"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me."
"Go to the Limits of Your Longing" ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Contrary to the popularly held wisdom that all mages should know at least a few battle skills to extricate themselves from the occasional hand-to-hand combat, Ava had always believed that her inability to fight had been the main reason behind her survival. She'd developed a keen sense of danger and of her limitations. As the soldier stormed towards her, however, she realized regretfully those finely honed self-preservation skills had failed her.
"Stop," she warned him, as she raised her hand, her fingers raking the air, stirring it with faint sparks. He ignored her, swatting her hand away.
"Magic is meant to serve man, not to threaten him!" he growled. His meaty hand seized the front of her cloak, pulling her roughly towards him. He reeked of drink, a sour and stale stench that wafted from his breath.
"Let me go!"
"I will," he replied gruffly, looking around and cuffing her arm with his hand. He began to drag her up the long staircase towards the ramparts. "I'll give you freedom soon enough," he told her ominously.
"To the battlements, light this one, no one will see, no one will know…" a voice repeated dully. Both she and the soldier startled.
"Who is there?" he asked suspiciously. Cole stepped out of the shadow, his hat obscuring the upper half of his face, daggers drawn. Ava squirmed, trying to extricate herself from the crushing grip.
The only words this lunatic wants to have with me are likely to be 'look out below,' and this other one…I don't know what he is. Perhaps a demon? Between a rock and a hard place, she surmised.
"What are you doing?" she protested. The grasp around her arm tightened and she realized that whatever determination had manifested itself in the soldier before had shifted into complete terror.
"Stop. You are hurting her."
The man's eyes darted about indecisively before he pushed her down forcefully, so she was leaning halfway over the parapet on the stairwell. As she struggled to right herself, she examined the fall below. It was high enough that she would not escape unscathed. Her hands helplessly sought to take a hold of the smooth stone wall.
"Hurt you push away and it pushes back. More of something doesn't make it better, it only makes more of it. He was always that way, you can't change him, it is the only way he knows!" Cole said cryptically. "Let her go."
Ava felt herself perfectly balanced over the parapet, the tips of her feet barely grazing the ground and the palms of her hand splayed over the other side of the staircase wall, precariously buffering any further downward slips. The soldier hesitated.
"Who are you?"
"Sprung loose like a wingless bird. You would do it without remorse, sanctioned by another's hate—"
The soldier appeared lost in thought for a few seconds before he decisively tossed her legs over the parapet.
"Get your demon out of my mind, witch!" she heard as she hurtled downwards.
Black smoke burst below and there he was, at the bottom, arms outstretched, aiming to catch her tumbling body. She crashed into him so forcefully, both were knocked onto the ground. The only thing she could think of as they collided was that his hat had flown off like a frightened goose. For a moment she wondered if she was still in one piece. Beneath her, he stirred slightly. His arms, she realized, were wrapped protectively around her shoulders and head, cradling her against his body.
Demon or spirit, he feels real enough.
Cole raised his head sufficiently off the ground to catch a fading glimpse of the soldier, as he scrambled away. He rolled her off him firmly, a look of steely determination in his eyes, before rising to his feet and striding off after the man.
"Wait!" she called out nervously.
His head turned to where she sat in the snow, and he hesitated before returning to her, offering her his hand, clad in fingerless leather gloves.
So cold, she noticed, as he pulled her up to her feet. Without his hat he appeared even more boyish with his light and unevenly cut hair.
"Leave him be," she told him. "I'll make a complaint tomorrow."
She glanced at the daggers, their hilts surfacing behind each shoulder. She reached into her cloak.
"Is this yours?" she asked boldly, flashing the pebble at him.
"No," he answered plainly. He walked ahead further to pick his hat off the ground, dusting the snow off before planting it securely on his head. "It wavers and floats, everything changes, perhaps people, too. That which had seemed so certain now moves backwards…" He examined her with further interest. "It's because of me, isn't it?" he asked her contritely. "Don't do it."
"Do what?" she feigned ignorance.
Maker, how does he know?
"I need to know. Are you the one who gave my patient this?" She displayed the stone to him once more, on the palm of her hand. His expression softened.
"At the margins of the river, the reeds bent, floating beneath the current, it made him want to run his fingers through her hair, she asked him to teach her how to skip them over the surface. He held his breath when he took her arm. A flick of the wrist. It was the happiest moment of his life. When he gulped for air, his lungs flooding, I told him the truth: it was the happiest moment of her life. She'd asked him just so he would. He held the pebble, a flick of the wrist. He held his breath, smiled, and was gone," Cole recalled.
She peered down at her hand. The old man had been comforted by a memory from his youth. A memory of love. Of a fleeting moment of happiness.
But for what purpose? Didn't demons bargain with the desire of one's heart? That was why combatting them, evading them, was such a difficult, elusive thing.
"Who are you? Why were you there?"
Had he caused the man's death? Does he lurk around the suffering, the ill, and the dying because it is where he derives his sustenance from?
"The words are only a means to an end, but I am not that end you think I am," he explained.
She rubbed her cheek warily. Not human, she was quite certain.
"Do you come to the patients often?"
"Only if they are hurting."
Does he feed on their pain and suffering?
"Will you continue to do so?" she asked, fearful of the reply.
"I don't know. Will they continue to hurt?" He might as well have been mocking her, but the sincere expression on his face gave her pause.
"Why haven't I seen you before?"
"Why do you see me now?"
Exasperating! she exhaled.
"I don't know what to make of you."
"You never do," he said appeasingly. "You'll forget me anyway."
She stared at him, confused.
"We have met before?"
"Sometimes."
She couldn't bear it if somehow she had drawn him there. How often had she indulged unguarded thoughts? To hope or wish for an outcome, as she often had, when administering care or witnessing suffering— these were all dangerous things for a mage. Perhaps the difference between a prayer and an incantation was even flimsier than she believed. What if she had somehow unwittingly invited him? Spirits came when beckoned properly, she knew. His guileless face appeared incapable of violence, but the daggers told a different story.
"I have to go," he told her, looking towards the direction in which the soldier had fled.
"What are you?" she persisted.
"I don't know," he answered. "But I am Cole."
"Could you become a demon?" she asked cautiously.
"If I become a demon, they will cut me down." He became agitated. "I don't want to be bound. I saw the Gray Wardens bind demons, their dark song growing louder, slick with blood. It calls, I fear someday it may utter my name, roving eye on a moonless night."
A chill crawled up her spine. She had cared for plenty of the injured from the siege at Adamant. Even after their bodies healed, they cried out in terror, haunted by memories more horrid than any nightmare. All Adan's elixirs, even the most potent ones, could only numb them into a stupor, a brief reprieve from the unrelenting remembrance. At least demons could be banished, cleansed, pushed back into the Fade, even destroyed. Not so easily done with memories.
What if I bound you to this stone? she wondered, rolling the smooth pebble between her fingers. Perhaps it would make you safer…or make the infirmary safer. Tameryn had told her to bring the stone to her once the ritual was completed so she could properly cleanse it. They could figure out what to do once he was safely contained.
"Don't," he asked her aloud. "I do not know what I am, but if I am changed further, I may be lost before I am ever found."
She pondered his words.
"I won't do it," she assured him. But she had to tell someone, she realized.
"Thank you," he nodded appreciatively. "And don't worry: you won't remember me once you leave—"
That she did not like. It made her uneasy.
He continued to stare at her and they stood in awkward silence until he betrayed some confusion.
"Wait—That didn't work. You are supposed to forget."
"But I don't want to forget," she informed him.
He considered her words.
"Most want to forget. Something is different. Is it you or me? We meet for the first time for the last time."
They wandered together towards the dispensary. She noticed he glanced often at the path the soldier had taken.
"Promise me you won't seek him out," she urged him.
"He wants to hurt mages," Cole confided. "He seeks to please him— 'See me,' he cried, but the hand in the gauntlet never caressed his head…"
Ava watched him speak in his enigmatic, trancelike manner.
I can see how one could become enthralled, she thought, her eyes taking in how his full lips arched in a perfect bow.
"You are a strange one," she told him, as they reached the doorstep.
"You always say that," he nodded, turning away.