Who: Signy Dagna and anyone from Group 1. Where: Redcliffe, down in the town. Lakeside. When: 28 Molioris, 9:45 Dragon. Evening. Summary: Redcliffe hasn't changed, but it seems different. Status: In Progress.
Redcliffe was not precisely as she remembered it.
After they had settled in the castle (a place that Signy found herself more comfortable than she had been, since they had left Amaranthine, nearly a fortnight ago), she had begun peering out the windows, trying to catch a glimpse of the wooden buildings clustered, haphazardly, around the flat lake. The lake was something she had been living with for a few days, now, Its alarming expanse, and the way the sun glittered off of it, painfully bright during the middle of the day, and the weird, new wind patterns, all of those things had slowly become… not natural, not yet, but less new and alarming as they had traveled south from the Mage's Tower towards Redcliffe. The lake had always been close, if not always in view. It was not the unnerving impossibility that it had been, when she had first come here.
But it was not the only difference she had noticed. From the castle, it had been hard to see all of the town, and that had only made her want to see it more. Was it the same? Was her memory truly that poor? What else could it have been? Eventually, after putting away her gear from the road and finding something to eat in the very obliging kitchens, she had decided to go out and see it for herself. (Some uncertainty motivated her decision to leave the castle, as well. The other Wardens, they were the sorts of people far more inclined to be at home in a human castle—Coan was a noble, Vienne was some sort of noble, too, or at least she had come from their caste, and Savio had an exceedingly cultured dog and, furthermore, seemed the sort of person who could seem comfortable anywhere—but she was too short, too frightened, and woefully uninformed.)
She walked down the dusty, sharply sloped hill; it was not until she reached the bottom of the basin the town was set in that she realized how much she was not terrified. At least, not in the way she had been, the last time she had been here: her pulse wasn't racing nearly as fast, though she was still conscious of the sky above and the wide, open spaces and the strange humans around her. But she felt neither like crying, nor (quite) like running to hide indoors. She was sure-footed on the rocks, at least, but as she came into the center of town, she found herself unsure of where exactly to take her feet. To the forge, again? To the Chantry? No, the Chantry seemed a bad idea, if for no other reason than she hadn't the faintest clue what was the proper behavior there, nor if her ancestors would be offended if she respected those Andrastian traditions.
So, after some internal debate (during which she looked probably more like a lost child with a particularly serious face than she would ever have wanted to know or ever admitted), she started for the lakeside. The buildings there were... well, she could remember when they had seemed so strange and incorrect, standing up on their own with no cave wall backing and supporting them, made of wood, and so unnaturally far apart. Now, it only occurred to her after a few minutes, as she stopped underneath the last one that jutted out towards the water, the closest anyone found it wise to build to Lake Calenhad. She wasn't terrified of the lake anymore, no, but that didn't mean she was going to to trying to fall into it. A wind might pick up. She might stumble. Maybe water was mildly magnetic. There were all sorts of incredibly smart reasons to go no closer.