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WHO: Cole & Several (includes OPEN THREAD for Rifters)
WHAT: Compassion returns to Skyhold.
WHEN: Early-Mid Haring
WHERE: Skyhold
NOTES: Cole works best with individualized threads rather than completely open ones. Please don't be afraid to contact me (Plurk or PM) if you'd like to set something up! Prompts will be posted in comments.

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"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.

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