demonicbeauty | Fade Rift Inbox

"I could still fly. Fly from the fire I didn't know was coming."

They hadn't spoken for some time, but he was beside her now: drawn in by the thread of a painful memory.

"The words still burn. There was no time to say 'I'm sorry.'"

Not for her, and not for her mother.

It was hard to sneak up on an Alastrian. Between her sense of smell and her ability to hear a pulse--to say nothing of approaching footsteps--Ariadne was very seldom surprised. And it was more from the surprise at being surprised than anything else when she yelped suddenly, dropping the bundle of table scraps she'd been collecting from the dining hall.

She whirled around, guilty at first, but then with confusion when she registered Cole's...well. Hat.

"You...you startled me!" she gasped, bending over to quickly pick up the stolen food.

Cole was used to people not knowing he was there until he spoke. They just didn't usually jump like that. He flinched a little himself before stooping down to help gather the food she'd dropped.

"You're used to knowing. Hearing the heartbeats, smelling the change in the air. Sorry. I could try to be louder next time."

She paused, briefly, to look at him. Yes. She was used to knowing. And she wasn't used to someone else knowing, someone else pulling many of the same parlor tricks she relied on.

It was unnerving.

Ducking her head, she started to gather the food again. "Back home, they used to joke about putting a bell around my neck, so they'd hear me coming. Maybe that would work for you?"

"...but then everyone would be able to hear me." That would be a bit too much.

Ariadne nodded slightly. "I think that's why it's a joke." But she had to admit, sometimes, humanoid humor eluded.

All right...most of the time it eluded her.

Wrapping up her bundle, she stood up straight. "What are you doing here?" she asked cautiously. "I mean, not that I'm not glad to see you. I always like seeing you. But...it's been awhile. I figured you were off doing something very important, I guess."

"I've been here. You haven't needed to see me." He stood, mirroring her — though ultimately towering several inches over her, shading her under the brim of his hat.

"I see you. You think a lot about the little people. You play them songs, and try to make them happy. Tiny hands, gratefully grasping at a crust of bread. It's good."

She frowned a little at that. Needing to see someone? That was a tricky consideration. Especially here.

But her frown melted away when he went on about the children.

"I try," she said, ducking her head modestly. "It's hard to be a kid in a place like this." It was hard to be an adult too.

"It's hard lots of places." He said it like he knew. Or it could have been just because he'd heard it elsewhere. "It matters when people try to make it better."

Ariadne tilted her head to one side, eyes running along the planes of his face for a moment. When she had to finally blink, she unwrapped her bundle and took out a sweet roll she'd pinched from someone's plate, offering it to Cole.

"Were you ever a child?" she asked.

He looked at the roll quizzically for a second before simply shaking his head. Still a bit awkward, figuring out how to politely refuse. Most of the time, he didn't have to worry about it — but she was going to remember him.

"I remember parts and pieces. That was the real Cole — before I was him."

He stepped toward the exit, assuming that she would follow. She wanted to deliver the food, didn't she?

Indeed, she did. And after putting the roll away and tying up her bundle again, she followed after Cole.

"What do you mean by 'the real Cole?'" she asked, doing her best to keep her voice down as she trotted along. "Are you trying to imply that you're not real?"

She wouldn't be surprised if he said yes.

"I'm not. Not really." And that wasn't a sad thing. It just was the truth. "I'm what the real Cole wanted to be. Something better than he thought he was. Someone that could help instead of hurt."

The truth about the way Cole had 'hurt' people was something the spirit had tried so hard to impart to him before he'd died.

"He had a childhood. He had a mother who loved him, and a father who didn't. It — wasn't always hard. But there were too many bad days, in the end."

So there was--or had been--a real person named Cole at one point. But this wasn't him. Ariadne could put it into the context of some of the stories she'd heard growing up. Of people, spirits, monsters, demons inhabiting the bodies of humanoids. That didn't mean that this was the exact same thing, but it was enough to understand.

Of course, she had a million questions almost immediately.

"What he wanted to be? That sounds very, very nice. At least, I think it does... Helping, not hurting. That's good."

They passed through the wide front doors of the main hall, toward the stairs that led down to the courtyard. Cole gave her a small smile as they walked. The people they passed glanced in Ariadne's direction, sometimes, but never his.

"You should ask questions," he piped up as they started down the stairs. "People don't always want to ask — then, when they don't understand, they say 'demon,' and want to make us disappear."

That earned him a sympathetic grimace. She so hated the way that people threw around that word. Especially when it could mean so many things, not all of them bad.

But she let it go at that.

Every probability she saw suggested that Cole knew her secret. She didn't know how, exactly. Something to do with his otherness. But it wasn't something she felt ready to talk about.

Not yet, anyway.

"You should be very careful, giving me free license to ask questions," she warned him. "I might never stop. But I don't know if I'm being rude or not."

"Maybe I could ask you questions, too?" If that would make it more fair. Then she wouldn't have to worry so much about being rude.

Ariadne glanced sideways at him. "I don't know," she said. "It seems to me like you don't need to ask any questions. You just kind of...know."

There. She'd said it.

"There's a lot I don't understand." A hint of mournfulness in his tone, there: for all he can see, for all he can do, there's so much about existence that still escapes him.

On the other side of the coin, though, it can be fun to be curious for curiosity's sake.

"I never knew there were worlds outside of this one. I'd like to know more about yours. So many words are the same, but the meanings don't match. Elves. Demons. Dragon. Somehow, they're different."

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."

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