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It's a good day in Arlathan Forest. Bellara walks dreamily through the Veil Jumper's camp, today's artifact—a flickering, lacy hexagon that made small pebbles levitate and made larger pebbles melt into lava—already quelled and secured.
She curls up in her tent among her blankets and the debris of started projects she'll surely finish someday, cracks open a notebook, draws a clean line after the last entry, and writes today's date. There's the artifact to write about, but she can't forget the patch of stone that changed into loam overnight and began sprouting spinach and leeks, which don't even grow so far north, nevermind in dirt that used to be stone. To do: test for contaminants, magical or conventional, and harvest the spinach and leeks before the earth turns back into stone. If it turns back into stone. She hopes it doesn't.
Three pages deep into theorizing the nature of the patch of ground and whether it could be coaxed into growing cold-preferring fruit trees, someone calls a hello just outside her tent.
"Come in!" Bellara sings out. "Oh. Irelin."
Irelin's smile is as awkward as Bellara feels, but she leans in through the entrance to the tent, not quite stepping on the rug that Bellara's spread out over the floor. A few weeks ago she entered a lot more boldly. Months ago. A few months? Already? Time catches her off guard.
"A passing trader had a stack of newssheets." Irelin sets a pile of papers down on Bellara's rug like they might burn her, straightens up, and smiles again.
"Newssheets? Really?" Bellara scrabbles to her feet. A few months ago she would have hugged Irelin without a second thought, but the boundaries between them are all weird right now. Watching each other's backs, slapping pleasantries on the cracks between them like fresh clay on crumbling brickwork. She pats Irelin awkwardly on one shoulder, definitely the wrong thing to do, and crouches back down to look through the stack.
It's an even better evening in Arlathan. Bellara counts her breaths until Irelin's footsteps fade, and then counts five more just in case, before spreading the newssheets on her floor. Inactive magical artifacts get swept to the corners of the tent to make room. Quietly, so quietly, Bellara opens her trunk, lifts the layers of clothing and blankets, and retrieves the other notebook, the one with the black linen cover. The notebook that Irelin never knew about, that always drew Bellara's attention back to it.
This notebook doesn't hold daily entries of artifacts found and magical anomalies fixed. This notebook has different records, dating back six years, and it sometimes goes months between updates. It records oblique references to a mage who Bellara has never met and might never meet, in far-off Minrathous. Each story is more sensational than the last: Dock Town Mage Solves Kidnappings. Lyrium Killer Apprehended. Demon Summonings Cease.
Most of the articles are short on details. Bellara fills in the gaps with her daydreams, describing the blood splattered on the ceiling, the fury on the killer's face as he's found out, Neve Gallus's laugh as she brings him down with one perfect spell, hands him over to the authorities, and collects gold and praise as her rewards. In one months-long stretch with no Neve Gallus news, she went even farther, making up cases that never appeared in any newssheets. Cases that exist only in her own head.
"Maybe I could write to Neve. No, I can't. She must be so busy. But I could," Bellara mutters as she flips the notebook open to an empty page and begins sorting through the latest pile of papers.
The Fade bubble, the wild magic, the new anomalies in Arlathan, that was all interesting enough. The revelation of the risen gods, terrifying. The discovery of the Nadas Dirthalen spun Bellara's mind off in a hundred branching paths down every possibility of fixing it, the knowledge it must contain, the potential—that was thrilling.
It's all overwritten by her shock as she walks into camp and almost bumps into Neve Gallus.
The newssheets never published a picture of her, but the details add up. Robes and a scepter, a prosthetic foot that Bellara forces herself not to stare at, confidence in her bearing and a dry, expressive way of speaking that doesn't waste a word.
Of course, then Rook introduces her, but Bellara's a little proud that she figured it out first. Putting together the clues.
I thought you'd be older, she doesn't say. Stories with Neve on the edges have been cropping up for years and years, but they look almost of an age. If she wasn't already committed to joining Rook's cause, she is now. Bellara and Neve Gallus, Neve and Bellara, working together.
She's been staring too long. Bellara takes Neve's hand and shakes it. "Bellara. I'm a bit of an expert on elven artifacts, and history, and that's important. If you're up against elven gods."
Don't oversell herself. Don't shake her hand for so long. And don't mention the scrapbook.
Neve Gallus gives a polite smile back. "Glad to have you, Bellara. We need all the help we can get."
Bellara rushes to pack.
A few years ago, her tent was sparse from travel. She never bought many things out here, how did it all pile up? The rug, the pillows of several varying shapes and levels of firmness, stacks and stacks of paper and spell components. One and a half shelves of filled journals in her little bookcase, and another box of blank ones. They're expensive, but traders don't enter the unstable parts of Arlathan too often, so she buys a few every time she has the chance. In Arlathan, you never run out of things to take notes about, and Bellara takes a lot of notes. A lot. Her organizational system is second to none, though, with the final notebook in its special cover with the ribbons providing the guide to every other notebook.
She can't take them all in one trip. Her collection of notes will have to be incomplete for a bit, until she can return.
The most important notebook of all is the one with the black linen cover, bulging from notes and newsclippings. Bellara holds it in her hands, stroking the spine, and then nods and wraps it up in a warm winter cloak. The cloak goes at the bottom of her bag, under the spices and the little bundles of magical components, the notebooks for research, and a half dozen power crystals.
Bellara tries not to stumble over her own feet, or her own words, or her own magic. New people are always hard, even when she's on top of her game and confident in what she's doing, and these new people are harder.
Rook never stops moving. She's an elf, shorter than most. She's confident and intense, and she casts spells like pouring water. Enchantments glimmer on all of her gear, and even in quiet moments her fingers twitch over them, checking the seams where spell meets spell.
Harding was an Inquisition operative, and maybe still is, Bellara tried not to ask too many questions, and she knows everyone. Royalty, Wardens, merchants, even the Divine.
And Neve Gallus is Neve Gallus.
None of them ever seem to eat, except for chunks of meat or potato fried or boiled until they're unrecognizable, and they're all burning so much energy in research and worrying, and yesterday she saw Neve drink a cup of coffee that a wisp was hiding in, which doesn't seem healthy.
Repairing the Eluvian was simple. It was well-made long ago, only needing easy adjustments. It was barely at risk of exploding at all. The food, though, that might kill them.
She skips Harding's boiled potato dinner, despite the hunger, and her stomach wakes her up from her two-in-the-morning nap.
It's slim pickings in the pantry. Did Solas eat? Did Solas need to eat? Well, Bellara needs to eat, and it's her and her twenty types of spice and a few old potatoes and onions or hunger for the third day in a row. She should have taken the time to harvest the spinach and leeks from the mystery dirt in Arlathan; she'd risk a curse for a few fresh ingredients. But potatoes and onions are a meal, almost. She lights the stove. She zones out while chopping—there was something else near the eluvian, she could feel it, some sort of artifact that she can't even guess at the purpose of—and dices far too many potatoes. Bellara dices enough onions to match, should have started with them and done the potatoes while they softened, but the hunger and the gods make considerations like that difficult. She tosses the onions into the skillet and turns the flame down.
There's going to be a lot of stirring and waiting. That's some of Bellara's favorite cooking. Her hands stay occupied, and there's no reason she can't let her eyes unfocus a little and think about her day, or the Nadas Dirthalen, or Neve Gallus.
The daydream is just getting to the good part. Bellara's swinging across a canyon on a length of enchanted vines anchored to the Fade, chasing the final piece of evidence that will let Neve close her latest case. She stirs slowly while she daydreams, the pan of onions softening and browning, delicious aroma drifting up into her reveries. She amends the daydream. First she and Neve have a snack together, and then they find the final piece of evidence.
Bellara yelps when the door swings open. She zips her mouth closed, pretending she definitely didn't make a sound, when Neve Gallus steps through. Be normal, be casual, don't make her uncomfortable. Neve's already said that Bellara's hero worship is a bit much, so don't do it again. That's simple. It should be simple.
"Thought I smelled something. Do you always cook when you can't sleep?" Neve says, taking a seat across the counter.
"Oh, sometimes. I do things with my hands when I can't sleep, and usually that means fixing an artifact or updating my notes, but I missed dinner. So I was hungry." Bellara pokes a potato. It's getting soft, and the onions are almost caramelized. Perfectly timed.
"The food around here is an acquired taste," Neve says. "No one had someone who can cook on the list of recruitment priorities. That smells awfully good, though."
"I do what I can! Sometimes more than I can. Like tonight, I started chopping potatoes and I wasn't paying attention, so now there's too much potato. Would you like some?"
"Pre-dawn dinner? Sure, Bel."
Bellara nearly drops the plates at the nickname. Neve raises an eyebrow, but maybe the late hour excuses the clumsiness. She dishes up heaping portions for them both and sits across from Neve at the dark table. It's kind of nice; easier to forget her intimidation when the shadows prevent her from reading and re-reading every change in Neve's expressions.
"I know why I was awake, but why were you awake?" Bellara ventures over her first bites of onion and potato.
"The usual," Neve says. "You know what it's like when a thought moves in and won't let go."
"Try a dozen. Thoughts, I mean. That's how it is for me. Which thought was it?" Bellara says.
Neve's hair is down, flowing over her shoulders as she leans back in the kitchen chair and sighs. "One thought in a dozen forms. How do we even the odds?"
Two gods against four haggard, sleep deprived people who have barely been eating meals. Bellara shakes her head. "If I think about that too hard, I have to tinker with something until I calm down."
Neve's gentle chuckle sends shivers down her spine. Even in the dim light, her eyes gleam as her wry smile curls across her face. "Lucky us. That must make you the most productive mage Thedas has ever seen."
"I try," Bellara says modestly, trying not to stare at Neve's smile, or at her perfectly manicured hand resting on the table. "I mean, I'm sure I'm not the most productive mage. We might be tied. Rook, too."
"Don't sell yourself short, Bel. I've tracked down a few stolen elven artifacts. The last one blew a hole in the wall, then turned the rubble into these tiny glass bubbles, and then summoned a demon. And it wasn't anything powerful. You fixed that eluvian like that." Neve snaps her fingers.
"I suppose. The demon thing still happens sometimes. " The dark must hide her flush, at least she hopes. "Do you think you'll get any more sleep tonight?"
"I might nap. The wisps don't help; they're like little nightlights that try to get into my hair. Any chance you know how to keep them away?" Neve asks.
"I wouldn't know where to start. Maybe they think you're good company. Or maybe they like your clothes. You know, you almost match the little blue ones. Your clothes, I mean. You could try being worse company, but—don't." Bellara bites her tongue and glances up.
Neve looks back like she's pinning Bellara's unspooling sentences to one of her boards. "Are you saying I'm good company? I don't get accused of that often."
"You are," Bellara says. Neve Gallus is oddly easy to talk to. Brilliant and dangerous, but a bit of a mess in ways Bellara intimately recognizes.
Neve rests her chin on her hand, leaning forward so that even in the dark, Bellara can read her eyes. Amused, less tired than she'd expected. "Well, you're one of the better pre-dawn conversation partners I've had."
Bellara takes a bite of her forgotten potatoes and tries not to read anything extra into that sentence. It isn't working. She needs an out. "I should take a plate to Rook. She was looking kind of…"
"Strung out? Clinging to sanity by her nails? One missed meal away from murder?" Neve says.
"I wasn't going to say exactly that," Bellara says, smiling back at Neve. "Stressed. I was going to say stressed."
Bellara drops some food off with Rook, who's also awake, sitting crosslegged on the floor of her room surrounded by half a library of open books. She mumbles a thank you through a mouthful of potatoes and focuses back on her reading, so Bellara goes.
Neve Gallus. Neve. She could give her a nickname to match Bel, but it's hard to nickname Neve. It would have to be longer. Nevey. Nevel. Awful, no, just Neve. Neve, her pre-dawn conversation partner, which means absolutely nothing but two people who don't sleep much and like to talk. Friends, if she's being generous. Bellara and Neve, friends.
Bellara's journal—the secret one with the black linen cover and the newssheet clippings that she keeps hidden under her spare blanket—fills up, and so does the next one. Pages don't last long when, instead of a new article every month or two, she spends whole days adventuring around Thedas with Neve. The handwritten parts aren't made up anymore. Bellara tries to think of anything more exciting than their day-to-day lives, but last week they jointly countered one of Elgar'nan's spells. A god. Her and Neve, they defied a god.
Every time she's alone, she rubs her hands and remembers that spell, how Neve's own magic wrapped around her fingers and sang Bellara's into something greater. She's casted with other mages before, but not like that. Not without planning, just pure instinct, reaching out at each other and providing the missing pieces, Neve's cool control steadying Bellara's intricate patterns.
Oh, it was terrifying, too. Bellara has nightmares about Razikale and screaming halla. She'll have nightmares forever, with such a deep pool of horrors for her brain to draw upon, but she'll also have artifacts to tinker with and brilliant mages to have her midnight conversations with.
Well, maybe not forever. Not the midnight conversations. Not these brilliant mages, and not Neve, who won't always be sharing a kitchen with her and willing to listen to Bellara's pre-dawn ramblings.
So it's going to be one of those nights in her brain. Bellara sighs and digs out a wrench. Two hours later, when the artifact she's fixing is even more broken than before, she stumbles out of her room, squints into the Fade's ever-present light, and goes to find a snack and a pre-dawn conversation.
The snack is easy. Lucanis is brooding, sipping coffee, and making teeny tiny mushroom souffles that melt on the tongue. He hands her a plate full of them and promises to give her the recipe. Bellara supplements them with two bowls of the crisp, sweet soup she made earlier out of leftover cucumbers and the summer's first melons, a few mint leaves sprinkled on top.
The little souffles are good. Could use a tiny bit more something along with the mushrooms and gruyere; she'll improve on it next time she gets to the kitchen first. Some things you just can't make over a campfire, but seasoning is universal.
She knocks on Neve's door. The lights are on, and after a moment she cautiously opens it. "Neve? Are you awake in there?"
"To my regret." Neve sits on her desk with her feet on her chair, staring red-eyed at the wall. "Everything's starting to look a little fuzzy."
"Food might help with that."
Neve bites into a souffle. "Mm. Let me guess; Lucanis's." She tries a spoonful of the soup. "And this one is yours."
"How do you always guess right?" Bellara asks, carefully moving a stack of paper to the side and sitting on the desk next to her.
"Easy. Richer ingredients and a simpler flavor profile. Your food is, I don't know, brighter? Help me out, Bel." She takes another bite.
"I like brighter. It's better than 'too many spices' or 'unconventional'."
Wisps float around them, shedding their soft light on Neve. Bellara stares at Neve's fingers wrapped around the spoon, slender and strong.
"You're too modest. Something on your mind, or just the usual bad sleep?" Neve asks, leaning in closer and tucking a loose strand of Bellara's hair behind her ears.
That's going to be tomorrow's thought that keeps her up at night, but she focuses. There had been an earlier thought. Elgar'nan. Their spell.
"The usual. Well, the usual and a bit more. I keep thinking about Elgar'nan's ritual. The bad parts give me screaming nightmares, but the good parts…" she looks at Neve's hands. "That spell we cast together. What else could we do?"
"There's a thought." Neve sets her plate to the side and turns to face Bellara, bracing herself with one hand on the desk, their knees almost touching. "Want to try something?"
"Yes! I mean, I didn't come prepared with anything specific in mind. Something simple. We could try one of those little wards the Dock Town merchants wear." Bellara turns herself, mirroring Neve. Their knees do touch now, and she doesn't shudder, or tense up, or stare at them. She sits up straighter and holds out her hands, focusing the connection to the Fade's power in her fingertips.
"Those hardly do anything. They're supposed to stop knives and arrows, but I've seen them struggle with thrown pebbles."
"Maybe our version will be better," Bellara says.
Neve shrugs doubtfully but holds one of her own hands upward, power flickering around it in carefully contained little tremors through the air. "You lead."
Bellara lays the foundation, shaping power into a shield. No, more flexible than that, a globe, and then more precise than that, and it can't be there all the time, tracing sigils through the air and bringing her concept to life. Neve doesn't join in until the spell begins taking shape, and then she whispers the things that are missing from Bellara's foundation. Her spell fills the gaps like water flowing between stones, conducting and amplifying.
It tingles.
Bellara giggles as the spellwork ends, and then she nearly tips off the desk. She flexes her hands as summoned power fades, but the spell lingers, wrapping them both in comfort.
"Our version is definitely better," she says, giddy, giggling again.
The watching wisps all gather close, nudging up next to their hands, chiming. Bellara pats one and then looks up.
She nearly bumps her nose against Neve's. "Sorry! Sorry," Bellara says, leaning away. Don't think about how close she is, how their hands brushed in the heat of the spell.
"It's okay, Bel." Neve steadies her with one hand on her shoulder, and if the point of contact also tingles, it's from the spell. Totally the spell. "Good thing we started with something small. That took more out of me than I thought."
"Really? I feel great." Bellara stands up and nearly falls, her knees jelly. "Great and tired."
She shakes out her hands and touches the air around her, stroking the dormant lines of power. These could stop a knife or an arrow. Maybe something bigger. Unanchored as it is, the spell will fade in a few days, but what a spell.
Bellara stumbles to Neve's door. She's too giddy, she'll say something she regrets if she doesn't leave. How pretty Neve's hair is. How often she's thought about touching Neve's collarbones. How she'd like to cast more spells like that, sitting even closer, holding hands. That would help the spellwork. Holding hands, that is, to feel the power ebbing and flowing under Neve's skin. The hands are where the magic touches the world, at least for Bellara.
She's been staring at the door for a minute, forgetting how to open it. Doorknob, twist. Door, open.
"You alright, Bel? Let me walk you back," Neve says.
"No, no, I'm fine. You don't need to trouble yourself. I'm just next door."
"There's a lot of Fade between here and next door." Neve steps up beside her and wraps her arm around Bellara's shoulder.
Bellara stops swaying, so she must have been swaying before, so Neve has a point. A terrifying point, and more shudders spread from every point where they're touching. Bellara bites her lip to keep herself from saying anything about anything.
In the privacy of her own room, she touches her shoulder where Neve's hand rested, pressing the memory deeper into her flesh, and she gets out her journal.
The third Neve journal turns into a research journal, charting spell reactions, successes and failures, which ones benefited from joint casting and which took more energy than they were worth. Other little details go in the margins, like how Neve wore her hair and how it felt when their hands brushed, which snacks she ate most of, how the wisps reacted, the strength of the tingles.
Neve knocks on her door as Bellara's updating the recipe book she trades back and forth with Lucanis, scribbling notes and substitutions between lines.
"Hey, Bel, did you take notes on that spell from the other day? The electrified ice one." Neve sits down comfortably on a pillow, watching her write.
"Of course I did! You can never have too many notes. They're in the black journal over near the top of the pile." She nods to the journal corner, and then realizes her mistake. "Wait. I'll look it up, my organizational system is a little hard to parse, it'll be faster."
Neve already has the journal open. "What are you talking about? This is organized chronologically." She flips to the most recent entry.
Bellara closes her eyes. The most recent entry, the one with the electrified ice spell they'd jointly cast over a crowd of darkspawn, has a poem in the margin. It's a first attempt, Bellara's never dabbled in poetry before, but the metaphor called for it. Elements mingling, combining, becoming something greater than their parts, like the full-body shock of Neve's hand brushing hair away from her face and steadying her as she stumbled from overexertion. Like them, Neve and Bellara, names that sound perfectly right with an and between them. Fighting darkspawn. Holding hands.
"You should really just let me find it," she says, but it must already be too late. Neve's footsteps cross the room toward her, carrying her doom with them.
She jumps as Neve gives a breathless laugh just beside her ear. "Our names do sound good with an and between them."
"You weren't supposed to see that," Bellara says faintly.
Neve brushes an escaped bit of hair away from her forehead and Bellara's eyes fly open in surprise. Her mouth's serious, but her eyes are gentle, and she doesn't take her hand away from Bellara's cheek.
"You're not. Mad?" Bellara says.
Neve shakes her head. "Not mad, no. But I'm no good at this, Bel. Feelings."
"If neither of us are good at them, maybe it balances it out."
Neve's breath shivers on Bellara's cheek as she chuckles. "You think so?"
"Not really. Maybe. We can't spend life just doing the things we're good at." Bellara brushes her fingers over Neve's neck like she never has before, willing her to stay. She closes her eyes again.
"Maybe you're right."
Neve's lips just touch Bellara's. It shouldn't be enough to be noteworthy, not enough contact, not for long enough, but it is. A shiver travels down her spine and spreads through the rest of her, a little gasp spills from her lips. It's worth a journal entry, ten journal entries, recounting it from every angle.
Bellara rests her hand on Neve's jaw and does it again. Firmer, even better. Again, her lips moving as she finds the rhythm and samples the stale coffee on Neve's tongue.
That's more than a tingle. That's an earthquake, drawing a groan from Bellara's throat. She slows down, paying attention to the amount of pressure that makes Neve gasp, the angles that make her hands stutter on Bellara's waist.
Bellara pulls away, gasping, feeling around for a fresh journal. No, wait, that's weird. Neve isn't an experiment, she's Neve.
"Are you going to write this down?" Neve says. Grinning, her perfect hair a mess, lipstick smudged.
"I thought about it, but then I thought that would be weird, so I'm not," Bellara says.
"Hey, I wouldn't be here if I didn't like your flavor of weird. Go on."
Bellara snatches up a blank journal and writes today's date. Kissed Neve Gallus. She likes it when I run my teeth over her lower lip.
"Just don't show this one to anyone else," Neve teases.
"I would never." Bellara sits back next to Neve, their thighs firmly touching, and kisses her again.