one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling
one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
The light catches off of Adna’s scales as she tips her head upward to look more fully at the golden stallion, her serpentine eyes unblinking as they study him from the curls of her forelock. He seemed steady, she thinks. Like a river or the ancient trees that live within this ancient forest. He seemed like he could weather a storm, and she finds herself hoping that he never has to—that he can remain untouched.
She, herself, has never been able to avoid such things.
The storms live within her more than she is affected by them and she feels herself swallowing the chaos down every day. Just trying to get by. Just trying to find her feet and move forward with her life.
But he offers her something like a second chance, or a fresh start, and she knows that she will need one. She could not give it to Rupture and Bela. They had been born into her agony (how she had cried over time), but perhaps they could live with her here. Perhaps she could find some peace before—
Well, before she needed a home for another child.
She does not divulge such things to him though. Instead she just tilts her head in thought, curious about his formal way of speaking but finding no offense in it. “Adna,” she says, thinking briefly about how similar their names are, but before she can mull it over too much, the thought is gone.
Instead she takes a step forward to fall in next to him, glancing upward briefly to look at the bird that had so far just observed quietly. When she realizes that he had asked her something, she shakes her head to clear her thoughts, swallowing. “Oh, mostly Loess,” she says. “My father Vulgaris raised me there with my mother Leliana while he was Champion and then, briefly, King.” She doesn’t mention the year that she lived by the river when she was kicked out of her home or the fact that part of her stay had been when her mother was held captive or even that they had both left to live in Tephra now.
She just lets the silence take over again, staring hard before her before asking her own question.
“Is the bird your friend?”