faderift | Open | If you forget, is it like it never happened?

She recoils as if burnt. Fear flickers raw across her face in a rare, undisguised display —

— And she knows him.

Two years and another lifetime ago, a lot of good men’s lives ago (and bad men, and children, and all the others in between), but unmistakable now. The pale boy. The ghost of the Spire, already looking half a corpse.

"Never," She manages, because defiance is a shield for the unarmed. "You never forget the young ones."

But that's a lie, of course. Faces, names, they all blend. You forget the young ones too, you just never forget that they were young.

She can’t begin to make sense of it. But she doesn’t think she’s dreaming (So why hasn't anyone noticed him?). Back when old Lieutenant Courwin still spoke in whole sentences, he always spoke of how real his visions seemed. Real as anything, until they weren’t.

Maybe it’s what rips the words from her now with such uncharacteristic freedom: That kernel of certain doubt, this isn’t happening.

"What are you?"

He didn't have the hat then, or the lightly armoured jacket. His emaciation was more prominent, a starved waif drifting dark and fearful halls.

"You all forgot me."

It's almost like being in the cell again, all the people around them fading into the background so it's just them in this moment and she sees him.

It doesn't mean what it did then.

"I'm Cole." It's a who are you and a what are you all rolled into one. "I'm the Ghost of the Spire, the Forgotten Boy, the wish of something better than cursed and wicked and suffering.

"I'm Cole."

It's not an answer. Yet perhaps, the only true answer he — (it?) — can give.

Nails curl into her palms, tiny half-moons of presence, of focus. If this isn't real, then perhaps she can end it, bring herself forth. It it is, all the more reason to force her head clear.

She doesn't remember a Cole, perhaps a skimmed name some name on a manifest, not one of hers. An apostate? It would explain the cells, but,

But not one of hers. As though that were any excuse. Finally, she seems to find her feet under her, snarls,

"You're a murderer," Called the pot to the kettle, but Maker, if anything had helped raise the Spire's tensions to a boil— "And you will not harm than any further."

As though she could do a damn thing about it. How many apprentices have fled to the shelter of the Inquisition's ranks? How precious few would trust her for any kind of warning?

"So are you!"

Normally, Cole would mildly agree. he killed them, he shouldn't have, but he thought he was doing the right thing. But the cell is too close, the fear and the despair and the soul crushing loneliness.

"How many mages did you murder? How many apprentices?"

He flickers away, smoke curling in the space he was because he puts distance between them, trying to untangle from her emotions. "I thought I was helping them. I was wrong. I wanted to end their despair and terror. Like Cole's ended."

She used to count. Ages ago now. The trouble with counting is this: If you begin counting, soon enough you'll have to decide what does and what doesn't. If you have a conscience at this job, you stop counting quick.

It's moving — a ripple through the air that the distant, detective's part of her mind files away as peculiar — and then it's speaking (a confession?) and she braces herself against the countertop space that it's left behind.

(The barman slides by, lifts his eyebrows in a wry little smile, and she knows he must have noticed none of it).

Despair. Terror. Like Cole's ended. The fixations of a spirit, perhaps even the kind that might wear a corpse. But a revenant alone could not be capable of this. An abomination? Could not know the things it seems to.

Wren forces herself to rise, shoulders set back, expression carefully absenting itself. A familiar look, the hollowness of a hard, shiny helm. Her fists stay tucked tight.

"You knew when they were there." A quiet statement, empty, leading. Real or imagined, she's a duty to do here. There are facts somewhere in this tangle — there must be. "You got around the guards."

"I'm not in a corpse. This is me. My shape."

And yes, that was just direct mind reading. Her fears are too apparent and he has to try and soothe them, because it's what he is. "I'm not like Anders and Justice were. And I'm not living in a body. They took Cole's body away, like rubbish, discarded and forgotten."

It's a leading statement, but Cole lacks the social skills to understand that she's trying to get more information from him. "Yes."

He waits a beat.

It's information, and it's information she's wanted. The flat comfort of truth.

But it's nothing that it should know she wants. Not in so many words, plucked as though breath. Its nature makes it nothing that she can trust, not wholly. A forthcoming creature might still lie.

What reason would it even have to do so? It's already admitted to the worst of it. Its words are impossible, its mannerisms strange, inhuman. But these years have seen so many impossible things. And the humanity's the trouble of it.

"This shape. Why take it?"

Be still. If you're still, you can let it move through you: all the tiresome obfuscating emotions. Deliberately, slowly, she begins to run her mind along the lines of the Chant. Tries it backward. Tries it in Tevene. Perhaps there is a way to block the thing out yet.

Edited 2017-02-18 03:21 (UTC)

"I don't understand why people tell things that aren't true. Except Varric's stories, I understand them, they're for entertaining, none of it is true. They're to make people feel things, smile, gasp, enjoy. They make people happy."

It hasn't occurred to him yet that he should stop reading her mind, because her distress is still tangible.

"It was the shape that would help. He wanted a life where he wasn't a monster, wasn't a mage, wasn't dying alone in a cell, stomach hollow, tongue cracked. He wanted another life. He didn't want to die alone, forgotten. This shape helped."

The Chant doesn't do anything bad to him. Instead, he starts to very softly sing.

"Shadows fall, and hope has fled. Steel you heart; the dawn will come."

It grabs to stretches of phrase, small images and bursts of emotion, independent of language. Like a child snatching for blocks, without any set pattern to disrupt. Perhaps it would be interesting, if it weren't playing inside her own damn skull.

It's singing and she wants to shudder; an old song, a dull pang of memory for those days when her mother sang. When they spoke at all. Its sweetness jars against the pulse of her heart, the burnt melody of her veins.

It never even occurs that she could simply ask it to stop.

"When?" The lower levels were old, the Veil thin. Torn by another death, anything might have invited itself in. "When did they forget him?"

Maker help her, she thinks it may be speaking literally. The names rush free, unbidden: check themselves against a catalogue of faces, and habits; and what must once have been affection — replaced by the bitter resignation of grief.

Not Joane, not Werner, (be still) never Arnault. Averie? No, she could tell whenever he was up to his bullshit,

(be still)

Not one of her men. She would have had it from them, one way or another. They would have shared such a horror.

Edited 2017-03-22 07:08 (UTC)

He stops as soon as the pang hits her, as if he knows it hurts.

"Rhys... Rhys said I'd been there a year? A year before the Spire revolted? Maybe... a bit more?" He doesn't really know, his grasp of time is stilted and fragmentary at best.

"I don't know his name. Tranquil don't say no, Maker's sake, get rid of that, burn it, we'll lose the paperwork, it'll be like it never happened." There's Orlesian inflection to the words, a soft growl. "Evangeline didn't know, either. I was their dirty secret. My death- his death. Cole's death."

Rhys. So he'd been hiding it. Of all the idiot complicities —

She has had few dealings with the Senior Enchanters, kept her eyes on those more likely to be approved for travel. But if she understands what it says, can she fully blame him? Knowing how this came to be would have been a dangerous business. There'd have been no one to trust with such news.

And the Captain, Of course she wouldn't have been told.

Wren is furious, and she is tired. In the old days, she could throw herself into that: keep plunging headlong at the source of woe until she has answers. Until quiet words are had to let it lie, leave it be.

But the old days are gone. Her people are gone. The quarry’s here; and it is strange, and dead, and at once not — and there’s not a single reason left to chase.

"If you harm anyone here," She doesn’t bother to finish the threat. Stillness comes at last. Or perhaps that’s the wrong word for it, for this flat ache. Perhaps when Dolentius visits her tonight, it will know to call despair by its proper name.

Wren shakes her head. If she has empathy of Cole's situation, it is not for this alien thing, but for the boy that it was once drawn to. A short, painful life reduced to human error; transformed into only another line item of the Order's shared failures. He deserved more of them.

A new thought that begins, as she looks at last away, as her palms finally uncurl.

"I will need to bring this to the Seekers."

But she knows — and perhaps it will know — that she doesn’t plan to do that either. She should tell Reed, but she won’t.

Rhys had done what he'd had to when faced with an invisible, in audible boy who was forgotten even when people did catch a glance of him. he'd not told anyone because there was nothing he could prove or do.

"Don't blame Rhys. No one else could see me. And they wouldn't have believed him that he was trying to help a hedge mage who was trapped in the Pit. The would've said he was hiding him when they couldn't find me."

And Cole wouldn't have been found.

"I don't harm anymore. And I've never caused hurt. I know I scare you; you scare me too. Deep in my bones, cold aching, knot in the gut like starving, but resting under my ribs." He touches his solar plexus. "Reed knows. I met him. We talked. Cassandra knew. If I hurt anyone, you have to stop me. You think of me as 'it', you can do it if it must be done."

Of course the Nevarran is at ease with this. Of course. But it’s the Nevarran’s damn Inquisition, and there’s nothing that Wren can do about that.

Still, it betrays a softness that she wouldn't have expected of the woman — else an assessment Cole poses no threat. Even if by its own admission,

Quietly: "Do you fear that you will?"

Hurt anyone. What must be done is what she’s always done. The actions matter little, beside their potential necessity.

(It’s already necessary. Whatever its intentions, this thing is inhuman, and it has killed. But she cannot touch it. Will not, unless.)

"Cassandra promised to kill me if I turn into a demon," Cole adds on. That was important, Cassandra's willingness not to be blinded by sentiment matters to Cole.

"Fear... yes. I don't want to be a demon. I don't want to be Despair. I want to keep helping people, easing their pains."

He leans forward, pale eyes peeking out from the shade of his hat. "You cared that they died. Did you care why?"

"They died because you killed them."

Blunt, reductive. Defensive.

Why? It wanted to end their pain, it has said as much. As though each soul were a rabbit caught beneath the wheels of a cart. As though such wounds would not scar over given time, become an impact and not an end. Someone should have been there for them. Should have protected them. From this, from the world, from themselves.

She watches its eyes, regards it warily. Wren believes in the mercy of a blade. And yet,

It was not one of hers. No, not one. Not one, but all.

Each living, beating heart of the Spire: hers. My people, my home! A sworn duty, a role to fulfill — splintered as surely as bone.

Of course she cares. She would not break herself against this did she not. You do what must be done, because someone has to do it. Because no one else is going to. You care, and you learn to close yourself to it; to swallow that fire and cage it in place. You handle the how, because the why shifts, changes. Because someone always needs the how.

"I was wrong to kill them, even though I was trying to help."

And then he's there , in her space, up close and looking actually angry. "So why didn't you help them before I had to?! Why did you let them all suffer and fear and hurt until all they wanted was to die?! Why didn't anyone save us?!"

And as if he's realised, so close, too dangerous, the terror is back on his face and he's gone in a curl of smoke, briefly visible outside as he flees and then vanishes again.

It’s gone.

It’s gone, and she doesn’t follow.

Pursuit has always been a refuge; action, a form of release. But she doesn’t have it in her now for that, for the relentless search. Not when she knows that all she’ll find at the end is a mirror.

Wren leans against the countertop, and by gradual inches, she folds. Rigidity slides into a boneless exhale. Until all they wanted to do was die,

Wanting and doing are such terribly different things.

"You alright, ser?" Someone’s asking, one of the faces from before, and the sound is miles distant: an echo down the pit. Why didn't anyone save us? "You look like you've seen a ghost."

She thinks she'll avoid this place a spell.

Open | If you forget, is it like it never happened?

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