The road meandered over soft coastal hills covered in short grass. The caravan went along, unhurried, through the unchanging landscape, until the sun started slipping lower and closer to the line of the horizon and small white clouds started turning a ripe red. It was then that the mundanity of the landscape was broken by a small shape on the edge of the road, perched on top of the hill desolately alone.
The statue of Abeona was time-worn and had probably been part of a much larger edifice, at some point. Now, the edges had been rounded by erosion and its pedestal had been chipped by time, but it was still recognizable as a cloaked woman holding a rabbit, her head lowered and her face devoid of features.
The caravan stopped and started setting camp across the road from Abeona's statue.
Amell approached it, spurred by curiosity. It came almost to the height of her chest, pedestal and all. There was also a stone bowl in front of it, but as she knelt down to inspect it closer, she noticed another, stranger detail. At the base of the statue's pedestal, almost completely overgrown by weeds, there were words inscribed in the stone. She removed some of the greenery to get a better look, but the words were nearly all faded out. The few letters she could make out seemed to indicate the inscription had been in Arcanum, the official language of the old Tevinter Imperium.
Stranger and stranger.
This did make sense, to a point. The Imperium had stretched the entire continent of Thedas, once, and many of their old relics could still be found in places they once mastered. An altar dedicated to a spirit, however, was an odd find indeed. The Tevinter magisters were certainly capable of binding spirits and souls to stone, but to what end, in this specific case?
Unfortunately, if the inscription gave any explanation for this oddity, Amell would have to remain ignorant. There was no way of making it out after all this time.
Sighing, she reached a hand up to the edge of the pedestal in order to pull herself up from her kneeling position, but she retracted her hand rapidly when she felt the familiar ripples of the Veil.
She hadn't noticed it exactly, before, perhaps because it was so faint, but the Veil here was somewhat thinner than in other spots. Not dangerously so, but comparable to how it felt in the laboratories back at the Tower; how it felt in any place where magic was (or had been) performed regularly.
She looked down at the bowl with a frown. There were many disparate pieces of the puzzle here. Tevinter; spirits; blood rituals?
"What're you doing?"
Amell nearly jumped out of her skin at this query, if only because she'd been so focused on the problem at hand.
She got up and turned to see Dyson, Sorrel's little brother, looking back at her with suspicion.
"I was, ah... Just curious," she shrugged. "What do you know about Abeona?"
"Is that a trick question?" the boy scoffed.
"No! No, we just don't worship spirits where I come from."
Dyson stared at Amell for a long moment. He had brown eyes, but far from being warm, they were dark and unfriendly. He bit on his lip, deep in thought, as if expecting Amell's words to be a trap.
"We don't really... worship Abeona, you know," he said after a time. "Not like... not like we pray at the Chantry or to the Maker. We just... we ask her for help and we give her stuff so she'll be friendly to us on our journey. We give her rabbits and birds, because she likes those," he explained haltingly. Both he and his sister seemed to have this odd way of talking.
"I see..." Amell gave one last look to the statue.
It seemed harmless, only stone, smoothed by winds and rain. By the time she looked back, Dyson was gone.
* * *
The transition from day to night turned the sunny pastoral hills surrounding them into indistinct black stretches of darkness, pierced only by the flickering of flames from the campfire and the various lamps hanging from the wagons.
Mead was brought out and passed around, cheerful storytelling quickly turned to singing and someone was playing a flute.
Sten did not see much point to this agitation. But Amell obviously must have, because she was sitting on a crate next to a wagon, barely in the light of the campfire, but observing the revelry nonetheless. She was grinning, though that might have had more to do with the mug of mead in her hands.
He was in the middle of debating his next course of action when her eyes flicked towards him. She caught his gaze and tilted her head to the side, raising her eyebrows; it was a question, if he'd like to join her or not, but the answer was before she even asked.
He walked over to her and acquiesced when she gestured for him to sit next to her, on a neighboring crate.
"Sten, have you been avoiding me today?" she asked lightly, cramming as much incredulity into one word as she could manage.
"You seemed busy," he evaded, unwilling to admit anything.
"Why?" she continued her inquiry, as if he'd replied in the affirmative. "Have I done something?"
"No," he said, perhaps a bit too quickly. "The fault is mine," he added in a lower voice. "It... concerns the observation you made this morning."
She looked down at her mug, brow furrowing in thought as she tried to recall their conversation.
"Oh," she breathed, once the answer came to her. "But I didn't mean it as criticism, Sten. You may call me whatever you wish."
Sten remained silent, watching her, considering.
"What?" Amell asked, because she was not sure what was happening or what she'd said wrong.
"We walk a very fine line, kadan," Sten answered cryptically.
"I don't... understand," she said, careful and slow, still unsure.
"We may only become so close, before circumstances will inevitably separate us."
Amell still did not fully understand what he meant, but now she had an inkling. And Sten was watching her expectantly, waiting for her to see things his way and that could have contributed to what she said next, though the actual culprit might have been one too many mugs of mead.
"I almost kissed you-- back at the inn."
He had no visible reaction at first. His face remained unreadable. His eyes betrayed nothing. Then...
"I almost did much more."
And with that, he got up and left.
Amell felt heat spread through her body. Perhaps it was mead or perhaps it was embarrassment, but it was most likely Sten's words, burning tantalizing lost possibilities in her mind.