The Seeker Fortress

[Lord Seeker Lambert]

It stood glimmering against the horizon, the bars of sunlight gleaming off its polished battlements, no filth marring the pureness of its greatness. So stood the Fortress of the Seekers, proud in its splendor: north of Val Roeyaux, east of Val Chevin, on the slopes of the Arlesanian foothills it lay. The Lord Seeker looked eastwards from his chair, where he had comfortably settled himself after returning from Val Royeaux. Eastwards and to the north his gaze reached, to Ghislain and yonder, until it finally reached the now ruined fortress, Andoral's Reach. It had once been destroyed; an Exalted March, led by Andraste herself, that left the whole empire in tatters. It had been the single most decisive victory for the Maker and her Bride in the whole history of mankind. Lambert shuddered at the thought. He was to repeat her trick, a part of it: he was to destroy the already ruined fortress of Andoral's Reach. Dark thoughts. His gaze swept astray from the north, finally settling itself on the walls of his very own fortress.

Daily and every hour you could see the constant shifts of templars patrolling its walls, occasionally led by a man in a fancier uniform: sometimes certain Seekers were assigned guard duty as penance. A light penance, perhaps the lightest and easiest of them all: the worse the failure, the worse the punishment, and the failures those men had committed could've varied from simply not saluting a superior to blatantly ignoring an order. His eyes fell, coming down to stare at his wrinkled palms, and now they were touched with a hint of sadness. Could he finish his task before death claimed him and he would take his place at Maker's feet? Could he bring the nations together to oppose the threat of magic, to bring them down once and for all? They had proved that they couldn't be trusted with the small mercy of Circles.

There was nothing more he could do. The situation reminded him of a story he had once heard: a templar's dog had once gone mad, and the owner had been faced with a hard decision. Let it live and risk hurting someone or dispatch it? In the end, the templar had chosen the latter - the dog proved to be too dangerous to allow it to live. Just so, the mages had to be put down - they could not be trusted with the simple task of not hurting anyone with their abilities, and thus served no function in the world except to spread chaos.

His gaze rose again. Before him he saw the great towers and bastions of his fortress, the Seeker Fortress, crossbowmen stationed on top of those battlements in regular distances, the white cloaks of their uniforms gleaming in the sunlight as though they were moist. Banners of the Seekers hung from tall poles, dwarfing the smaller Templar banners by a good distance, and several streamers fluttered on the very peaks of the fortress' several towers. There were eight of them, in total: four on the outer walls, four on the inner walls, each manned by crossbowmen and decorated with banners and streamers of both the Templars and the Seekers; a marvelous sight, he would've thought, but as of now... he could only be grateful that such a place existed. A place where there was as little sin as there could be.

A stack of papers was balanced on his desk, a quill and an inkwell hastily placed in the approximate vicinity of those papers, and another stack lay beside the first; those were already signed papers, due to be picked by his assistant later tomorrow. Until that, he had some more reading and signing to do. He let his eyes fall as low as to the floor before rising from the high-backed sedan chair and moving to the smaller, simpler stool next to his working desk. There indeed was a lot of work to do; too much. Too much for today.