This, she feels in her chest. A sharp thing, almost a knife of feeling in reaction to what he describes.
It is not a surprise, really. Only the details of it, not the outcome. Of course he did this. Of course he made himself into a shield.
Her fingers tighten around his elbow.
"You're very brave," she murmurs, more noting it herself than telling him what he must already know. Was he ever frightened, or did it come easy to him? "I wanted to do that, when I was very young. But the Enchanters never thought a healer should be that close to anything that might keep them from their duty."
And it had always been very clear to her what her duty was, even before the Annulment, when a battle was a far off fantasy, improbable and unlikely.
Maybe he senses something in her murmur, his other hand coming to lay over hers as they walk together. Does not dispute this assessment of his bravery—because he supposes that's so—but does set about thinking of what a more truthful framing of this information might be.
He isn't quick to get there, listening instead. "There's wisdom to that," he offers, mildly. "But there's a wisdom to knowing how to defend yourself, if you must."
It's not as though Marcus has forgotten the things she's been through, and so if his comment grazes against those recollections, it's only because there is only so much two mages speaking can do to step around the realities of their own history.
So he adds, "It might have been brave, but it was also satisfying. Standing in place, you know. There were plenty of times prior to that when swinging my staff at someone could only be a fond fantasy."
A tightening, there and gone in the span of a breath, in her face.
Yes, it would have been better if she'd been more adept at defending. Not just herself, but the others. Maybe she would not have been alone in her escape if she had been more skilled.
She has thought this before. Felt some quiet, guilty bitterness for it, and long since let it go.
All her teachers, they had taught her as best as they knew how. Who could have foreseen what had come to them?
"It doesn't diminish it," she tells him. "I understand some of what it must have been like, to be able to push back."
The southern Circles were cruel. She has had all the ways of their cruelty explained to her, demonstrated time and again when they speak together and she sees all the ways her life was different from theirs.
is the kind of agreement that comes with recognising a close call. There was a wave of newly-freed southern mages who were immediately drunk on new found power, and Marcus cannot say he didn't sympathise. Didn't feel its potential edge, the way so much anger suddenly given outlet could twist around. His thumb smooths over her knuckles.
Feeling her tension, in some small way, the distant shapes of things unsaid. He knows her well enough (and understands it well enough) to guess at their dimensions, a little.
"Better we never needed to learn," he offers, after some steps. "But you're good at it. Quick, strong. Did you come by your lightning, at Dairsmuid?"
She has spoken of this on the crystals, the experience softened down to soothe rather than convey the whole of the experience. It would frighten people, she knows, if she gave voice to what it felt like in truth to wrench lightening down from the sky. Bending an element to her will, and sending it onward to strike down those who would do her and her people harm.
"I was very small," she tells him. "I would make sparks dance on my hands, they said. I almost remember it."
But it's the kind of memory that is cobbled together from retellings, she thinks. It is only partly hers.
"I had to wrestle with it, as I grew. It didn't come as easily as the rest."
Whether Marcus likes it or not, he's sure, is far from the point. And what that means, to like it, to know some adrenalised thrill at the sound of it, crackling energy and bright white flash, the sort of primal danger that should make the animal in him, as it should in anyone, flinch back, but knowing so well he needn't—well, he wouldn't know where to begin in articulating it, strolling with her.
So, I like it will have to do, near-muttered and a little self-deprecating for how unhelpful a comment it is. It is a complicated thing, wielding the kinds of magic that have justified their histories. And present. Perhaps future.
"I had some difficulties when I was young, as well. I don't know that I properly mastered anything until I was grown."
Digging up memories from the days prior to the Circle feels, likewise, a little like piecing together a story he was more told and otherwise only half-remembered.
"I produced some cinders in a fight with a sibling, I'm told, but to the best of my knowledge, no one was hurt. It wasn't long after that that I was brought to the Circle, which I didn't take to very well. It was a place that demanded obedience, full of other children I had no desire to be friends with, and I had a growing instinct for magic that outstripped my skill in controlling how I felt."
This is all said plainly. He has, before, been frustrated with mages who speak of their experiences of Circles in vaguer terms, like I was a poor student, as though it were all so normal. She is curious, and he doesn't mind sketching that picture to some small extent.
Not for the first time, she wishes he had grown up in Rivain.
But it is a hard thing to wish for truly, properly. Because what would have become of him had he been raised in Rivain? Would he have been at the tower? Would he have been cut down like so many others?
"Did you love it?"
Drawing him to a halt, so she can look up into his face. Dulcinea huffs, dancing a finnicky little side-step but coming obliging to a stop before the reins pull taut.
She stops him, and asks him so earnestly. Marcus feels no compulsion to lie, but can imagine doing so. Yes, he loves his magic, and always has.
Instead, he says, "We weren't taught to," even, quiet. "It was in equal measures a thing to be afraid of, like a sickness, or a responsibility we never asked for, that we weren't permitted to indulge." His hand comes up, settles fingers gentle at her neck, a tender touch as if to say that he is well, how long ago it all was. "But I think I made allies with it despite everything, even if I couldn't make it my friend."
It never felt like the enemy, magic, no more than unbridled rage could be beaten back. Tamed, over time, honed, and his.
That pang in his chest makes the warmth of fingers at her neck into something incongruous. Even while they speak of something so weighted, she feels the way heat prickles on her skin in response to this soft, reassuring touch.
"I loved it, as long as I can remember."
What was there to fear? No one had ever taught her to flinch from what she could do, even when her emotions outstripped her self-control. (She had been an even-tempered child, not given to temper. That had helped.) She had grown into it. She had always cherished the way magic felt, cracking sparks in the palm of her hand.
"I'm sorry it wasn't that way for you."
Yes, he is well. She understands that he is not grieving. But she wishes—
Well, it is a wish she has for all the mages she knows. He is no exception.
It can't be grief all the time, paralysing force as it is. In another world, he'd sat on the banks of a river and tried to explain it to a rifter, which is a unique absurdity, but it felt important to explain why he'd been weeping at the time, and isn't certain he'd truly honed in on it, too quick to reach for anger. It isn't all the time for the injustices done, but for the absence of what could have been theirs. What a revelation it had been, to meet Derrica.
And it hurts, sometimes, to hear of Derrica's experience, and hurts, always, to remember how it had been stolen from her too. She should have grown more into it. She's still so young, in the scheme of things, and nearly a child still when it was all destroyed. A happy childhood doesn't mean that grave injustice wasn't done to her too.
But she always loved her magic. That, the Chantry couldn't take.
The hand at her throat sweeps a gentle touch of the pad of his thumb against her jaw and cheek for her apology, accepting it.
"I became better with it, later," he says, "in part because I realised so many of those other children I'd hated felt as I did. Children that would become men and women in a rebellion, but it was enough at the time to have them as brothers and sisters."
He goes to take her hand, to pull her back into walking with him.
"I'd have wanted something different for us all, but we didn't have nothing."
They are alone, moving through the hilly stretch of land here. There is no one to see the way he takes her hand. It is for her, and the moment of uncertainty is only out of long-held habit.
The points of time in which she has entertained someone simply keeping hold of her hand on a long walk are few and far between. It takes her a moment to link her fingers through his, as they wind their way back the way they came.
"Do you love it now? Or is it still something like what you are describing?"
An uncertainty.
Power that flows through them, infuses them, comes forth into the shapes they will it to manifest their hopes as much as their fears.
Marcus doesn't answer for a few moments. He doesn't want to lie to her to make everything feel neat or duck her sympathy; he doesn't want to make much of something that isn't, an amount of pride that would like to separate himself out from the other southerner mages who regard their own magic with distaste, fear, resentment.
"I don't now if it's love," he says, finally. "But there're moments. Like."
And another pause, searching around for the rest of that sentence. Strange to think how much he has spoken to mages of the Circles, the Chantry, of war and brotherhood and freedom, and so relatively little of magic itself. That hint of instinctive reluctance against speaking to its most dangerous aspects.
"Learning how to call fire and rock from the ground. That wasn't taught to me. We learned to light candles instead, and Chantry verses, or making feathers fall upwards. But then we were out, and it was like there was so much more to me. That I could rend the earth apart and make it do what I wanted. It was everything I dreamed."
It's the sort of talk that ordinary folk fear to hear from a mage, he knows. But none of those are around.
All at once, she is aware of wanting him. Of wishing to have this conversation tucked somewhere more intimate, where she might tuck fingers under the linen at his throat, balance across his lap.
It feels incongruous still; this newfound feeling spreading warm across her skin as they broach familiar topics.
When she is quiet, it is as much to observe the way that sensation settles, finds space within her body, as it is about turning over his answer. Finding a mirror to it in her own experience.
"I wish," she says, and stops.
Not because she is going to say something that would terrify someone ordinary to overhear.
"I wish that you'd grown up the way I did. Knowing all parts of yourself always."
It grazes against something tender, those words. A little painful, beneath layers of bone and muscle and a habit for stoicism. He still has her hand, so he can express something through the squeeze of his around and tangled through her fingers.
Him too, the gesture says.
"I intend to make up for lost time," could come out a little dry, defensive humour in the for of self-awareness, a subtle joke about how much he intends to use his magic in the present and near future, potentially not only in service of defeating Corypheus. It is a little too earnest for that, instead.
It would be pleasing to know that the things he says make her want him. It's more than enough to find what he expected, which is her understanding.
No, they aren't dawdling. There are tracks directed into isolation, and their quarry is likely not difficult to mark even at a distance. Demons and shades aren't subtle.
Still, she is aware enough of their function here to think twice about pulling him to a stop. He would oblige her, she thinks. Marcus had hesitated not at all in that room. Even with so little to compare it against, Derrica has the sense that if she did pull him down to her, he would come willingly.
"I'll be pleased to see you do so."
Something she can offer without any trepidation, even though the flicker of a dream in which she had been given a full understanding of what his magic could do living as a shadow in the back of her mind.
She is not afraid of him.
"Look," follows on the heels of that, a sweep of her fingers at the tracks before them. "I think it's close by."
The grass is still smoldering in front of them, path curving into the trees. No blood to signal further victims, a minor boon.
It brings about a subtle change in disposition, where inner reflection is abandoned for outward focus, snagging attention across scorch marks and then up towards the tree line. Nods, at that, and then where their hands are joined, sweeps his thumb across her knuckles before releasing her, reaching back to gather the lead of his horse.
Kevin, behind him, whickers gently, and it's only a second longer to catch the scent of burning plantlife.
"We can tie these two here," Marcus suggests. Then, something like concession, "I'll keep my distance if it's something we can both pin down." Rather than a fear demon and its ability to crackle through the Fade.
Lifting a hand to his arm, she squeezes lightly in acknowledgement.
But it prompts a concession from her as well: "It might take more than what I'm capable of."
All their training has improved her in many respects, she knows. She is not helpless.
But the ground is scorched and singed. Derrica has no ice at all in her magic, and what she has begun to develop trends away from the elemental in many respects. If they are trailing after a rage demon, they will have to do some evaluating between them as to how they might bring it down.
"I can cage it," she suggests, as she passes the reins to him so he might tether her mount alongside Kevin. "Is there something here you could throw at it?"
The humour in a simple, blunt answer (not unlike the material being offered) is not deliberate, but recognised on a delay, a small twinge to his expression as Marcus glances to her from where he's tying the leads to the low sling of a sturdy branch. "I can slow it first," he adds. "Then you cage it, and then I'll bludgeon it."
The horses will have enough room to themselves, moss and grass to nibble at—and Kevin already ducking his head in to investigate, temporarily forgetting that threatening smell of demon and fire. Doesn't acknowledge, either, the passing pat to his shoulder.
A splinter of humor finds its way to her expression, breaking some of the seriousness in the set of her jaw. It lingers, even as he outlines the plan.
A distance, he'd said. If they could manage it at a distance, he need not put himself within reach of fire and molten lava.
"You make it sound very simple."
Derrica would certainly like it to be.
Catching hold of his hand, she laces her fingers through his to stall further movement. Derrica lays her free hand over his chest, pressing a spill of magic to him. A cool blue barrier spreads outwards, clinging to the folds of his coat, liming his shoulders and arms, sparking down his hips. Protection, the only certain shield she can afford him.
There's a small scrape of sound from him at her casting, somewhere between surprise and amusement, both minor. His hand squeezes hers, and there's a glimmer of white-blue light, similar in the way it settles over her, motes of it snagging in her hair, in the weave of her clothing, ready to spring away like cold embers if she's struck.
"We can try to keep it that way."
And he has no desire to get in range of fire and lava. Having a good handle over those elements in his own casting grants him exactly no immunity at all from its worst effects up close.
Keeping their hands in a loose tangle when he goes to start them off, he adds anyway, "I may try to draw its fire if it has any capability for distance. It won't be as sacrificial as it looks, so keep your focus on caging it."
It is the best they can do, she knows. There is nothing for the flicker of objection that sparks in her; she doesn't give voice to it.
Yes, she mislikes the idea of Marcus courting injury, and the prospect of him increasing the likelihood of it by making a target of himself.
But they are only two. They have a job to complete.
"I don't like it," is not an objection, not really. Just a lodging of dismay at the prospect, marked by her thumb swiping along his as she contemplates the spurt and flare of heat and lava consuming the copse of trees ahead of them. As one sapling falls, the outline of the demon grows clearer. It's movements are erratic, but no less threatening for it.
"Let's do it quickly," she acquiesces, hefting her stave in her opposite hand. Ready, even if she is reluctant still to begin in earnest. The heavy scent of ozone gathers in the air around them, power coalescing in preparation.
The smell of fire is quick to suffuse this patch of forest, but it takes barely a scrap of thought for Marcus to hold smoke at bay of them both as he brings his staff to bear, moving off from Derrica's position. It all does happen quickly as desired, and roughly to the sketch of the plan they'd made: stone cracks beneath the rippling form of the rage demon, turning lava into cracked obsidian as magic pulses up from beneath the earth to merge creature to ground.
Beneath the crack and snap of lightning that comes next, he sends jagged, gracelessly flung rock, flames trailing off the edges, gleaming with Fade green from whence it was summoned. There is but one instance of a jet of fire sent his way, and where it strikes, he only winces, Derrica's defenses flaring bright along with the radial deflection of fire from his body, instinctive magic of his own.
No burns, no scratches, only some initial shock of weariness cladding his bones by the time the last strike of bludgeoning stone disassembles the demon's form, leaving it an acidic pool of black ichor and scattered flame and lava.
Satisfying. If there is only a brief moment of checking each other over before Marcus is hauling himself up into Kevin's saddle, now untethered, it's only because he would rather they both be elsewhere.
Elsewhere being a small inn, a generous application of the identifier to the annex above the local tavern. The slant of the ceiling is a sort of inconvenience, as is the close quarters housed in that space beneath rooftop and above taproom, but it offers a degree more comfort than the hayloft in the stable. They're left with a basin and pitcher of cool water, a stack of clean cloths, the promise of dinner if they wish it. The bed has clean linen. Perhaps Marcus may graze his head on the ceiling, but Riftwatch has spent nights in worse accomodations.
The murmur of conversation drifts up to them, muted down to an indistinct rise and fall of sound as Derrica's fingers dip back beneath the strap and buckle of Marcus' armor.
"We'll need to send a report along to the Commander," she is saying, brow pinched into concentration. "Let him know that we've swept the valley and managed the danger."
He is tired, she knows. And she is too, but where Marcus' work is long finished now, hers isn't quite done.
"Hand me that cloth, please," is a murmured aside, as her thumb meets the sweat-warmth of his his skin.
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no subject
It is not a surprise, really. Only the details of it, not the outcome. Of course he did this. Of course he made himself into a shield.
Her fingers tighten around his elbow.
"You're very brave," she murmurs, more noting it herself than telling him what he must already know. Was he ever frightened, or did it come easy to him? "I wanted to do that, when I was very young. But the Enchanters never thought a healer should be that close to anything that might keep them from their duty."
And it had always been very clear to her what her duty was, even before the Annulment, when a battle was a far off fantasy, improbable and unlikely.
no subject
He isn't quick to get there, listening instead. "There's wisdom to that," he offers, mildly. "But there's a wisdom to knowing how to defend yourself, if you must."
It's not as though Marcus has forgotten the things she's been through, and so if his comment grazes against those recollections, it's only because there is only so much two mages speaking can do to step around the realities of their own history.
So he adds, "It might have been brave, but it was also satisfying. Standing in place, you know. There were plenty of times prior to that when swinging my staff at someone could only be a fond fantasy."
no subject
Yes, it would have been better if she'd been more adept at defending. Not just herself, but the others. Maybe she would not have been alone in her escape if she had been more skilled.
She has thought this before. Felt some quiet, guilty bitterness for it, and long since let it go.
All her teachers, they had taught her as best as they knew how. Who could have foreseen what had come to them?
"It doesn't diminish it," she tells him. "I understand some of what it must have been like, to be able to push back."
The southern Circles were cruel. She has had all the ways of their cruelty explained to her, demonstrated time and again when they speak together and she sees all the ways her life was different from theirs.
"And you didn't lose yourself in doing so."
no subject
is the kind of agreement that comes with recognising a close call. There was a wave of newly-freed southern mages who were immediately drunk on new found power, and Marcus cannot say he didn't sympathise. Didn't feel its potential edge, the way so much anger suddenly given outlet could twist around. His thumb smooths over her knuckles.
Feeling her tension, in some small way, the distant shapes of things unsaid. He knows her well enough (and understands it well enough) to guess at their dimensions, a little.
"Better we never needed to learn," he offers, after some steps. "But you're good at it. Quick, strong. Did you come by your lightning, at Dairsmuid?"
no subject
She has spoken of this on the crystals, the experience softened down to soothe rather than convey the whole of the experience. It would frighten people, she knows, if she gave voice to what it felt like in truth to wrench lightening down from the sky. Bending an element to her will, and sending it onward to strike down those who would do her and her people harm.
"I was very small," she tells him. "I would make sparks dance on my hands, they said. I almost remember it."
But it's the kind of memory that is cobbled together from retellings, she thinks. It is only partly hers.
"I had to wrestle with it, as I grew. It didn't come as easily as the rest."
no subject
Whether Marcus likes it or not, he's sure, is far from the point. And what that means, to like it, to know some adrenalised thrill at the sound of it, crackling energy and bright white flash, the sort of primal danger that should make the animal in him, as it should in anyone, flinch back, but knowing so well he needn't—well, he wouldn't know where to begin in articulating it, strolling with her.
So, I like it will have to do, near-muttered and a little self-deprecating for how unhelpful a comment it is. It is a complicated thing, wielding the kinds of magic that have justified their histories. And present. Perhaps future.
"I had some difficulties when I was young, as well. I don't know that I properly mastered anything until I was grown."
no subject
How different that must have been, to be taken into a Circle in southern Thedas.
Derrica doesn't recall it as a terrible thing. But then, she was always allowed to walk out into the world when she pleased.
no subject
Digging up memories from the days prior to the Circle feels, likewise, a little like piecing together a story he was more told and otherwise only half-remembered.
"I produced some cinders in a fight with a sibling, I'm told, but to the best of my knowledge, no one was hurt. It wasn't long after that that I was brought to the Circle, which I didn't take to very well. It was a place that demanded obedience, full of other children I had no desire to be friends with, and I had a growing instinct for magic that outstripped my skill in controlling how I felt."
This is all said plainly. He has, before, been frustrated with mages who speak of their experiences of Circles in vaguer terms, like I was a poor student, as though it were all so normal. She is curious, and he doesn't mind sketching that picture to some small extent.
no subject
But it is a hard thing to wish for truly, properly. Because what would have become of him had he been raised in Rivain? Would he have been at the tower? Would he have been cut down like so many others?
"Did you love it?"
Drawing him to a halt, so she can look up into his face. Dulcinea huffs, dancing a finnicky little side-step but coming obliging to a stop before the reins pull taut.
no subject
Instead, he says, "We weren't taught to," even, quiet. "It was in equal measures a thing to be afraid of, like a sickness, or a responsibility we never asked for, that we weren't permitted to indulge." His hand comes up, settles fingers gentle at her neck, a tender touch as if to say that he is well, how long ago it all was. "But I think I made allies with it despite everything, even if I couldn't make it my friend."
It never felt like the enemy, magic, no more than unbridled rage could be beaten back. Tamed, over time, honed, and his.
"How was it, for you?"
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That pang in his chest makes the warmth of fingers at her neck into something incongruous. Even while they speak of something so weighted, she feels the way heat prickles on her skin in response to this soft, reassuring touch.
"I loved it, as long as I can remember."
What was there to fear? No one had ever taught her to flinch from what she could do, even when her emotions outstripped her self-control. (She had been an even-tempered child, not given to temper. That had helped.) She had grown into it. She had always cherished the way magic felt, cracking sparks in the palm of her hand.
"I'm sorry it wasn't that way for you."
Yes, he is well. She understands that he is not grieving. But she wishes—
Well, it is a wish she has for all the mages she knows. He is no exception.
no subject
It can't be grief all the time, paralysing force as it is. In another world, he'd sat on the banks of a river and tried to explain it to a rifter, which is a unique absurdity, but it felt important to explain why he'd been weeping at the time, and isn't certain he'd truly honed in on it, too quick to reach for anger. It isn't all the time for the injustices done, but for the absence of what could have been theirs. What a revelation it had been, to meet Derrica.
And it hurts, sometimes, to hear of Derrica's experience, and hurts, always, to remember how it had been stolen from her too. She should have grown more into it. She's still so young, in the scheme of things, and nearly a child still when it was all destroyed. A happy childhood doesn't mean that grave injustice wasn't done to her too.
But she always loved her magic. That, the Chantry couldn't take.
The hand at her throat sweeps a gentle touch of the pad of his thumb against her jaw and cheek for her apology, accepting it.
"I became better with it, later," he says, "in part because I realised so many of those other children I'd hated felt as I did. Children that would become men and women in a rebellion, but it was enough at the time to have them as brothers and sisters."
He goes to take her hand, to pull her back into walking with him.
"I'd have wanted something different for us all, but we didn't have nothing."
no subject
The points of time in which she has entertained someone simply keeping hold of her hand on a long walk are few and far between. It takes her a moment to link her fingers through his, as they wind their way back the way they came.
"Do you love it now? Or is it still something like what you are describing?"
An uncertainty.
Power that flows through them, infuses them, comes forth into the shapes they will it to manifest their hopes as much as their fears.
Does Marcus love it now?
no subject
"I don't now if it's love," he says, finally. "But there're moments. Like."
And another pause, searching around for the rest of that sentence. Strange to think how much he has spoken to mages of the Circles, the Chantry, of war and brotherhood and freedom, and so relatively little of magic itself. That hint of instinctive reluctance against speaking to its most dangerous aspects.
"Learning how to call fire and rock from the ground. That wasn't taught to me. We learned to light candles instead, and Chantry verses, or making feathers fall upwards. But then we were out, and it was like there was so much more to me. That I could rend the earth apart and make it do what I wanted. It was everything I dreamed."
It's the sort of talk that ordinary folk fear to hear from a mage, he knows. But none of those are around.
no subject
It feels incongruous still; this newfound feeling spreading warm across her skin as they broach familiar topics.
When she is quiet, it is as much to observe the way that sensation settles, finds space within her body, as it is about turning over his answer. Finding a mirror to it in her own experience.
"I wish," she says, and stops.
Not because she is going to say something that would terrify someone ordinary to overhear.
"I wish that you'd grown up the way I did. Knowing all parts of yourself always."
no subject
Him too, the gesture says.
"I intend to make up for lost time," could come out a little dry, defensive humour in the for of self-awareness, a subtle joke about how much he intends to use his magic in the present and near future, potentially not only in service of defeating Corypheus. It is a little too earnest for that, instead.
It would be pleasing to know that the things he says make her want him. It's more than enough to find what he expected, which is her understanding.
no subject
No, they aren't dawdling. There are tracks directed into isolation, and their quarry is likely not difficult to mark even at a distance. Demons and shades aren't subtle.
Still, she is aware enough of their function here to think twice about pulling him to a stop. He would oblige her, she thinks. Marcus had hesitated not at all in that room. Even with so little to compare it against, Derrica has the sense that if she did pull him down to her, he would come willingly.
"I'll be pleased to see you do so."
Something she can offer without any trepidation, even though the flicker of a dream in which she had been given a full understanding of what his magic could do living as a shadow in the back of her mind.
She is not afraid of him.
"Look," follows on the heels of that, a sweep of her fingers at the tracks before them. "I think it's close by."
The grass is still smoldering in front of them, path curving into the trees. No blood to signal further victims, a minor boon.
no subject
Kevin, behind him, whickers gently, and it's only a second longer to catch the scent of burning plantlife.
"We can tie these two here," Marcus suggests. Then, something like concession, "I'll keep my distance if it's something we can both pin down." Rather than a fear demon and its ability to crackle through the Fade.
slides under your doorstep
But it prompts a concession from her as well: "It might take more than what I'm capable of."
All their training has improved her in many respects, she knows. She is not helpless.
But the ground is scorched and singed. Derrica has no ice at all in her magic, and what she has begun to develop trends away from the elemental in many respects. If they are trailing after a rage demon, they will have to do some evaluating between them as to how they might bring it down.
"I can cage it," she suggests, as she passes the reins to him so he might tether her mount alongside Kevin. "Is there something here you could throw at it?"
no subject
The humour in a simple, blunt answer (not unlike the material being offered) is not deliberate, but recognised on a delay, a small twinge to his expression as Marcus glances to her from where he's tying the leads to the low sling of a sturdy branch. "I can slow it first," he adds. "Then you cage it, and then I'll bludgeon it."
The horses will have enough room to themselves, moss and grass to nibble at—and Kevin already ducking his head in to investigate, temporarily forgetting that threatening smell of demon and fire. Doesn't acknowledge, either, the passing pat to his shoulder.
no subject
A distance, he'd said. If they could manage it at a distance, he need not put himself within reach of fire and molten lava.
"You make it sound very simple."
Derrica would certainly like it to be.
Catching hold of his hand, she laces her fingers through his to stall further movement. Derrica lays her free hand over his chest, pressing a spill of magic to him. A cool blue barrier spreads outwards, clinging to the folds of his coat, liming his shoulders and arms, sparking down his hips. Protection, the only certain shield she can afford him.
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"We can try to keep it that way."
And he has no desire to get in range of fire and lava. Having a good handle over those elements in his own casting grants him exactly no immunity at all from its worst effects up close.
Keeping their hands in a loose tangle when he goes to start them off, he adds anyway, "I may try to draw its fire if it has any capability for distance. It won't be as sacrificial as it looks, so keep your focus on caging it."
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It is the best they can do, she knows. There is nothing for the flicker of objection that sparks in her; she doesn't give voice to it.
Yes, she mislikes the idea of Marcus courting injury, and the prospect of him increasing the likelihood of it by making a target of himself.
But they are only two. They have a job to complete.
"I don't like it," is not an objection, not really. Just a lodging of dismay at the prospect, marked by her thumb swiping along his as she contemplates the spurt and flare of heat and lava consuming the copse of trees ahead of them. As one sapling falls, the outline of the demon grows clearer. It's movements are erratic, but no less threatening for it.
"Let's do it quickly," she acquiesces, hefting her stave in her opposite hand. Ready, even if she is reluctant still to begin in earnest. The heavy scent of ozone gathers in the air around them, power coalescing in preparation.
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Beneath the crack and snap of lightning that comes next, he sends jagged, gracelessly flung rock, flames trailing off the edges, gleaming with Fade green from whence it was summoned. There is but one instance of a jet of fire sent his way, and where it strikes, he only winces, Derrica's defenses flaring bright along with the radial deflection of fire from his body, instinctive magic of his own.
No burns, no scratches, only some initial shock of weariness cladding his bones by the time the last strike of bludgeoning stone disassembles the demon's form, leaving it an acidic pool of black ichor and scattered flame and lava.
Satisfying. If there is only a brief moment of checking each other over before Marcus is hauling himself up into Kevin's saddle, now untethered, it's only because he would rather they both be elsewhere.
hits fast travel button
The murmur of conversation drifts up to them, muted down to an indistinct rise and fall of sound as Derrica's fingers dip back beneath the strap and buckle of Marcus' armor.
"We'll need to send a report along to the Commander," she is saying, brow pinched into concentration. "Let him know that we've swept the valley and managed the danger."
He is tired, she knows. And she is too, but where Marcus' work is long finished now, hers isn't quite done.
"Hand me that cloth, please," is a murmured aside, as her thumb meets the sweat-warmth of his his skin.
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