faderift | (no subject)

"You don't have to be." At his service, that is. He sounds — he is — mildly uncomfortable at the prospect. But moving on.

"You came from somewhere else. Like most of them." Most of the people who fell through the rift. He tries to listen, to pluck out some facts about her past, her world... it's difficult. So foreign and far away. "Does you world have spirits?"

Again, she's flummoxed because this is her normal greeting to anyone but the question is more important and she can always ask again later, besides, it feels safer, to allow the conversation to be steered into more charted waters.

"Si, my home is sort of like Antiva. Just with less murder and backstabbing as the national sport and much more romance and wonder, if you're curious." Blues and silvers, old figureheads salvaged, the smell of fish and brine and always noise and bustle, enough that Skyhold seems too quiet to her most days. She considers the question carefully though, managing a more sincere smile this time. "Not like this place. When you die there's nothing to possess you, nothing like them or the demons, and demons are just a story, or they are in my country. Beliefs differ very greatly, country to country, we care about the storm hags out at sea, the great whales who know so much, and mermaids of course."

Thankfully she's not from the place with the legend of a demon fooled by twins who might not have been twins, by clever words and masks and a soul split in two.

Mermaids. Not a word he knows, but one that calls up a haunting melody, and at once he understands.

"Sirens singing, tails flickering, flashing like sunlight on waves. They drag sailors into the sea."

"They guide us home, when it's our time." Most of the stories are from the survivors of wrecks or the ones watching from the shore or a ship as someone beautiful and fair, almost too fair to look upon, rises from the depths and gathers another with them, disappearing in a flash. "And the great one sits in the pearl that is the moon and makes the waves to give us life."

The sea can always take their life however he wishes to because it's not exactly taking away, only taking back. Home is always the water, the waves, salt on your lips and the cry of gulls when the air smells like brine when it tugs at your hair.

"Do you have those here? It is only fair to ask a question for a question, no?"

"Yes." It is fair. "And... no. At least I don't think we have them. But I've never been to the sea. And I've never seen anyone sitting in the moon." He imagines it would look quite beautiful, though.

"I get to ask another question now? Is that how it works?" ...oh. "Or do those two count?"

And that was three questions. He feels he hasn't got the hang of this game.

"You've never been to the sea," she echoes, shaking her head almost sadly. Too many people here have never been or if they have, their journeys haven't been full of joy upon the waters. If she ever is afforded a chance, she dearly hopes to show at least one soul here the wonder of sailing and seeing only the horizon.

"Yes, the question you want to ask is the one that counts. And I realise I have a habit of phrasing things like questions myself." It's something she picked up very young when it could be used to distract a person or to trap them in a lie or a story but she has to pay attention now. "Ask your question, or more, questions are small things between new acquaintances, I won't keep so strit a tally this first time."

Hm. And now he has to think of one.

"There's — someone else. She loves the sea, too. Rolling waters, the smell of salt." He's encountered her in the tavern, heard her quiet longing. "Have you met her yet? I think she'd like you."

"I don't go around sniffing people, but if it's who I think it is, then yes, we've met to play cards together." Unbidden, she laughs because she'd been called kitten and it had been so different and strange that it had managed to catch her off guard. Sailors know sailors and Zevran's description of her had left little doubt anyway.

"What did you mean exactly though, about how it was good there were more here?" Because she did watch the other rifters arriving in the Mire, strangely detached even as she knew that the same had happened to her and it strikes her as so odd, that so many of them are her, pulled from worlds nothing like this one or their own for whatever purpose.

"We have more pieces of the mark now." Because she must have heard about the Herald, and what happened... hadn't she? "I didn't mean it's good that you'd been taken from your homes. Without the mark, we couldn't close the rifts. We couldn't heal the sky."

“This is probably going to make me sound like an idiot, though I should be used to that here by now I think, but if we have pieces, then how big was the mark of the Herald? Her death was announced when the first group of us arrived here, they said they’d found her but we all have pieces…” No one had said what killed her exactly, probably too raw when they’d just found her body and she’d skipped the funeral of a person she hadn’t known to leave more room for those sincerely grieving to pay their respects. “You really believe it though, that something like a tear in the sky can be healed.”

She doesn’t know if she does. She hasn’t even used her own mark at all yet and most of the time when she’s climbing she’s taken to binding it so it doesn’t distract her more than it should. It just seems like an awful lot, to be brought so far from home to do what seems utterly impossible as more demons spill out to try to kill them.

He doesn't need to believe it. He's seen it.

"It already happened once. She did it." Even though it killed her. He's going to leave that little detail unspoken for the moment, though.

"I wish I knew more about how the mark works. The Fade calls, but I can't answer. I can only listen."

"But she's gone now." Burned, Araceli would assume because that was the funeral custom of Thedas, at least for humans so far.

"And what does it say?" She's intrigued despite herself, because that bit oddly - or maybe not so oddly - makes sense to her, sitting on the skeletal hull of a ship to listen to the ocean. Never words she could understand but something that never failed to settle her so she could move. What she would give for that now... "How is it you can listen though? Could we? Like holding a shell to your ear?"

He considers the comparison — or rather, tries to, but gets stuck on the idea of listening to a shell in order to hear the ocean.

"Can a shell hold that much water?" he asks, sounding mystified.

"Oh it can't, I mean most hold nothing, though there are big conches you can blow like a horn and huge clams, bigger than grown men if you dive deep enough." She tries demonstrating but her arms will only stretch so far and even then it's not really far at all. "You just hear the rushing sound, your own blood. And where I'm from, well we believe that the sea is in our blood and so when we hear that, we hear the sea."

It occurs to her that this isn't unlike meeting foreigners at home wanting explanations and she's glad she's not standing so she can't scuff her toe in the dirt.

Oh.

"Like dreams," he realizes, and there's a pause — long enough to perhaps make her wonder whether he's going to explain — before he does. "Solas explained it to me, once. The spirits in the Fade sing your own memories back to you, while you sleep. It's where dreams come from. That's how you can hear it."

Like dreams, he says and her brow furrows for a moment, because it's a different explanation to any she's ever had but it's a different world after all. And it fits with what she's been told of the Fade thus far, or it fits enough that it doesn't seem entirely outlandish.

"But would that work for someone like a rifter? What would spirits even make of us, there has to be something different for all that seems the same." Little things, but enough that it matters, somewhere deep down. "So I have to just try listening to my dreams, that might work or help or something?"

"Maybe." There's a slight downturn to his tone, a lament -- he knows he's not being very helpful. "I'm not sure."

He thinks about it for another second.

"I like the idea of the shells, though. And dreams. The sound of the waves, the shining visions of the nighttime. Moonlight on the water." He's getting rhapsodic, now.

"For someone that says they haven't been to the sea, you paint the picture just right. When the waters are calm and still, it's like a great long mirror, no boundary between the sea and the sky, like they're stretching into one another forever."

Perhaps it's selfish to hope that there's a reason for the Inquisition to go to the Storm Coast, so that she can just watch the waves from another world.

"If the spirits here can sing my own shores back to me, I should be very grateful I think, right now there are still too many things close to nightmares. Demon faces, the dead rising out of the water." That and falling, falling through the rift and not knowing what was happening until it was too late to even try to stop it.

"You're afraid." And her fears are being reflected back to her in the night. "So are lots of people."

It isn't meant as a dismissal, but a comfort. She isn't alone here.

"People can be bound together by what they're afraid of. So long as they don't let it defeat them."

"Fear isn't a bad thing. Fear makes you run faster, makes you keep fighting even when it hurts though I'll admit, it's very tiring." It's hard to be this far from home for the first time in her life, and for all she's made friends, she has a glaring reminder of being the outsider. Of people thinking she might be a monster.

She has friends here, she has to remember that much at least, and she has Lux too.

"Maybe it's because I'm good at watching, or because I have to, but as good as it is to have so many backgrounds, so many perspectives...some of them are still very much afraid of each other."

"Some are not," he reminds her. "That matters more." At least, he hopes it does.