#vasrea

TWO

She comes to you sometimes, here in this strange highfortress she calls hers. It is a place of ancient stone builded high and strong,cupped among the fingers of the peaks. The air here smells of ice, and the windhas teeth. But there are so many stars at night, so high, with air so thin andclear. So many stars. You like to sit upon the ice-rimed battlements and watchthem wheel. Sometimes you lay back upon the stony wall and the world flipsover. You feel as though you might fall upward, into the stars, and you takeher hand to ground yourself.

This time when she comes to you, you have a surprise waitingfor her. There is a glade outside the fortress and far from the churned groundwhere the soldiers have their city of tents and wagons and wains. Spring hascome at last, despite the snows which still feather the highest peaks white as bonyegrets; and when you walked among the trees there, you found them. Tiny, red asblood, and perfect; you pour the strawberries out into her cupped hands like asecret treasure.

She eats them with such slow solemnity and care that yougiggle with a girlishness you thought you had forgotten, and when you kiss hershe tastes like spring itself. 

THREE

She is a creature of a vast and untapped sensuality, youthink with no little amusement and no little lust. Like a girl, she delights insensation, in prettiness and in the novelty of pure experience. There is novanity in her and yet she drapes herself in swishing silks and soft linenswhich let the light shine through; they are not softer than her skin, nor finer.

She blushes pink as dawnstone when you tease her for it,sliding the layers of her garb away one by one and clicking your tongue againstyour lips; she laughs a little when you comb your fingers through her hair and sayit is as soft and heavy and fine as the raw silk of her shawl, when you touchher and you say she is a thing of luxury herself, that she is something to bekept and treasured. She is as gracefully shaped as any of your carvings offine-grained wood but more stirring by far; she lives, she breathes, she quiversas you draw callused fingertips along her bare skin.

You tell the knobs of her spine through your fingers like astring of polished beads; yes, there is a carnality to your appreciation of herbut under her patient tutelage you have become a creature of sensuality also,delighting in her. You touch her because she is there, she is there to betouched; and you remember suddenly that when you were a girl, you thought you’dbe an artist.

You knot the heavy rope of her hair around your wrist andhold it there, bound in her and bound by her, touching her now with lips andtongue instead of fingers. Her skin tastes like salt and sharp herbs, as wildand limitless as the sea. 

FOUR

You have known mages but you have never known a mage likeher before.

You remember one time, in her chambers high above theancient stony keep, you watched as she dusted her fingers together like a womansprinkling cinnamon upon a pastry; but it was tiny purple sparks which fellfrom her hand until, with a sudden flaring rush, the candlewick caught alight.

The delicacy of that movement had been an exquisite thing,so tiny and so perfect and so entirely unlike the way she is fighting now. Thisis raw, you think, as you weave between the enemies which would strike at herif they could and you slice into them, feeling your daggers bite deep intocorrupted flesh. The way she fights is unpracticed, is an outpouring of emotionchanneled forth into power unrefined and all the stronger for it. She is notclumsy, but she is unrestrained. The delicate flakes of lavender fire havebecome instead a throbbing indigo maelstrom, a sea-born tempest with her as itsmoving eye.

Your hair rises from your flesh with the crackling electricityas you move through her storm.

Exhilaration thrums through you in the aftermath. Wardenslie dead upon sand-swept stones and your blades drip black demon blood. Thehorror of it will catch you up soon enough but for now there is only triumph,the sheer animal joy of having survived. It surges in your veins in place ofblood, that wildness, and you meet her eyes and think perhaps she feels it, too.Her chest is heaving and stray tongues of purple fire still lick around herwrists and you think you have never seen anything so beautiful as her standingthere, alive, vibrantly alive.

It is only a few steps to reach her side; a spark of powerarcs between your mouth and hers and you learn the taste of lightning.

 FIVE

You tell her that once, so long ago it feels now though youknow it has only been months, you decided that you would put yourself betweenher and harm. You tell her that this, thisis harm, and this sacrifice is yours to choose. You tell her that a witch oncetold you that when you came to look upon the abyss, you must not hesitate toleap, and you tell her that the advice of witches is not to be ignored.

This is the abyss, you tell her. It’s time for you to leap,you tell her.

This is your sacrifice and you have chosen it, and you knowthat she will let you. She understands duty, after all. She of all peopleunderstands that. Her heart is the kindest that you have ever known, and youthink that you have lived a lifetime since you met her. And that is all thatanyone ever gets, isn’t it? A lifetime. You have been fortunate.

You know her so well now and while she is still your sparrowyou sometimes think of Merrill when you look at her, too. Not because of thedelicately tipped ears which peek through hair like a spill of glossy ink, no,but because both have a sort of wilting innocence belied by a core of metalstrength.  Her will is strong and pure assilverite, proof against all poisons. You are better now, for having loved her. You are cured of some aching bitterness.

And she is strong enough to let you go, like you knew she would be. You tie a bit ofsilk around her wrist, there in the sickly shifting greenness of this unwellplace; it is a bloody crimson, folded around itself many times into a long,smooth band. When she unfolds it later, if she does, she’ll find a black-wingedbird embroidered there. A hawk, or just possibly a sparrow.

Regret, like the teacher’s fear of failure becoming the student’s shroud, like the future steering the past through a tapered present, like a mentor’s sadness twanging the heartbeat in her chest.

Responsibility, worn like a badge of honour she prides herself on, like a thousand candles casting an altar in golden light.

Redemption. Redemption. She seeks it in the fractures of a broken boy’s legacy, and Maker knows she’s tried, she’s tried, but he had favoured order over truth. It was a dream that broke him, and he had the gall to hope that order would stitch him back together. Instead, she’s driven a sword through his chest, a clean thrust, a clean slate, time to start anew. Remember him, her brain screamed while her right hand burned (had it been right? had it been righteous?) and her chest heaved with lungs drowning in regret.

Regret, and for a precious short span of time (then? now? ever?) she wanted to forget––––but he had been a good student, an eager student, and she could not have wished for a worthier vessel to fill with an ideology she thinks pure and eternal. When the red horror sank its teeth deep into his flesh, it rid him of a future. Who is she to take it from him a second time?

No, regret cannot negate memory. And with every breath, with every rise and fall of her chest, she will remember.

Cassandra opens her eyes to fingers brushing against her knuckles; a placid touch that screams against raw, blood-caked skin. Andraste forgive her, but the light can be too bright sometimes. When Ilaan reaches out to grasp her hand, she pulls back, gently so. “No.” Tired, exhausted, a night’s worth of howling and sobbing and pummeling a wall; as if blood, sweat or tears would somehow weigh enough to compensate for a young man’s aspirations leading to his doom.

The stillness of this moment feels almost bought, fleeting––––but then Ilaan anchors it all with one simple, quiet touch, a tentative question bouncing back and forth between her eyes and the small furrow of her brow, and the face of the Seeker, an open book to read.

She shakes her head, and wills herself to smile.