bethen avilla ; the circle mage (bethe) wrote in thedas, @ 2010-02-24 21:16:00
Who: Bethen Avilla & Signy Dagna Where: The Library of Vigil's Keep When: Before dawn, 14 Molioris, 9:45 Dragon. Summary: After the Joining, Beth finds that she can't sleep and meets with one of her fellow Wardens. Rating: K
It didn't matter what town, village, city, building -- wherever there was a library, Bethen was more likely than not to gravitate toward that space, walled in by careening towers of books and tomes. This wasn't her Library, but it was close enough. Though containing a far smaller than the quantity found at Kinloch Hold, it was well-kept and had all of the essential texts, particularly for magi, ready and available. In the week and a half between their arrival at Vigil's Keep, Beth had taken the time to study each spine and note those she hadn't ever seen before. To her surprise, she even found one of Dee's books in the collection. It seemed that Grey Warden Seward had excellent taste. She slipped the book out of place and brought it to one of the long tables, where one lonely candle sat flickering. The mage -- the Grey Warden, now, wasn't it? -- had been unable to sleep again and fled her room shortly before dawn, though this was worse than all the other nights before. This time, she'd dreamed, briefly.
Before her was a sea of fire and ash, the air so thick and hot that she had begun to choke in her sleep as the blistering winds swept across her face. Her skin was spotted with thick patches of grey, almost scale-like and smooth, and she had clawed at the marks all over her body, trying to pull them off of her, but it was futile. It was the Taint. She was corrupted now, twice as sinful as the day she had been discovered to possess magic. Someone grabbed her arm to stop her, and when she reeled around she was face to face with Lirana, flanked on each side by Byron and Emrys -- but it wasn't quite them. They were dead. Half of the flesh on their faces was hanging loose from their bones, and their eyes were sunken; one of Byron's was missing. The fingers on her arm were skeletal, bone clamping down around her wrists.
They cried her name loudly, half-wailing, half-screaming, the volume rising in her ears until she was practically deaf. And then...the roar. The vibration of that dragon's voice shook her to the core, and caused the rotten bodies before her to crumble into a fine powder that was carried off into the winds. Freed from their grasp, Bethen turned around to see a dark shape rising from the blackened ocean. It blotted out the rest of that blood red sky as it spread its wings and took flight; the only thing she could see were its piercing eyes, like beacons of flame, searching for her...
Beth sat up straight in the rigid wooden chair and blinked. Had she fallen asleep again? She shuddered and pulled the thin blanket she had brought as a make-shift shawl closer to her body, though it wasn't really that cold in the room. The chill came from within. She didn't even remember sitting down, but Dee's book was spread open under her palms. She skimmed the paragraph that her finger had landed on. It was about the First Blight. How appropriate. She tried to keep reading, but found that she couldn't focus on the words. The jumble of letters made absolutely no sense no matter how many times she ran her eyes over the same sentence. Bethen was simply exhausted, but incapable of actually resting or thinking of anything else besides the people who had died in that room.
Her friends. Her surrogate family. For the third time in her life, she was suffering from survivor's guilt. But these weren't senseless deaths -- not all of them, at least. This was sacrifice. And there was still so much more to come. If this was hard now, then what about when they had to actually fight the darkspawn? What if someone died on the end of their jagged blades? She didn't fear for herself. She hadn't been afraid of dying, not since she was nine...but watching other people suffer and perish? That was the hardest part of the evening's test.
Lost in thought, Beth was suddenly startled by the soft pad of footsteps moving around the corridor outside, just beyond the open doorway. Instinctively, her body had tensed with paranoid fear, even if this was perhaps one of the strongest defenses in all of Ferelden. Maybe it was just the cat, or one of the Keep's guards. Nevertheless, she had to know who was there. "Hello?" she called out quietly, wincing as her voice echoed and bounced around the empty chamber.