Chapter Text
Dairsmuid City bustles and jangles like the worn brass bridles on donkey carts, weaving seamlessly through the heady crowds–the press of sweaty, perfumed skin rankling Evelyn's nerves even, grateful as she is to finally be off the ship–and only the clear ringing of those bells cuts through that sea of endless noise around her. Foreign words, not just the smooth lilting of Rivaini, but Antivan and Qunlat as well, and she can swear that for a brief moment there was a Dalish couple at the edge of the bazaar, speaking to each other in quick, quiet words like nothing she had ever heard before. Yet whether it is in Common or not–the shouting, merchants leaning over the piles of their wares and shoppers haggling with dismissive hands, moving like well-rehearsed theater–is constant.
But that is only the noise.
Heavier is the heat, weighing at the base of her neck like a wet towel still warm from the kettle, pressing down with each step she takes. Hairs she didn't even know she had sticks to her tacky skin and the loose, formless tunic Mother Guinevere gifted her does little to staunch her overheating– no matter how much she plucks and fans it at her chest.
Those people that weave around her, however, are effortless in the way they navigate this rambling city and all its side streets, narrow alleyways with as much traffic as the main squares, fabric billowing from incensed shrines to alluring, smoke-shadowed cafes. Their eyes pass her over easily, though not unkindly, and there are many that give her a soft and knowing smile– kindly looks warping the colored lines etched on their faces, and tugging at the gold jewelry pierced in, at various places. It is strange to see such marks outside of some few Dalish elves that would pass near Ostwick, during the trading season.
Though if they're sweating as much as Evelyn herself is, she can't tell.
Another jolt to her shoulder, the woman placing a steadying hand at her arm, eyes apologetic, as if she can tell Evelyn is an outsider, reeling from the sheer frantic energy of the place, and she realizes that this is the fourth time she's passed the same stall selling smoked deepstalker skewers. A dancing troupe that she now recognizes jingles in the middle of the square, hips swaying and pressed with clinking, glittering coins. The music is a roiling beast flying high above the raucous chatter of the streets fanning out around them, and the sun beats down hard.
Her map, another gift by Mother Guinevere as she was packed into the wagon, hangs uselessly at her side. The marketplace has cast a mirage over her eyes, or the streets and stalls themselves shift as easily as a river delta, changing by the hour– or at least the last time this map was drawn. Either way, it's useless to her now.
That fact comes with a kernel of panic, sprouting at that heat-heavy base of her throat where the day has already worn her down to a trudging crawl.
But it's not so dissimilar as her first time in Ostwick as a child, even then, she was both enamored and disorientated by the movement of the city, small as it was. For she was even smaller, holding tightly to Mother's petticoats as merchants hawked pale cheeses with a strong, savoury smell and finely woven bridles, perfect for their many horses. Somehow in the rush of the crowd Mother and her were separated, though truly it was Evelyn that crept carefully, eyes like saucers as she saw the mages' stall: three young women with robes like the fairytales, studiously perched by tomes that turned themselves and surrounded by wisps, or perhaps it was mages' flame, hovering like pixies above them. One of the women caught her eye with a smile, her hair long and beautiful, and Evelyn knew enough of princesses to know you couldn't simply refuse one that beckoned you so clearly.
The Templars at their side, broad-shouldered guardians with heavy swords and even heavier heraldry adornments, were occupied with a gaggle of women that flipped their hair over one shoulder, tracing curious hands over stark, silverite armor. She slipped by them easily. It was always much easier to sneak around as a child, unseen in every dimly-lit hallway, unheard as she peered through the cracks.
But the mage saw her, and when she peered over the stall, rolled a thin band of silver through her fingers. A precious ring. Yet before Evelyn could even reach out and touch it, she felt the crackle of magic– like lightning in the air, raising her hair on end and making her stomach do pleasant little flips within her belly.
Evelyn had nearly had it too, grinning a gap-toothed smile up at the woman, conspiratorial in that innocent way that only children can be, when Mother swiped her hand fiercely and tugged her back into the fray. Her nails pinched painfully into her skin, she remembers, and remembers the marks they left for hours even once they rode back to the estate. She'd never seen her Mother's lips pinch so severely, or her brows so heavy-set on her eyes, which were typically so light and jovial. It was like a dark cloud came over her, and then spilled its rain onto Evelyn, too.
Mother didn't have to say anything for her to get the message. She would later hear enough at the Chantry pulpit, and around the dinner table, horror stories that her brother and sister carried back from Templar training– the terrors of abominations, the plight of villages burned out entirely by their rage. It became easier to forget that ring, and the funny, flipping feeling it sent to her belly.
But, strangely, she never did forget the way sunlight reflected off her long, flowing hair. It was easier to remember her as a princess than a mage.
And though there are no stinking, pale cheese here–the Rivaini much prefer the milder, sweeter stuff which Evelyn simply cannot accept–the crowd does seem to be full of princesses, with their hair like halos about their head, gilded in bangles and jingling hoops. For a moment, the weight of being well and truly lost is forgotten and she is simply a child again, swept up in the rushing tide of a city on its feet, dancing all around her, drums and pipes wistful in the air.
But then there is that fear, again– lost, she thinks, well and truly. An entire sea separates her from her cloister, and her family. Here she is, lost, in a strange land where she can speak only two, maybe three words of Rivaini. She assumed that she'd pick up far more than she did on the ship's ride over... In truth, she spent far more of that trip doubled over in her ensuite loo than she would ever care to admit, and if there were any beautiful views of the Venefication Sea, it was through the misty-eyed haze of nausea and unrepentant homesickness.
She needs to find someone. All of a sudden again it feels as if she is a ship without an anchor, rocking on the waves of an open, endless sea– drifting...
There. A scent like cherries, apricots, plums hanging ripe from the sun-warmed branches of her family’s orchard as she climbed high, fingers sticky and stained, chasing the next sugar high…It wafts over to her lazily, drifting in the warm and stale wind like a siren’s call– promising cooler summers, and wind-battered coasts. Her eyes find the source easily, all too easily. Its stall is filled to bursting with the fruits, some fresh and still ripe from the vine, and others dried, heavy with sticky syrup and glaze. The merchant at its side wears a wide, charming grin beneath his generous mustache, and it reminds Evelyn of a summer-ripe melon.
He's certainly a local, that man. If anyone knew where the ages-old Archive in this ancient city would be, certainly it would be him. But there's another man there, and Evelyn finds her eyes tracing him strangely. He's as much an outsider here as she herself is.
You wouldn't think it from watching the way he haggles with the man, however– his fingers, long and pale as the rest of him, point across the stall and stress each Rivaini word he lilts out, expertly. But as much as his tongue might seem at home in this bustling place, the rest of him stands out starkly from it. First, she notices, are his clothes: a drab linen tunic that hugs tightly to his waist and shoulders, with patchwork pants that scoop beneath his bare feet. It's not unusual for an elf she supposes, but even that, his Elvenness, makes him stand out purely because as much as Ostwick is her home, she had never before seen Elves in the main quarter, intermingling with humans so brazenly and haggling with them.
It makes Dairsmuid seem all the more striking and unusual now, even beneath the vibrant fabrics draped over sun-soaked squares, and alleyway shops bursting with brass and incense smoke– merchants calling far too sweetly, offering tea and gossip. She's fallen for the trick now twice already, which is how she's ended up about 30 silver pence lighter, though with a copper earring in her pocket, because she doesn't even have any piercings, and honey-soaked aniseed cake still sweet on the back of her tongue. That one was very much worth its weight in gold.
But this elf, this man seemingly just as foreign as herself with his bare, pale head and dull-colored fashion, is weaving verbal circles around the merchant over, if Evelyn can tell, a small sack of apricots that sit heavy on the scale between them.
Perhaps he would know the city just as well then, and unlike her Rivaini innkeeper, not laugh her out of the bazaar for not having this "city-sight" that its residents keep teasing her for. It's all in good fun, she knows, just like everything in Rivaini society... and it makes her ears burn all the same, too-warm beneath her frazzled braid. It makes her feel like a clueless child again, and not in wonder towards a vast, bustling city but in shame for her own ignorance.
Surely this man can remember coming here fresh-faced, un-sunburned, and lost in the great labyrinth of it all?
Evelyn still approaches shyly, though, gripping tightly to the rucksack at her shoulder as she edges nearer, hearing more clearly now the accented and lilting Rivaini that pours out between them. She's caught only please and good sir– those few words she managed to pick up in her seasickness.
Mostly when she hobbled to the only pharmacist on board, who gave her terribly rank potions that despite their odors, did manage to at least numb her stomach enough to stop the jumping.
But ultimately, its the merchant who sees her first, approaching from behind, and splays his arms out wide in joy for finding a far easier customer in her, evidently. He seems to disregard the other man altogether to focus on her, a kindly smile lighting up his face and stretching his mustache in a way that reminds her of her estate's farrier, an old man who let her take the horses out even when Mother sent her to tutorage– letting her escape etiquette and expectations, even if just for a little while. The smile disarms Evelyn completely, and she sidles up to the stall, caught out.
As much as she appreciates the man's open kindness, however, she did come for a reason and turns slightly towards the elf, his eyes still focused resolutely on that heavy bag of apricots.
"Greetings," the merchant beckons her in Common, with a broad wave. "What is your most favorite of all fruits, habeebti?"
Beloved.
That endearment is another one of Evelyn’s few words, easy enough to understand when the whole of Rivain seems to hum with the very word– habeebi is what Grandmother mutters to the small child at her hip, who swiped a floral sweet from beneath his Mother’s nose. Every charming greeting must include it, though used most typically with family and friends, Evelyn finds that those particularly charming people wield it well enough to disarm her. Even the man who checked her entrance into port used the title, as sure as if she were a small child.
It is yet another way this place has already snaked itself beneath her skin, reddened and sweaty as it may be. But there is something entirely placating about those moments between people. It’s every moment in between– navigating foreign streets and rambling alleyways that lead, seemingly, to nowhere and the absolute insistence at haggling at every turn– that leaves her confused.
And as much as she feels lulled to hand over the rest of her silver stipend to this charming merchant and his piles of sweet, tropical fruits... There is a reason that she approached, and though the elf still has yet to turn towards her, she just laughs awkwardly, shaking her head.
"I'm sorry, serah, but I was actually hoping to–"
The man bellows, wide and theatrical as all Rivain is. "The loveliest of all flowers, here, in my city in front of me– and yet she will not indulge herself in such sweetness for one so sweet?"
Evelyn's lips tilt a small smile, because as much as she has already learned of business practice here in Dairsmuid, and she has learned the hard way, it still lightens the residual panic of her chest, and lifts the heaviness of her shoulders. It feels easy and free in a way that many things in this city are not.
He, like the expert merchant that he surely is, senses the break in her resolve. "Come, my sweet. For a lovely rose such as yourself, roseapple confit... Just like the Orlesians, yes?"
She meets his smile with a wry one of her own, secretly thinking how lucky the man is that she is not, in fact, Fereldan. The poor man would face a wrath that's probably not even heard of in this city, where even the harshest of words are layered with habitual endearments and blessings. He's quite lucky that most Ostwickans would feel more offense at being called a "Marcher" than an Orlesian.
The man at her side seems to know it as well, for he huffs a short breath that nearly makes her turn, eyes wide, before the merchant leans over his stall with a sticky, pale pink slice of roseapple held delicately between silver tongs.
"Free for the most beautiful of all ladies," he says, like a kindly and entirely too-dramatic grandfather, of which she's sure he is. "So that she will bless my stall once again, when she remembers such a fantastic taste! Amar's Sweets, everybody– even the Orlesians approve!"
She might've bothered to correct him, if only to prevent some charges of fraud for false advertising, had that unassuming slice of dried and sweetened fruit not exploded on her tongue in a menagerie of flavors– first of which is the sheer amount of sugar, still wet, though a thinner syrup than she'd feared when she saw them sitting in pools of the stuff still. But there's a deeper flavor there, sour and floral and sun-ripened. Suddenly she's back in the orchard again, with skinned knees and sticky fingers, her tongue even sweeter.
Her smile is truthful, and she shakes the man's proffered hand. It's warm, and as sticky as hers is.
She finds she doesn't mind as much as she ought to.
But the other man at her side, the elf, clears his throat impatiently. He rattles off some more Rivaini at the merchant, tapping his foot as he gestures towards the apricots, sitting patiently on the scale, with a determined amount of silver in one hand as he reaches with the other. Amar rolls his eyes with a strange, and seemingly frustrated gesture, but takes the offered silver nonetheless.
Even if she's getting a poorer deal for it, Evelyn finds she much prefers her own method of haggling: which is to look as innocent as possible, of course, and hope that the merchant has enough goodwill not to rob her blind for being foreign.
Though it's hard to tell if it actually works, of course...
Her fear of haggling is pushed hurriedly to the side as the man begins to walk away, however, and she jolts towards him suddenly. "Excuse me, serah–"
He stops, turning with a sigh as he seems to size her up, from her dust-battered sandals to the mussed braid of her hair. His eyes linger most on the heavy rucksack of her shoulder, Chantry insignia etched into the aged leather of its strap. Another gift of Mother Guinevere's pressed into her hands with this offer of work, and the promise of divine blessings. Not that Evelyn needed much convincing.
"I have no alms to give, sister."
Evelyn’s mouth falls open in indignant shock, and would be comical if not for the harsh sting of those words, and the strange juxtaposition: an elf, dressed in linen rags, calling her, daughter of a proud and noble line, a beggar. Some part of her rankles, of course, suddenly self-conscious of the white tunic that was supposed to keep her cool and yet failing at that, seems to only make her appear as an alms-ringer.
She pushes past the hand he raised in that infuriatingly quiet, polite dismissal.
"I'm not here asking for Chantry business, serah–well, not exactly–" she stutters, already thrown out of kilter. "I would only like directions to the city's Archive, if you would be so kind!"
He most certainly would not be, if their interaction thus far is any indicator. But like all of Dairsmuid, he may just surprise her, wrap her in some Rivaini traditions that she has yet to learn, sprinkled in generous terms of endearment, or apologies...
He does not.
Instead he pauses– with a questioning tilt to his brow as he takes her, and her question, like a far too bitter tea. It gives Evelyn her own moment to pettily look him up and down though, best haughty impression on full force: those near-invisible freckles mottling his nose and forehead, and the dimpled press of his chin. Some few sparse moles dot the plinth of his neck where it dips into the dull linen tunic. He would be handsome, were his eyes not tinted, at least to Evelyn’s, with some bit of coldness. It is yet another thing which marks him as outsider.
Where all other things in this city are warm and rich, with overwhelming sweetness, he stands out like a thorny reed– tall, and cold, and pokey.
The hand he raises to point around the bend of the merchant's stall, to an alleyway she can glimpse between shifts of the fabric, peeking where it dips into the shadows of the city–strangely, a blessed reprieve from the heat–is no less cold. It is not the biting insults and colorful, flagrant language she might overhear in the squares of Ostwick, all of them muttering an apology to the Maker when they see her shuffle past. But it is stark all the same, an obvious and confusing snub that sets her upper lip downwards.
Even those patrons that migrate around them seem to sense the tension, heavy as the midday heat overhead, and Amar sidles awkwardly behind his stand, though he gives her a merciful wink.
"Why thank you, serah."
Her overt politeness carries a coldness of her own, and contrasts, in her imagination, his own terribly rude manners. But he simply nods, apricots still heavy at his side as he disappears into the roving crowd, that bald splay of a pale head being absorbed back into the city, as if he had never existed at all. That's the one nice thing about cities, she thinks. There's enough people around to cover up those few that you really, truly hope to never see again.
She ducks past the billowing silk into blissful, cool dampness– the lone alley tempering the red and sweaty stickiness to her skin, and breathes out a weary sigh.
"Onto better things," she says, quietly, to no one but herself and the few mangy cats that lift their heads from their licking only briefly, before dipping back into better things. "Thank the Maker... 'For there is no darkness, no death either, in the Maker's light and nothing He has wrought shall be lost.'"
The strap of her rucksack worries pleasantly beneath her thumb as the Chant, already, easing gently that knot within her chest undone. The alley takes her on its path, and she follows dutifully.
This is what she wanted, after all.
–
Evelyn stops to pet one of the alley cats, striped and spotted and sniffing expectantly at her caressing fingertips, because though she's walked down this path for a short time, part of her has started to believe that the man pointed her down this way only to be rid of her. It's better than walking in the same bazaar square for the fifth time in a row, however. That cat beneath her petting hand meows again.
But she has nothing for the poor thing– the sticky sugar of her fingers has been long-since licked clean... Only the mild taste of sweet cardamom and roseapple lingers, though still it fades on the back of her tongue.
So she puts even more fervor into pouring love onto the small, mangy thing. Its eyes close in bliss when she scratches at the base of its tail, and Evelyn doesn't stop herself from dropping to a full kneel, roving scritches through warm fur that must be an absolute nightmare to wear in such a hot, humid summer. Perhaps that's why they all gather in these shadowed alleyways, enjoying the many little treats of fish bones and fresh water that Rivainis are taken to leaving. Its one of the city's most endearing qualities: in the Marches, similar to Fereldan and even, to an extent, Orlais– dogs are the favored ones, their loyalty fermented in the eyes of Andraste herself and by proxy, the Maker. But dogs never made their mark on Rivain like the cat did, brought first by the Tevinter Empire and then kept, lovingly, by the local population.
But Evelyn has always adored cats. Their eyes, their scheming silence as they either ignore you, or cause such mischief that you're forced to pay your undying attention to them. They're smart, but luxuriate in fine pleasures even when they live on the streets, filling themselves quite easily in Ostwick as a port city. There is never a shortage of fish offal to be pilfered through.
And these Dairsmuid cats are no exception. This one drinks its fill of her affections, and she hums, giving it a few scratches behind the soft velvet of its ear, and then the even softer velvet of its nose, where its eyes close with a purr.
If the creature were not practically jumping with fleas, she would press her face right into the soft fur there, laying kisses like ships down that harbor of a forehead, striped and soft and perfect. For a moment she does get close to it– tempting as it is, and her petting fingers grow tenser with the overwhelming affection boiling inside of her. This cat has lived seas away from her all its life, and yet she understands it perfectly, each close of its eyes and flick of its tail. Its home is different, and yet the language of cats stays very much the same.
"Alright," she sighs, knees creaking as she shifts on the hard cobblestone path. "I really should be–"
Her head lifts from her bow above the contentedly purring cat, and her fingers still in soft fur. Thank the Maker she stopped to pet this lonesome cat, for by His providence is the Archive right beside her, an unassuming alcove of the same stone that makes up much of this city; sandstone the color of warm beaches, arched into wide windows and doors to let passing wind through.
But past that wide arch is its courtyard, the rustling leaves of citrus and fig trees shining vibrant green, and through that peeks the bright turquoise double doors of the Archive, the one landmark of her map that has, apparently, stayed the same.
The cat abandons her, having had its fill of affection now that her fingers have stilled, and it meanders down another offshoot of an alleyway, sniffing for mice and other holy offerings.
Evelyn pulls her rucksack tighter on her shoulders as she stands, feeling, suddenly, like a martyr approaching the Grand Cathedral. It is a pilgrimage of sorts: this Archive houses countless artifacts, many of them from the holiest of ages, kept safe from the pillaging of the Imperial Chantry which took its share from the repositories of the Free Marches during various, seemingly unending wars. But here, in the capital of a nation buffered and surrounded largely by well-defended sea, many of their holy artifacts have remained entirely untouched– and during the most tumultuous times, Chantries across Thedas have sent their most precious relics to be guarded by the Dairsmuid Archive. It is a place that, until now, Evelyn has only read about, a strange kind of affection and gratitude cementing itself within her.
Mother Guinevere knew well of her desire to work within the reliquary, defending what little remained in their cloister after so many ages of wars and pilfering and betrayal. It was the easiest task that Evelyn has ever taken, to come here like a pilgrim to the Temple of Sacred Ashes and to know, finally, how she herself could care for what little remained.
If there were ever a place to study the best practices of reliquaries, the very best was here.
And yet, strangely, to her it appears entirely empty.
For years she imagined these walls bustling with the work of scholars, drawn from across Thedas, just like herself, into these walls to study the ways of protecting our Makers gifts. There would be entire crowds of robed men and women just in the famed courtyard alone, drafting up endless treatise just like those she poured over in her cloister, enamored with the work of the Maker seen in countless artifacts throughout Thedas. By the gentle bubbling of a fountain they would sit, passing some fragile relic with careful hands between them, and arguing, in the most scholarly of ways, about what it meant for the world and Beyond.
A small fountain gurgles a lone sound, and the mottled leaves of fruit trees groan, and some cat meows from within, echoing from some stony passage.
Well. Perhaps the scholars are within. She's heard that faith in Rivain is much more communal, with many Andrastians praying together depending on the set of the sun, shielding themselves during the hottest hours of the day within the cool shadows of their Chantry, or the comfort of their homes.
Evelyn laughs, a soft sound that still rings throughout the empty courtyard and into the alley behind. Of course those scholars wouldn't be out here now, she thinks. The sun has come straight overhead and beats down mercilessly even into the alleyways now, and the walls can cast no shadow to stymie the heat. Some beads of sweat roll down her neck, and join the sea of them beading beneath her tunic.
The turquoise blue doors open with a brassy creak, and she blinks to adjust her eyes, sun-battered, to the low and… frankly dusty light.
All of it was a grand swathe of architecture, domed high above her head with all manners of patterns pressed into the stone, lined in blues and green. The dome opened slightly at its peak, to another, smaller dome lined with stained glass whose depictions she couldn’t quite make out, not from here. But those beams of sunlight break through and make pale ladders through the swirling dust, landing on sturdy libraries filled with tomes as thick as her leg, and the entrances to reliquaries gilded in fine gold, humming with the protection of some strange and hidden magics.
At its core–the very structure of it has been recorded in countless reliquarian traveling tomes, detailing the fine and defensible masonry of the building–it looks exactly as the sketches she's poured over for much of her life. But Chantry scholars always spoke of this place as a bustling haven for all of Thedas' greatest minds, pouring over relics and precious, ancient writings.
Now it just appears... decidedly empty.
Abandoned, even.
So that slowly building eerie feeling jolts like lightning within her when the doors close behind her, a fair few paces away, now. Evelyn rounds quickly where the sunlight dims with a careful, brassy squeal.
The man from the fruit stall, sack of apricot still heavy at his side, watches her closely, though he strides in as confidently as any intruder she has ever seen. Perhaps she offended him so much, somehow reading the contents of her mind, that he thought better of his earlier assistance– and decided to just kill her, instead. That he hardly seems the man for mercenary work doesn't faze Evelyn's theory, because the narrow set of his eyes burns with suspicion, and he meanders with the careful ease of a fox to a field mouse.
With the echo of his steps throughout an entirely empty room, with only the dust and the tomes to hear her screams, Evelyn's teeth are set even more on edge.
If the man notices it, he certainly doesn't seem to care.
But his words are wry as he speaks: "Our fruit merchant will expect to see you again, Sister."
Perhaps he is a far more innocent nutcase, then– chasing her down to admonish her for a cultural faux-pax she hadn't even made yet. Though his lecture just might end with a dagger at her throat, so she won't pass him off so quickly, still.
So much for the friendly help of a fellow foreigner.
"I..." she begins, rifling through all kinds of possibilities. If she were to placate him, would he be able to tell it was a self-servicing lie? The man stares with the sharpness of one quite able to catch her out on that, though admittedly, her conscience is heavy even at the thought of an easy lie. She's spent far too much time in the cloister now to break her oaths. Should she pull some words from the Chant to calm him? He hardly seems enraged and in need of spiritual centering though, even if the Chant might help her to be center, right about now.
In the end, she decides simply to tell the truth.
"I hadn't thought that far ahead," she admits. "Coming here was my only real plan– I hoped... Well, I thought coming here, the rest of my plans would fall into place."
It feels ridiculous now, to say that in a dust-filled chamber that rings simply with emptiness, with her hair still matted to her forehead and neck with a profuse of sweat, which now sends a chill down her skin as it dries.
His brow lifts, skeptical. "It is a dangerous thing, to place such hopes in singular occasions. One finds that reality itself often differs."
She rankles, again, with that childish shame she felt from before. Her defenses go up as sturdy as the fortifications of Ostwick itself– a grand length of stone that held countless Qunari invasions through the ages. Now it means simply that her hands tighten on the straps of her rucksack, embossed with symbols which have given her so much hope, and are now paths for her thumbs to worry.
"It's hardly so ridiculous to think one of the most well-defended Archives in all of Thedas would be a good starting point," she argues, eyes tracing a great split in the stone ground.
He hums, though it's a mistrustful sound.
"I suppose not."
An awkward silence, as heavy as the looming summer air beyond the Archive and its temperate courtyard, yet lingers between them. For that moment, they are two immovable objects suspended in time and space. Evelyn is the first to crack, with all of herself burning to fidget like a guilty child at the receiving end of his quiet stare. That quiet seems even heavier in the great emptiness of this grand, domed chamber.
"Where is everyone, then?" she asks, giving a pointed glance around the chamber, where tomes are left splayed open on their tables and some chairs are still draped with the scarves and robes of scholars. "Was there a conference? Our cloister heard nothing of it."
Evelyn would not think it possible, and yet the thorny spines of the other seem to rankle even further, like a hedgehog curled entirely on itself, wobbling beneath her single prodding touch.
"There is not," he says pointedly, and rounds her to shoulder the heavy bag of apricots on a cleaned desk, with a neat pile of books already at its corner. Its just near the central reliquary itself, sitting like an altar where sunbeams pour down from the domed roof, and he begins unwinding the satchel's ties, freeing the ripened apricots from their canvas prison.
They lay there like tens of little blushing faces, peering at Evelyn– taunting, again, as she can practically taste the sweetness of her tongue.
But she steadies her stubborn resolve, not yet ready to lose to such an obstinate grouch. "I realize now that I don't yet know what you do here, serah. Are you the groundskeeper?"
It... did not come out the way she intended, she realizes, once the words are already out of her foolish mouth. That Mother Guinevere told her relations with elves were more lax in this nation, Evelyn had originally adored the idea of it, that people would not be separated and divided by something as superficial as their ears. Perhaps, she thought, all the people of one nation would be united under a singular banner that tied them together, and a shared devotion to the Maker.
She did not expect her own careless tongue to be her undoing, however.
He catches her fumble with all the grace of a wolf already waiting to lunge.
"Ah, I see. It may come as a surprise that an elf might hold any place at all in this Archive, Sister. Yet I assure you that it is not so uncommon in Dairsmuid, as it may be in Ostwick."
That name–that home of hers–is practically spit back into her own face, though the collected cool of his doesn't even crack with the venom of it. Evelyn wonders how often he might say such things that it looks entirely in place on his features, as calm as if he were asking her for a spot of tea, or a recommendation for a particularly well-aged cheese. But his composure doesn't stop hers from slipping.
"I–you know that I didn't mean it like that," she stutters, and his brow lifts as if to ask: Do I?
But her resolve budges on, undeterred as a fine Ostwickan charger.
Even as she feels her cheeks reddened again in that childish shame, and her eyes burn hotly beneath her hair blessedly, mercifully, covered with that frayed pull of her braid.
"How did you know that I was from Ostwick?" she asks, hoping to catch him in his own blunder.
The man trudges on, however, entirely unblundered.
"Besides your blatant blindness, or disregard, towards local customs? Or perhaps the mulishness in the face of things yet unfamiliar, and complete belief that you are the exception to every rule–even, including–the closed doors of an Archive which barred no invitation? It has been common enough with your countrymen, I assure you." His speech, cutting cruelly again to her nationalistic heart, makes him turn with a haughty look, the chill of it pouring down his nose at her.
"But all of that is common enough, with your peers–" he does not say it, and yet Evelyn understands him now to mean humans.
He does not give her enough time to bristle at that, for good reason, before he continues.
"I am familiar with your heraldry. I am also familiar with your Mother Guinevere's insistent meddling in the affairs of others, unfortunately."
Evelyn's mouth gapes. "You know the Mother?" she asks, and then again, because her mind is buzzing like bees around their hive: "Was it you that denied the requests for the retrieval of our relics, then?"
His head shakes a minuscule movement, and Evelyn feels some of her indignity shift away with it. "It was not me," he says. "I arrived just a week ago, after hearing that the Dairsmuid scholars were being called on urgent business to Llomerynn. It was, supposedly, a peace-keeping negotiation with Tevene dignitaries that would take all of their archivists. Yet I knew that the Archive itself could not sit empty. There are too many powers who would use the vacuum of it for their own gain, and jeopardize what remains."
Evelyn can only imagine this place, just a week earlier, rolling and groaning with the force of a hundred scholars packing what they can, careful tomes stacked into their rucksacks and thrown over their shoulders, or onto donkey carts, preparing for a long journey to the southern island. But all of their scholars at once? It seems foolish for them to leave this fortress, defensible as it is, entirely unmanned.
But there's another question already burning at Evelyn's tongue.
"You seem remarkably well-adjusted for a man who's only been here a week. If I had known better, I would've thought you a local."
And it's true: just from her first sidelong glance across the bazaar, he seemed to fit in just as any other haggling local, turned just slightly towards the merchant and yet still far enough away to give the impression–try me, I can walk. His Rivaini flowed just as easily, theatrical as it simply must be, with his hands, second only to the mouth in speaking Rivaini, punctuating each dramatic point. Only the freckled paleness of his bald head shone as a foreign beacon.
His bald head now roams around the table, and the litheness of his fingers, no longer in their dramatic dance, instead roll loose scripts of parchment carefully to be sorted back into their shelves. Her question still hangs in the air, and he does not rush to fill it.
But when he does, each word is slow, and deliberate as if it were a poem.
"I have spent many years researching my way across Rivain," he says. "It was not an unfamiliar place."
Quite a short poem.
Evelyn, scholarly as she is, having spent much of her time as a Sister pouring over antiquated riddles and transcripts, digs for more. "Is that how you know Mother Guinevere, then– from sharing in a pilgrimage?"
He huffs with his hands rolled gently around a calfskin vellum. “Chantry scholars rarely venture outside the capital, and even then, move only between their walled cloisters. No…I spent much of my research among the wild and ancient ruins, and their battlefields. Places that often only the Dalish dare to go. That their existence is not shrouded in constant suspicion and threats of exile makes it far easier to work with what they have already found."
The dig at Mother Guinevere and the cloisters, as well as the–quite rightly justified–dig at the rest of Thedas for their persecution of the Dalish goes unquestioned.
She leans nearer, a curious tilt to her head. "What can someone even research in the wilds?" she asks. "Aren't there bandits and... giant spiders?"
Unlike her previous blunder, he must see the enthusiasm pouring from her eyes, ready to latch onto any story that he’d tell. Luckily for her, he doesn’t seem as hard-pressed to tell these stories as he does the others. He only chuckles and tucks another armful of parchments into the filing of a shelf, numbers etched into the dark, dusty wood of it. The whole Archive smells lightly of its aged resin.
"Not all knowledge is yet codified so neatly into Chantry encyclopedias, Sister. There is much that has not even made it into text..." his lips tilt, but his next words are more careful. "I study the Fade, and that in itself is not a popular subject of Chantry scholarship. Yet... the world of spirits is endlessly fascinating."
Evelyn speaks out her ignorance willfully, and knowingly. "What can it tell you beyond what the Maker has already said?"
"There are countless stories within the Fade which one can only know by venturing themselves," he says, taking her curiosity in easy stride. "The spirits there reflect memories in constant mirage. Just as there are, in our world, endless truths– so too are they dreamt and made into the Fade itself. Exploring them... I find endlessly fascinating."
The Fade has always been a place that Evelyn knows she dreams, of course, half-remembered images and feelings that linger just at the edge of her mind when she wakes. Sometimes it was fun to share them with her friends as young girls, ruminating on what the symbols might mean. They would rally together, all with their hair still in braids, and ponder whether the goat with a red lead was truly an ominous omen, or perhaps some deep yearning within them, aching to be set free. These sessions would last about as long as it took them to get readied, of course.
Then it was off to breakfast, the flicker of their dreams already long forgotten.
"How can you even remember those dreams?" she asks.
Let alone study them... is what goes unsaid.
He chuckles softly all the same. "It is easy enough, when one is awake within them."
"Waking in dreams..." Evelyn mutters in a half-breath, as if she herself is remembering some distant dream, and in it is fear and fire and the warning tone of a Mother all too furious for her child. They are the ones that lose themselves in their dreams, dragging demons in fire into our world and destroying all with their rage, leveling the most holy of Chantries to rubble and leaving punishing curses on all the land. In one moment you may be in a petty squabble with a stranger and in the next, after dreaming their vengeful waking dreams, they walk the world as an abomination, hunting for you and your family.
Evelyn's heard enough of mages and their waking dreams to know how this one ends.
But if he truly is a mage, she thinks, does she truly want to make him angry?
So she asks him another question, instead.
"Don't the... demons," she whispers the word, "tempt you?"
"I am an apostate," he nods. "But your Circles are not the only places where mages may go to study the ways of demons, and learn to resist their temptations, controlling their dreams. In fact I would argue that they teach only fear and encourage the very subversion they attempt to mitigate, but I fear that is a conversation for another day."
The small, teasing smile he gives is the most welcoming expression he's shown all day– even as he's rejecting those questions already bubbling inside her: How did you learn outside the Circle? What did you learn? she wonders, daring not to ask and yet still burning.
"What is it like?" she asks simply, instead.
He turns from his work at the table and faces her, curiously, with that thin line of his brow raised in silent appraisal. For a breath he merely watches her, a careful look heavy in those pale eyes.
Evelyn does not falter beneath it.
Then he holds out his hands, and the pale length of them still in the cool, quiet air between them. Evelyn does hesitate for a moment, wondering if, finally, she's reached some limit she truly should step back from– some precipice which might actually lead her to fall. Yet as much the fear might be fluttering in her chest, so too is the excitement, with the distant memories of the mage of Ostwick's market and the humming lightning ring flashing again through her mind. It leaves some strange yearning in the pit of her stomach, and so Evelyn reaches out, one hand slipping atop his chilly ones.
It's a gentle brush of fingers and yet in that second, a sudden warmth like smooth honey melts over her palms. It hums, dancing along her skin and seeping into her bones, where she had not even realized she felt so cold, and hums like a drumbeat from so far away. The ambience of it builds around them, and then, along with the warmth, slowly dissipates– as if it had never even been there at all.
Her fingers tense, as if she could grab at the feeling and pull it back like a bridle.
And finds herself drawn ever deeper in.
In the end, Evelyn is seated on the cushions of one of those ancient chairs, with an abandoned robe draped behind her back, and her fingers drumming along the smooth, fragrant wood of the table between them. The man has seated himself long ago as well, after she settled in with a determination to ask each and every question, to fulfill every yearning curiosity as if he were an open book before her- and for the most part, he is.
He speaks easily now, not at all the stilted and suspicious riddles that he greeted her with, but instead in long, meandering poems where he sprinkles the occasional Rivaini, after she mentioned wanting to learn.
She prods each of his stories, of the Fade, and the spirits there, and his dream-journeys within them, as if they were alive. Suddenly all the tomes she so busied herself with in Ostwick seem like mere graves, and yet here she is now, interrogating the living, breathing dead. In fact, that is exactly where the ambling of their conversation has now come to.
"You've never once seen where the souls of the dead pass through?" she asked, incredulous as a fishwife chatting at market. "Why didn't you ask Wisdom-- or Faith?"
He chuckles again, and it is a low sound that settles deep within her belly, warm and humming and familiar. "It was not the most compelling question that I had at the time. I was far more interested in sifting through the memories of the living, though they had all long-since passed by then. But it was their journeys of life that interested me, rather than the end."
Evelyn shuffles on the fine cushion beneath her, and rolls a small, fuzzy apricot between her fingers.
"It would be the only thing on my mind," she admits. "There's so much debate among the living, what if we could finally know what the Maker did with our souls in the end?"
"What would it change?" he asks, earnestly.
"I'm sure some Chancellor out there would pocket a few gold pieces."
His answering laugh is soft and breathy, yet Evelyn does feel some reticence, remembering all the books and treatises and exchanging letters with other Chantry scholars, asking endlessly what answers their own reliquaries might hold. The answers never came, however, and it seemed that Chantries across Thedas were stuck with the same question that Evelyn was: this question of death, and what comes beyond.
The Rivaini argue that one's soul is taken first by watchful ancestors, cleansed and washed of one's sins in some distant fold of the Fade.
The Anderfels leave their dead to be taken to the skies by vultures, so that their soul can return to the earth in every whisper of the wind, sending messages to their children and their children's children.
Even some cloister in a small, backwater Fereldan farming village proclaims a vision-of a merciful Maker, swayed by the compassion of the bride at His side, to accept back those who have walked in His light faithfully-while the rest of the Chantry sells divine forgiveness through donation and indulgences. The question of death seems entirely lost in the performance of it, and she watched her family perform it long enough, donating estate land and riches to guarantee they would have as much room in heaven as the Hartford's down the lane.
It was all very sensational, at whatever soirees such news would be carefully lain, that one's family has been promised only the finest of lodging in a place that no one had answers for- not even its name.
This is what Evelyn has so decidedly studied: the knowing of one's end.
More useful to her cloister, though, was the preservation of the remains of those saints and figures that had already passed. Yet they stayed to Evelyn as artifacts of the mystery of that journey, left for only the living to make sense of.
That along with, apparently, dreams.
Another bout of silence takes them over. Evelyn realizes the sun, which was only a few minutes ago, it seems, was high above the courtyard and gilded dome, now dips below the rambling patchwork horizon of Dairsmuid. Ages of empires now fall atop each other with their bones: flat terraces and pointed spires, all of them reflecting dusk's last dying light. It's as all he told her of the Fade in those passing hours, except the follies of man are reflected by terracotta earth and stone instead of spirit's will.
The thought makes her turn with a sudden realization, shifting comfortably in her seat.
"I don't know your name," she chuckles. "...serah"
Somehow, in the past few hours that they've talked, meandering conversations dipping between the two of their questions, though Evelyn admits it was mainly her own curiosity towards the radically unique journeys he's had in the Fade-- the idea of referring to him by such a formal title is laughable. And yet, she finds, she has no other name to call him by.
He tenses even under her light-hearted gaze.
All the warmth that had built delicately between them with such scholarly debate, warm like the cobblestones outside the doorway, and the sticky flesh of dates drying on the merchant's stall, shatters like a thin glass bauble. The surliness of his brow resigns itself again to shuffling parchment on the table, as if it were not already organized once, twice- three times Evelyn is sure.
But though his brow is tense, his voice remains soft, if guarded- not the thorny barbs he'd thrown before.
"I am Solas, if there are to be introductions."
Hardly a warm welcome, however.
Solas, his name strange on her tongue as she mulls it over, not Rivaini, certainly- and if it were Orlesian then his accent, though lilting, gives none of it away. His name, just as the rest of him, is exceedingly hard to place and even harder to understand. Yet... she doesn't dislike it, the name. It fits neatly between her teeth and curves itself efficiently, so as not to waste any time at all, around her tongue, where it rolls off easily.
Some part of her wants to mutter it, even just under her breath, to see what it would feel like in all its usable glory. As if they were truly friends, shared scholars, even- but she knows he'd be quick to catch it.
Even when he pretends not to hear her anymore, she can read enough of him now to see the flick of a sidewards glance, the purse of his lips as she also rises from the warmed cushion, edging to the corner of the table with an uncomfortable tap of her finger against the smooth, resinous wood. She opens her mouth to say something, anything, really: maybe an apology, just out of instinct, or some strange noise just to fill the silence again.
Maybe his name.
But in the end she can say nothing, because his back is already turned, and he walks to unlock the central reliquary's doors to slip inside, the half of him still in the chamber with her pausing for just a moment, with his back still turned.
"There are many free rooms in the Archive," he says, quietly. "Take your pick."
It is an even stranger goodbye, when all she can see is the pale plinth of his neck disappear back behind the gilded doorway, and his fingers linger, for just a moment, before it slips back shut.
Evelyn shoulders her rucksack, worrying at the finely stitched lines and embossments.
Well, at least she'll have a place to sleep tonight. The alley cats didn't seem willing to open their trash-filled hovels except for some discarded fishbones, anyhow. All Evelyn has as she walks, silently, creeping through the Archive of her dreams as if it were a crypt of discontented dead, is the last lingering of cardamom on her tongue, and an ego fit for bruising.