entrancelogs | ☼ Arrival; ☼

Who: Bethany Hawke and [open]
Where: Outside the caves!
When: Now...ish?
Rating: PG-13 for now!
Summary: Yass queen

The Story: Her head was swimming. The battle with Orsino had taken nearly all her magical power, but it was more than that -- seeing him use blood magic to take the corpses of all the mages that she’d known living and working in the circle to turn himself into an abomination -- it was too much. Too much on top of the templars and countless innocent people who had no doubt been killed when the Chantry had been obliterated. Her heart ached as if her mother and brother had died all over again. So much senseless violence because of Meredith, because of the extremist templars -- she squeezed her eyes shut and when they opened again, she was surrounded by a cave of brick icicles. What fresh hell was this?

“Garrett!” Her voice echoed hollowly in the cave and she spun, panicked. “Garrett!” What if this is some sort of last-ditch effort that Orsino learned from that horrible beast, Quentin? Was she going to be trapped in some sort of labyrinth for the rest of her (probably very short, very painful) life? She scanned the room and let out a sob of relief at the sight of the entrance to the cave, scrambling up the incline with little care for whether she was letting the barbs of once-molten stone bite into her skirts. She rushed toward the point of light, awkwardly using her staff to half-vault her toward the ever-growing gleam.

Blissfully, the Circle-mandated wear was spelled to be durable and once she made it to the sunlight, she skidded to a stop and took in her surroundings, staff at the ready.
“Show yourself!” There had to be someone here, there had to be some meaning of this that could be explained. The pain in her heart was too fresh for this to be heaven, and she had been to the Fade -- this was not it. Impatient at the lack of an answer, she slammed her staff down on the ground. A bolt of flame shoots from the spot it hits, landing nearby in an explosion of sparks.

“I don’t have time for this!” She needed to find her brother, because nothing about this place made any sense.

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She just ... furrows her brows. "Garrett, I don't know that there will be any Circle left to speak of when the dust settles." However, she squeezes his arm gently and tries to steer them away from that train of thought.

"Yes, please. I feel rather unprepared."

...Well, that's news, and he makes a note to ask about it later but for now, they can focus on getting Bethany up to speed. "Well, there's everything I've told you already, and every so often there's these things people call 'events.' Wonderland likes to make us its playthings, even more than we already are, and subjects us to different things. Swarms of creatures, changing itself into an entirely new location, altering our memories, just to name a few. If it wasn't intent on terrorising us, I'd be fascinated by how its magic works."

He begins to lead her towards the mansion as they talk, intending on taking her to his room so they can have some privacy and she can catch her breath. "There's little more we can do other than simply weather them, unfortunately."

"I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard you utter the phrase 'fascinated by how its magic works' on one hand, Garrett." She knows that he just went over how he might not be the same man that she remembers, exactly, but -- well. She can't help but notice his lack of weapons, too, and opts to remark on that instead, "And it's certainly a higher number than the times I've seen you without your sword."

She tries to make a mental note of where they're going as they walk, and she is, of course, trying to take in the scenery. "Well, that sounds suitably horrifying."

"Sword?" He can't help but echo that, putting it together a moment later. Ah, but that means... "I'm quite a bit different from the Garrett you knew then," he adds after a moment with a quiet laugh. "I'm a mage, just like you, Bethany." Of course he sounds proud of it, and while he knows his sister's feelings about her -- their magic, he's never been anything but proud of his own.

He did mean to elaborate about Wonderland, but this is a touch more important.

The look she gives him initially is probably one that Garrett remembers his sister giving him on more than one occasion -- the 'are you sure that you aren't kidding me' look, specifically, but he had said there would be differences. She clears her throat.

"Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say 'just like me'. I'm sure I have to better than you at one spell, at least."

"Well, from the sound of it, you're... from the future, so I would hope you used that time to study," he's teasing her, but there's an undercurrent of worry because he's quickly learning that siblings from the future rarely bring good news. "I think you were always better than me, anyway," he has raw talent, sure, but nobody is going to deny how much work Bethany put in.

She smirks. "A lot of my time lately has been dedicated to teaching some of the newer initiates the basics, but I have been doing a great deal of studying as far as Force Magic goes." There's a really easy joke about her being a control freak in that statement, isn't there?

What he says, though... "What's the last thing you remember?" She wonders how similar his timeline is or isn't to the one she remembers, but it could at least give her a point of reference.

Garrett lets out a low whistle, clearly impressed. "Force Magic? I'm impressed Bethany, I don't think I could ever do something like that. I've had luck with Primal and Entropy, but... " He trails off with a shrug, his steps faltering when she asks that question.

"Ah," Garrett hesitates, unusual for him even knowing there are, apparently, multiple hims. "The Deep Roads Expedition?"

She smiles easily at Garrett's compliment, even if it falters as soon as he mentions the last thing that he remembers. She knows that her Garrett didn't allow her to go on that particular trip.

"Ah," she says, brows furrowed. "Quite the adventure, from the way I heard you tell it." Yes, that conveyed well enough that he'd left her at home without betraying the fact that it had been nearly upon his return that she'd been taken to the Kirkwall Circle.

Garrett hums thoughtfully. He can understand the reasoning behind not taking Bethany along, as much as the thought of it doesn't sit right with him. But if he picks apart every decision his alternate selves made, he'll be here quite literally forever.

"Something like that," is what he settles on. "I never even made it home. We were trying to find our way out and suddenly I was in the tunnels under the mansion. Thought I was having some sort of fever dream."

☼ Arrival; ☼

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