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"I did."

There's no disappointment. The offer is made. It's Richard's choice what to be done with it. If there's no comfort in speaking of his troubles, then she doesn't intend to press.

Maybe he will remember the offer sometime later. Maybe not.

Regardless, she turns in towards him, bringing up one leg to rest carefully on the edge of the bed. Settling in, if he intends to speak of it now.

“There is an entity that comes to me in my dreams,” confessed as matter-of-factly as he might report on a delivery of fresh towels to the baths, Richard adds, by necessity: “Less often, now.”

His affect hasn’t changed with the subject any more than it has with her settling in, tattered and listless under his blanket.

“I thought for a time it might be my god working to reach me through the veil.”

Listening to him, Derrica straightens, spine stiffening at the strangeness of Richard's admission.

There is some familiarity. Derrica has drawn spirits to her. She has heard spirits murmuring to her through the Veil. This is a skill she's been honing her whole life, but it doesn't sound as if Richard is referencing something quite the same.

"Do you not think that anymore?" she asks, carefully, softly.

He marks the shift in her posture with a glance, down and up.

“No.” He doesn’t.

And that seems to be the end of it.

Good story, Richard.

“I can never quite make out what he’s saying,” he continues, unprompted. Why not. “It’s cruel, in a way.”

"He's not asking you for anything?"

There is, fortunately, no place on the leg nearest her where Derrica could put her hand without hurting him. But the instinct is there, to reach out.

Heat rises beneath the hard planes of his bony face, stings at his eyes, wrung back by a tendon-cracking flex at the back of his jaw. It stays set out of alignment for a moment. He sniffs. Dry, as if in evidence. A steady breath clears the rest.

And he’s back again, locked onto her knuckles at his knee as to assert to himself that they’re the only part of her really here for him to have this very normal and professional conversation with.

“Not directly.”

"Not directly?" is gentle prompting.

It is not accompanied by a nudge of her knuckles. The slight pressure of that contact remains unchanged. But her eyes are very intent on his face.

The restoration of dignity makes answering easier with this particular cat out of the bag.

“I’m certain it wants the same things most of you do.”

He, it.

Resentment sits harsh in the lines around his mouth but there is nothing evasive about his reluctance to resume eye contact. Nothing to signal deception.

“I don’t believe there is any cause for concern.”

"There is always reason to be cautious with spirits."

A lesson Derrica remembers from the very earliest days of her childhood. Not a warning meant to scare or to discourage, but to bring clarity to what was being done each time a Seer opened themselves up.

"Do you know what I am?" is a gentler question, though her scrutiny of him doesn't lapse as she offers it.

She'd promised information too, on the ferry that night.

“Of course.”

It’s rational to agree. He’d seen the aftermath of the abomination that tore through the Gallows the year prior. Or maybe it was the year before that. The books and records he combed through afterwards were explicit and often well-illustrated.

Never mind the demons he’s seen himself in the field.

“I know that mages skilled in healing magic are more inclined to work closely with spirits of the Fade.”

Speaking about it in the context of study is easier still, second nature crept in to file tender details behind titles and volumes and chapter headings. Some of his splintering has room to smooth itself under that added structure.

"We do," is Derrica's first, steady agreement.

She has considered that sometimes, whether her skill in this field is due to her skill in another.

Before she continues, she takes a brief assessment of the room around them. At Richard's knee, her fingers pluck anxiously at the folds of the sheet, the only outward sign of nerves.

"I'm Rivaini," she persists. Richard is not of this world, and will not draw such conclusions himself, apparently, though Derrica knows him to be a diligent researcher. "I know more about spirits because of what we believe, and because of what I was raised to become."

The fabric whispers between them. She forcibly stills her hand, releases the fabric as she straightens once more, folds her hands over her knee.

"Have you heard of the Seers in Rivain?"

It’s the fidgeting that barbs into his periphery and brings his eyeline more presently onto her in aside, the change in posture. He lands on her hands resettled over her knee. Most of his research has been more insular to his own interests and the interests of those close to him -- research around personal safety and potential. Research for the war effort.

The intricacies of Thedosian culture have often evaded him. The humans are cruel to elves and the dwarves are cruel to their own. The Chantry’s approach to tending mages has been primitive and at times desperate. Tevinter is full of interesting ideas and potential and blight.

Still, he’s been around long enough and done enough reading that the Seers in Rivain tugs a thread of recognition, albeit hazy, unspecific.

“I’ve heard of them,” he says, in the hedging tone of one who is supposing only just now that he should’ve read more closely.

Helpful.

A little smile tugs at her mouth, nodding.

"I'm one of them," she says quietly, slower, watching Richard's expression closely. "We speak with spirits. Commune with them."

Here, some shared ground. Some expertise that might be useful to him, if he cared to call upon it.

"I hear them," is more to the point. "And I know you're a cautious man, but I hope that you know how cautious you must be when something from beyond tries to converse with you."

That’s a level of interaction that elicits doubt first, and then a thread of exasperation, as if he wishes it was something he could quickly un-know. It’s fleeting. Why is Derrica so often at the center of these details. And why does she trust him with them?

But he has sins of his own by any inquisitorial threshold and eventually his curiosity brings his read of her back up to eye level.

“What do they say?”

No word on his awareness of the danger. The edges of his composure are still brittle.

"It depends on what I ask," she tells him, before tempering it with, "But they aren't always clear. I interpret, as best I can."

Maybe she should be cautioning him more clearly. It worries her, even though Richard doesn't seem to be reckless or power-hungry in ways that would leave him open to harm.

But still—

She shakes her head, continues, softer, "It's why before it wouldn't be only me. The other Seers, the older women who had more experience, would be able to interpret better."

But Derrica was driven out of Rivain. And now she is linked so closely to so many people here. It would be a hard thing to leave, even to rejoin the Seers.

He’s quiet while he thinks about it, gauging for the first time Derrica’s age in earnest through a study of her face, the finer skin around her eyes. Nothing about her previously has ever registered to him on a richter scale of potential disaster. A mage is a mage, a healer is a healer. She’s always seemed well in tune with her emotions.

A little too in tune with her empathy, perhaps.

Reassessment with this added knowledge makes him tired, settles at the bottom of his heart like a spill of silt heavy through the ventricles.

“What kinds of questions do you ask?”

"I haven't asked any. Not since I left Rivain."

And she stops short of talking about what the Mothers had asked, what prophecies had passed from them to villages and towns and beyond.

"Do you ask questions, when you hear them trying to speak to you?"

Alright but what kinds of questions did they ask --

The focus of his study adjusts, suspicion tightened into crow’s feet, a glancing flicker of reproach he doesn’t try to hide. Spell broken, he looks away, the tension he keeps in his chest pinched in, held, and vented off in a soft huff of exasperation.

“Not anymore.”

Edited (f) 2022-01-01 21:27 (UTC)

"Since you've been here?" is the right approach, Derrica thinks.

Maybe he was able to speak clearly before he fell through a rift. Or maybe it's more complicated than that.

And maybe it's easier to talk about this, than to talk about what he did and didn't ask for.

“Since I determined it was an impostor.”

His hands are sorely wanting for a novel to leaf through to separate himself from his reluctance to answer at all, scabbed knuckles curled instead for him to fuss with the lay of his blanket. It’s already very tidy, up to the point he twists out of it like a beached ginger merman.

There is a sincere urge to put her hands over his. It even flutters at her fingers, shifts her body to turn more fully towards him.

But Richard likely wouldn't appreciate it. So Derrica settles for holding her place, brow pinched into a worried frown.

"What does that mean?"

Piano wire tension flinches taut up the back of his near arm at her shift -- the surface of a defensive flare that brands bright in his eyes in a look flashed quick aside. This is the bristle of a creature coiled at the bottom of a drain, starved and hateful and ready to snip off the end of the finger being curled down the chute after it.

There and gone.

He folds it away under a spring draw of tension, haggard through his chest, hard bit into collarbones and across his shoulders.

“It isn’t Oghma,” he says, finally, measured over an ill-repressed shiver of exhaustion. “I’m sorry I mentioned it. Please let me rest.”

Edited 2022-01-04 07:42 (UTC)

"I'm sorry."

Taking his hand would be unappreciated. Derrica knows this, and so tamps down the notion more thoroughly. The minor hesitation at the request is quickly pushed aside. She rises, reaches to give the blankets a quick tug to cover him more securely and erase the evidence of her perch.

"I'd like to talk of it again, please. When you're ready."

Based on their current track record of discussing magic related information, that might well be another year. Derrica does not point this out.

Inbox - Fade Rift

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bow on this y/y?