bethen avilla ; the circle mage (bethe) wrote in thedas,
"Cord," Beth answered quickly and with absolute certainty -- it was the easiest of her decisions to make thus far. Chain was stronger, but more difficult to repair, capable of rusting if not cared for properly, and slower to warm against skin; furthermore, she had a personal fondness for leather as a material (and, not that she realized he had any idea what she smelled like, its scent would be more of a reminder of her). She had little in the way of gauging the price of stone, so she'd already been palming a handful of coins at her side before hearing the actual total. They were still tepid as they passed hands, silver bits in exchange for a thin strip of hide and a piece of crystal hardly any bigger than one of her fingers. If the merchant's son had been looking at her in any manner different from the other customers, Bethen was oblivious to it; she was, as usual, utterly clueless about her own visage. Other women were cute, pretty, or beautiful -- Falina was cute, Dee was pretty, Thais was (as much as she disliked the woman) undeniably gorgeous -- but Beth was, by her own standards, plain and best valued for her mind, not her physique.
With the exchange completed, the duo were quickly on their way again. The mage was learning how to keep up with the fast footed motions of the cleric, though she was still hardly as nimble or reflexive as the rogue; she only just barely managed to avoid getting herself knocked over by a small woman with large basket of vegetables as they passed by the local bakery. The crowds tapered off the further they drifted from the food vendors, allowing the women to finally walk side by side, and for Dee's voice to be much more audible at a conversational level. Beth didn't have to strain to listen or focus on her words, watching Dee's expression shift as she told her story. Some of the details seemed vaguely familiar; Beth considered herself to be a friend of Alderic's, but she wasn't as capable of pinning down the dates that he'd been away from the Tower, not nearly as well as she could with Aurin. For him, she counted off the days between the time he left and when he was expected to return, but her relationship with Alderic was decidedly different.
In spite of how many years that Bethen had known Alderic, this story was new to her; she had some notion that the templar had seen evils in the world outside the Tower, but rarely ever heard of the specifics. They spoke mostly of books and intellectual subjects, scholars discussing the latest breakthroughs, not of close scrapes with death, for himself or for his good friends. She understood his sense of privacy and respected it, though, and perhaps even moreso now that she had Deidre's side of the story. The man was not arrogant, but he took his failures to heart, and in no way could she imagine this event to be easy to speak of. From what she could tell, it had been no one's fault except the darkness of night, though she had a feeling that Alderic wouldn't have thought of it that way at the time. It made her wonder just how he would behave on their future mission, now that they were walking straight into the lion's den.
"A sharlock, then? The way people say they just...appear make them sound rather like shades," Beth observed quietly, drawing comparison from the only thing she had actually seen in motion. But her last encounter with such a demon was a different story, for another day. She waited for Dee to continue.