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She smiled mildly. "I can understand how frustrating that is," she said. She knew all too well. And it bothered her that homophones could cause so much confusion across more than one world. Language was normally a place where she excelled.

So, finally, she shrugged. "All right," she said. "You can ask questions, if you want. I think I can trust you, can't I? Not to get me in trouble or anything."

The word 'Inquisition' would never sit well with her. One more problem of homophones.

"Claws curling out from fingertips. You used them to keep yourself safe."

And he hadn't told anybody about those. So, yes. She could trust him to keep her secrets.

Ariadne smiled grimly. Of her Alastrian gifts, her talons were the most difficult to reconcile. She was a pacifist. She didn't like hurting other people. But for climbing and breaking and...well...scaring people...they really couldn't be beat.

She glanced down at her fingernails, which looked so ordinary and Human for the moment. "It's said they can break any mineral known. I don't know if that's true or not, I've never tested it."

"That would be a lot of testing." Where would you even start with that, Cole wondered.

"What if you didn't know the type of mineral you were testing on? Would it not work then?"

"I can't say that I've ever encountered an unknown mineral," she said. "Trees. Metal. Stone. Even enchanted cloth. Everything in my realm rips. Except for my own talons."

Of course, she couldn't dismiss the notion that something native to Thedas might challenge her limits. But she'd been cautious about it.

"Red, jagged shards," Cole murmured. "Unearthed, unnatural. Corrupted somewhere beneath the stone—" But he interrupted himself, and spoke again with a more conversational voice. "No. That wouldn't work."

"I could try," she offered.

Ariadne, of course, had no idea what he was talking about. But it was simple enough to know that it was something that was troubling him, Thedas, or both. And she was far too eager to please for her own good, most of the time.

...all of the time.

"It's the red lyrium," he said, answering the question she hadn't asked. "Towers of it left at the Temple of Sacred Ashes, scattered along the Storm Coast... the templars were taking it, before the Herald saved them. It ate their insides." He almost shuddered at the memory of that last part. He'd watched it happen at Therinfal Redoubt, not understanding, but knowing it was wrong.

"Varric doesn't dream, but he sees the shards sometimes, when it's dark and he closes his eyes. He wants them destroyed." But: "You're not supposed to touch it. It could hurt you."

Her eyes widened to the size of coins. She'd heard of the mysterious red lyrium, and heard nothing good about it. But nothing could quite measure up to the idea of something eating your insides.

What the Red Dragon would do if he ever learned of such a substance.

Burning alive would seem like a mercy.

"I don't know if my talons could really destroy it. Only cut it into smaller pieces. But I'd be willing to try, if you thought it would help."

"It's hard to say." He sounded doubtful. Cole did his best to never deal in false hope — things would always be worse after the thread broke. "If you see any, you could try. But be careful."

"I'm always careful," she said. Which was more or less true. Depending on how you looked at things. Her occupation wasn't exactly for the wary, but she went about things as wisely as she could most of the time. And since she was so often so easily dismissed, she was Lysia's secret weapon.

"I think it's my turn to ask a question though," she added. "And I'd like to how know it is that you can just appear someplace. There's never any hint. Not even a smell."

"I'm there already. People don't see me." Or smell him, apparently. "Not until they need to."

"Invisibility doesn't mask a scent," Ariadne said, more to herself than to him. "Which means that if you're there already, it must be on a separate plane of existence."

They were pushing the boundaries of how well she understood existence. She's participated in some of the Elf rituals in the past, calling on the deities of the Sacred Realm. Princess Amanda had done her best to explain it. Like two pieces of parchment, overlapping but separate.

It hadn't made much sense, but Ariadne hadn't forgotten it.

"Must it?" Doubtful, but curious. He'd never heard anyone else describe it like that. Then again, most people struggled to describe what he did in the first place.

At least he had gotten better at explaining it from his own perspective. Without that, they'd really be lost.

"It's not only about seeing. I make myself silent. I slip through the spaces in their minds, the places they don't want to notice, the parts they forget. Unseen and unremembered. It's better that way."

"You make yourself sound like an hallucination," she mused. She supposed that would serve as explanation in the same way, especially given the way that the natives of Thedas described the Fade.

Another plane. One that belonged to dreams.

Unfortunately, Ariadne wasn't much of a philosopher. She had only the most basic education and had never given much--if any--thought to magical theory.

After all, she wasn't herself magical.

She stopped in her tracks though, glancing from side to side before asking in a soft voice, "Am I the only one who can see you?"

He paused, too, tipping his head as if listening for something.

"No." There was a younger woman standing by the nearest stone wall - if Ariadne had seen her before, it would have been assisting one of the many merchants set up in the courtyard. She held a crumpled piece of parchment. Her eyes were rimmed with red.

In an instant, Cole was at her side, speaking hushed words and holding one of her hands with his. After the brief exchange, something shifted in the young woman's eyes. They were still lined with tears, but they didn't look quite so sad anymore.

Cole returned to Ariadne. The other woman didn't look his way again.

"I think it's my turn." He gestured with a nod - Shall we move on? - before beginning to walk again, leading her out of the castle proper and toward the refugee camps. He hadn't thought to make it a question of turns, but hey, if those were the rules she wanted to use...

"What do they mean when they call you a demon? I know what a 'demon' is here. I didn't know it could mean something else."

Ariadne watched the exchange with interest. If nothing else, it reconfirmed her instinct that Cole--whatever else he was--seemed to be a kind soul. And that was important to her. She associated plenty with the selfish and the downtrodden and the snide.

Kindness was a precious and rare resource.

When he returned, she didn't ask about it. She just nodded and followed along as he started walking.

"First of all," she said softly, "you need to understand that where I come from. No one calls me a 'demon.' Most people I know think I'm just an ordinary Human. And my own kind--Alastrians--don't refer to us as demons either. It's a broad term. Basically for any creature that has something more than two arms, two legs, and one head."

"A name for something that isn't normal," he mused. "A word too wide to hold onto anything. It means lots of things, and nothing at all, all at once."

"That's one way of putting it," Ariadne said, smiling grimly. "But it's also taken on a connotation of something...evil. Like the mountain trolls that sack villages. Or the mermaids who drag sailors to the depths. All of what they do gets rolled into the word demon and...those of us who aren't murderers tend to get...blamed."

It was complicated. And there was a history stretching back thousands of years, long before Ariadne was a part of it.

It was strange, how similar and different two meanings of the same word could be. Plenty of things in Thedas got blamed for being demons when they weren't — even the things that were demons didn't always know what they were doing. And that made Cole wonder whether the demons in Airy's world knew, or if they were just confused.

"Why do the mermaids do that?"

"I don't know," Ariadne admitted, frowning. "It's a good question. I like to believe that, at least, it has something to do with what they need to survive. That they're not just doing it for fun or something."

People were innately good. And she wanted to think of mermaids--fellow demons--as being good too.

Hm.

"Demons here — the things that are demons," as opposed to the things that were just accused of it, "sometimes want to hurt people. They've looked too long at the parts of people that cause pain, and they turn into that. But sometimes they just don't know what they're doing."

Ariadne watched him carefully for a moment. She didn't want her thoughts to come out as an accusation. She wanted to choose her words carefully. "You see the parts of me that are in pain," she pointed out slowly. "But you aren't a demon."

She added the second part very fast.

"What's the difference?"

"The difference between feeding the hurt, and healing it. Some spirits don't know where it is." Without any hesitation whatsoever, he added: "I didn't always."

She caught the implication. But didn't want to probe it. Not right now, anyway. Even if people were good deep down inside, they weren't always perfect. They made mistakes.

Ariadne had made more than a few herself.

So instead, she tilted her head slightly and asked, "How did you learn?"

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colecomfort - 2016-04-20 03:18 (UTC) - Expand

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demonicbeauty - 2016-04-20 13:30 (UTC) - Expand