Strictly speaking, there are no Inferni in Thedas.
No quick and easy way to summon someone to warm his bath, and only a few scant hours in the evenings where the communal ones are kept hot for Riftwatch personnel, or sometimes harried servants carry pails up and down those terrible stairs for a private room. Kirigan — he’d called himself Kirigan here once more, falling back on a lie and a false name as easily as breathing — didn’t have the pull to ask the servants for that favour, and when he’d tried, they just levelled a blank stare at him. You can use the communal baths, ser, with the rest of them.
So. Public it is. Delicately levering himself into the hot baths, sinking into the water with a sigh, letting the heat settle into still-healing muscles and ugly scarring; the deep rents are everywhere across his bare skin, as if some great beast had torn into him like tissue-paper. (They had.) He sinks low enough into the water that at least he’s half-decent, pale arms slung over the edge of the pool, his head tipped back, unruly black hair slicked wet to his head.
Aleksander exhales, but he doesn’t close his eyes. He doesn’t like letting his guard down.
Which means he sees her as she enters, a towel wrapped around her body. He expects a lightning jolt at the sight of her, perhaps, some hook in his sternum, the tether yanking the connection between them taut —
but it’s gone, there’s nothing, whatever warped his magic in the rift also having changed the nature of their connection. His brow creases. The first expression on his face, when Alina Starkov sees the Darkling again, is not seething resentment, but this: sheer confusion.
communal baths wildcard babyyy
No quick and easy way to summon someone to warm his bath, and only a few scant hours in the evenings where the communal ones are kept hot for Riftwatch personnel, or sometimes harried servants carry pails up and down those terrible stairs for a private room. Kirigan — he’d called himself Kirigan here once more, falling back on a lie and a false name as easily as breathing — didn’t have the pull to ask the servants for that favour, and when he’d tried, they just levelled a blank stare at him. You can use the communal baths, ser, with the rest of them.
So. Public it is. Delicately levering himself into the hot baths, sinking into the water with a sigh, letting the heat settle into still-healing muscles and ugly scarring; the deep rents are everywhere across his bare skin, as if some great beast had torn into him like tissue-paper. (They had.) He sinks low enough into the water that at least he’s half-decent, pale arms slung over the edge of the pool, his head tipped back, unruly black hair slicked wet to his head.
Aleksander exhales, but he doesn’t close his eyes. He doesn’t like letting his guard down.
Which means he sees her as she enters, a towel wrapped around her body. He expects a lightning jolt at the sight of her, perhaps, some hook in his sternum, the tether yanking the connection between them taut —
but it’s gone, there’s nothing, whatever warped his magic in the rift also having changed the nature of their connection. His brow creases. The first expression on his face, when Alina Starkov sees the Darkling again, is not seething resentment, but this: sheer confusion.