Signy looked down, studying her hands and the water, again, for a moment; the information was swirling around in her mind, although the things about the mage's test, the Harrowing, took a backseat to what Bethen had said last. It would have been dramatically appropriate, like in a tale or a story, if the water had been swirling, too, but her drink was not obliging the rules of stories.
"And that, when that happens, it's called an abomination? When a demon warps a mage's body, they..." She struggled to find the words to describe something she had not seen firsthand, except for a small piece of on the road of the Diamond District. She had been told that, after they finally took Vidar down, once the-thing-he-had-been had stopped moving and the city guards had finally relaxed, the body had exploded like a vein of gas, underground, when someone was foolish enough to strike a flint nearby. There had not been much left at all, after that. And the firsthand accounts were full of details like that; horrifying, difficult to wrap the mind around, full of confusion. "They become big, and I suppose, very awful looking? Blackened skin?" What else had she been told? Fire. There had been a great deal of fire, but beyond that Signy could not recall any other solid details. "Is that it? Or is that something else?" She wanted to be sure, before she started talking and realized that Bethen had meant something entirely different. "What do abominations do? If the answer is, uh, great amounts of violence? Well, then, I haven't precisely seen one, but I nearly did." Even for having not seen it, it was an unpleasant memory; she could still very keenly recall the smell, on the street, sulfuric and full of the stench of burned hair and beard and flesh.
"Where would I be able to find out more about demons? And the Fade? I have just an awful number of questions about that and that was always sort of one of the things we didn't understand very well. Have you always gone there when you slept, even before you knew you were a mage? And spirits, and demons, they're from there?" She was not, at the moment, entirely conscious of how much she sounded like Dagna, or like Dagna had at her age, with words and questions tumbling out of her mouth. Signy was less enthusiastic, perhaps, but she had always been withdrawn, and now she was withdrawn and exhausted. Still, Bethen and her willingness to answer all of those thousand-and-one questions had pulled Signy out of that nervous shell she so often retreated into, here on the surface.