It's just the two of them in her apartment late into the night. Dante and Fara.
The lights are all dimmed in the apartment save for the lamp on her desk, the shade angled so the light falls directly over the manuscript she's bent over. Makes it easier for her to pick out words among the faded lines of demonic scripture. The apartment seems eerily quiet, as if the air itself is holding its breath in anticipation of what will come from those hellish scrawls. Everything is very still except for Dante's shifting and the occasional odd ringing sound when Fara adjusts the stone set into the middle of the band clapped around her forehead.
Dante's standing directly behind her. Patience isn't a virtue of his, and the waiting is driving him to distraction. He fidgets so much that every time he bends over her shoulder to get a closer look she growls at him and tells him to back the hell off. He shoots her a grin she can't see every time and obeys, if only for a few minutes.
Eventually Fara gets so irritated by it that when he peeks over her shoulder again she lifts an elbow and plows it into his side. Not that it does any good. She's a tiny thing and any strike she makes against Dante is like hitting a rock. She sits up straight, tossing a blank eyed glare over her shoulder, those unseeing eyes always fixing eerily on their target, the irises the color of good red wine. She points to a cabinet across the room. "Get yourself some whiskey and quit crowding me."
"Like I don't already know where your liquor is," Dante grumbles a bit but moves across the room and lets her read, unable to really get annoyed because, after all, she always has very good liquor.
"Shut up."
"Everything is always in order too. And marked!"
Fara says something under her breath in a language he doesn't know but he can guess what she's saying isn't complimentary. He watches her silently as she continues to read, tangled black hair obscuring her face as she bends over. He'd always thought it was kind of funny. Born blind and dedicated to a life of a scholar.
Of course when he'd pointed out the humor of it, she'd commented on how sad it was he had to have a blind woman do his reading for him.
No sense of humor, that woman.
Fara finally leans back from her perusal and rubs her temples. The effort of focusing through the stone always gives her a headache. "It's not from the demon world," she informs him.
Dante pauses in pouring his third shot of whiskey, turning to look at her. "Those markings…"
"Are demonic," Fara is already nodding grimly. "And the writing itself is infused with power. Dante, this couldn't have been written by anything less than a major demon. It's not possible. Any human that tried to write it would have gone stark raving mad after a few words."
Dante sets his glass down. His voice is calm, almost thoughtful. They make an odd picture, facing each other across the room. The man tall and powerful and pale haired, the woman dark haired and delicate as bone china. "But if a demon wrote it and it didn't come from the demon world…"
Fara, of course, can't simply let it rest there, she has to explain. "The smell and sense of it is off, it would have reflected the power contained there if it had been written in the same place. And it would have been much more powerful."
Dante continues on as if he hasn't heard her. "Then where the hell did it come from?"
This time her answer is simple. Troubled. "I don't know."