Neffa a Reyeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lessthanelementary) wrote2016-07-16 11:22 pm
lessthanelementary) wrote2016-07-16 11:22 pm
Entry tags:
[you are the string in my bow]
What a shit day it’s been. ...What a shit week it’s been. What a shit month. The interval of time matters less and less. It’s been too long since Syllad put aside his work for the day and felt satisfied with it, or like it mattered at all. It’s been too long since he had a conversation that felt productive. Like the Inquisitor’s told him something both true and important. He’s fallen back into old habits, staying up too far into the night to work, as though if he just gets more done he’ll find some tipping point where any of it feels like what he should actually be concentrating on, instead of a distraction from something large and terrible hanging invisible over his head.
He wants to get out of here for a day; run a great distance, shoot at something until his shoulders burn with the effort, look at the shafts buried in a human-shaped bundle of straw and feel like he’s produced a tangible result. He’d do it—leave for a day—except he might miss something. Come back to news he should have been there for. Everyone knows it’s getting worse. I don’t know what you think you’re hiding, Ategran, but we’re not stupid. I’m not—
He crosses the courtyard, moving with his head ducked against the late-autumn breeze toward the piece of a tower they gave him to stay in so long as they’re camped in this castle, which they half-tore down before occupying. Been a while since anything brought them out this far into the wilds of Ferelden, but their presence is a political statement these days, and the continued goodwill of the Teyrns depends on their sticking around long enough to fortify this place and clean out the country around. Or something.
He opens the door with one shoulder. It is stupid of him, to think it matters whether he stays or goes any given day. It’s not like Ategran would tell him more if he stayed.
The path from the door to the front room he knows by feel. Lighting the lamp by moonlight through the window is harder. He wishes he were a mage just as often when he’s faced with tasks this size as he does in the middle of battle; sometimes you want to rain fire down from the sky, sometimes you’ve been working fourteen hours and having to dig out your own tinder in the dark feels like an injustice. This is one of those nights. His fingers are cold and clumsy, and he mutters “Come on” at the lamp (The table? The universe?) as he fishes for something to strike the match against.
And then the lamp flares to life untouched, throwing bright spots across his vision and sudden heat against his face. What--! He startles, this full-body flinch like someone’s just flung a bucket of water in his face, gets his knife out of its sheath and his back away from the door—he’s acting on instincts he hasn’t put to proper use in a year at least, and thank the Maker he’s still got them—and he looks capable of defending himself, at least, when he gets what’s in front of him into his eyes.
He gets a strange twist of the stomach that comes with seeing something in front of him so unthinkable, his world needs a second to resettle around the aberration. It’s not unthinkable that there should be someone waiting to meet him in his own house (unlikely as it is that anyone around here would break in an hour after midnight). It’s just—unthinkable that it’s Neffa.
Neffa’s not dressed like Neffa. He’s wearing dull traveling clothes of mediocre quality and unflattering cut, and his hair is pulled back in a single impatient braid, springing out around his hairline and at the back of his neck. He’s sitting on the very edge of a wood chair with his hand on Syllad’s breakfast table, like he’d poised himself to jump up when he heard the door. There’s a walking stick of too-bright polish leaning up against the wall in the corner, and it occurs to Syllad that the strip of dusty red cloth tied around its top is concealing a rune. He came disguised—?
“What,” he says, because it feels like he should get the first word here, but didn’t come prepared for discussion. “What—“
“Syllad.” Neffa hesitates and then stands, hands at his sides but tensed. He wouldn’t need the staff if I came at him. “Sorry I didn’t send word ahead. I thought it better to be as discreet as possible.”
His voice is the same. What, you thought he’d lose his accent? No, that’s not it. It’s just that it’s been two years and Syllad hardly feels like the same person he was when Neffa officially severed his ties to the Inquisition and traveled back to Tevinter, where what he’d done in the South wouldn’t tarnish his reputation in any irreparable way. And Syllad’s sent a letter a month up north since then, of course, hasn’t been completely without Neffa’s wry, florid commentary on his life; but it should feel less now like Neffa could have just—just stepped from the day he left right into this moment, with just the same heaviness pulling down all his words.
Syllad stalls by sheathing his knife, something he doesn’t actually need to look down to do, but that gives him a second without Neffa’s eye contact pulling his thoughts in a dozen unimportant directions.
“Discreet,” he says, with a glance at the lamp. “Right.” Putting away the knife might have been a bad idea. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands now.
There’s a more Neffa expression, though, that pointed lift of the eyebrows. “I thought it would be better than trying to start a conversation in the dark.”
“I mean, you could have had the lamp lit already—“
“I couldn’t risk being seen.”
“Seen?” He’ll stop just repeating everything Neffa says in a moment. Because you go through so much of your life afraid someone will see you. “What—did you murder a guard on your way in, or—?” He laughs, but it comes out wrong, too brittle. “You didn’t exactly ride out of here in disgrace, Neffa, who do you think is going to—?”
“I didn’t announce I was coming.” Neffa’s stands with the fingertips of one hand resting on the table beside him, like he’s planning either to deliver a report or to run out of the room. “As far as anyone in Minrathous knows, I’m staying with private friends in Orlais. I couldn’t risk being caught out on the road—couldn’t risk the news of my coming making it back there.” A corner of his mouth pulls up in something not a smile. “And that’s to say nothing of the larger political situation, which is a separate matter entirely.”
Syllad falters. This is too direct for Neffa. It’s not like he’s ever pictured how a reunion would go—he’s not the kind of person to fantasize about that—but none of the conversations he’s manufactured in the past two years, when his wish that Neffa were there flared particularly strong, were anything like this. Those mostly take place in a world where Neffa never left; imaginary-Neffa never kept any secrets.
He crosses the room to sit heavily in the chair across from Neffa. He has to look up at him this way, but hell. He’s been on his feet all day. This place isn’t the size of Skyhold, but it’s big enough when you have to cross it eight times a day. He makes himself take two mental steps back, to return to the last really comprehensible statement Neffa made. Get the facts first, Besaal. Then you can think about… everything else. “…Why didn’t you announce you were coming?”
Neffa pulls in a deep breath. Syllad wonders how much he’s rehearsed this. He can see Neffa picking through different ways to phrase it, and he feels impatient. You think I’ve never seen you do this before? You think you need to control how I react to this? Do you know me?
Neffa says, with a plainness that strikes sharp: “The Inquisitor needs help.”
Syllad feels his heart trip over itself.
The inner circle knows, of course. Shatterstone and Skyfire spend more time in private conference than out of it these days, testing new stopgaps every three days, sleeping even less than Syllad does. But they’re all under strict orders to say nothing of it to anyone outside of the Inquisition (and unspoken orders, he supposes, not to bring it up to Ategran—or so you’d think, anyway). If they’ve caught wind of it in Tevinter—
“…You’ll have to be more specific, Neffa,” he says, evenly but a second too late. “The Inquisitor is fielding a few major crises at once at the moment. I assume you’ve got word, even in Minrathous, that he—“
Neffa makes an impatient gesture Syllad remembers well, one that seems to knock his words out of the air before they land. “The mark. The Anchor. Come on, Syllad—he can’t have hidden it from you.” He frowns. “Can he?”
Syllad closes his eyes, lets out a long, slow breath, and with it, stops pretending.
“No,” he says. “No, he hasn’t hidden it from me. Though not for lack of trying.” That’s a note of bitterness he’s managed to keep out of his voice around everyone else. He opens his eyes. “But I’m sure he doesn’t know news has reached Tevinter.”
“It hasn’t. I…” Neffa reaches up to run a hand through his hair (another familiar gesture), forgetting it’s pulled back, and ends up with a disheveled puff of hair sticking out over his forehead. Syllad’s instinct is to laugh; he doesn’t feel he should. “I—No one knows but me, so far as I know.” He’s making the face he used to make when he had to give a report he knew was unfavorable, using the tone he used to use, disconnecting himself from responsibility through carefully regretful disdain. It's a verbal fidget. “…Well. That’s not strictly true. It is likely that someone else knows, but it’s an untested hypothesis as of yet, and not one I plan to bring before anyone but the Inquisitor himself until I’ve drawn a more certain conclusion.”
In this way, and in no other, Neffa is a hell of a lot like Shatterstone sometimes. Maybe it’s a shared trait among all mages, the ability to say nothing in so many words.
Syllad feels an impatience he doesn’t want to feel. Maker, is there anyone who doesn’t know more about what’s eating Ategran than he does? “Then why come here first?” he says. “Why not just go to the Inquisitor?”
Neffa makes a vague, casting-away gesture Syllad doesn’t recognize. “He’s much better-guarded than you are.”
“You didn’t have to sneak in, Neffa. If you’d sent a discreet message from outside the fort he would have come for you.” He can’t seem to nail down a natural laugh tonight, but he tries again all the same, and fails. “What were you expecting? Did you think he was going to throw you in a cell?”
“My release from the last cell was conditional on my leaving. I thought it best not to take chances.”
“He didn’t exactly send you off with a warning—“
“I don’t pretend to understand what the Inquisitor is thinking now. I haven’t spoken with him in two years.”
“It would have got you an audience, anyway, wouldn’t it? He’d have seen you one way or another. That possibility wasn’t worth it?”
“I don’t want an audience. I need to speak to him.”
“And you think coming to me was the way to get to him?” Ah, that came out bitter. “I don’t know what you think he shares with me, but—“
“Considering the nature of the news, I thought it best to avoid having to explain myself to more than one person at a time.”
Andraste’s gaping necrotic sword wound— “Neffa, if you’re not going to tell me what you’re doing here—“
His voice has been getting louder as they talk over each other, and he hears that rebound off the rafters and ricochet off the glass of the windows and fill up Neffa’s stricken silence.
“—Quiet. Quiet. Please.” Neffa lurches to his feet, one hand stretched out like he’s, what, going to clap a hand over Syllad’s mouth—? But he doesn’t.
He sinks down to his knees in front of Syllad, in a way that isn’t beseeching so much as just… weary. He puts his hands on the arms of Syllad’s chair and leans in (and it’s one thing to have Neffa in the same castle, in the same room, and another to have him this close, to be able to see the dust in his hair and smell the road on him). He says, quieter, “I know what’s happening to him. I dreamed it.”
“You—“
“Two months ago. I felt it. What he’s been feeling. ...Because he’s been feeling it, right? Yes? Yes.” Neffa's looking up at him now, speaking like he thinks anyone could possibly overhear them. “It came when I was sleeping, that first time-- the pain in my hand, the-- the blinded sort of feeling--" He shakes his head. "And then again, a month ago, and again, two weeks ago. It was worse every time. And I didn’t… I thought from the beginning it was different, that it wasn’t just a dream, but I waited for word from the South. And it didn’t come. And I realized, after too damn long, that the Inquisitor doesn’t know.”
Syllad leans down, resting his elbows on his knees, mixing up their space. “…Are you ever going to tell me what he doesn’t know?” he asks, and at least this time he asks it without shouting.
Neffa looks into his face from a distance of about six inches. His expression is... uncertain? Not of what he's saying, but of what the reaction will be. He swallows. He drops his gaze. “Augustine’s the source,” he says.
There’s a long silence, in which Syllad does not look at Neffa and Neffa does not look up.
Syllad can understand why Neffa wouldn’t have wanted to lead with that. There is a reason he left Orlais, after all. Augustine is the single most publicly memorable thing that ever happened to him. He’s already being written into premature histories of the Inquisition as the Conduit. Of course he’d be fearful, walking around with that secret. Of course he knows what people remember when they look at him, what the less well-informed still half-expect to see.
He probably factored into this conversation the moment Syllad would need to swallow down the sudden jump of his heart into his throat. Probably why he’s not filling up the silence himself.
“…All right,” Syllad says, when the silence starts accumulating too much weight. “All right. The source of—the Anchor—?”
“Corypheus was the source of the Anchor. Augustine is the source of what’s happening to it now.”
“And he’s—told you—?”
“No. I know what it feels like.”
The way Neffa says that – blunt, quick, decided – tells Syllad not to press this point. Neffa never did tell anyone what it felt like to have Augustine in his head – not in any detail. Syllad can infer that it was terrible, because Neffa has never once pretended it doesn’t bother him; he’s just never elaborated.
Syllad has wondered if Neffa doesn’t think he has a right to say it was terrible, considering what he did while under Augustine’s control. Maybe Neffa can’t make himself ask for sympathy from the people whose friends and subordinates died by the dozens to subdue him without killing him. An imagine springs, unbidden, to mind-- Syllad thinks suddenly of his bowstring digging into his fingers and the clack of Kazatya’s sword on the wood of the bow, moving his shot out of line, and of Kazatya’s firm “Not yet.” He wonders how close Neffa’s experience was to the unthinkable thing Syllad assumed it was, that made him feel so able to do what felt like the most merciful thing. He wonders who would have come to tell them this now, if Kazatya had been of a different mind that day.
Syllad decides that this is a useless causal chain to speculate about, because Neffa is here, is still kneeling at his feet, and instead he puts his mental energy into letting his world reorganize itself as necessary. It takes a couple of breaths.
“…You’re okay?” he asks after a moment. Very slight emphasis on You. This is a talent he has, keeping his voice this exact kind of level in situations like this. He’s very good at not sounding like he doesn’t want to sound.
“I’m fine.” Neffa, on the other hand, is usually better at concealing mixed emotions. Syllad hears both the relief and the guilt in that. “It isn’t—Augustine’s not…” A vague, unhappy gesture. “With me. You know. I don’t think he’s with Ategran, either.”
“So Augustine’s…?”
“Connected, somehow. I don’t know how, exactly. Only that he is.” A tired laugh. “See—it’s just clear enough news to sound like I’ve brought it with nefarious intent, and just vague enough not to be useful. Can’t announce it before the council, can’t promise a solution. Couldn’t even write Shatterstone—I felt like I had to be here.” The end of that is wry. Neffa has never put much store in what his feelings dictate he should do. “Even though Shatterstone will, I’m sure, take it out of my hands the moment the Inquisitor tells him.”
Syllad's hand hovers vaguely over his own leg; he can't decide whether or not to rest it on Neffa's dusty shoulder. "...Look," he says. "Maybe you can't answer this, either, but-- is Ategran-- is the Inquisitor going to be--" He's so tired. He's never this inarticulate. "I mean, what's the prognosis? What's Augustine's goal here?" What is it doing to him?
Neffa shakes his head. "I told you. He isn't speaking to me. It's-- it's not like it was. I didn't-- ha. I didn't go looking." Are you crazy, his tone says, and implies the nervous smile. "I couldn't tell you if Augustine knows I know. I was half-afraid he'd stop me making it here."
It's understandable, of course, that he wouldn't go searching for Augustine alone. At least he's telling Syllad what he doesn't know. That's more than he's gotten from other involved parties. The intent is helpful, even if the information is less than useless. Syllad feels, abstractly, the sense of wanting to overturn a table, and is too tired to sustain it.
Neffa shifts in place. He could move back to the chair, if he wanted to. They could have more than half a foot between them. Syllad doesn't suggest it.
“...Do you plan to stay?” he asks.
Neffa shrugs. “If the Inquisitor thinks I should. I imagine Tevinter will have to learn I’m here eventually. But at the least, it won’t be before I’ve said my piece to him.” He wants to sound neutral about this, Syllad believes, as much as he doesn’t want to be turned away.
“…He wouldn’t have turned you away, you know,” Syllad says. “You’re actually the only person in the world who thinks he would have. Did you honestly believe, after everything—?”
Neffa lets out a soft breath that’s almost a laugh. Sort of sheepish, sort of defeated. “I couldn’t be sure. …But, if I’m completely honest, I wanted to come to you first anyway.” He looks up; and, with a sense of giving up, folds his arms on Syllad’s lap and puts his chin down on them. “It’s not that I thought you’d do anything, exactly. But whatever I did—I thought it best you know about it. Don’t ask me why.”
Syllad tips his head back, lets out a long sigh; and, with a sense of giving up, winds his fingers into Neffa’s hair, under the half-unraveled braid. “I can’t do anything, I warn you. If Ategran listens to you—which he will—you’ll be miles ahead of me.”
“Mmm,” Neffa says, eyes half-closed. Syllad decides to take it as sympathetic. “So long as he listens to you when you tell him I’m here.”
He should tell Ategran now, Syllad realizes. This is news worth waking him up for, isn’t it? This can’t wait. They’ve lost enough weeks, enough days, enough hours, already.
…But it’s so still, this moment. Neffa’s mage-light throws their shadows up on the wall, unnaturally steady. The window is black as though it’s been painted over. Syllad wonders if Ategran’s room, up in the top of the tallest remaining tower, is so still. It’s been dark for hours. He might be asleep now. Shatterstone and Skyfire will be; Syllad has a talent for looking less exhausted than he is that neither of them share. He’d felt awake fifteen minutes ago, but there’s only so far even the adrenaline born of surprise and fear can carry him, following these last two months. And that’s to say nothing of Neffa, whom Syllad has seen sleep two hours a night for a week and look less weary than he looks now.
Six more hours won’t end the world. We’ll go at dawn.
He sinks down deeper into the chair, and slips his fingers down the back of Neffa's roughspun shirt. “He will. You can have a bath while I meet with him." The clothes, he imagines, aren't going to be worn again. "Did you sleep on the ground every night? You were committed.”
Neffa raises his head slightly, to look more affronted. “I hope you don’t think I intended to meet him like this.”
Syllad pulls on the stupid tuft of hair hanging over Neffa’s forehead. "Perish the thought.”
Neffa came here with the same heaviness pulling down his words that he left with two years ago, but he came with everything else about him, too, and that’s—comforting? No, not quite, but—stabilizing. Augustine made of Neffa something he wasn’t, briefly, but on the other side of that Neffa still remains – Neffa, who came this far down the southbound road alone and wearing roughspun, with a strip of wool wrapped around the rune in his staff, and who will certainly bring up both the terrible secret he came all this way to tell and the roughspun tomorrow morning. Neffa, who convinced himself Syllad was going to call a guard on him when he appeared, and who now seems about to fall asleep on his knees. Neffa's stupid hair and his roundabout answers. All here.
Maybe that’s how Ategran will come out, as well. Harder to read, unhappier someties, quieter about some things, and still himself. At least as much himself as Neffa still is. As much himself as he's remained thus far. Ategran's at least as resilient as Neffa a Reyeth, isn't he.
Ah, Maker. Syllad hopes so.
He wants to get out of here for a day; run a great distance, shoot at something until his shoulders burn with the effort, look at the shafts buried in a human-shaped bundle of straw and feel like he’s produced a tangible result. He’d do it—leave for a day—except he might miss something. Come back to news he should have been there for. Everyone knows it’s getting worse. I don’t know what you think you’re hiding, Ategran, but we’re not stupid. I’m not—
He crosses the courtyard, moving with his head ducked against the late-autumn breeze toward the piece of a tower they gave him to stay in so long as they’re camped in this castle, which they half-tore down before occupying. Been a while since anything brought them out this far into the wilds of Ferelden, but their presence is a political statement these days, and the continued goodwill of the Teyrns depends on their sticking around long enough to fortify this place and clean out the country around. Or something.
He opens the door with one shoulder. It is stupid of him, to think it matters whether he stays or goes any given day. It’s not like Ategran would tell him more if he stayed.
The path from the door to the front room he knows by feel. Lighting the lamp by moonlight through the window is harder. He wishes he were a mage just as often when he’s faced with tasks this size as he does in the middle of battle; sometimes you want to rain fire down from the sky, sometimes you’ve been working fourteen hours and having to dig out your own tinder in the dark feels like an injustice. This is one of those nights. His fingers are cold and clumsy, and he mutters “Come on” at the lamp (The table? The universe?) as he fishes for something to strike the match against.
And then the lamp flares to life untouched, throwing bright spots across his vision and sudden heat against his face. What--! He startles, this full-body flinch like someone’s just flung a bucket of water in his face, gets his knife out of its sheath and his back away from the door—he’s acting on instincts he hasn’t put to proper use in a year at least, and thank the Maker he’s still got them—and he looks capable of defending himself, at least, when he gets what’s in front of him into his eyes.
He gets a strange twist of the stomach that comes with seeing something in front of him so unthinkable, his world needs a second to resettle around the aberration. It’s not unthinkable that there should be someone waiting to meet him in his own house (unlikely as it is that anyone around here would break in an hour after midnight). It’s just—unthinkable that it’s Neffa.
Neffa’s not dressed like Neffa. He’s wearing dull traveling clothes of mediocre quality and unflattering cut, and his hair is pulled back in a single impatient braid, springing out around his hairline and at the back of his neck. He’s sitting on the very edge of a wood chair with his hand on Syllad’s breakfast table, like he’d poised himself to jump up when he heard the door. There’s a walking stick of too-bright polish leaning up against the wall in the corner, and it occurs to Syllad that the strip of dusty red cloth tied around its top is concealing a rune. He came disguised—?
“What,” he says, because it feels like he should get the first word here, but didn’t come prepared for discussion. “What—“
“Syllad.” Neffa hesitates and then stands, hands at his sides but tensed. He wouldn’t need the staff if I came at him. “Sorry I didn’t send word ahead. I thought it better to be as discreet as possible.”
His voice is the same. What, you thought he’d lose his accent? No, that’s not it. It’s just that it’s been two years and Syllad hardly feels like the same person he was when Neffa officially severed his ties to the Inquisition and traveled back to Tevinter, where what he’d done in the South wouldn’t tarnish his reputation in any irreparable way. And Syllad’s sent a letter a month up north since then, of course, hasn’t been completely without Neffa’s wry, florid commentary on his life; but it should feel less now like Neffa could have just—just stepped from the day he left right into this moment, with just the same heaviness pulling down all his words.
Syllad stalls by sheathing his knife, something he doesn’t actually need to look down to do, but that gives him a second without Neffa’s eye contact pulling his thoughts in a dozen unimportant directions.
“Discreet,” he says, with a glance at the lamp. “Right.” Putting away the knife might have been a bad idea. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands now.
There’s a more Neffa expression, though, that pointed lift of the eyebrows. “I thought it would be better than trying to start a conversation in the dark.”
“I mean, you could have had the lamp lit already—“
“I couldn’t risk being seen.”
“Seen?” He’ll stop just repeating everything Neffa says in a moment. Because you go through so much of your life afraid someone will see you. “What—did you murder a guard on your way in, or—?” He laughs, but it comes out wrong, too brittle. “You didn’t exactly ride out of here in disgrace, Neffa, who do you think is going to—?”
“I didn’t announce I was coming.” Neffa’s stands with the fingertips of one hand resting on the table beside him, like he’s planning either to deliver a report or to run out of the room. “As far as anyone in Minrathous knows, I’m staying with private friends in Orlais. I couldn’t risk being caught out on the road—couldn’t risk the news of my coming making it back there.” A corner of his mouth pulls up in something not a smile. “And that’s to say nothing of the larger political situation, which is a separate matter entirely.”
Syllad falters. This is too direct for Neffa. It’s not like he’s ever pictured how a reunion would go—he’s not the kind of person to fantasize about that—but none of the conversations he’s manufactured in the past two years, when his wish that Neffa were there flared particularly strong, were anything like this. Those mostly take place in a world where Neffa never left; imaginary-Neffa never kept any secrets.
He crosses the room to sit heavily in the chair across from Neffa. He has to look up at him this way, but hell. He’s been on his feet all day. This place isn’t the size of Skyhold, but it’s big enough when you have to cross it eight times a day. He makes himself take two mental steps back, to return to the last really comprehensible statement Neffa made. Get the facts first, Besaal. Then you can think about… everything else. “…Why didn’t you announce you were coming?”
Neffa pulls in a deep breath. Syllad wonders how much he’s rehearsed this. He can see Neffa picking through different ways to phrase it, and he feels impatient. You think I’ve never seen you do this before? You think you need to control how I react to this? Do you know me?
Neffa says, with a plainness that strikes sharp: “The Inquisitor needs help.”
Syllad feels his heart trip over itself.
The inner circle knows, of course. Shatterstone and Skyfire spend more time in private conference than out of it these days, testing new stopgaps every three days, sleeping even less than Syllad does. But they’re all under strict orders to say nothing of it to anyone outside of the Inquisition (and unspoken orders, he supposes, not to bring it up to Ategran—or so you’d think, anyway). If they’ve caught wind of it in Tevinter—
“…You’ll have to be more specific, Neffa,” he says, evenly but a second too late. “The Inquisitor is fielding a few major crises at once at the moment. I assume you’ve got word, even in Minrathous, that he—“
Neffa makes an impatient gesture Syllad remembers well, one that seems to knock his words out of the air before they land. “The mark. The Anchor. Come on, Syllad—he can’t have hidden it from you.” He frowns. “Can he?”
Syllad closes his eyes, lets out a long, slow breath, and with it, stops pretending.
“No,” he says. “No, he hasn’t hidden it from me. Though not for lack of trying.” That’s a note of bitterness he’s managed to keep out of his voice around everyone else. He opens his eyes. “But I’m sure he doesn’t know news has reached Tevinter.”
“It hasn’t. I…” Neffa reaches up to run a hand through his hair (another familiar gesture), forgetting it’s pulled back, and ends up with a disheveled puff of hair sticking out over his forehead. Syllad’s instinct is to laugh; he doesn’t feel he should. “I—No one knows but me, so far as I know.” He’s making the face he used to make when he had to give a report he knew was unfavorable, using the tone he used to use, disconnecting himself from responsibility through carefully regretful disdain. It's a verbal fidget. “…Well. That’s not strictly true. It is likely that someone else knows, but it’s an untested hypothesis as of yet, and not one I plan to bring before anyone but the Inquisitor himself until I’ve drawn a more certain conclusion.”
In this way, and in no other, Neffa is a hell of a lot like Shatterstone sometimes. Maybe it’s a shared trait among all mages, the ability to say nothing in so many words.
Syllad feels an impatience he doesn’t want to feel. Maker, is there anyone who doesn’t know more about what’s eating Ategran than he does? “Then why come here first?” he says. “Why not just go to the Inquisitor?”
Neffa makes a vague, casting-away gesture Syllad doesn’t recognize. “He’s much better-guarded than you are.”
“You didn’t have to sneak in, Neffa. If you’d sent a discreet message from outside the fort he would have come for you.” He can’t seem to nail down a natural laugh tonight, but he tries again all the same, and fails. “What were you expecting? Did you think he was going to throw you in a cell?”
“My release from the last cell was conditional on my leaving. I thought it best not to take chances.”
“He didn’t exactly send you off with a warning—“
“I don’t pretend to understand what the Inquisitor is thinking now. I haven’t spoken with him in two years.”
“It would have got you an audience, anyway, wouldn’t it? He’d have seen you one way or another. That possibility wasn’t worth it?”
“I don’t want an audience. I need to speak to him.”
“And you think coming to me was the way to get to him?” Ah, that came out bitter. “I don’t know what you think he shares with me, but—“
“Considering the nature of the news, I thought it best to avoid having to explain myself to more than one person at a time.”
Andraste’s gaping necrotic sword wound— “Neffa, if you’re not going to tell me what you’re doing here—“
His voice has been getting louder as they talk over each other, and he hears that rebound off the rafters and ricochet off the glass of the windows and fill up Neffa’s stricken silence.
“—Quiet. Quiet. Please.” Neffa lurches to his feet, one hand stretched out like he’s, what, going to clap a hand over Syllad’s mouth—? But he doesn’t.
He sinks down to his knees in front of Syllad, in a way that isn’t beseeching so much as just… weary. He puts his hands on the arms of Syllad’s chair and leans in (and it’s one thing to have Neffa in the same castle, in the same room, and another to have him this close, to be able to see the dust in his hair and smell the road on him). He says, quieter, “I know what’s happening to him. I dreamed it.”
“You—“
“Two months ago. I felt it. What he’s been feeling. ...Because he’s been feeling it, right? Yes? Yes.” Neffa's looking up at him now, speaking like he thinks anyone could possibly overhear them. “It came when I was sleeping, that first time-- the pain in my hand, the-- the blinded sort of feeling--" He shakes his head. "And then again, a month ago, and again, two weeks ago. It was worse every time. And I didn’t… I thought from the beginning it was different, that it wasn’t just a dream, but I waited for word from the South. And it didn’t come. And I realized, after too damn long, that the Inquisitor doesn’t know.”
Syllad leans down, resting his elbows on his knees, mixing up their space. “…Are you ever going to tell me what he doesn’t know?” he asks, and at least this time he asks it without shouting.
Neffa looks into his face from a distance of about six inches. His expression is... uncertain? Not of what he's saying, but of what the reaction will be. He swallows. He drops his gaze. “Augustine’s the source,” he says.
There’s a long silence, in which Syllad does not look at Neffa and Neffa does not look up.
Syllad can understand why Neffa wouldn’t have wanted to lead with that. There is a reason he left Orlais, after all. Augustine is the single most publicly memorable thing that ever happened to him. He’s already being written into premature histories of the Inquisition as the Conduit. Of course he’d be fearful, walking around with that secret. Of course he knows what people remember when they look at him, what the less well-informed still half-expect to see.
He probably factored into this conversation the moment Syllad would need to swallow down the sudden jump of his heart into his throat. Probably why he’s not filling up the silence himself.
“…All right,” Syllad says, when the silence starts accumulating too much weight. “All right. The source of—the Anchor—?”
“Corypheus was the source of the Anchor. Augustine is the source of what’s happening to it now.”
“And he’s—told you—?”
“No. I know what it feels like.”
The way Neffa says that – blunt, quick, decided – tells Syllad not to press this point. Neffa never did tell anyone what it felt like to have Augustine in his head – not in any detail. Syllad can infer that it was terrible, because Neffa has never once pretended it doesn’t bother him; he’s just never elaborated.
Syllad has wondered if Neffa doesn’t think he has a right to say it was terrible, considering what he did while under Augustine’s control. Maybe Neffa can’t make himself ask for sympathy from the people whose friends and subordinates died by the dozens to subdue him without killing him. An imagine springs, unbidden, to mind-- Syllad thinks suddenly of his bowstring digging into his fingers and the clack of Kazatya’s sword on the wood of the bow, moving his shot out of line, and of Kazatya’s firm “Not yet.” He wonders how close Neffa’s experience was to the unthinkable thing Syllad assumed it was, that made him feel so able to do what felt like the most merciful thing. He wonders who would have come to tell them this now, if Kazatya had been of a different mind that day.
Syllad decides that this is a useless causal chain to speculate about, because Neffa is here, is still kneeling at his feet, and instead he puts his mental energy into letting his world reorganize itself as necessary. It takes a couple of breaths.
“…You’re okay?” he asks after a moment. Very slight emphasis on You. This is a talent he has, keeping his voice this exact kind of level in situations like this. He’s very good at not sounding like he doesn’t want to sound.
“I’m fine.” Neffa, on the other hand, is usually better at concealing mixed emotions. Syllad hears both the relief and the guilt in that. “It isn’t—Augustine’s not…” A vague, unhappy gesture. “With me. You know. I don’t think he’s with Ategran, either.”
“So Augustine’s…?”
“Connected, somehow. I don’t know how, exactly. Only that he is.” A tired laugh. “See—it’s just clear enough news to sound like I’ve brought it with nefarious intent, and just vague enough not to be useful. Can’t announce it before the council, can’t promise a solution. Couldn’t even write Shatterstone—I felt like I had to be here.” The end of that is wry. Neffa has never put much store in what his feelings dictate he should do. “Even though Shatterstone will, I’m sure, take it out of my hands the moment the Inquisitor tells him.”
Syllad's hand hovers vaguely over his own leg; he can't decide whether or not to rest it on Neffa's dusty shoulder. "...Look," he says. "Maybe you can't answer this, either, but-- is Ategran-- is the Inquisitor going to be--" He's so tired. He's never this inarticulate. "I mean, what's the prognosis? What's Augustine's goal here?" What is it doing to him?
Neffa shakes his head. "I told you. He isn't speaking to me. It's-- it's not like it was. I didn't-- ha. I didn't go looking." Are you crazy, his tone says, and implies the nervous smile. "I couldn't tell you if Augustine knows I know. I was half-afraid he'd stop me making it here."
It's understandable, of course, that he wouldn't go searching for Augustine alone. At least he's telling Syllad what he doesn't know. That's more than he's gotten from other involved parties. The intent is helpful, even if the information is less than useless. Syllad feels, abstractly, the sense of wanting to overturn a table, and is too tired to sustain it.
Neffa shifts in place. He could move back to the chair, if he wanted to. They could have more than half a foot between them. Syllad doesn't suggest it.
“...Do you plan to stay?” he asks.
Neffa shrugs. “If the Inquisitor thinks I should. I imagine Tevinter will have to learn I’m here eventually. But at the least, it won’t be before I’ve said my piece to him.” He wants to sound neutral about this, Syllad believes, as much as he doesn’t want to be turned away.
“…He wouldn’t have turned you away, you know,” Syllad says. “You’re actually the only person in the world who thinks he would have. Did you honestly believe, after everything—?”
Neffa lets out a soft breath that’s almost a laugh. Sort of sheepish, sort of defeated. “I couldn’t be sure. …But, if I’m completely honest, I wanted to come to you first anyway.” He looks up; and, with a sense of giving up, folds his arms on Syllad’s lap and puts his chin down on them. “It’s not that I thought you’d do anything, exactly. But whatever I did—I thought it best you know about it. Don’t ask me why.”
Syllad tips his head back, lets out a long sigh; and, with a sense of giving up, winds his fingers into Neffa’s hair, under the half-unraveled braid. “I can’t do anything, I warn you. If Ategran listens to you—which he will—you’ll be miles ahead of me.”
“Mmm,” Neffa says, eyes half-closed. Syllad decides to take it as sympathetic. “So long as he listens to you when you tell him I’m here.”
He should tell Ategran now, Syllad realizes. This is news worth waking him up for, isn’t it? This can’t wait. They’ve lost enough weeks, enough days, enough hours, already.
…But it’s so still, this moment. Neffa’s mage-light throws their shadows up on the wall, unnaturally steady. The window is black as though it’s been painted over. Syllad wonders if Ategran’s room, up in the top of the tallest remaining tower, is so still. It’s been dark for hours. He might be asleep now. Shatterstone and Skyfire will be; Syllad has a talent for looking less exhausted than he is that neither of them share. He’d felt awake fifteen minutes ago, but there’s only so far even the adrenaline born of surprise and fear can carry him, following these last two months. And that’s to say nothing of Neffa, whom Syllad has seen sleep two hours a night for a week and look less weary than he looks now.
Six more hours won’t end the world. We’ll go at dawn.
He sinks down deeper into the chair, and slips his fingers down the back of Neffa's roughspun shirt. “He will. You can have a bath while I meet with him." The clothes, he imagines, aren't going to be worn again. "Did you sleep on the ground every night? You were committed.”
Neffa raises his head slightly, to look more affronted. “I hope you don’t think I intended to meet him like this.”
Syllad pulls on the stupid tuft of hair hanging over Neffa’s forehead. "Perish the thought.”
Neffa came here with the same heaviness pulling down his words that he left with two years ago, but he came with everything else about him, too, and that’s—comforting? No, not quite, but—stabilizing. Augustine made of Neffa something he wasn’t, briefly, but on the other side of that Neffa still remains – Neffa, who came this far down the southbound road alone and wearing roughspun, with a strip of wool wrapped around the rune in his staff, and who will certainly bring up both the terrible secret he came all this way to tell and the roughspun tomorrow morning. Neffa, who convinced himself Syllad was going to call a guard on him when he appeared, and who now seems about to fall asleep on his knees. Neffa's stupid hair and his roundabout answers. All here.
Maybe that’s how Ategran will come out, as well. Harder to read, unhappier someties, quieter about some things, and still himself. At least as much himself as Neffa still is. As much himself as he's remained thus far. Ategran's at least as resilient as Neffa a Reyeth, isn't he.
Ah, Maker. Syllad hopes so.