Riya Labelle was frozen in place, only capable of letting date turn around her.
Vhennuh Surana, her child of five years, clinging in normalised fear to his father's leg.
Taralen Suranna, who did his best to deflect the escalating harrassment of a band of human thieves.
Riya could not hear the exchange from her place in the centre of the market square. After so long working in the busy exterior, she had trained herself to focus only on the script in her head - lines and lines of prompts to pull out, as if candidly, to steer each customer in a certain direction with an appropriate amount of momentum. The script in her mind blocked out any other potential action, so when she watched her husband and son that day, she felt no connection or responsibility to them. That simply wasn't in the script.
Taralen, as always, maintained a non-aggressive posture. The humans picked at him, circled him, presuming that he had gold on him if he were taking a child to the market. Even at a distance, Riya was aware enough to know these were the type of humans who wouldn't stand for an elvhen child to get a special treat from the market. That was to be *their* special treat.
This child of a timid, gentle Dalish man - the humans must have found him laughable, Riya wondered. The Dalish were savage in the eyes of a city-dweller. A gentle Dalish man was just asking to be robbed and battered, his child left sobbing and traumatised, fearful of ever stepping foot in the marketplace again.
Riya knew there was a streak of herself in her own son, however; she was not surprised when Vhennug's face contorted in rage as he screeched something unkind, and full of malice.
This only caused Taralen to freeze, expecting the rebellion to escalate, but the humans laughed. Now *there* was the ferocity appropriate for an elf. The boy's father was a disappointment, dedicated to descalation, but the child would bite back. Now they could get away with the robbery by claiming they were the victims.
If Vhennug's retaliation had stopped there, it might have, but the child's hair whipped about, his clothes began to ripple and move on their own as static electricity pulled the fabrics this way and that.
Taralen spasmed awkwardly as Vhennug instinctively gripped his leg tighter. A comfort to offset his fears as he tried defending himself and his poor, sweet father.
What happened next passed too quickly for anyone to clearly recall.
First, frost creeped across the ground. Though some would say it was the clouds which gathered first.
Dozens within the radius would tell horror stories of the injuries inflicted that day, of all those lives lost. Though none were ever told about the child's father. Whose body was left alone by even his wife, as she stared on. Watching folks running for shelter from this freak weather event - what the Chantry would later explain as a 'Storm of the Century', or so such phenomena was dubbed by mages of the Circle. Frost and lightning combined into something no regular mage should be capable of upon his first Awakening. When the child was seized by the band of trolling thieves, they were deemed as heroes by the whole city. They had cornered a conniving Dalish hiding his somniari child, captured and marked the child with a scar across his forehead declaring him as 'WITCH' so that he could be found again should be manage to slip away with his frightful elvhen magicks. One of their number even went on to be invited into the Templar order, so brave and noble was their deed. Riya heard nothing but praise for those men for weeks. She kept silent through it all, only breaking character once when the mural was painted in memorandum of all those lives lost. She crossed the marketplace then, a month since she had last seen the faces of her husband and her son, to include her husband's name amongst list of casualties.
Quietly, she write 'Taralen Suranna' in white ink. Subtle enough that it would not draw attention, would not have her questioned and cast away. Yet bold enough in deed that she could hold back her tears.
