suitsahero

((OOC: Since a few people mentioned this, I thought I'd write one starter and whoever wants can tag in. This is one of my favorite sorts of set-ups so I don't think I'll get tired of playing it over and over if that's how this shakes out. I've tried to leave a variety of actual starting states or reasons to be there open as well.))

Getting up to the castle on purpose is difficult.

It's difficult to get to the bustling town at the base of the mountain. Transport is spotty at the best of times, mountain passes obscured by snow and ice most of the time. It's doable in the spring and summer, but the town is almost completely isolated in the fall and winter. Plenty of people make the journey, though, to enjoy the vistas, the peace and quiet through the winters, or just the ability to eke out a simple living, far from other stresses. The town is something of a tourist destination, both for those reasons and to climb a separate peak from the one with the castle on it. People go missing in the snows most years, but it's not considered dangerous beyond that, and everyone is warned extensively not to go wandering outside of the known routes or without a guide.

Nature is beautiful, but also deadly. It is nothing to be overly concerned about, beyond making sure people know how to be safe.

The people who actually live in the town are a bit superstitious, though, as only people living in relative isolation and in tension with a hostile environment can be. Which provides the next obstacle to getting up the mountain to the castle: no one is willing to take you. Stories vary on what lives up in the castle depending on who you talk to. A monster, a magician, an evil spirit, or just a strange artist who wants to be left alone. No one seems to agree on what is up in the tower, but everyone agrees that you don't go up there, you don't bother whoever, or whatever, it is. People don't come back or maybe people do come back but they're different, strange, don't remember things, or maybe no one has ever been up there at all.

And then, if you happen to still be painfully curious, particularly when you can clearly see lights moving through the castle in the evenings, the way up to the castle is also treacherous, requires skill and luck just to follow the unkept trail through the snow and rocks and trees, the way turned steep and winding through disuse. And the villagers also say there are wolves, though you've never seen any.

On the other hand, it is remarkably easy to find the castle on accident.

Nothing about it is magically easier, but if you throw safety to the wind, if your tent is ripped open by falling snows or you lose a trail you're supposed to be on, suddenly difficult and dangerous obstacles become your means of survival and climbing up to the castle doesn't seem like a journey to be embarked upon with caution but a last, desperate act of someone who doesn't want to freeze to death in the snows. Surely whatever is waiting there is better than that. Surely.

And what of those who fail? Who go out into the wilds only to succumb to the elements?

Well, no eyes and ears can be everywhere, but some few who do have their journeys set to end in the most final way possible might find themselves waking in a warm bed, instead, fire blazing merrily in a hearth. Are you lucky to have survived or not? Only time will tell...

There are many places that Lord Haurchefant has been in his life that have been unexpected but standing on an airship landing dock waiting for the arrival of his betrothed is close to the top of the list. It's certainly one of the most nerve-wracking ones.

He's not unhappy about it, exactly, doesn't bear any kind of sullen resentment or bemoaning of his fate. He'd volunteered, after all. It's just... like something from a storybook, isn't it? The High Houses do play politics over love in marriages for the most part, his very existence is proof of that, but he's never heard of the arrangement being arranged entirely by others and certainly usually the couples had met before. But this kingdom far across the sea has older ways, and when it was stated in no uncertain terms that the way they were to cement their alliance was to marry their princess to a member of Ishgardian nobility, the Archbishop had agreed.

There were reminders, of course, that the Ishgardians had no king and of course the Archbishop had forgone all worldly pleasures in pursuit of his religious ones (a fact every Ishgardian knew was not the case at all, but the pretense was enough to exclude certain other knights from the selection process) so there were no princes to be had, but surely a suitable groom could be found among the High Houses. Whoever offered one of their sons for this would be quite favored, after all.

One might be forgiven for thinking that that was why he volunteered, or that it was coerced or asked of him in some way, but really, it was sitting there, listening to them talk about this poor girl like she was an inconvenience that pushed him over the edge. That the practice was backwards, but necessary to the kingdom, that it was a sacrifice for a noble Ishgardian to be stuck with some foreign princess. A jeering sidebar about how she was probably ugly, another about the joys of foreign women not so frozen stiff as their Ishgardian counterparts, were the final straws that had him hunting down his father.

There are so many that he can't save. But he's pretty sure he can save this one.

And so, here he is, dressed in finer clothes than he usually prefers when he's not in armor, waiting in nervous anticipation for a woman he's never even seen so much as a picture of.