"By saying 'Love' you let loose all the angels and demons that were asleep within the bowels of mankind. "Love" is not, as you think, a simple, tranquil word. Within it lie armies being massacred, burning cities, and much blood."
The Last Temptation of Christ ~ Nikos Kazantzakis
"Ah!" Ava stretched. "I could sleep into next week!" she told Cole.
Another dawn. Another day to get through. When all was perfectly still, the feeling crept up on her, startling her as to its sharpness. She cast her eyes down.
"Even the thickest wool can't make winter spring," Cole began. She glanced up again, her lashes tear-struck. "Do you wish to forget?" It was a sincere question, rather than an offer. She tilted her head. "I can help people forget when the pain is too great."
"My pain isn't too great," she clarified. "It isn't pleasant…and it probably won't leave me alone for a while…I might even feel pangs if reminded of this someday. But I wouldn't want to forget."
"Why?"
"I don't know," she told him, making her way up the stairs to the crenelated ramparts. "So that I don't make the same mistake again? So I know to avoid certain situations…people?" She thought of Adan. If she forgot him, would she do it as easily as he had seemed to have forgotten her? "Sometimes that pain is bitter, but healing medicine.
"Is it for you?" he asked, following her down a quiet stretch along the ramparts. She dusted a sprinkle of snow off a spot on the ground and sat down, her back leaning against the wall. She signaled Cole to settle beside her. Reaching into her satchel, she pulled out a bundle bound in white cheesecloth. Cole saw she had unpacked a small loaf of bread.
"The pain is just there. It just is. It is up to people to make something of it. Some do. Some don't." She tore at the loaf with her fingers, pulling at the crust before offering him a piece. "You can see the best sunrises from here," she indicated to him, shaking her piece of bread towards the greyish sky. He held on to his bit of bread, feeling the roughness of the smooth baked crust and the light brown sponginess of its innards.
"What will happen to you?"
She looked at him with a determined expression.
"I've made a decision."
Stalwart thoughts, bright and brave, they come to her aid and defense, she has summoned them and they've rallied, he understood.
"I have filed my request to be trained as a physician as well as complete my studies as apothecary."
I can help wherever I go, will be needed anywhere I am, she assured herself.
"You seek purpose" he said.
"Or meaning," she added.
"Do you find it bad that I can help people forget?"
She munched on her hunk of bread, eyes trained on the horizon, a radiant golden glow irradiating across the mountain peaks, scattering the inky remnants of night.
"We, healers, are trained to understand pain as a warning. The body is talking to you, asking you to listen. Something is broken, not working properly, and needs attention. We learn to think of pain as a helpful friend. 'Where does it hurt?' and we are grateful when the path is a clear one and we can prevent more damage. Imagine that without that pain, we'd be unaware of our bodies' ailments," she explained. "A burn stings and pulses, but it tells you the skin cannot take the heat. Pain asks us to be mindful, and kind, and demands that we stop, slow down, pay attention."
Three black-feathered birds, their plumage oily and slick, alighted on the roof over the machicolated passage she and Cole had crossed. He stared at their curious stony eyes as they engaged in an odd little dance, wings flapping and beaks cawing roughly into the brisk morning.
"At times, though, the body is too broken," she stated. "There can be no salvaging after the damage has been wrought, and then…the pain is more than a warning…it's a lament. It is perhaps a consequence of being mortal," she concluded. "All we can do in those cases is give comfort. We sedate, we numb…we keep old friends- the body and the mind- apart." She espied the birds, their heads eagerly bobbing from side to side as they observed them both. She tore another hunk of bread and shredded it into smaller pieces, which she cast on the ground in front of them. A cloud of wings beat down onto the stony ground and they both sat quietly, watching the birds peck at the pieces of bread. "I think some hurts are too great to heal by the means we currently have. I know that is definitely true of the ailments of the body…I can imagine it is true of the ailments of the mind, too."
She smiled as two of the birds faced off over the last breadcrumb just as the third dashed forward and stole it. Cole imitated her and threw his crumbled hunk of bread to the birds.
"You and I aren't that different, you know?" she told him, turning her head to meet his observant gaze. "We both care for others. We are at our best when we are honoring that part of us. I wish…" she hesitated, "I was more like you."
It bursts into bloom, an unexpected reprieve, a hint of impossible spring in the heart of winter. A strange sensation, he realized, not completely at ease.
"Knowing you are here, among us, and that we are both trying to help others the best we can…It gives me great comfort."
Strange. I think the same of her. A reflection, complimentary opposites.
"Sometimes, " she continued conspiratorially, "when something is particularly hopeless, when a prognosis is grim, I hope you will take over where I cannot go. That those who suffer will not be alone or frightened when they can no longer hear my words or feel my touch. All my life I was taught that anything that slipped through the Fade only sought to destroy us. When I underwent my Harrowing, I was terrified. I did not even gaze upon the demon that came to me, would not engage it in conversation, so determined I was to avoid any temptation. My teachers told me I awoke screaming." She turned the thick lyrium-infused silver band around her finger, absorbed in the memory. "And yet, the dreams I've had, Cole…I cannot believe the Fade to be as evil as I've been told it is. After all, this world is a wicked place, but we still can find great courage, kindness, and beauty. It must be true of the Fade, as well. And if it is true of the Fade, then we, mages, aren't the harbingers of evil many would make us out to be. You are good. You give me hope. You give me faith."
She quietly rose and the birds hopped away from her, suspicious of her proximity, but relented once she shook the cloth of the last breadcrumbs before wrapping her loaf and tucking it back into her satchel.
"I leave tomorrow," he told her abruptly.
A pained look flashed across her eyes briefly.
"Will you be gone long?" she wondered.
"No, but I don't know what will return and what will be gone."
He would have reached for her hand just then. It struck him as an appropriate gesture, but Adan was there, a ghostly presence, alternately shimmering and weighing in her thoughts and he did not know if he would be welcome. It troubled him: doubt was not something familiar. Hesitation wasn't, either.
It all came down to one thing: love, he understood. It was at the heart of everything: the devout, fervently reciting the Chant of Light, the covetous scholar yearning for forbidden wisdom, or the starry eyed dreamer who architected a life with a beloved. In the name of love, Cole had seen, people committed grand gestures—sometimes valorous, selfless, and touching. In the name of love, he also realized, armies had been raised and great atrocities justified.
Love was a blessing or a curse, depending on the master it served.
It soars; it buries.
If I still were like myself of before, what would I say to this me, now?
I am not the me I should be.
He did not like it.
Adan scanned the sparse room. He'd packed almost everything, except for a few essentials he would be carrying with him. The books and most of his equipment: phials, tongs, alambics, and crucibles had all been carefully packed away. He'd been allowed to store his belongings in one of the abandoned cells of the mages' quarters, leaving the keys with a colleague from the armory, who'd await further instructions on what to do with them. He stripped the bed down to its straw mattress and placed his bedroll over it. The bed had always felt lumpy and uncomfortable, but then again, he suspected sleep would elude him regardless of his accommodations. On the nightstand two books remained stacked. One was a treatise on alchemical transmutations involving air-based spells—essential, he knew, to the work he was attempting to accomplish in the Western Approach. The other was a book he had carried with him over many years. The leather cover had been gouged and scratched, the spine cracked and brittle, and the pages yellowed. It was his personal copy of his first apothecary's manual. Inside were all his notes, all his observations, everything he had learned and gathered, etched out along the margins: adaptations of older recipes, suitable substitutions, remedies most effective against different ailments. He knew it by heart. He'd paused when pulling it off his shelf, unable to pack it away.
I'll give it to Ava before I leave, he thought. She could make good use of it, he imagined, stroking the cover wistfully.
As the day of his departure approached, he eyed the worn book uneasily. As long as the book remained, he still had an excuse; he could tell himself they had unconcluded business between them. Once he handed her the book, however, it would be all over. The book was a token allotting him a few precious moments with her. It was annoyingly contradictory to him that the one thing he yearned for the most was the one he wanted to do the least because it would likely never happen again.
At moments like those, he wished he were already far away from Skyhold, trekking across Orlais. He'd been warned by colleagues in both earnest and in jest that the Western Approach was a thankless, arid place. He'd have to contend with savage wildlife, the threat of dragons overhead, and lingering Darkspawn that eked forth from cracks in the rocks.
"It's a wretched, inhospitable place," he'd been told by those who'd completed tours of duty there.
No more than in here, he exhaled bitterly, tracing the alchemical symbol for lead over his heart with his finger.