There was a pause, and a moment of silence, and then a pale face, surrounded by a cloud of mussed, slightly frizzy blond hair appeared at the door. "I'm sorry," the dwarf said, peering into the room, her voice quiet and small and a bit rough, as though she had not been speaking in a long time, or as though her throat was sore. The latter of which made a great deal of sense, given what she had been through in recent hours. Her eyes were red-ringed and puffy, and she blinked once in the candlelight that was coming from within the library. "Did I disturb you? I didn't mean to, I was just curious who was awake."
Who else was awake, she meant; who else had failed, completely and utterly, to fall asleep. Signy herself had found sleep nearly impossible; she hadn't yet actually fallen deep asleep enough to dream, that night, so she had no idea what waited for her. What new, particular horrors this change had added to her attempts to sleep. Dreams on their own had been bad and strange enough.
She'd seen the faint light in the hallway, flickering out from the doorway into the library. Signy hadn't spent much time in that room, but she'd figured out where it was. Who would be reading at this time of night? The question had made Signy, even bleary and awful-feeling as she was, hadn't been able to resist the short detour. Now, she saw a face just barely familiar—a human woman, one of the other new Grey Wardens, survivors of the, well, survivors of the Taint. The thought was sickening in and of itself—she had been taught from childhood what happened to dwarves who ate the flesh of darkspawn or tainted creatures, how their flesh was twisted, how they lost their minds in the twisted maze of the Deep Roads. There were epics and songs and tragedies and, Ancestors, even children's songs about eating of the taint and paying for it.
The tune of one of those songs had been stuck in her head all night, on and off, popping up at awful, awful moments. Like this one. The chorus floated through her head again.
Signy took a step outwards from the door frame, peering further into the library, and also revealing more of herself than just her face. She'd changed clothing since the Joining, trying to get away from the awful smell of blood and vomit that seemed to cling to her dress, even once she had gotten back to her room. Her new dress was much the same as the old one, though—one of the ones she'd gotten when it became clear that she really only had the one set of clothing left. She held a metal flagon in one hand—it was full of water, nothing more elaborate.