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He hesitates a moment too long before shaking his head.

"We're all humans. I'd never met an elf or dwarf before Thedas. And until pretty recently, we thought humans were all there was."

Edited (words) 2020-11-10 00:06 (UTC)

His isn't the first world she's heard of that only has humans, but she always has to ask.

"What happened to change that?"

He breathes out, long, face turned to the sky. As he considers how to answer that, his eyes close.

He hasn't even come close to mentioning the protomolecule around anyone here. But it's dreams of the Ring builders that shook him awake not long ago tonight, and lying about them seems impossible.

What happened to change that?

There are flickers behind his eyelids, never very far, of the garish lights of a pachinko parlor, of crystalline blue snaking across corpses, of an asteroid swinging through space straight for Earth. Nearer to the surface, lately; despite the lack of surface similarities to the experience, the Silver Lamp had reminded him of the visceral sensation of being trapped, and dying.

He opens his eyes, and speaks to the stars.

"We started finding the things left behind by an ancient civilization. They're long gone, but their ruins aren't."

Athessa watches his expression while he thinks, trying to read something about him in the comportment of his face.

There's the deep set of his eyes and the dark circles under them, suggesting sleeplessness that she'd guessed at before. But also the way his cheekbones stick out, gaunt not from malnourishment but from something else. Nerves, maybe. The lines on his forehead, a faint crease between his brow, say maybe he worries a lot. (She's seen him frown the same way Derrica does when she's healing one lapse of common sense or another.) But the lines at the corners of his eyes show good humor, a tendency to smile (like Bastien, she thinks).

And even just the act of closing his eyes to think, opening them and looking skyward, that says something.

"Have I stumbled on something you don't want to talk about? Or don't know how to?"

The question reminds him of Monica Stuart, actually. The woman was half stalker and half psychologist in her pursuit of filming an award-winning documentary; and in the months she stayed aboard the Roci, she so often used prompts like that. It was her job, of course, and she was a consummate professional. He didn't hold any of it against her.

This is, of course, different. Athessa asks because she's curious, and because she cares. What he does is slant a look towards her that's full of a soft, wry humor.

"As you can probably guess," he says, both in answer and not-an-answer, "finding evidence of alien life came as a shock. It challenged everything we thought we knew."

(First proof of extraterrestrial life.

And it's just more death.)

To her own surprise, she actually laughs. Not a full-blown guffaw or anything, but a relieved little chuckle.

"Phew. I thought it might've been something traumatic."

He doesn't smile.

Talking around his own experience is one thing, but —

"A hundred thousand people died for first contact." Not accusatory, just exhausted; his own fault for not being clearer. "And a lot more after. That'd only been the beginning."

There was Ganymede; there was the war; there were the catastrophic speed limits in the slow zone; and there was Ilus. So much of it counts up, for him, as blood on his own hands.

"Fear of the unknown didn't exactly bring out the best of humanity."

That, he thinks, is probably an old story to her.

"Fuck."

Four letters that cover all manner of sin. Fear of the unknown is a familiar source of misery for her, for people in Thedas at large, but that's an unfathomable death count for finding an old ruin.

"I'm sorry."

He considers, you don't have anything to apologize for, or it's not me who should have your sympathy, or me too. Instead, he's quiet.

At length, he looks over at her, all dark circles under her eyes and elfroot smoke swirling, and asks with a slight nod, "Do you want to talk about it?"

Murderhaus. Anything else that might be troubling her.

Rather than answer, she blows a few smoke rings into the chill air and watches them drift away. The voices of every person who has ever told her that she can talk to them start to overlap until she can't tell whose voice she's remembering anymore. She glances at Holden.

"Do you?" Surely he has questions beyond the obvious why and what the fuck.

He pulls a face.

"Not really."

The thing about murderhaus is that it's a horrible thing that happened, had been happening, but Medrod is dead. And he was just a lone, crazy, cruel person, not part of some larger conspiracy or organization. There aren't any more leads to track down. There aren't more people who need saving. So he can shut the door on this experience, do what he can to help the others, and move on to the next thing.

(He is not, of course, the captain; and this is not, of course, his crew. But God knows he wasn't any help at the inn. And he didn't need to be, and they didn't need him to stop the murderer, and that's fine. But something he can do, now, is carry his own weight.)

Athessa nods. Well, there ya go. She takes another long drag off her joint and snuffs the roach on the ground, freeing up both hands so she can unfurl the blanket she's wearing and drop one end of it over his shoulders, since it's plenty big enough to share. Then she points up at a specific set of stars, drawing lines between them in the air.

"See that constellation there? That's Shadow, Falon'din's owl. Which means nothing to you, I know. But. Look. Owl."

She just thinks it's neat.

He moves in closer when she pulls the blanket around the both of them, to stretch it that much less. Lets himself lean against her just a little bit, sharing some warmth, as he follows the point of her finger to the constellation.

"Huh." His interest is genuine as he asks, "So who's Falon'din, and why does he have an owl?"

"Hard to say, really. Some say he is the owl, others that it's his sacred companion," She waves her hand vaguely. "Some people think it's not supposed to be an owl, that it's a hawk instead.

"But Falon'din was the elven god of death, and before he was banished he would guide spirits into the Beyond. I think the owl is supposed to symbolize that he wasn't afraid of darkness or something."

He remembers reading about the ancient Greeks, paintings and sculptures of the goddess Athena and her sacred owl. A brief surface similarity that dissipates as he learns more detail.

"Banished, huh. Did he do something to piss off the others?"

"Probably," she shrugs. "I don't remember the whole story anymore, just that most of the gods ended up banished and imprisoned. Probably because they were assholes."

This, coming from the woman who insisted on a Dalish burial for those elves they found. It's complicated.

It doesn't occur to him as a contradiction. Those elves deserved proper burial rites, whatever that entailed for them, whatever anyone else's personal beliefs may be.

"Who were the others?"

"Well, the big two were Elgar'nan the All-Father, and Mythal the All-Mother. Elgar'nan was also the god of vengeance, and Mythal the great protector. Falon'din and Dirthamen were their twin sons, god of the dead and the keeper of secrets. Then Andruil, the huntress, and her sister Sylaise, the hearthkeeper. June, Sylaise's husband and god of the craft, and Ghilan'nain, mother of the halla and Andruil's beloved."

Don't worry, Holden. Athessa doesn't expect you to remember all of these names and designations. Almost enforcing that, she yawns, teeth chattering slightly towards the tail end of it.

"There's also Fen'harel, the Dread Wolf. He's kind of a trickster, betrayed both the Creators and the Forgotten Ones — the ones who made the world and their evil counterparts — and brought about the destruction of Arlathan, our ancestral home."

It's a lot of information, but he's pretty interested in it, listening closely. How much he remembers will remain to be seen, of course, but he's trying. He used to read mythology for fun, this is up his alley.

"The elves' ancestral home? Was it in Thedas, or somewhere else?"

"In Thedas. Somewhere up north, towards the edge of Tevinter. I think the reality of it is just that the elves back then were overpowered by the Imperium, and Fen'harel didn't have anything to do with it."

It's hard to say which stories are true and which are made up to explain away the inconceivable.

Like inventing gods, stories, to explain natural phenomena. It's an explanation that makes sense. He considers the loss of Arlathan, the reality of elves' lives as he's seen it since being here. Alienages, the bodies in Medrod's basement, the funeral Athessa insisted on giving them.

"When you said," he asks slowly, "those elves we found were Dalish, what did that mean?"

He speaks carefully, gently, as he alludes back to the Silver Lamp. Those elves, not those bodies.

As he speaks, whatever hint of a smile that played at Athessa's features before fades. She doesn't frown, per se, but it's a reversion of her expression from something warm to something a little more distant.

"Elves used to live in a place called the Dales. It was a concession given to us by Andraste's sons after she and an elf called Shartan led a slave rebellion against the Tevinter Imperium.

"But the Chantry doesn't like it when they can't control people. So they sent missionaries into the Dales to try and convert the elves, and when the missionaries were turned away, they sent Templars. When relations got worse, the Chantry led an Exalted March against the elves, overwhelming their forces and in the end, forced them to convert to Andrastianism and give up centuries of tradition and beliefs to live in Alienages and be treated like shit."

Athessa glances at the tattoo on her wrist, the reminder she got of where she came from, who she's lost, how far she's come.

"Those who didn't assimilate have been living in nomadic clans ever since, clinging to a history that has been mostly lost or destroyed, scraps of a language we can barely use to communicate with one another, traditions that are passed down from generation to generation. And if we're very lucky, we get left alone. If."

She doesn't realize that she's switched to saying we rather than they, but it's not much of a secret that she's Dalish. Not among Riftwatch, anyway. She looks over at Holden, not sure what to expect from him after this monologue.

"Those are Dalish elves. They mark themselves with tattoos that symbolize the gods they serve. Mythal. Sylaise. Andruil. June." The tattoos on the ones they buried.

Once he knew about Alienages, it was only a matter of time to guess she was Dalish. She'd told him once, after all, that she was born in forests outside of Kirkwall; that I came to Kirkwall under less than ideal circumstances when I was thirteen. Her recognition of the bodies of the Dalish elves, knowing what to do for them. She doesn't share the tattoos of her people, but that's not something he'd ask about. If she wants to explain that, she will.

He listens to the story, and he thinks, I really fucking hate this place sometimes. But the worst part is that this story is familiar, has played out across his own system's history countless times. He can't blame these cruelties on Thedas. It's depressing to consider them a universally human trait.

"I'm sorry."

He shifts an arm so he can put it around her shoulders, give her a quick sideways sort of hug.

The briefest flicker of a wince crosses her face, thanks to some lingering soreness in her shoulder, but nevertheless she leans into his side-hug, nodding acknowledgment of his sympathies. Athessa exhales, blinking rapidly to try and dissuade herself from crying. It's cold. The last thing she needs is to have tears and snot frozen to her face.

"Yeah. Me too."

Sorry that it happened, sorry that he's having to learn about more cruelty, sorry to her clan for not giving them their dues sooner. She may not be responsible for their disappearance, for their deaths, but she can't help but feel like she's let them down ever since then. She's become so distant from both sects of elvhen that at times, it feels like she's betrayed them all.

Tears well up, fall, and before Athessa realizes it's happening, she's speaking to why what they saw in murderhaus has affected her so personally. Not the deaths of her kin, nor the horror at what people are capable of.

"One of them...one of them looked like my mum."

"Jesus."

He lets his hand drop till it's closer to her elbow, away from her wound. Then, as she starts to cry, he starts moving his hand up and down her arm, gentle and soothing.

"I'm sorry you had to see that."

Christ. Like seeing her own people butchered and mutilated isn't awful enough.

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