not the end & not the [START!] {R}

The grapevine was a funny thing, and most the time, Melisande didn't trust it.

Well, anyone in her Order worth the weight of the armor they wore typically wouldn't trust it, but you'd be surprised how many did end up whispering about a lot of silly things. You eventually learned to tune it out, up until the point an official messenger came to confirm it, and then, you had to bloody deal with it. That wasn't a common occurrence, however. Today it was a mix of the guard captain’s wife having been seen cheating on him, three teenagers swearing they saw one of the apostates that were plastered on wanted posters around the city doing horrible demon summoning in one of the back alleys, and that their Grey Wardens were apparently back from their Deep Roads dive that they'd disappeared to not a week ago so something obviously went horribly wrong.

The only one remotely plausible was, of course, the first of the three, what with Jader currently over-saturated with templars to guard the border into Fereldan from apostates, and 'their' wardens (by that, people meant the outpost that just happened to be on the outer rim of town who kept to themselves ninety percent of the time) would have either been spotted as returning right away by someone more official, or not seen at all, as Wardens were apt to do. At least, that was what she was told how it was – she's had precious few encounters with Wardens herself, and had only secondhand knowledge to go on – and that secondhand knowledge always seemed bitter and annoyed. Why, she had no idea - she knew they took in more questionable ends of the world, including stray mages, but you'd think her fellow templars had suffered a personal, grave insult from them.

So the worse she expected when she went out with her contingent for a sweep of the section of the city assigned for her to keep an eye on for the next few days was running into the guard captain in a particularly foul mood. Not that that would be any different than normal for her – she had a passion for stepping on his toes when she could, so he was always rather unhappy to see her. She sent off her unit in pairs of two and volunteered herself as the odd number to go alone – after all, it wasn't even dark outside yet, and would only just barely be so by the time the sweep was done, so running a solo patrol didn't intimidate her. They all split off with a salute to the knight-lieutenant, and the redhead turned and started making her own way down the main streets – intimidated or not, she wasn't fool enough to volunteer herself for back alleys and unused streets if she was going to be patrolling alone. Jader being the nearest city to the only safe way to cross the border from Orlais to Fereldan made it a hotspot for trouble recently, after all.

[attr="class","tags"]tag to GABRIEL CAZAL

[attr="class","lyric1"]I believe in nothing

[attr="class","lyric2"]Not in peace

[attr="class","lyric3"]And not in war