts to see if there was anything tied to what they were working on. His teenage son finally arrived with the scrolls and tomes he had requested hours ago. Glancing up at him before grabbing them, he froze, only for a moment. His son greeted him with a sheepish smile, his eyes, up until this moment an earthy brown like his mother’s, a soft peach. The man let out a deep sigh of relief.

    A young child was brought before his clan’s Keeper by his parents. The Keeper motioned for the child to come forward, holing out her hand. The boy slowly walked over, softly grabbing her hand before looking up at the Keeper with bright pink eyes. With a bright smile, the Keeper announced she would train the boy as her First.

    • May 2011 n
    #My Mind#Dragon Age#Magic in Thedas#Dalish Elves#City Elves#Rivain#Tevinter Imperium#Thedas#Sun's Snippets
  • ofcrowsanddragons

    The Antivan Mafia

    The Antivan Crows operate like the mob, especially when it comes to recruiting desperate members of the public in a system they uphold. They're also... a genuinely legitimate power with close connections to the King of Antiva. These things are both true.

    Antiva appears to operate according to and be ruled by a system of merchant houses (including the Crows) and merchant princes (arguably including the Talons).

    I posit, veering into headcanon territory, that if we're thinking of the Crows as the mob, we should extend that thinking across all of the merchant houses across all of the Antivan city states. (Of course, other houses often outsource their murder to professionals.)

    In terms of understanding what the Crows are, and especially what the Crows we see in Treviso are, @ravioliage brought up the great example of the Yakuza being the first to send aid in the 2011 tsunami, and further, that the largest organized crime networks throughout history "donate food in bad neighborhoods" so that people think kindly of them and become fodder for recruitment. Meanwhile, that gang or mafia or whatever is actually responsible for the fact that the neighbourhood is a bad neighbourhood, and that the people there "can't afford to eat."

    They do this because this is how you maintain power over people. You keep them moderately content in a system that's designed to feed on them, or you at least keep them blaming something other than you. The problem from here, as we the audience try to establish what is justifiable for our viewpoint characters according to our own morality, is that the Crows are also established within a system of merchant houses that have very little reason to operate in any other way.

    By which I mean, the other merchant houses also operate like the mob, feeding on the people at the bottom to keep their entire operation spinning. The Crows are contract killers, with lives that very much seem dedicated to the job, in a set of rotating institutions that stab each other in the back all the time. The other merchant houses create silk and wine and the basic necessities of life, perhaps with more ordinary lives, but in a system where hiring a killer is a normal way to do business.

    I think the reason that Lucanis sees "his" kind of commerce as not all that different than the other houses in Antiva is because, as far as he can tell, it's not. He gets hired by someone on the inside to kill the head of the family so that they can take power (in some of the extended media), which he likely considers evidence that they're not so different from the Crows themselves.

    There's no reason to think that the other houses in Antiva operate according to a more optimistic model than the Crows do. If the merchant princes don't run their own "mobs" (with their own guards and men-at-arms, and their own ability to hire mercenaries), then at their best, they're still playing a Game of Thrones.

    Is there an escape from that kind of system? If you care at all, do you leave or try to make it better? If you're Teia, you fight—and you might be wrong to do so, because your default response is to aim to slit a hundred throats by nightfall. If tomorrow there are a hundred more, then you have more knives.

    The problem with systems is that you take the ones that shaped you with you... wherever you go.

  • ofcrowsanddragons

    What I wrote earlier today is deliberately a low-key introduction into thinking of nations as something other than a single entity ruled over by a "legitimate" figurehead.

    What's the difference between a noble family (the Borgias and Medici, for example) and a family that rules a criminal empire?

    All of these structures are about powerful people appearing legitimate to their peers and to the people below them, because that helps them maintain their power. Smart leaders, including the ones that are greedy and selfish, know that appearing benevolent to the people they rule over helps them maintain that power. When that doesn't work, they rule through fear—but Machiavelli (somewhat of an opponent of the Medici, hilariously) advised that it's better to rule through both.

    This is every structure in the setting.

    • Apr 11113 n
    #Wonders of Thedas#Dragon Age#DATV#Antivan Crows#Antiva#Treviso