Cole stands at the edge of a cabin, visible yet unavoidably unseen. His heart, which up until now he's assumed is nonexistent, is currently breaking, shattering into uncountable shards before being flung to the farthest, darkest corners of Thedas. This unfamiliar heartbreak he's experiencing is all because of that damned elf. Katria Levallen, whose persistent and passionate, wonderfully introverted and beautiful beyond belief. He had spent hours upon hours studying every minute feature of hers; her enormous glassy eyes that slant in like a cat's, her thin lips that rarely lift into a genuine smile, (it seems sometimes that Cole is the only one who can see through her smokescreens and tinted glass to the frightened girl underneath, just under the surface) the gentle curves of her Vallaslin whispering around her jaw and twining around her neck, it's all known to him, all came to his notice at some point of his life.
Currently his heart is being torn to shreds by Katria, who's flirting with the former Knight-Captain Cullen. Her eyes sparkle with coy mirth, and the full, real man with stubble on his face and a flush in his cheeks is grinning at whatever surely clever thing she has said.
That could be you, jack-ass! Cole winces at the sharp thought. Sure, he theoretically have switched places with Cullen, the lucky bastard if only he had a…
...a what?
A substantial body? An ounce of courage, of valor that people of old sang songs of? The full-bodied good looks that everyone but him seemed to possess? Cole threads his fingers through, and takes a handful of light coloured hair and tugs uselessly, knowing that nothing but running so fast that to most he 'flickers' will quell the supernova of foreign emotions pressing from the inside out. Look at me. Cole thinks desperately. Please. Notice me. Look me in the eye. - it's all I need.
But Katria doesn't. Cullen's face is now full of desire, takes a step further and places a hand on her jaw and a reddish flush is brought to her normally pale cheeks by reason other than the wintershock air. And Cole is bound to the one spot, unable to tear his eyes away from the scene and now he knows how souls trapped in phylactories feel, completely stuck and going mad, mad, mad. Katria giggles. The high-pitched sound is carried by silver wind to his standing prison in front of his cabin. She doesn't feel the weight (or rather weightlessness) of his hopeless admirer's gaze, she doesn't look away from her seemingly new lover's eyes and look at him because this isn't a fantasy and this isn't a fairy tale or faery's tail it's his nonlife, halfway in between reality and nonexistence. He anxiously plucks out a few hairs and allows them to fall to the ground, watching with a dull disinterest as the strands glow translucent in the fading sunlight. This is one lover's tale that won't come to truth. This is one lover's tale that can't come to truth.
His heart, which apparently, does exist, is broken glass, shards and slivers have fallen apart, folding in on itself under all the pressures. Inside of him is a windstorm, howling and whipping around his barren insides, and he must keep it inside because if for a second he lowers the drawbridges, melts the ice and calls in the guard and cracks himself open and allows all the sticky messiness inside him to spill out, the shards of lost pieces of himself will impale and hurt anyone nearby. He doesn't want to see Katria hung up on his heartstrings.
And then it happens.
Cullen leans in and pauses just for a moment, as if to ask permission, angles his face just so and kisses Katria. The moment is painfully stretched out, sand in a glass ticking by one grain at a time. Her eyes open wide in the initial surprise and then they lower, eventually coming to a final curtain close, and her hand is entwined with his, fingers interlocking with one another. Cole is unpleasantly and unwillingly brought back for a moment to when he was this close to that kind of contact with her, when he was caught in a murky place of despair and confusion on his reality.
Cole suddenly can't breathe at all. The ground, interestingly enough, seems to have slanted and he can swear the sun itself and everything else - the crowds of soldiers, priests, pilgrims, villagers, plants and even the barn cat strolling by is laughing at him for his cowardice. Their maws gape open, white teeth glittering in the light and eyes of all different shapes and sizes alight with a hard, mirthless shine. He tries to breathe, tries to clear his mind of panic and every time he manages to coerce the air into giving him a lungful, it's agonizingly cold and sharp and freezing the pink insides of his lungs but it's a good hurt because it distracts him from the world that is falling apart.
Go, go go! he thinks frantically. By the grace of the Divine the spell rooting him to the frost-laden ground is broken and he runs as though his non- life depends on it. Which it may.
To the world, all they see is a pale shadow of a Fade spirit born in a body of sorts standing, then a flicker, like a candle flame and it's gone.
As if it were never there.
And no one remembers.