Post #2669728 in The Canticle of Fate, a roleplay on RPG

“Milord?”

Cyrus raised his head, narrowing his eyes on the intruder. “Cyrus.”

She blinked once, her mouth turning down more from confusion than outright displeasure. “I beg your pardon?” The soft clink of tin on wood accompanied the words, and she withdrew her hands from the metal tray and stepped a pace backwards.

“Cyrus. It’s my name. Use it.” He paused. That was a bit wrong, wasn’t it? “Please.” That seemed better. Satisfied with the exchange, Cyrus returned his attention to the parchments in front of him. He stood—he usually stood, when working, preferring the possibility of motion to the confines of a chair—at a desk tall enough for the purpose, occupied for now with charcoal and paper, the architectural schematic of an impossible building laid out in front of him. Of course, what was impossible on this side of the Veil was not always so on the other, but the ways of translating between them were few. Even mathematics had its limitations, but he was confident that—

“Oh. Um, all right then. Cyrus.” She sounded uncomfortable, but she wasn’t leaving like she usually did, so he assumed she wanted something. He tore his eyes and intellect from the work under his hands and tried to refocus both on her. Difficult. Tedious. How did people do this?

His flat stare must have been enough to goad her into revealing her purpose at last, because she continued without further prompting from him. “I was wondering… about the pictures.” She gestured behind him, but he didn’t turn. He knew full well what was there—most of the open walls of his atelier were covered in parchments and papers of various sizes, until nary a spare inch of stone could be seen beneath. They were covered with all kinds of things: calculations, formulae, hypotheses, and most prominently, drawings. Precise technical renders like the ones he was working on were paired almost to a one with impressionistic watercolors, pale hues bleeding from the edge of a brush until paper could blot them and set him right again. Triage on the contents of his head, and utterly necessary, though it would have been better if they weren’t.

He arched a brow, an invitation to continue. “They’re… they’re the Fade, right? But it’s never sensible like that.”

Among the things he had discovered about the servant who’d taken it upon herself to feed him were several discrete facts. Firstly, her name was Livia. She was an elf, slightly older than himself, if he had to guess, though even he knew better than to ask a woman her age. She was also a mage, and had formerly been a Magister’s slave in the Imperium. As was sadly typical in cases like hers, she knew enough of magic to do some useful things, but her education was sorely lacking in matters of theory or even advanced application. He did not ask whose slave she’d been or how she’d escaped—the simple fact of the matter was that it didn’t really matter.

It didn’t take someone of his considerable observational talent to note that she near-vibrated with curiosity every time she entered the atelier; it may well be that she continued in her task of providing him with regular meals more so that she could study the space than because she cared whether he was fed or not. Occasionally, she would venture a small question, which he answered when he was paying enough attention to hear them. He wasn’t, always, but she didn’t seem to mind.

But the question she asked now had no simple answer. It was mired in all the things she’d never learned, all the things that were his stock and trade, and he debated the merits of trying to explain. His eyes traveled to the food on the other side of the desk, and Cyrus sighed, feeling a bit put-out. “Whether something is or is not comprehensible isn’t a feature of the object. It’s a feature of the observer. The right observer knows how to look at the thing so that it makes sense to her.” He grimaced at the crudeness of his own explanation, and tried something else.

“Most people don’t have full control of themselves in the Fade. No ordinary person has much say in what they dream—many of them don’t even remember it. Mages can do a little more. They can move their own bodies or cast spells or anything as they like, but their environment is still, in large part, outside their control. It was not always that way. Once, the Fade, all of it, was shaped. At some point, everything there was sensible to someone.”

Livia looked thoughtful a moment, peering at him with amber-colored eyes. “So you… figure out how to look at things?” There was a note of confusion still in her voice, and he supposed he could understand that. It wasn’t exactly something most people would bother to do, even the mages. It made his lightning bolts no more potent, his shields no sturdier.

“More or less.” He shrugged, glancing back down at his drawing for a moment. A castle, it had once been, from a dream long ago. Not even his—not really.

“What about the paintings, then? Those look more like the Fade to me.” She smiled, flashing bright teeth, and Cyrus cleared his throat.

“…feelings. They’re just an exercise, nothing important.” He rubbed the fingers of his left hand together, smearing charcoal over the pad of his thumb. Cyrus pretended it was more interesting to him than it actually was.

“They’re beautiful, though.” He frowned, shaking his head. What care had he for aesthetics? They weren’t useful, or informative—he simply had to get them out. He felt the direction of his thoughts turn, and waved a hand dismissively, like he were trying to banish a mist from the air near his head, or perhaps a phantom inkling of imagination. Livia must have taken her cue from the gesture, because he heard her footsteps receding. That was probably rude of him, but he didn’t—

The thought never reached its conclusion, because one of the angles of his castle blueprint caught his attention, and he picked up the charcoal again, dashing out a few more equations on a separate sheet of parchment.

It was an indeterminate, though probably not very long, amount of time later that another person knocked on his door, but this one did not bother with waiting for a reply. Estella let herself in, as usual, knowing as she did that it was preferable to enter without regard for courtesy than to accidentally interrupt something important by waiting around for the niceties to be observed. She knew him well enough to avoid attempting to engage him before he was ready for it, and instead chose a chair at the other end of his worktable, picking carefully through the parchments and books laid out there, likely an attempt to figure out exactly what he was working on at the moment. He doubted it would take her long—Estella may have had a dim view of her own intellect like everything else, but she was clever. Extremely so; but as with other virtues she possessed, it was subtle, hard to see if one wasn’t looking for it. He wondered if she’d have any thoughts on his current endeavors, and glanced over in her direction. One benefit of caring about someone was that he found it much easier to focus properly on what they were saying and doing. Though perhaps benefit was the wrong thing to call it.

When his attention shifted to her, she smiled at him warmly. “Your food’s still good, by the look of it.” She said it lightly, but there was a faint note of reproach in it, a subtle reminder that she wasn’t particularly fond of his willful self-deprivation.

His lips pursed; Cyrus contemplated the merits of continuing to ignore dinner in favor of his work, because he wasn’t really hungry, but she was here anyway. He might as well eat, if only to satisfy her need to look after him. He couldn’t begrudge her that—not considering his own protective tendencies. “If it please you.” He set his charcoal down and wandered over to the tray Livia had brought up, carrying back over to another chair, this one clustered amicably with Stellulam’s. It was a far cry from the vaunted long tables of the Imperial aristocracy, but he’d had more meals in this manner than he had any other, balanced on his lap in a workshop he called his own, far away from the social world that so preoccupied others. Solitary, for the most part.

The odd thought struck him that he might hate not working because it reminded him of how little else there was in the world for him.

His hands paused in their motions, and he swallowed thickly, shaking his head slightly and resuming as before. How absurd. If the past six years had proven anything, it was that the work was enough. The work and Estella’s company, more than enough, even if the latter was sparse these days. But—

“And what brings your lofty personage to my humble abode on this day, Lady Inquisitor?” His eyes narrowed, evidence enough of the jesting nature of the words, the twist to the corner of his mouth an unnecessary confirmation.

Estella rolled her eyes at him, leaning back further in her chair and pulling one of the books from his desk into her lap. She was careful with it, of course—as different as they were, they both had a certain reverence for such things. Her expression quickly sobered, however, and she didn’t answer him right away, instead cracking the book open, scanning over the writing he’d filled it with deliberately, smoothing a finger along the outside edge. “I thought I’d see how you were,” she replied at last, glancing up and smiling a bit thinly. “You’re up in this tower so much I hardly ever get to talk to you unless I come here.”

Her tone was too heavy for the words; clearly, there was something she wasn’t saying. Cyrus didn’t initially dignify her words with a response. They both knew he was antisocial, and by his own lights, he’d actually been doing fairly well. He regularly if not frequently interacted with other people, and though he generally found it all extremely awkward, this was because he chose, mostly, to attempt it on some non-trivial level. He could socially manipulate just fine; it was actually engaging that was the trial. But he was attempting it, at least with a few people. Livia, Asala, even Zahra in some strange way.

If her complaint had really been that he wasn’t around enough, this would have all been what he mustered in his defense. But that wasn’t what she was saying, not really. He still didn’t like this, the fact that he sometimes found her very difficult to read—she’d become far too good at hiding her thoughts. Well and good, but not from him. That part still stung.

“You’re lying to me.” Cyrus couldn’t keep the hurt from his voice, and he didn’t try. He had no reason to lie to her, after all.

Estella shook her head, the customary impassivity of her face giving way to something like concern or perhaps even alarm, from the way her eyes rounded large. “I’m not Cyrus, really.” She sighed, her posture slumping slightly, shoulders falling into what was close to a hunch. She looked to be making herself as small as possible, and indeed it was not difficult for her to take up very little space.

“I just...” she frowned, glancing down at the book she held and then back up towards him. “I don’t want to be the Inquisitor right now. I don’t even want to be a soldier right now, or a leader, or a Herald or anything. And if there’s anyone who never bothered to think of me as any of those things...” she trailed off, the implication obvious enough. He had known her before she was anything but Estella, when this vulnerability and hesitance was raw and covered with no veneer. She looked exhausted, now that she’d shed the layers of fortification she drew herself up with. Exhausted, and perhaps a little bit afraid.

“Tell me about something that has nothing to do with any of this?” She looked around, clearly in search of a way to make her query more specific. “Like... this. What is it?" She held up the book in her hands, though from the way she'd been studying it, she already had at least some idea.

Any frustration or resentment Cyrus had been feeling vanished like it had never existed, wiped away by Estella’s evident state. Instead he felt angry, mostly at himself—how had he not noticed the strain she was under sooner? She’d worn her protections so well that even he’d been fooled by them, too preoccupied with his own ire that they existed to begin to wonder what they really hid. He was a selfish bastard, and for once, he hated that about himself. He should have noticed this before now. He should be the kind of brother that she’d have confided in before now.

But he hadn’t, and he wasn’t.

She wasn't even confiding in him now, not really. She'd implied a problem, but told him nothing of its nature. While perhaps ordinarily, he would have been inclined to brush away the request and inquire after the larger issue—why wasn’t she sleeping? If someone else was forcing this on her he would have words for them, and more than that if words were not enough—he suddenly found himself unsure he was really entitled to those questions anymore. Looking at her now, she resembled more thoroughly the version of herself he had known than he suspected she had in nearly seven years. It was strangely difficult to see. Cyrus didn’t understand why, but he knew it unsettled him deeply.

“It’s nothing important. Just a lexicon.” He spoke the words softly, anchored to the present moment and for once not drifting in and out of his own head. “I’ve been to a lot of ruins, and taken down the writing there. I’ve spoken with spirits, and they’ve given me more. That one is all the elvish I’ve encountered.” He knew she had an interest in languages; she spoke more of them than he ever would. If she wanted to be the version of herself that he knew for a while, instead of any of those other things, well... maybe this was the best way.

Estella split her attention between what he was saying and the book itself, turning the pages with careful fingers, studying the pattern of the runes and the meanings he’d put next to them, his notes on their likely ages, possible dialects, and evolution over time. “It’s a cipher,” she murmured once he’d finished, clearly putting the information together quickly. A small smile curved her mouth, and she glanced back up at him. “This isn’t unimportant at all, Cyrus. The Dalish, they don’t have their language anymore, just pieces, you know that. With this and a grammar, they could have so much more of it again.”

Of course, what he’d written was only the first part of things—the vocabulary. There was nothing in a lexicon alone that provided instructions for constructing grammatical phrases, or when to conjugate verbs or decline nouns.

He’d intuited those things from what he’d heard and read—there had been no need to write the rules down, as they changed much less than the words themselves. Cyrus reached up and ran a hand through his hair, tilting his head to the side and studying Stellulam’s face. She didn’t seem particularly morose, just fatigued, defeated and possibly afraid. But it was also clear to him that she wasn’t planning on acknowledging any of those things any further than she already had by coming here in the first place, and he didn’t know how to get her to tell him what was going on in her head.

He wondered if this, too, was a new development, or if she’d hidden things from him before in the same way. Because he recognized this look on her, he just didn’t... his thoughts were turning in unhelpful circles. Cyrus sighed. “I suppose.” Not that he really thought there would be much of anything the Dalish could do with the knowledge—it wouldn’t help them, as far as he could guess, and he had little interest in acts of goodwill that didn’t go anywhere.

Estella let the silence continue for a while after he spoke, turning through a few more pages of the book. “Can I... can I have this? Just long enough to make a copy of it? I think it would be nice to have something to do that wasn’t... that I can do.”

Cyrus blinked, frowning slightly. “I think you have plenty of things to do already, don’t you? Too many, if I’m not mistaken.” He didn’t think he was, either.

It was her turn to sigh, and she shook her head a little. “Maybe. But...” She closed the book over and ran her hand up the simple leather covering. Estella’s eyes fell shut, and she took in a deep breath. “I just want... to have something that no one has to know about. That no one has to teach me, and... that no one has to care whether I do properly or not. I know that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, but I...” Estella shook her head again and worried at her lower lip with her teeth.

“And if I succeed, I can feel like... maybe that success is really mine.” The way she looked at him was more open than anything that had preceded, and it was obvious that she meant what she said. “It’s stupid, but there it is.”

“It’s not stupid.” He understood the feeling better than she probably thought he did. Cyrus grit his teeth, then forced his jaw to relax. “If it means so much to you, it’s yours. And I... won’t ask what your plans are for it.” He half-smiled, willing to keep the conditions she wanted. If it was really important that no one know or think to care about her little project, then he would make every effort not to.

He swallowed thickly, meeting her eyes and holding them with his own. “Stellulam, I... know there are many things you think I should do better. And that one of them is... not relying on you so much.” He spoke carefully, aware that it was a sore topic for him still, and trying his best to keep that from coloring the things he said. “But I don’t want you to feel like you have to hide anything from me. I might not be the most... stable or grounded person, but I’m still... I’m your family. And I’m doing terribly if you think you have to spare me your thoughts or feelings.” He knew he didn’t make the best listener, and he knew that the intricacies of emotion and sentiment were at times beyond him, incomprehensible in the same way mathematics were incomprehensible to some. But all the same, he wanted to help her with them.

“I hope that... that you know you can rely on me. That I’ll always help you however I can, even if all you need me to do is hear you.”

Wordlessly, Estella stood, placing the book down carefully on the surface of his worktable and moving until she came to a stop in front of where he sat. Taking one of his hands, she pulled him gently until he stood, then wrapped her arms around his middle, pressing her cheek to his chest and tightening her grip. “I’ve always relied on you,” she whispered, the words muffled somewhat by his shirt. “And I always will.” She kept her hold on him for a while, but eventually her hold loosened, and she tipped her head up to look at him.

“I love you, Cy. You know that, right? Even if we’re both different now, and even if we become more different still. That won’t change.”

He did know. At the bottom of it all, there was always that feeling. That bond. He felt it now, welling up in his chest, warm and indecipherable, more mysterious to him than any puzzle or bit of theory, but just as fundamental to his being as his magic itself. He nodded, clearing his throat, and smiled.

“I love you too, Stellulam.”

Snippet #2669728

located in Thedas, a part of The Canticle of Fate, one of the many universes on RPG.

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