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[QueenCrow]

Chapter One - Knife Ear

 

 

On fair days, the courtyard is a place of warmth, bright shrieks and the laughter of children playing.  It is the unforgettable scent of fresh green grass and the loam that will offer forth bounteous Fereldan harvest.  But tonight it is raining.  The sky pours the promise of a green tomorrow, but that must grow from the muck that slickens with each passing hour of rain.  All is treacherous footing here.  Tonight is a chill night, the moon blanketed from sight by black storm clouds.  The air is so saturated that those of less sturdy constitution feel the sense of drowning with each breath, and the wetness wafts the scent of mud mixed with the endless gallons of fermenting horse ****** drained out of Dennet’s herd.  There is no one else out – only her.

 

She stands in the rain bearing an expression that is as somber and lightless as the weather.  She is soaked to her skin, shivering and transfixed.  Unmoving.  Her liquid jewel eyes staring.  There in the place where the training yard was once, a statue has been erected during her absence.  It is the Herald of Andraste carved of marble that no doubt gleams on a fairer days.  Tonight, on the first night she beholds the likeness, the Inquisitor is darkened to a lifeless charcoal grey with rainwater, grotesquely slimed with a shine that reflects the only nearby light – torches under the eaves near the doors of the Herald’s Rest and the armory.  And though when the statue was raised it was complete, since its raising, someone has come in the night and broken off both of the once-long ears at their midway points.  It’s the break that has her hypnotized; she stands gawking at the alteration to her image when anyone else would have sense to go in out of the rain.  She is, herself, like the statue – stone still -  as the light behind her from the door of the Herald’s rest flutters and hisses with a gust of wind.  He is drunk.  His steps shift, faltering out of the tavern, barely keeping him upright and she can hear his inebriation before he utters a single slurred word.  

 

“RRrrrraaaaabbit!  Come ‘ere little rabbit!”  

 

Of course he’s smashed.  What else is there to do in the Herald’s Rest but keep celebrating now that the sure death promised by Corypheus has been averted?  Her stare, sparkling fade green even in the moonless night, remains of the statue and the point at which its ear has been docked.  The calls from behind her have not moved her, though her senses begin to spread.  Then she catches scent of his drunkenness.  Sack mead and the spices Ferelden foot soldiers use to cover the throat-stinging, dry bitterness conjured from what was once sweet golden honey.  Then she feels him and he touches her in a way that is as familiar as a lover, loutish as a drunken stranger, and aggressive as a man at arms.  The leather of his gloves is still dry for the moment and it is warm against her chilled face. His body is warm, even though his uniform, as he turns her, wraps her waist and captures her tightly against him.  She senses his quiet friend standing nearby.  They - shems with swords -  never go anywhere alone, do they?  He turns her face up to him and she can see the flushed face of a young soldier too much in his cups, perhaps not too young to possess the strength of a man, but too young to wield that strength wisely.  She looks into his bloodshot eyes, breathes in sack mead, soldier sweat, iron and leather, the wet of an unforgiving rain, and familiar lover’s words cast and low and filthy as the muck in which they stand.

 

“Show me your pink, little rabbit.”  His voice is drunkard-loud, sludged as footing in the yard, and it competes with the sound of the rain echoing off of the battlement.  

 

The other soldier breaks his silence with encouragement to the one who has her.  “I heard laying with a knife-ear has a way of draining a man of his sorrow, though the Orlesians say laying with them the same as laying with an animal.”

 

Gloved thumb traces over her lower lip.  A demon-touched smile changes the expression of the faintly bearded soldier.  The foul weather, shivering, the docked marble ears, soldier's gutterspeak, and unhealed pain begins to flower in her, blooming a heat that could swiftly rise to white-hot.  

 

“Come home back to the barracks with me, little rabbit.  Be a good girl and, after I’m done, I’ll put you to sleep nice and warm in the cage with my mabari .”  Sack and suggestion assault her.

 

Cullen strides out of the armory and catches the scene from the flank.  He’d intended to make double time toward the keep – the sense to get out of the rain driving him forward before the armory door is open for him.  He might have been seen if his flanking position hadn’t sheltered him from the lowered bar of drunken perception, but it appears to him that he isn’t noticed.  He halts in the rain as he realizes that the elf in the soldier’s arms is the Inquisitor.  He is present as the low soldier speak is directed toward her.  She is the one being held before the marble version of herself whose ears have been marred by vandals in some kind of coward’s protest that must have occurred during a changing of the watch.  He cringes inwardly.  He’d hoped the statue could be repaired before her return.  The sense of dread that has been growing in him over the weeks since swords were last called for swells as he stands there, silently in the rain, witnessing this scene.  Reactions form in his mind even before they play out.  The possibilities of outcomes, strategy, are as much instinct to him breathing and are always – always- tainted by his experience.  He has been witness to the strength and power the Inquisitor wields.  He was one of the throng sent her to face Corypheus, watched her wield the magi, protect them, and save them.  He is one of the ones who knows how strong she has become – strong enough to defeat their enemies and heal the heavens.  And he is the one who prays to the Maker every night that she won’t become another Meredith.  He knows the Inquisitor well enough to recognize the anger engraving itself over her face - he’s seen that expression before, the one that is usually followed by a maelstrom of light, ice, fire and death.  Without conscious realization, he holds his breath.  Just enough of the words reach him.   Knife-ear.  Cage.  He imagines a mind blast that could drive the soldier’s breastplate through his ribs – him smashing himself against her the way he is.  It’s instinct again that drives Cullen forward from his silent survey of the mud slimed field, an aggressive instinct that is well tempered with the absolute dread of seeing another admired leader fall from righteous heights into harm to her own followers in the name of rule.

 

“YOU THERE!”  The Commander charges forward into the dim light, backlit hellishly by the torches under the armory eve.  “This insubordination will not be tolerated!”

 

The drunken soldier’s attention is away from her for a split second.  Just a heartbeat look flashes toward  Cullen and then the drunk’s attention is reformed.  He drops hold on her waist and the hand that had turned her face up to him drops and pins to his side.  He is straight as an arrow, the mead’s effect seemingly replaced by fear of his Commander.  The other one, full of sorrows left undrained, fails to snap to his drinking companion’s example.

 

“Commander, she’s just a knife-ear.  Them lot are subordinate to us, not us to them.”

 

The Commander’s presence grows like the mustering storm clouds above, lending a menacing appearance to his stature as his charge meets the soldier’s position and sticks itself before the two men like a deadly blade thrown from the armory and hitting its mark bullseye.  His words thunder over the hiss of the rain.  

 

“She is the Herald of Andraste, your Inquisitor!  If not for her, you’d be dead!”

 

She never takes her focus from the one who touched her, pulled her against him and held her there, and though the Commander’s charge into the fray has checked the rise of her anger, she is focused enough to see the dawning confusion in the young soldier’s expression.  Folly and fear waft from the young man just like the scent of drink, sweat and spices.  She witnesses his struggle through the haze of drink and shock, flailing, grasping full-fisted to take hold of his senses and she waits with her eyes fixed to him in a way that suggests she is taking aim.

 

“What?”  The soldier’s eyes dart from focus some point of attention straight ahead – anywhere but the Commander’s glowered stare -  to her.  He sways ever so slightly in his attentive posture, then joins his friend in damning himself, and her, with his words.  “That ain’t the Inquisitor, Commander.  The Inquisitor’s got those wild elf markings on her face.  Her face…it’s bare like a sla…  alienage ra…”  He stumbles over his thoughts, stammers, catches himself just before the fatal fall.  “Servant’s.”  In another heartbeat moment, they are all standing in the rain looking at her face and wondering at its nakedness.

 

At first, on the journey to, and during the conclave, the vallaslin marked her as different.  It made her an outsider among them.  It made things more difficult, but not unexplainable.  Just looking at her face – the vallaslin masking her nearly as much as the masks of Orlesians – told everyone at once what she was.  Dalish.  Free elf.  Danger to shemlen.  Wanderer, avowed never to submit.  Never again shall we submit, is what the vallaslin told one and all.

 

Suddenly she is drawn inward and time seems to slow in an unpleasant rift of rain and awkward stares and her naked, rain-sheeted face.  Crack and thunder of the Commander’s voice seems to break on some distant horizon at once and she hears the HIS words inside her mind once more – loud and unavoidable, like when the nightmare tormented her in the Fade.

 

Your face … The vallaslin … They are slave markings.  Blue light overtakes her memory and mind, her waking dream, the smell of his palms, the shine of his loving eyes, and then she remembers Solas’ voice again.  Ar lasa mala revas … You are free.

 

“What discipline do you find appropriate, Inquisitor?”  Cullen’s thunder pulls her from her waking dream of Solas, once beloved before he left her to live with her nakedness and a breach torn in her spirit.  She blinks focus back to the youthful plains of the offending soldier’s face, flushed with drink and embarrassment, wet with the falling rain that looks more and more like tears amidst the forming expression of regret.  She feels utterly stripped once more, yearning for the mark that Solas declared were slave markings then charmed from her– the mark that symbolized her freedom and refusal to submit to everyone but Solas.  

 

Rain, cold, slime, fatigue, heart-broken pain, shame, lingering rage, and almost-unbearable burden of leadership coalesce into a mélange that characterizes the nature of her spirit.  And it bursts forth from her, naked and broken, not in bone-crushing energy blast but in tense, quiet laughter that resounds with the black tone of irony.  The commander breathes easier at the sound of her laughter.  Though touched with something dark, it’s nothing like Meredith’s power-maddened cackle, that hard sound he still dreads in his nightmares.  And a smirk slides over the chiseled lines of his rain-glossed face as Cullen hears her answer and recognizes that there is justice mixed in with the irony of her command.

 

“Relieve him of his Inquisition uniform.  Bare him.  Let him be kenneled nice and warm with my mabari in their cage.”

 

Cullen watches her as she goes – the way she seems to slither her way silently through the mud, the way she wades into shadow until he can no longer make out her serpentine saunter.  He has wondered about the absence of the tattoos that adorned her face when she arrived, but notes as she goes that removal of her tattoo did nothing to diminish her wildness.  The fear of his nightmare made real again vanishes as she does.  Trepidation returns with the dawn, though, for he finds the Inquisitor waiting for him just outside the doorway of his quarters.  She says the words and he feels as if his breastplate has been driven into his lungs.

[QueenCrow]

Chapter 2 - The Heresy 

 

“Please…come in.”  The cadence of his speech is never as rhythmic and sure as the tempo of his march – he is a warrior and commander, not a poet. 

 

He has discovered her waiting outside his door at dawn and steps aside to allow her entry into his office.  She’s so small in comparison to him as she passes into his chamber.  How large he feels, the strength he feels in her presence never evades his notice.  Knowledge of what she is capable keeps him to ground.  He closes the door and rushes to the solitary chair in the room to clear the seat of the stack of books and scrolls.  He is talking as he makes a place where he suspects she might be more comfortable.

 

“Forgive me.  I rarely entertain company here.  Most often people stand to attention and I tell them what to do.”  Scarlet pink taints the tips of his ears and she notices.  He smirks and laughs at himself, a symbol of good nature, as his stack of books are exiled to the floor.

 

She wades into the essence of Cullen – an agile strength always mixed with a boyish awkwardness that he has not yet left long behind with his childhood.  Something golden and good remains of the boy who begged Templars to train him even well into manhood.  It has always been the case with them.  She has listened to him, but her listening has been deep – a sensing of him with her whole body.  Perhaps it is something she learned from Cole – listening with all of herself, including the spirit that resides within her.

 

“Thank you, Commander.”  Gratitude swells in her.  He was going somewhere, obviously, but will make personal time for her.  She flows into the seat that is large enough for two of her and remains focused on his face. 

His worries have not escaped her.  Please, Maker, not another Meredith.  She smiles softly as he searches the room for a place, then chooses to lean casually against the edge of his desk.

 

“How may I be of service, Inquisitor?”  Something dark touches the light in her eyes as Cullen offers himself and she the envisions a  naked soldier in a mabari cage before her mind’s eye.  The vision is accompanied by something she learned from Solas.  Fear is one of the most primal instincts and nothing is stronger, save perhaps desire.  The vision of the nude soldier, white knuckles and iron bars, pleading, devoted allegiances sworn, is shoved aside and replaced by the inward vision of Cullen in Templar regalia positioning his shield for defense.  She molds her magical call to him even as she begins to speak.  Spirit and body sing desire.  Her words are countermelody to which the boy given to the Templars and the Chantry may listen.

 

“In the beginning of things, after the moment I was transformed from prisoner to ally, I believed that the cries of heresy from the Chantry were due to my ignorance and the question over whether or not I was responsible for the destruction at the conclave.  As one of the Dalish, my knowledge of Chantry history has been limited to one aspect really.”  He is listening.  Commander Templar crosses his hands before him.  Weren’t his hands entwined just like that when she found him praying to the Bride of the Maker?  But he is tracing the line of her throat as she speaks with his amber gaze.  He isn’t all prayer.  She warms the curve of her mouth into a smile and continues. 

 

“Shartan, who joined Andraste, fought at her side, was betrayed with her, and died with her.”  He blinks.  A trace of frown taints his brow.  She can feel what has pulled him from the grace of her slender throat and instead of leaving an opening compelling him to speak the words, she utters them for him.  “Even before I saw the mural at the University of Orlais during our business at the Empress’ masquerade ball, the mural of Shartan and his ears docked to less resemble an elf’s ears, Mother Giselle educated me in what is referred to as The Heresy of Shartan.”

 

Purpose coalesces in his mind with the speed of a Commander overseeing a war map and he recognizes the forces of her words forming into one position.  The statue of the Dalish Inquisitor in the rain, her ears docked.  The mural of Shartan in Orlais, his ears docked.  Heresy.  Cullen adjusts himself against the desk edge uncomfortably and without purpose of will, raises his hand to knead a moment of stress from the back of his neck.  The taint of color has spread from the tips of his ears to his whiskered cheeks.  The vision of him dropping his spiritual shield washes through her mind as he speaks, and for the first time, uses her name rather than her title.

 

“I cannot convey how sorry I am about …”  The boy inside the man fumbles.  He blinks again and the kneading becomes futile.  What should he be sorry for?  The Herald of Andraste’s broken marble ears?  Shartan’s docked ears?  The crude soldier making clumsy, drunken advances toward a beautiful woman in the rain?  Or should he be sorry for the shouts of heresy, or that the Canticle of Shartan has existed as heresy in his mind even until this day.  Should he regret the truths that have been embroidered into his Andrastean soul since the moment of his birth?  He struggles to form sorrow for all without being sorry about who and what he is.  Self-loathing of that magnitude would doom him, given his struggle against lyrium chains and uncertain purpose.  She soaks his struggle and sorrow into herself and rises from the chair to rescue him.

 

“Please, Cullen, we go forward, not back.  That is something you taught me.”  It is the first time she has used him name.  Once, during private game, his name lingered on her tongue like a sweet droplet of honey ready to fall.  It is a relief to finally sing the sound.  She moves to him and reaches out.  Unseen flow sparks as she lays the lightest touch to his arm.  This is not something new.  She has been touching him, soothing him, sending her aura into him for the months he has been fighting lyrium chains.  For the space of a heartbeat, she wonders if he knows that she has been infusing him with herself.  She searches his eyes and finds the returning vision – the Templar lifts his shield.  He withdraws from her and as the warmth of his body under her fingertips leaves her question is answered.  He knows.  Of course he knows.  And he knows how to refuse her.

 

His paces carry him through the room.  Full circle falls under his feet and he returns to the desk, the window, where he gazes out to the mountain peaks as thoughts having nothing to do with the snow-capped peaks tumble through his mind.  She has served him.  That’s what he believes.  He has struggled and she has helped him.  Magic was meant to serve man.  The course of his thought changes flow.  He wonders why he hasn’t taken her into his arms.  Tasted her lips.  The apostate, that’s why.  I wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea.  Thick arms cross over his breastplate and he turns back to her.  He swallows.  “Which way is forward, Inquisitor?”

 

There is a long moment of feeling him.  She yearns for Cole.  The Templar in her mind’s eye has his shield raised and the listening only yields unintelligible whispers from the Commander for as long as his shield is up.  He is, and always has been, the most skilled in evading her reach, her calling, her silent song.  Even though her listening fails, she knows the true heresy begins to dawn on him – it is written, or no longer written rather, on her face.  Her blood writing is absent, just as is her lover.  She swallows too, then moistens her lips with a slide of her tongue, moistening the path for her words.

 

“Mother Giselle also imparted history of the Inquisition while we were in Haven.  She believes that the essential purpose of the Inquisition is that we fight when necessary, and then when the need to fight for survival is passed, we lay down our swords.  Or staves, as the case may be.”  The soft laugh that bubbles from her rings with a light cynicism, just as the one she sang to him in the rain.  She has remembered who she is, and with whom she is speaking, just as he has remembered.  “I have adopted Mother Giselle’s belief as my own.  Our enemy is defeated.  I will now lay down the weapons of war.  The inquisitor is no longer necessary and I will be leaving before the new moon.”

 

No harm has come to ever come to him.  She has never used the power he has witnessed in her in any other way than to protect and serve.  Even so, as the lyrical sound of her voice fades off on the air from the dirge she has just delivered, he feels as if his breastplate has been driven into his lungs.  His mouth has gone as dry and he struggles for breath.  When he turns toward her, it is with the carriage of a warrior casting aside his shield and she is waiting for his charge even before he begins.  The warrior knows the failings of hesitation.  It’s now or never.

 

Two bodies connect.  Force meets force.  He lifts her from her feet as he takes her into his arms.  Heat and essence entwines even before their mouths collide.  And, thereafter, the flow between them, push and pull, give and take, is desperate until it becomes frenzied.  She infuses him as before and he begins to fill the emptiness left in her like a wound – bereavement of an absent love, broken ears and the adrift feeling of surrendering her place in the world.  The moment of fear has been snuffed out - weapons of war cast aside in a sentence and a gesture.  Desire lifts from a spark so small that it that might have only been seen in complete darkness, to the heat of an all-consuming inferno.  The essence of Cullen floods her. Through loss, fear, desire, all things primal and unshakable, the heresy of the knife-eared Inquisitor and the Commander who has raised her up, on more than one occasion, remains.

 

Breathless, he releases his hold on her and she lifts her gaze to his amber eyes.  They are fired with a passion she has not felt from him before, despite her attempts at listening to the whispers that emanate from him.

 

“Maker’s Breath.  I’m sorry.  That was…”  He doesn’t finish before she closes her eyes and bows her head.  Her mind screams inwardly without sound.  NO!  Please don’t speak!  Impulsive.  Ill-considered.  Should not have encouraged it.  Her mind is overtaken by another voice again.  She shakes her head slowly to clear her mind and reclaim herself from desire and fear.

 

“Please don’t be sorry, Commander.  It was…”  Before she can finish he has touched her very much like the sack-scented soldier touched her the night before.  Her face, absent of the blood writing, lifts to him and he finishes the thought for them both.

 

“It was really nice.”  Amber and fair hair, whiskered skin and soft smile, scent of leather, fur and metal and something that could only ever be described as Cullen comes to her.  Then his lips touch hers gently once more and she whispers to him.  Moist breath warms against his mouth as she speaks the words that will cause a Templar turned commander, once more, to raise his shield.

 

"Most of the mages will be leaving with me, Commander, and all but one of the elves."

[QueenCrow]

Chapter 3 - The Gift

 

Nightingale’s face is shaded by her hood, but suspicion shines visibly in her eyes nonetheless.  Even the cacophony from the gathered crowd does nothing to keep Cullen from noticing the cut of the glance. 

 

“It’s like letting wolves in the gate and we’ve already got the mages to worry about!”  A faceless voice thrusts complaint over the noise of people crowded together in dissatisfaction.  A moment of déjà vu restrains the Commander to silence in front of the group that has formed just inside the main hall.  How many times has he done this before, played his part as strong-armed mediator until he’s forced to choose a side?   

 

“They are the Inquisitor’s people and are only here for a short duration”.  He’s assuring the crowd.  As a military commander, Cullen has cultivated a leadership style that self-consciously projects an image of sincerity, fairness, optimism, and unshakable strength.  His voice is firm and decided.  He wonders if the Dalish camped by the stables can hear the shouts of the mob.

 

“The aravels mean they aim to stay for a while!”  Another shrill voice bearing malcontent notes rises above the din of gathered malcontents.  Cullen searches the crowd to identify the source of the voice, but abandons his search as familiar face and voice lifts up in dissatisfaction.  “Those ornery halla have the horses kicking at the stalls and fences.  Won’t be much longer that I can contain them.”  Dennett has the good sense to confine his complain to the presence of the halla, though in truth he blames the halla riders just as much for the upset of his herd.

 

The optimism in the Commander’s carriage sours visibly and for a long moment, he is silent and scowling before Dennet and the crowd.  “The Inquisitor brought us here to Skyhold.  Since our arrival, none who come peacefully have been turned away.  We have made room for all of good intention to shelter here.  The Dalish will receive the same treatment.  They are welcome unless they act to make themselves unwelcome.  Now, everyone back to your duties. ”

 

Cullen hasn’t taken more than a handful of steps away from the dispersing crowd when he is diverted by Leliana.  “Have you spoken to our Inquisitor, Commander?”  He hears something in the Nightingale’s song that reminds him of the discontent of the crowd, especially in the inflection of the words our Inquisitor, and hearing it renews the taint of a frown on the lines of his face.  His expression speaks wordlessly of irritation, perhaps touched by his own discontent even without listening to the complaints of others.

 

“I am on my way to find her and speak with her now.”  His strides begin but he is stopped by the quiet insistence in Leliana’s voice and the gestures guiding him toward the doorway leading to the war room.  Just inside the doorway, the Spy mistress begins to impart the harvest of her trade to the Commander.  

 

“She is becoming a potential danger to us.  My people have reported that she has made personal contact with Fairbanks and there has been a message to the Blades of Hessarian too.  She is an elf, and Dalish.  Without us, she would have been, and will be, eviscerated in the game in Orlais.  Even if she severs ties with us and acts on her own, it was we who promoted her as the Herald of Andraste and Leader of the Inquisition.  Her evisceration, should she return to the Dales, would also be our evisceration.”  Fervor hisses in Nightingale’s whispers as she lays out the new formation of pieces in the game.

 

Josephine forms the duo of Spy mistress and Commander into a trio.  The Ambassador adds her information and council freely, having expected this meeting of diminished numbers would take place sooner rather than later.  “She has exhausted all personal resources obtaining weapons and armor.  I can only assume they are for the Dalish who have come, and the mages and elves who are planning to depart with her.”

 

“She could be building her own army, Commander.”  Nightingale witnesses the deepening frown creasing Cullen’s brow.  She knows even when the Commander speaks words of assurance and optimism, that he is calculating the risk that Leliana is correct.  The Inquisitor is becoming a potential danger.

 

“She could be thinking of the defense of the group travelling through lands that are only newly stabilized.  What would you have her do – lead a band of indefensible people through dangers she knows well enough firsthand?  Her actions have always been to defend those who need defending and we are the ones who taught her to arm and armor herself.”  He tells himself even as he is speaking the words that his trust in her is justified.   Still, doubt stains his thinking.  Still, his experiences taint his existence.  “And what would you have me do – put her in irons again and tell her she must remain to serve us?”

 

The Ambassador bows out of the conversation with the grace of one who realizes the Commander’s diplomacy is something of a new, and beneficial, development in his character.  Nightingale smiles at him.  The curve of her smile is lush and sullied with something hard and knowing.  The bard in her knows that men will read all sorts of things into a knowing smile if you let them.  “Is that such an unpleasant thought to you?”  Her move plays on the desire she suspects in the strapping young ex-Templar.  Leliana’s next move plays on the fear she suspects lingers.  “Do you think you’re still capable of putting her back in irons if it was necessary?”

 

Cullen holds her gaze, reads into that knowing smile.  He clears his throat into the side of his fist, then nods to Leliana and leaves the council of doorway whispers.  As she watches him go, Leliana’s knowing curve of mouth evolves ever so subtly into one touched by admiration.  The Commander, in his truculent response to her, has managed to deny her any fuel for the hardened suspicions cast in his direction.

 

In one of those moments when circumstance conspires to turn the world toward tragedy instead of triumph, Cullen passes through the doorway toward the Inquisitor’s quarters and carries the heavy burden of the crowd, the councilors, and his doubt up the stairs with him.  The nightmare that kept him from sleep, another dream of horrors that has left him tired may have receded into the background of his worries had the recruit not been the first sight at the top of the chamber stairs.  The soldier is kneeling.  Cullen halts at the top of the stairs and stares, stunned by memory.  In the nightmare the recruit knelt.  They were trapped together, Commander and recruit.  Aside from the presence of the recruit, it was all the same as the circle tower, except that the cage they were trapped in wasn’t a magical one but a mabari cage.  He’d been second guessing himself about order the recruit caged for her and the nightmare, he told himself, was the result of that second-guessing.  The sight of the recruit kneeling, and the appearance that he is kneeling to her, triggers something in the Commander.  His charge into the Inquisitor’s quarters is blind of thought.  It is a rush of pure instinct.  He finds himself physically blocked – the young recruit has risen and stepped into the straight line between Commander and Inquisitor. It stalls him.  What would Cullen have done to her if he’d reached her?  That is the question on the young soldier’s mind, shining in the widened gaze she has fixed upon Cullen.  Even the Commander asks himself the question in the time it takes to conquer experience, doubt, and suspicion.  Knock her off of her feet. Clasp her tiny throat in unyielding grip, purge her, summon an unforgiving pillar of light.

 

“What have you done to him?”  His voice is not so much a voice as a growl that threatens and forewarns something menacing heading her direction.  Had she not been so battle-jaded but remained skittish with the newness of guardianship, or perhaps if the young recruit, sentenced to the cage for insubordination, had not spoken swiftly, she would have thrown up her barrier in readiness for battle at the sound of the Commander’s growl.  But she is far beyond battle-jaded and the soldier does speak.  He answers the question put to her and refuses to make eye contact with Cullen as his words fill the quarters and dispel a brewing battle.

 

“Mistress Lavellan hasn’t treated me poorly, Sir.”  His demeanor is a far cry from the nature he showed in the rain.  The words jerk as the burden of her packed chest is shouldered and the recruit steps from between them, moves past Cullen, toward the stairs, and returns to his duty without needing to be told.  The Commander reassesses the field.  The recruit is well.  Moved to defend her.  Speaks to her defense. 

 

A full minute slowly calming rhythm breath marks time before one of them speaks.  She is haunted, momentarily, by the memory of him, his philter box turned into a projectile, the smash of glass against his wall.  The sound of beam splintering and groaning under his fist.  His voice.  That growl.  The careful melody of her words, wavering only once, flows like velvet on the air to him.  She is careful as she follows the velvet toward him and he receives her just as carefully.

 

“Please come in, Commander.  It’s good that you are here.”  Large, liquid eyes and moist-bloomed mouth forming as she says the words are an elixir to his doubt, his fear.

 

She touches him.  His stare drops to her fingers tracing over the back of his hand.  She is merely standing near but he feels as if she is wrapping herself around him.  The scent of her, her smallness, the slender grace of her fingers as she casually caresses him– all conspire to draw him into the fog of a peaceful aura.  “I am…I…Forgive me.  The question was unworthy.”  Before he can stop himself, he utters the word that assures her, once again, that desire, fear and envy still torture him when he dreams.  “Inappropriate.  I…”

 

“Consider it forgotten.  Is there something I can do for you?”  The light song of her voice fades.  Recruit steps sound on the stairs. There’s the tin-groan of the door hinge.  The latch falls and she is alone with the Commander.  She touches him and they haven’t mentioned it.  It’s something so intimate between them and neither has said a word.  Sending the true purpose of his visit to the rear for the moment, he determines to confront her. 

 

“This has been going on since the day you found me…at less than my best.”  Amber eyes lift and penetrate her gaze.  His hands turn, take hold of hers, tighten.  “What is this that you’re doing for me?  What magic is this?”  He knows and he confirms for her that he is aware of how she acts upon him.  He’s one of the few who could know, and one of the ones who has the skill to control and negate her.

 

A silent, resounding chime fills her as she recognizes what Cullen wants from her – something perhaps very like the understanding she wanted for herself.  The Commander wants the truth.  A saddened smile curves her full lips as she recognizes that he is important to her, and she will show him what he means to her by giving him the gift of the truth.  Trust.  Her words are near whispers, somehow lacking the angry sharpness around the consonants that were born in the suspicions and complaints he’s heard all morning.  “This magic is part of Vir Atish’an, the Way of Peace.”  She weaves an Elvhen truth for him, perhaps one found in a circle of magi in a refined or sterilized form.  “I believed it could serve your well-being after you determined to deny yourself lyrium.  After you asked Cassandra for a suitable replacement, I knew this could relieve some of your pain.”

 

He stops her, having been given the answer he wanted and combining it with his experience.  “It has helped.”  But something in his expression changes, a minute warmth in his eyes cools.  Is one leash being replaced by another?

 

The way she listens to him so deeply, watches him, senses him, it’s impossible for her not to see the chilling of Cullen’s expression.  She fluidly withdraws her hands from him, uncloaks him of her aura, and turns to move deeper into her chambers.  Her caution shows even though she is determined to give him what he came for, the gift one gives to those of meaning. 

 

He feels of the loss of her and doesn’t resist the urge to follow.  As he pursues, he brings his purpose in finding her to the front lines.  “There have been complaints about the halla.  Apparently, even the aravels have caused some nervousness.  People are afraid of what is unfamiliar.  They fear what they don’t understand.”  I fear what I don’t understand.

 

She turns back to him but keeps her distance.  “Imagine the relief those nervous people will feel when they see the aravels and halla leaving in the morning.”  She smiles ever so softly and shows him a jewel glint of large eyes that hint at her efforts to make light of something unpleasant.  He hasn’t mentioned resistance to the presence of the Dalish along with the halla and aravels, but she knows without the confirmation of words needed.  Knife ears broken off.  Blunted.  As a kindness given in return, she doesn’t mention that the Dalish themselves only entered where humans reside as an extreme gesture of good will toward her, and that the good will, even though she is one of them, was hard and barely won.

 

“Will you be meeting with Solas?”  Another ‘now or never’ feeling at the mention of her leaving compels Cullen to skirt the boundary of propriety from whence he has just retreated.  He sees the drain of light from her eyes the heartbeat after he speaks the name.  The curve of her lips turns.  The immediate change in her stuns him into silence as she delivers the rest of her gift given to him.  The truth.

 

“Solas has taught me that while being with him might have been possible in another world, it will never be in the one in which we live.”  She stills her pacing saunter and takes a deep breath, swallows the flavor of pain in her mouth before she continues.   “It’s true that I have resisted that lesson.  I have spent the months since our victory over Corypheus looking for him.  I have found no trace of him because he doesn’t wish to be found.  No, I will not be meeting with Solas.”

 

He saw her once in battle, a good distance away, but still clearly visible to him.  She was laying on her back choking on a momentarily mouthful of blood.  Then he saw her get up, reclaim herself and reset her staff.  She moved stiffly and strangely as wounded things do, but she fought on.  She is moving the same way as she paces the quarters and delivers her purpose to him.  She moves as if she is bleeding inwardly from wound left behind by connection bound deep within her severed. 

 

Despite her obvious struggle, she gives Cullen the truth, her trust, the silent symbol that she is still his ally despite her departure.  And she gives it all, every piece, even the most delicate and guarded threads of the Elven words she weaves for him into those skeins with which he is already familiar– Arlathvhen at Halamshiral, the Clans, the Keepers, the truth she must share with them.  The Fade, Asha'bellanar and Mythal, Red Crossing, the sentinels at the temple, Abelas and his words about the Elvhen and Tevinter.  The vallaslin. And also Solas, who seemed to know so much about the breach from the beginning, Pride who shares common blood with Sorrow.  

[QueenCrow]

Chapter 4 – Dreamer

 

“No!  Stop!  If anything in you is human…kill me now!  Stop this game!”  He kneels on the stone floor, his hands clasped so tightly before his contorted face that flesh has been forged into one white-knucked fist.  His body rocks weakly with the chanted mantra of his fears.  “Using my shame against me!  Ill-advised infatuation!  A mage of all things!”

She comes upon him like a breeze, an unexpected hot wind and the buzzing light that singes his skin fades with her arrival.  The stone under his knees turns to soft loam and green grass that looks faded of color in the wan moonlight.  Insects begin to strum and chirp their nighttime love songs.  She kneels at his side and presses herself so close to him that their two bodies threaten to become one.

 

He opens his eyes and glowers at her from behind his fists.  “You left!  I saw you!  I saw the magic wake out behind you.  I heard your hart bugle so loudly it hurt my ears.  The halla answered and then I saw the landships lift on their axels and become buoyant on a river of your magic.  How could you do that?  Then you were gone!  What trick is this now?  How are you here with them…the blood mages…the demons…wicked fingers that snake into my mind.  How are you in this cage?”

 

“There is no cage, Cullen.  See?”  She lifts her hand and gestures to the starry night sky.  “You have remained strong, for your own sake, for my sake, and for the people who depend upon you to protect them.”  Small, nimble fingers fall from their trace of the stars in the night sky and caress soothing touch to his brow.  “The demons, the voices, they have whispered to you in the night, but you only grow stronger.  They will stay away now that we've shown  them they will not break you, and that you are not alone.”  So small next to him, she must rise on her knees to brush her lips to the whiskered plain of his cheek.  Her honeyed words are no more than whispers of hot breath against the corners of his mouth.  “And if they return, I will come back to you and fight by your side.”

 

“Why?”  His body begins to relax into the slump of exhaustion and the expression of terror that has held in masculine lines changes to a mask of bewilderment.  “Why would you come back to me...fight at my side again?”

 

Her lips brush over the stubble of his jaw.  Her hands tease into the wild shocks of his hair and down the column of his neck as she backs from his only enough to look into his eyes.  A strange smile blooms over her mouth.  “Cullen, do you need to ask why?”  One more kiss placed tenderly to him, peaceful and quiet, a stolen breath of his warmth, then she rises and turns.  A light mist rises with her and slithers around her legs in winding tendrils.  As she begins to wind her way away from him, she turns once before the lifting fog envelops her.  “I’ve left a gift for you under your bed.  Find it when you wake.”

 

“When I…what?”  A deep gasp of wind that has come chilled from the peaks fills his lungs as he jolts up in bed.  It takes him a moment to realize where he is.  His bedding is twisted from his thrashing and though slightly damp from his sweat, he fists the sheet, towels himself absently, then wraps it loosely around his hips.  He rises and paces the steps through his loft that it takes to feel the solid footing underneath him.  Details cut through the fog of sleep to his consciousness and turn his stare back toward his bed.  What comes after he masters his focus is cautious.  Even as his knees touch the floorboards he doubts his sanity.  Reaching underneath the bed, he finds nothing and laughs to himself.  Then he looks.  He sees it.  Slowly, he claims the thing – a small box of ironwood so dark that it almost looks back, and inlaid with oaken vines creeping all along the top and sides.  He handles the box gingerly at first, as if unsure whether it is illusion or artifice.  That it is charmed, a spell cast upon the vessel to open only for him, is something that he may never know, as when he opens it, it yields its contents without any resistance.  The lid lifts in his fingers and, though the glow from within is infinitely fainter than when she made the offering, it illuminates his awe-widened eyes.

 

“Oh, Maker…”  Magically strengthened glass feels warm in his hand.  Just like her lips felt.  He clutches the phylactery she has made in its strange, elven-looking vessel, and begins to understand what she has, by her own free will, given him.

 

 

(*Somewhere in Thedas, or the Fade, Solas greatly disapproves*)

[QueenCrow]

Warning:  The story begins to take a violent turn and may include some sexual content in the next chapters - not more than is present in the Dragon Age: Inquisition game or Dragon Age series novels, however.

 

 

Chapter 5 – Flat Ear

 

“It was a bad idea to let her go alone.”  Varric is usually the one to put worry into phrases in which there isn’t a single, wasted word.   He kicks the pack under the table next to his boot– a table that is truly two crates with a board laid across, but it’s the finest furniture in the Blades of Hessarian camp. The drink, with drink being infinitely more important to underworld militia than furniture, is excellent.  Varric burns the taste of his worry from his tongue with a shot thrown back.

 

“This is why you’re not really the spy master you could be.  You want to babysit.  She said it was better for her to meet them alone.  The boss is resourceful and they’re HER people.”  Bull matches Varric’s enthusiasm for washing words away with a swig of liquid fire.  Bull makes a sound to clear his throat, something like a smaller, shallower version of the sound a dragon makes right before he’s ready to spit flame.  His next words bear the unseen flame.  “She doesn’t come back when I think she should and we’ll go and get her.  Orders be damned.”  Bull jerks a thumb at a pillar of man at arms sitting in the shadows nearby – one of who knows how many of the Blades of Hessarian, the one who said it wasn’t really the Inquisition they followed; they followed her.  Some of the Chargers present nod confirmation before they lift their cups and knock back the drink.  Bull takes another massive swallow to clear his mouth of the last words spoken.  It will take the heat of the drink to numb the nerve endings and replace the bitterness of orders be damned.  He speaks those words more and more since the destruction of the dreadnought and survival of the Chargers.  And then he drinks more and more.  He won't be returning to his people. 

 

***

 

She stands in the surf’s swell and watches as the ship clears the waves, then appears smaller and smaller on the roiling, watery horizon.  “My friend.  Goodbye.  May fair winds fill the sails that carry you home.”  She smiles, but the curve of her lips is a sad one.  Who would have ever believed that a child of the Dalish could speak the word ‘friend’ to a son of the Tevinters?  For love of his country and people, he will change things for the better.   Her concentration on Dorian’s departure shields her from complete awareness of all other things, so she isn’t as vigilant as she would normally be and she doesn’t realize when the elves appear in the in the tree line along the beach.

 

“Lethallan.  I won a fine blade from Beles, who wagered you would not return to us.”  He is a pillar of a figure himself, tall for one of the elves.  Lean, fluid lines, tight sinew and exquisite strength make his build much like the weapon he carries in his hand – a bow of unrivaled craftsmanship.  Moving from the trees alone, he closes the distance to her in swift, silently sauntered strides.  He moves like her and is dark like her – one of those who was born to move in the night.  She turns to him and the sad taint of her smile vanishes to leave only a gracious and graceful bloom of her mouth that shapes to form his name with the sound of happiness. 

 

“Vir’Tan, Lethallin.  I am so glad to see you.”  At once he is against her, wrapping his arms around her to hold her to him, devouring her with his senses and pushing back the cowl that shades her from his full appraisal.  The light sea-misted daylight washes over her face.  His eyes penetrate her, then sharpen into a piercing scowl.  The hold he has on her releases and he steps back from her, reeling as if he has just taken a blow to the gut. 

 

“Your face!  The vallaslin!”  The sound of it is venomous – she has heard the same tone of voice used by Templars and Chantry in the word ‘apostate’.  For a moment his expression betrays that he is unsure whether he can believe his eyes, but clarity returns to his scowl as more hunters of her clan emerge from the trees and join him.

 

There is a pause where the words fail her, but just as clarity returns to Vir’Tan, she regains herself as well.  “Vhenan, please let me tell you.”  Color warms her cheeks, and the hue is so striking on flesh that once bore the blood writing bestowed by the Keeper of her clan, but is now bare.  All of her reaches out to him with the smooth and subtle wind of her voice, but she sees at once that he is himself – the hunter of the Dalish she left behind.  Even before he moves, she senses that he is coming and the mantra sounds inside her mind.

 

Vir Assan: the Way of the Arrow
Be swift and silent;
Strike true, do not waver
And let not your prey suffer.
That is my Way.

 

In the way of the arrow, he comes swiftly and without fair warning.  The dull sound of flesh and bone connecting seems otherworldly until she feels the searing heat of the pain through the side of her face – her eye, her nose and mouth, the cheekbone that is bare of all save for her the ravishment of her blush.  The strike of the pain is as fast and ferocious as the snap of her head with the blow.  Momentary blindness keeps her from knowing that she has spun to face the sea again, and by the time her senses begin to return to her, she has fallen to her hands and knees.  Blindness gives way to the blurry sight of her blood falling in quick-tempo droplets between her sand-planted hands.  She tries to rise up from her hands and knees but falters, then fails as she feels the razor’s edge of his blade - the fine blade won from Beles? - poised and threatening to cut into the tender flesh of her throat.

 

The strike has been true and she holds, only able to move with his fist tangling in her hair and lifting her hands from the sand.   The blade bites ever so slightly.  She feels a thin rivulet of warmth flowing slowly from beneath the razor’s edge.  Blood to match what flows from her nose and paints her paralyzed lips.  Blood to match the hot tears poet’s tears welling and spilling from widened jewel eyes that reach out to the waves at the point where she watched Dorian’s ship sail over the horizon.

 

She feels him behind her.  Closer.  His blade does not waver.  There is no waver in the hiss of his voice into her ear either, and the words almost keep time with the heartbeat throb of pain in her head.  “I told Beles that if you returned to us, you would not be the same woman.  But to bring hardship upon us, mark us as the clan of the mighty Herald of Andraste who saw the error in the ways of her savage kin…  to forsake the sacred blood writing, forsake our beliefs, or ways…forsake me.”  Breath rushes angry and hot from Vir’Tan as his fist tightens in the shocks of her hair and pulls her head back to render her absolutely vulnerable to him and the dagger he holds against her throat.  “You stink of shemlen, flat ear”.

 

His blade lifts from her throat, then there is only a drift in darkness where there is no pain and only the faintest glimmer of realization that the sharp crack she heard just before the black swallowed her up was the connection of Vir’Tan’s pommel with skull just behind the ear that was still warmed from his hissing breath.

[QueenCrow]

Chapter 6 – We Warred Upon Ourselves

 

When she wakes up it is to the fog of half-consciousness.  Her senses come slowly.  The pain is first – a dull throb that reminds her of VirTan’s fist.  Mineral iron flavor floods her with the taste of her own blood.  It is hard to open her lips, the blood having dried on them.  The scent of the sea and sound of the surf remind her of the place.  Yes, she pulls remembrance of her purpose from unconscious void of thought, I have come here to meet my clan.  Head lolling back against stone behind her, she makes further claim to focus.  Above her, her wrists are bound and her body is stretched high.  The rope tethering her wrists together is wound about some kind of statue.  From her vantage she can only see the great moss-covered muzzle of a beast – a bear, perhaps?  Is the ground under my feet?  Her bare toes feel into the cool soil and a gentle breath of relief groans softly from her.  She lifts her head away from the stone and the shivering overtakes her, teaching her that she has been subject to the treatment she’s witnessed the hunters of her clan impose upon humans, and the bare-faced city elves who throw their lot in with the humans, hundreds of times.  She is stripped bare.  Her naked body, her vulnerability, has been revealed and now she hangs, displayed and shivering in the swirl of cool sea mist.  The dull throb of bruises left behind like a phantom pain teaches her that she has been ill used while drifting under the surface of consciousness.

 

VirTan is there, waiting for her consciousness to return to her.  He is right there before her with the rest of the clan hunters who have scouted ahead of the clan.  Most are out of sight, but she knows they are all there, watching, pacing through the shadows of the trees as if they are prowling their prey as one.  VirTan is the one who is there before her.  She swims further to focus.  They are the pack, the group that watches, menacing eyes reflecting from darkness to warn that they will quickly overtake their target, and VirTan is the strongest, swiftest, the alpha among them.

 

“You became their pet then?”  The sound he makes at the end of his question is one of acceptance of something he thought impossible, of disgust and disdain.  He rises up from where he has been rifling through the belongings he has taken from her.  His words slither toward her, then into her, and her shivering becomes uncontrollable.  Her staff has been dismantled and the head, its crystal gleaming from within the sunburst, is in his hand.  In a heartbeat he is in front of her, so close that she can feel the heat of him through his armor.  The head of her staff glints in his hand in front of her eyes.  “They made you into the Herald of Andraste and take the symbol of Mythal from your flesh.  How did the shems do it?  How did they erase our ways from your mind and our sacred blood writing from your face?”

Despite the pain coursing through her each time she moves, her uncontrollable shivering making stillness impossible, she laughs softly.  The trill of the sound evolves into a stifled cough that replaces the cynicism in her laugh with the sound of injury.  The swallow she attempts is dry and catches in her throat.  Will the words come out?  Will they fail me in describing all that I have seen and learned?  Her tongue fails to wet her bruised lip, where crimson flow has dried into sick brown crust.  She attempts to swallow again and manages the mechanics a little easier.  When her voice finally comes, it is brittle and broken despite her attempt to send him the soothing song of velvet in sound.

 

“They made a mistake, Lethallin.”  She willfully uses the word.  My kinsman.  “I was…”  How will I tell him in the few words he may allow me?  “An artifact of the Elvhen, our people, was what pulled me into the Fade.  When I came out, the humans saw a woman behind me.  They believed her to be Andraste sending me to help them survive their troubles.  But it was a spirit they saw behind me, formed into the semblance of a woman.”  She can see that VirTan is listening, though she also sees his fingers claw, flesh whitened at the knuckles, around the sunburst symbol of her staff’s head.  “And the one who took the vallaslin from my face was not a human.  He was an elf, VirTan.  He was one of our people, Vhenan.”

 

“Our people?  The ones in the cities, cowering and scraping, submitting themselves to the will of the shemlen, singing the shem songs and forgetting to honor our gods?”  Incredulity shines inferno in his eyes.  The word come from between his clenched teeth.  His body is coiling with tension before her eyes, as if preparing again for the strike.  “They are NOT my people and neither are you.”

 

She turns her head just in time.  Where the head from her staff would have connected with her lips, the metal and crystal in sunburst shape smashes into the bruised softness of her cheek.    He presses his armored body against her, trapping her between the hardness of his lean frame and the stone behind her.  Everything about his arouses her senses, most of all the way his words hiss with heat and venom as he presses the sunburst into her throbbing skin. 

 

“This is their mark.  This is the Chantry and their maker.”  She is listening to him.  The anger in his voice shields something more fragile.  The moment when the bulwhark of his anger takes over and he is no longer listening is unmistakable.  He clings to all that remains of his world, because he lacks the power to restore it.  The aura of warmth, love, healing, flows uneasily through the mist of pain, fear, and anger.  Her spiritual reach to him shivers unsteadily, but perhaps the cloak of unseen warmth she willfully winds around him as he presses himself against her is the reason his words drop to whispers and once-felt tenderness.  “I would have joined with you.  I would have loved you”, he laments into her ear in nothing more than bare breaths and she catches the scent of herself on him, knowing fully that it was he who left her nude body pained with the specter of hard use.  “But now …” He pulls away from her, depriving her of the last remnants of close intimacy and the remainder of his words raise up from the whispers to a near shout.  He speaks them as much for the nearby hunters as for her.  “…you will share their fate.”  Then he is done listening.  He pulls away from her, turns from her and she knows he has withdrawn from the unsteady flow of peaceful aura.  “Bring Fen’Harels teeth!”  The command for the tools of the game comes in a bark.  She hears movement in the trees and realizes that they intend the chase that is so commonly inflicted upon their human captives.  They will bring the leather and fit it around her body.  The iron spikes embedded in the torturous garment, teeth of the dread wolf, will be the instrument of pain, tearing her with each step she will be forced to take away from the clan. [*]

 

Perhaps it is the same instinct compelling her that moved her to enter the room that day at the Conclave.  The will to enter.  The will to speak  ‘What’s going on here?’  And then the will to extend her hand toward the orb that bestowed the mark of magic on her.  Perhaps it is the will to fight, rage that her own clan would cast her out, harm her, wound her, war upon her.  Or maybe the hold on sanity is finally slipping, a common affliction for those with the power to dream and walk the Fade at will.

 

He isn’t looking as her head rolls back against the stone.  So occupied are they in preparing Fen’harels teeth.  They arrange woven leggings with nails embedded and make ready to fit the teeth to place on he and they don’t see her body reddening with the blush of effort.  VirTan doesn’t see the rope that binds her smolder, then combust.  Once the binding is burned away and she is rid of the rope lashing her to the stone, only a single hunter sees her coming.  But her movements, her dance, as she begins pulling from the veil and the way her naked body moves, is hypnotizing to him.  He stares at her, silent until the moment when they all erupt with a scream that ends in breathless silence – the moment when she pulls the veil to strike down upon them in a fist of Fade that pins them, helpless as insects, to the ground.

 

“I have seen Mythal with my own eyes.  I have seen her sentinels, her slaves, marked with the same vallaslin that once marked my face.  They call us nothing more than shadows, pretenders wearing vallaslin.  They say you are not their people.”  She fills the silence with her declaration, a voice filled with the power she pulls and shapes in her rift-dance.

 

“And this”, she bends, her bare breasts kissing sleek thighs as she plucks the head of her staff from the ground where he dropped it.  “This is the sun, who was curious about the land, and bowed his head close to her body.  Elgar'nan was born in the place where they touched.”  It is the sun for certain, and in her words, she turns the sunburst symbol of the Chantry into the father of Elgar’nan.

She kneels down by VirTan where he lays stuck to the ground by the force of the veil she has twisted into him, and she caresses his brow with the fingers of one hand while holding the symbol she carried atop her staff before his wide eyes.  He attempts to writhe, to gasp life-giving breath, and the mask of anger remains on his face.  “Ma Vhenan,” she invokes something of meaning to him, the Vir Bor'assan: The Way of the Bow.  “Tell yourself whatever legends you must, but know:  You must bend with truth, or you will break.”

 

Iron Bull is first to catch sight of her as he comes into the tiny glade.  A Qunari profanity tactfully kept in his own tongue cuts the air in response to the sight.  One of the Chargers, she who is called ‘Dalish’, is the first to peel with laughter at the sight of their former Inquisitor, laughing darkly herself, nude as the day she was born, holding Fen’Harels teeth over a group of hunters pinned to ground on their backs.  Fiona, casting uncertain glances to the other mages who have chosen to travel this path, feels the draw of energy.  They all feel the pull – their will, once more, has being focused through the woman who led them from Tevinter indenture.  The search party has arrived just in time, it seems, though none are certain who they’ve rescued – the woman who was their Inquisitor, or the hunters of the Dalish.

 

 

 

[*]  The foundation of this fanfiction is derived, of course, from the writing of those who authored Dragon Age.  In this chapter, in particular, the Dalish torture custom "Fen’Harels teeth" is borrowed from Dragon Age: The Masked Empire.

[QueenCrow]

Chapter 7 – Mage Hunter

 

 

There were rituals in the Circle Tower that helped him sleep.  He can barely remember them now and counts the lapse as more memory lost to lyrium.  Sometimes he thinks he remembers.  Maybe it was the candle burning down while he recited the Chant of Transfiguration.  He sometimes tells himself that the lyrium was part of the ritual that helped him sleep, but eventually it comes back to the truth.  He just can’t remember.  It bothers him.  If he could remember, he wouldn’t lay in bed night after night willing himself to sleep with a ferocity that keeps him awake.  It’s something else keeping him up tonight too.

 

He lays on his bed watching the night sky and sifting through memory.  Earlier today he watched children play in the courtyard.  At first he wasn’t really watching at first.  He was the Commander of Inquisition forces making the usual rounds and he happened to witness the smallest refugees enjoy the world he fought to make for them – a world in which they could play like children.  But the more he watched the more he realized what the children were playing.  Mages and Templars.  He noticed the little slip of a girl with some sort of vegetable skin, onion skins probably, pasted to the tips of her ears to elongate them to a point.  With coal or mud she had painted a branching tree on her forehead and she danced as if she’d studied the movements for more years than she’d been alive.  A crooked stick made into a mage’s staff was her partner and the dance of magic was childishly enchanting.  The little girl was pretending to be Inquisitor Lavellan.   Cullen watched her from the steps leading to the hall and smiled even as he saw the boy.  Skin, bones, knobby knees and wild blonde hair, the boy was distinguished in his make-believe by a ragged fennec fur that was painted with kohl, mud and something red, and draped over the boy’s shoulders in the same manner as the Commander wore his mantle.  The boy had a wooden sword fashioned from a broken broom handle, and a pot lid as his shield.  Fascinated, Cullen watched as the children stood side by side and fought another child who was roaring like a demon, or darkspawn, or perhaps a blend of both.  Once the terrible, tiny make-believe demon was vanquished, the girl and the boy turned against each other.  The smile that held on the Commander’s face surrendered to a serious expression as the boy in fennec fur mantle shouted at the little girl with a stick tucked under her arm – “The demon possessed you!  You must be killed!”

 

Cullen throws off the sheets to bare his skin to the cooling breeze drafting through his loft.  It’s the first step to the knots that are usually formed in the sheets by morning.  He rolls to his side and makes an effort to forget the little waif pretending to be the Inquisitor.  His focus is on forgetting the way she cried and pleaded not to be killed.  She wanted to live, she’d sobbed.  Cullen reaches for the phylactery that is on the barrel table next to his bed and claims it into his grasp.  Her phylactery.  Not one taken from her by force, not one required of her or coerced from her.  Her phylactery, the one she gave him so that he could find her.

  

During the day, he wears her phylactery on a chain around his neck.  It reminds him of who he was, who he is, and who she is.  Awake, in the daylight hours, it reminds him by chiming against the inside of his breastplate as he leans forward over his desk.  It reminds him that she isn’t gone altogether.  There are many things he’s forgotten, memories lost, less since forgoing lyrium, but this is something he doesn’t ever want to forget.  Another gust whispers into his loft as he shifts in bed.  The wind cooling his bare skin.  He turns onto his back and holds the phylactery above him.  Its faint glow fuses with the glimmer of the star field behind it, visible through the hole in his roof he has kept open so that the night sky can be the canvas of his dreams.

 

In a moment of realization, all has changed.  Noticing the faintness of the phylactery has shifted the whole world.  How dim it looks to him now.  Is it even glowing at all?  He blinks as if to insure that impending sleep hasn’t dulled his senses, but no.  The phylactery is diminished.  The tinny clinking of metal on metal sounds as he throws the chain around his neck, jerks upright on his bed, and lets the amulet containing her blood rest against his naked chest.  His swiftness and his force split threads as he tears the sheet from his bed and wraps it around his hips.  In the time it takes to drop down his ladder and claim a few quick strides he is outside on the battlement inspecting the amulet.

 

He was usually the one assigned to deal a necessary death blow during harrowings, but he’s done enough mage hunting in his life to know what this kind of diminishment of the phylactery means.  She has expended massive amounts of magical energy within the last day. 

 

“Why?  What’s happened?”  Without realizing his thoughts are made into voice, he paces the battlement with the blood-bearing amulet in his fist and tries to conjure all of the reasons.  Has she had to fight again?  Has she …?  No.  He doesn’t want to think of that.  She asked him once what he would do if she became corrupted and he wouldn’t answer her.  He won’t think of that.  He won’t, he tells himself, but it never matters what he tells himself.  He always thinks of that.

 

No one has ever told Cullen that the mage hunter’s ritual with the phylactery is blood magic.  'Ritual' has always been the word used.  And he is gifted when it comes to this.  What word it’s called doesn’t matter as he stops his pacing.  He stands in the place where they stopped once during a walk and tried to think of chaste thoughts with the mountain peaks as canvas for their desire.  The battlement is his physical horizon.  Its edge drops off to the whole world that rises and falls in space between him and her.  There in the star-lit dark, on the place where he wanted to kiss her once and didn’t, he performs the mage hunter’s ritual.  He chants the words.  The amulet, her blood, glows with cadence that tells him.  He watches, waits, turns, turns again, and his senses tell him where she is, and roughly how far away.  If he is patient enough, and he most certainly is, he will be able to tell the direction of her movement, if she’s moving at all, and the force of her magical energy and life flow.  Suddenly he realizes that the dimness of the glow could mean that she has used tremendous energy toward magic, or it may mean that she is dying, almost dead.

 

The amulet drops against his chest.  It lands to a heavily-tapped rest on him above where his heart thunders inside body.  Donning his armor takes very little time even without his page.  Rounding up a squad with kicks to their bunks, scowling barks and orders, and requisitioning supplies takes less than an hour.  They are on the road before dawn.  But those short hours seem like a lifetime to a hunter with the will to move as if some unrelenting calling in his core were compelling him.

[QueenCrow]

Chapter 8

 

RED

 

 

-The Cave-

 

Everything is wet, not only because of what the Red Templars have added to the world – tears and blood.  Water has trickled and seeped into the cave for centuries, so long that the flow has congealed to a rancid ooze.  Faint firelight skims the drenched stone with light movement, making the very walls seem alive.  Creatures skitter unseen in the shadows where the wavering torchlight only occasionally reveals red eyes peering out of the darkness.  Spirits and demons gawk through gossamer boundary of the Veil.  Too many eyes.  The air is thick and ripe with the scent of metal and men.  Armor, swords, lyrium crystals, the angry kind, hot spent breath, and the iron of her blood.  A throaty, broken moan erupts from her again, a bare sound, a weak sound – the strength to scream has abandoned her for now.

 

His boots sound across the stone floor and she gasps air.  Even in the drowning lucid haze of pain, she hears that he is withdrawing from her and knows that she will only have a few seconds to try and shoal herself up before he returns.  He coils the whip casually and lays it down on the table.  She can hear the strength of his breath in the cup as he renews himself.  She hears the patterned dripping of water, hears his swallow.  The rumble begins low, as if the ground boils tremors up into this man. The percussion of his armor clatters, signaling his mild convulsions in the silverite suit once belonging to the Chantry Order.  And then the growl that begins low in the pit of the Templar erupts into a power-surged roar.  Boots on the floor again.  Approaching.  The whip whispers warning to her as he unfurls.  He delivers another lash and the force of the hit judders up his arm into the core of his red, ravenous soul, then bounds back to her.  The power of his arm is inhuman.  He smashes her against the post and flays her open.  He comes again, then again.  It is a discordant and vicious song he keeps time to with his whip.  And it has been unrelenting for…hours? Days?

 

The whips tail tears fire over her back, she cries out a piteous sound that is brightened by the red lyrium force surged through his arm.  She slumps, stripped to the waist and bare-backed, against the rough wood as her legs falter beneath her.  Her cheek, slick with sweat and tears abrades against the newly bark-stripped trunk.  This has all been made for her.  Red strength and twisted thought have created this monstrous gallery inside the bowels of the world where her arms are shackled in a macabre embrace around a great tree trunk, one felled by muscle of the Red Templars, upon which they punish her.  Her cries die and she pants for breath, open-mouthed and delirious.  She closes her eyes, unable to keep them open or unwilling to see them standing around her any longer.  They are all there, though.  She feels them all around her, encircling her, stoic and silent like statues built of despair, hatred, and rage.  And she feels them draining her, suppressing her essence.  Their dampening smothers her and she struggles to gasp quick breaths between the physical force of the lashes.

 

 

-Outside-

 

It’s one of those annoyances on the edge of consciousness that can’t be ignored for long.  He is thinking of her and assuring himself that he’ll find her, along with the others, drunk to a stupor in a tavern just over the next hill.  The insistent light flashes in the periphery of his vision and glints him out of his thoughts again.  Scowling in the direction of the flash, he spots the silhouette of great horns against the failing light of dusk.  The flash.  A signal from The Iron Bull, and he halts his squad with a lifted fist and a barked command.  In no time, the mounts have been hidden and the Commander of Inquisition forces, with the sparest of squads, joins Bull’s mercenary company.

 

“We came upon her and her clan and they were fighting.  Elves.”  Bull chuckles, though there is a lightness absent from the sound.  “Next thing that happens is the leader, or…keeper of her clans shows up and everyone finally starts listening.  They had some kind of meeting in their wagon.”  Probably like what should have happened in the conclave at the Temple of Sacred Ashes. Bull doesn’t waste the words on ‘should have’, but keeps on going with the essentials.  “When they came out the boss and one the clan’s hunters got tied….joined.  ****, Cullen, I don’t remember what they called it but that isn’t important.”  Bull’s voice is low and his look to Cullen is direct.  That there’s a need to be quiet and there’s no time to waste can be heard in his fast phrasing.

 

“Bound”, Dalish interjects from within the huddle of the Chargers and something in the word flips a switch on Cullen’s expression.  The Commander’s stare is dark and predatory, the quiet snarl of an alpha who feels his territory has been infringed upon.

 

Bull sees the change in the Commander, thanks Dalish for her help with a grunt, then gets on with his report.  “Yeah.  So just at the point we’re all playing nice, celebrating whatever it’s called and opening the casks, the Red Templars attacked.  Boss does what she does and I see her running off with her keeper, and hunters from her clan hot on her tail.  Every single one of those red bastards attacking took after her.  It was her they were after.  She drew them away from the main group but by the time I caught up they’d pulled her and the ones with her into the middle of their force.”    The Grey giant pauses and pulls back the thick branch of an evergreen then turns his stare through the opening.  Cullen follows the look and spots the gaping black opening into the cavernous underground.  He starts formulating even as Bull speaks on.  “So here it is.   Those corpses at the mouth of the cave are all of the hunters she had with her.  The’ve been tossing the bodies out one by one.  Boss is in there with reds that outnumber us…”  Grey eyes scan the Chargers and Cullen’s squad, “… ten to one.  From the look of things, if we don’t do in, she’s dead.  If we do go in, she’s probably still dead and the rest of us dead with her.”

 

 

-The Cave-

 

There is the sound of the whip coiling in his gloves again but she doesn’t hear it.  Focus is gone and what little there is to claim is spent on realization of the sensation of hot blood snaking its way down the curve of her back from the cut of the last lash.

 

“Cleanse the mage.”  Somehow the metallic resonance of his voice, soaked and powered with crystalline taint suits the scent of misery on the air.  She struggles to find her footing, knowing what is coming, and draughts short and shallow breaths to steal as much as she can beforehand.  Tiny fists clench to white-knuckled hardness against wood, and she strains against the iron of the manacles that will gratefully help her to stay upright.  And then it comes as the Templars around her respond with fervent obedience.  The shock racks her and her lithe body stiffens.  Every muscle, every sinew, flesh and bone jolt with a force that reaches down her throat and pulls the very breath from her lungs, leaving her in a vacuum of lifeless, breathless space where the next inhale is impossible.  Perhaps she would have cried out again as she heard him approaching her from behind, but she can’t hear him, and couldn’t cry out if she wanted to.  It’s as if the pall of death has been thrown over her, only she has been buried alive, and paralyzed, so that she lives the sensation of death.

 

“Open your eyes. Look at her. “  He is behind her now, his presence so close that it feels as if he’s crept inside of her.  The voice hisses and crackles feedback to her and she opens her eyes to see Keeper Deshana held kneeling on the cave floor by a gauntleted fist.  “Save her.”  The presence of command is in his voice as the others surround Deshana and put the noose around her neck.  “Isn’t she your teacher?  The last of your clan?  Do you love her?”  Gloves hand strokes over her sweat-soaked hair slowly, a gesture of tenderness that is cruel in its deception.  “Unless you open a breach, she is going to die, she-elf.”

 

“Da’len…”  The Keeper’s voice is soft and serene as a song.  It calls to the wounded and faltering consciousness of the clan’s First at the whipping post.  “You cannot save me with destruction of the...”  Keeper Deshana’s song is cut short with the swift stroke of a Red Templar’s blade, a shriek and open-mouthed rattle.  Having opened her eyes, she sees it all as she saw the others.  Her Keeper’s blood spills in slow pulses into the pool that flowed from the rest of her clan’s hunters.

 

“You can still save her.”  Fed despair by the tinny crackle of the voice, he is narrator to the sight of her Keeper dying, and she mistakes the voice, just for a moment, for hope.  I can still save my Keeper.  “Open a breach to the Fade,” he hisses “and we will let you save your keeper before it’s too late.  Refuse me again, and you will be refused any further mercy.”

 

Against the damp surface of the whipping post, she nods slowly, though the words of surrender are still an impossibility.  He waves his hand behind her and the circle of Red Templars lighten the silencing – pull back the oppressive weight of red will they have crushed down on her.  “Yes.”  She gasps a breath, gulps futility at the word just spoken, then heaves with the force of remaining strength in her body.  The contents of her stomach would have spilled out of her lips, but there is nothing there.  She heaves and convulses the emptiness until she is able to find her breath and her words.  They are so ragged that he has to lean close to hear.  And she can feel him listening, judging, wanting the cause to unleash his red rage again. “I…can’t…”  Never before has the conjuring of speech been so difficult.  She reach for, and grasps, each word as if it were a handhold on lifeline.  “I must … draw …power.” 

 

His face is before her then.  His beyond-bloodshot eyes bracing her with unrelenting hold.  He appraises her silently for a long pause, then he sneers before raising up to his full height and boring his stare and words down upon her.  She has trouble looking at him, listening to him.  Each of his words marks another pulse of life from the Keeper and the heaviness invisible clock ticking is like thunder in the First’s mind.  “A mage, an elf, and she-elf at that.  Of course you’re not strong enough alone.”  The sneer twists on his face and paints into the dark joy of a man who has reminded an elf of her value in the world - beyond the mark on her hand, little more than sated lust and clean quarters to men such as these.  He turns.  His face is gone, then. 

 

“Men!  Focus your power through the mage.  Let her draw from your will!”

 

One of them steps forward and releases the lock on the manacles, then resumes his place among the red sentinels around her.  He stabs at her with his eyes, visible from the slits of his helmet, baby blue and red, while she steadies herself and gives swift and fleeting remembrance to the last time she drew power in such a way.  The ruins at the Temple of Sacred Ashes.  I can’t, comes in a mantra of thought.  She is so weak, so full of pain, so empty of anything else, so bared open to the taint of the Templars, and the demons that strain against the membrane of the Veil, all waiting to break through and reflect the RED. 

 

She casts bleary gaze to her Keeper, who has gone still and quiet on the floor.  Gone, like the others.  There is no time for prayer of mourning, though she lowers her head and her vacating stare is cast to the floor where her bare toes steady her.  There is no time for Falon’Din.  Nothing left to lose.  She quiets and lets her empty soul pull.  The mark on her hand sparks, causing the hateful statues around her to flinch and claim their swords from scabbards.  The sting of cold steel cutting from sheathes rings in the air as the din building within her rises to a resounding hum.  The anchor arcs twisted shafts of light to the stone surfaces of the cave and the red lyrium resonance of the Templars crescendos into a blaring voice that fills her and overfills her with RED.

 

The inhale of energy she draws from the men around her, once men before they were tainted with anger, fed on despair, tortured and twisted around crystalline red, is fathomless and soul-scorching.  At once, they fall to one knee in synchronous motion and direct their power toward the woman at the center of them.  She lifts to the fullness of her small stature, straightens and rises.  Her slender back, still streaked with the blood of her breaking, snaps into a wild arch.  Her head snaps back, flailing her back with sweat-damp shocks of her hair.  Bare breasted, belly concaves and her arms raise at her sides as light tornadoes around her.  Wild eyes and gaping full lips are the warning as the unrelenting power of the Red Templars floods into her, claws at the walls of her being, and pounds inside her like a battering ram aimed to tear her open before tearing the world.

 

Opened, filled with torrents of red rage, despair, and terror, her scream comes white hot and endless, like the scream of a thousand souls.  Bight and baneful is her voice, a shivering hot call that make a man's bones seem to thrum within him, smolder, then ignite.  It is a terrible sound, a wail of pain and fury that seems to burn the ears.  The Knight-Captain who wielded the whip drops the hilt from his hand and covers his ears, but the sound goes on and on.  The others, unable to cut off the draw they have allowed her, sway on their knee.  Some fall full-bodied to the floor.   She writhes in the pool of this red power, drawing even from the still-warm pool of life’s flow drained from clan, mate, and keeper, and her body jerks in such a way that is seems as if some great beast will rip free from within her and devour all.  The anchor arcs again and erupts shimmering bursts of light until the last blasts out from her then strikes back in toward her center.  Shaping the red power pulled from the Templars, she turns it not toward ripping open the Veil, arcs it outward toward them.  And then the wall of energy explodes from her, rolling over them all in an unstoppable force that pounds all around her into the immovable objects of the cave’s stone walls, floor, ceiling.   Stone wails, cracks, splits, groans.  Rock tumbles from dank walls and speaks threats of collapse for several minutes before finally clattering into quiet. 

 

She staggers and almost falls, but then a hand catches her by her arm.  They’d all heard the vile call of her red scream and decided the moment of hesitation and strategy was over.  The Chargers, the Qunari and a small squad made the choice.  And now he is there.  They are there.  Cullen catches her and keeps hold even as the reactive spikes of searing light begin to burst from her again and penetrate past his armor into the meat of his body.  At first gritting his teeth is enough to resist howling in pain, but when he pulls her to his plated chest and wraps his arms around her convulsing body, the roar breaks free and only stops when she is spent and limp in his arms.  So light in his arms when he picks her up, she feels like an empty husk.  He is cautious as he carries her out into the dusk, cautious with her as if she is fragile.  The battle is brief with the Red Templars remaining.  The throat-cutters do their work once the numbers have been reduced to the wounded and Cullen prepares the Inquisitor for a return to Skyhold.

[QueenCrow]

Chapter 9 -

 

 

Red Bleeds Into Blue

 

 

“Where do you think we are?”  The words snarl around her, coming from nowhere and everywhere.  The voice is so strikingly familiar that she can feel his hands on her body, feel the way he touches her lovingly before striking the blow.

 

She moves through the cave with the voice haunting her path.  Her breath heaves as she climbs, motivated by the determination to make her escape from the Red Templars to the surface.  Just for a moment, she tells herself as she stops to breathe.  She can’t breathe.  Their silencing reaches me even here?  Her hand trembles against the wall.  She needs the support of the stone just for a moment while she catches her breath and tries to still what courses, poison, through her mind.  When she pulls her hand back it is heavy and dark, slick with congealed blood and steaming with heat and Red.  She convulses with a gag and frantically wipes the gore against the remnants of her robe.

 

“Do not worry, vhenan.  Take your time.  They are not coming.  You killed them.  Didn’t you realize?”  The whisper teases her ear and she turns into the breath as she has done a hundred times before.

 

“Solas?”  He is there.  Astonishment takes her and she forgets herself.  How many times has she searched her sleep for the moment when this dream comes true?  Even when she was searching in the world for him, she always knew he would be found where she first tasted him – in the Fade – and she surges with joy that jangles into her, sparking between every synapse, thrilling her and making her forget.  She begins what she has dreamed, and moves to give herself to him, again.  But it is something in his eyes, perhaps, that stops her, or the faint smirk tainting lips where she would have another taste.  Or it is the voice? Where do you think we are?  Her belly flips inside her and she has to press the back of her hand to her lips to keep from retching again.  The tunnel churns and threatens to rob her of bearings.

 

“Not Solas”, there is no trace of the horror she feels as she turns and starts her ascent unsteadily toward the surface again.  As she takes the first step she can see the form of the demon darkening and shifting in the flank of her vision and chants to herself.  “Not Solas.  It is not Solas.”, even though her soul compels her to plead with whatever is in the shape of Solas.  Stay with me, help me, please don’t leave me again, not now, I love you. Please. Whisper ‘ar lath, ma vhenan’ to me just one more time.

 

Laughter surrounds her, coming from nowhere and everywhere incredulously. “Did you really think the harellan would help you.  Love you?”  She keeps moving and doesn’t look – forces herself to keep her gaze forward as she feels what she keeps her eyes from witnessing.  The being shifts into the likeness of Keeper Deshana and speaks croaked voice through the mortal wound that the Templar’s sword swathed through her throat, and her life.  “A fine Keeper you would have made.  Not only did the Dread Wolf catch your scent, you made it your duty to help him, begged him to love you, ached for him to touch you every night after the night he left you.  Stupid little bare-faced child.  That is Templar blood on your hand and the blood of your dead clan too.  Scrub and scrub.  It will never come clean.”

 

Her bare feet stop on their own.  Terror tremors rip through her, rattling her bones to the marrow. In the dark, wide eyes flood with tears that swiftly overspill the lashes.  She can’t breathe again, loses the strength to stand and falls, slender body slackened with hopelessness, to her knees.

 

“Ah.  Now you see.  I told you that you would see, didn’t I?”  The shadows shift again, shape themselves into her dream and her nightmare – Keeper Deshana is gone and he is there again, wrapping his graceful arms around her defeated slump and lifting her from her knees.

 

The mantra reaffirms in her mind.  Not Solas.  It is not Solas.

 

“Ar lath, ma vhenan.”  She can’t look at those lips speaking those words and turns away.

 

“Lies.”  A new mantra swirls on her tongue, transforming as her tormentor shifts shape.  She pulls herself from him, turns away from him.  She takes a step toward the surface, the light at the end of this blood-soaked tunnel of deceit.

 

“Remember how those words made you feel, vhenan?  I gave you the truth.  What we had was real.”  Honey-tongued words swirl around in her spinning mind and she takes another step, then another, and another between the soul-shaking sobs she can no longer hold back.

 

A cry brightens her chant as it bursts free on the back of a whimpered hiccup.  “Lies!”

 

“Why do you keep climbing, vhenan?  You don’t know what is up there, do you?  Waiting on the surface?  Where do you think you are?  Do you think you can hide from your pain here?  HERE?  This is my world, stupid little elf, and you know there is always a toll for passing through.”

 

She gathers her will and moves.  The words stab at her but she keeps moving despite the invisible wounds that seep anger into the throb of her heart racing out of control. Three more steps and her voice rises, wavering and halting, but the broken phrases mending themselves together as she searches for the answer, and the truth.  “I am in the Fade.  I am dreaming.  When I reach the surface of this place I will wake up and all of this will be over.”

 

Laughter rolls against the cave walls, over her, through her again.   The tone and timbre is the cruel laugh of the Red Templar Captain.  She hears his whip unfurling and turns to look behind her, her hands sparking with burst of blue energy as she lays eyes on the source, a thing still in the guise of Solas.  “Begone!” she hisses, her sobs evolving mercilessly into heaves of breath rushing tempests between clenched teeth.  But the laughter continues, even as it speaks with the voice that once carried the words ‘Ar lath, ma vhenan.’

 

“You need my help, Lethallan.  Let me help you.  You –are- in the Fade, but your body is in the arms of that Fereldan hound, the Templar who put you in irons after you survived the Conclave.”  He goes on, flooding her with plausibility and dazzling half-truths as swiftly as he can for as long as he can be sure she is listening.  “He wanted to kill you from the moment he found out you were a mage, and it was he, in fact, who urged the Seeker to that course of action.”

 

She shakes her head slowly, trying to deny even as she remembers.  Tell me why we shouldn’t just kill you now.  He steps toward her and she doesn’t retreat.  He wraps her in his lithe arms and she allows him to hold her just the way Solas held her against him.  And she listens as he whispers the flowing meter dripping from his smooth tongue into her ear.

 

“He now stands guard over you just like he’s done in hundreds of mage harrowings and he is ready to kill you, wants to kill you, for he has seen what you have done.  You have murdered Templars.  Some of them were men he trained himself.  You pulled power recklessly from all around you, even from the spilled blood of your clan in order to kill those Templars.  You attacked even him in your frenzy.  Do you know what sort of punishment he meted out for much lesser offenses in the Gallows?  You are weak, not strong enough to defend yourself after all that has happened.  You are succumbing to the insanity of a dreamer.  And you have made it easy for him to hunt you down even if you could get away from him.  Let me help you, vhenan.  He will kill you.”

 

Laughter rises again and so does the flare of mana from her hands, only the laughter is hers, irrational, a maddened trill of misplaced joy.  Shocks of blue light warp around her and the malignant spirit, then crackles into flashes of bright gold that sear with light and heat.  Then the hue of energy darkens and streaks with rage crimson, the crystalline glimmer of the blighted lyrium that infused her when she drew Red Templar power and forced her mind to plunge into the harrowing Fade.   Rage bounds within her, streaking the bursts of her mana with scarlet.  Her red focus knocks the Solas-shaped thing back in a show that she is weak, but she can conjure enough strength to repulse a malicious spirit.  Her laughter shuts off like its flow has been abruptly, and unnaturally, stoppered.  In the song of dead words that would more likely emerge from a tranquil than from her, she turns toward the light at the end of the tunnel and she speaks the truth.

 

“The stupid little bare-faced elf does not fear death.”

 

~*~

 

 

There is no time for Cullen to take off the breastplate before The Iron Bull lifts her up to him so they turn her around in the saddle rather than have her whip-lacerated back grate against his armor all the way to forward scouting position.  The Commander turns her so that her head rests his mantle like a pillow, her face tucked under his jaw where he can feel the push and pull of her faint breath against his neck and know that she is still alive.  They thread her thighs over Cullen’s once his boots are in the stirrups and then he tries to wrap her limp limbs around him.  It is a weird thing to do, Bull thinks, but marks it up to a flare of panic in the Commander.  For the first miles Bull rethinks the arrangement because he can’t look away from them.  The gait of Cullen’s horse is slow enough that it looks like they’re copulating in the saddle and the Commander is blushed an unnatural shade.  She is half naked though, and Cullen has never seemed the type to get his cork popped much.  It’s not like they have Tamassrans who’ll take care of that need and in the South it’s not like a Chantry man can get that kind of itch scratched without bearing the guilt of a whoremonger during his prayers to the Maker’s bride.  She’s still unconscious and Bull can’t decide whether he’s glad for it or worried that she hasn’t come around yet.  Cullen’s sweating a downpour and holding the Boss so tightly that her body is contorted by the force of his arm and crushed against him.  There’s a little relief when the Commander spurs his mount and rides on a little ahead.  Bull tells himself he can finally stop staring but he moves on the road to see if he can get a better look and he misses Krem coming up beside him.

 

“Somethin’ wrong, Chief?” Krem jerks his head at Cullen and the Boss and gives Bull one of those looks. Bull knows those looks from Krem by now.

 

“That’s a templar holding that mage.”  Bull says the words out loud and finally realizes that’s the way it is – not knowing whether Cullen’s trying to save her, fu*k her or ready to crush the life out of her.  Krem shakes his head and Bull sees it from the corner of his eye as he watches Dalish catch up to Cullen’s trot.  He judges it’s a ‘Vint head shake so Bull puts in Qunari perspective for the man from the land of boss mages.  “Did you fu*king see what she did to those Reds back at that cave?  At least three of them were torn clean in half.  All but a couple burnt beyond recognition.  And that one guy?  She took his head clean off his shoulders without even touching him.”  Bull looks at Krem to make sure he gets the point.  “Bas Saarebas.  A dangerous thing.  Back home…”  Where is home to a Tal Vashoth?  “-IF- they found a use for her and let her live, she’d be collared and chained, blinded, her tongue cut out, and her mouth sewn shut.”

 

Krem processes the Qunari world for a respectful pause then says his piece, ‘Vint style.  “Yeah, well, those Reds had it coming.  Where I come from they’d make her queen of the fu*king ball.”

 

Bull doesn’t miss a step in the march.  “I don’t give a **** about the Reds, or killing.  Back there?  The Boss?  Never seen her like that.  Out of control.  Maybe she needs an Arvaarad.  Maybe a Templar is just what she needs and that’s a Templar holding her.”  Bull spits to the side like there’s something slightly sour about what he just said and picks up the pace.  “That isn’t gonna work if she’s come out of the Reds’ hands corrupted, though.”  Speculation ends there.  There’s no need.  In the North or South, practically anywhere, the fate of a corrupted mage is the same.  Everyone who knows the rules knows that.  Bull and Krem move up in the small column in silence, both watching Cullen and his charge to the point of staring.

 

~*~

 

She smells of lyrium gone wrong.  As he holds her half-naked body against him, riding one-handed, belly to belly with her, she is enough to keep him hard and excruciatingly bothered without that bad lyrium scent mixing things up in him, tormenting him with his desire, need that won’t leave him no matter how much he denies himself.  His **** juts up in his leathers, forcing him to remember a base need that he’s never been able to forget.  He feels as if his veins are gaping open, sucking for the sweet haze that he can smell on her, that he remembers throbbing deliciously in him after each dose.  He buries his nose into her hair.  Sweat.  Blood, hers.  Lyrium.  Sour.  Her sex.  Lyriiiiuuummm.

 

She is unconscious nearly the whole way to the camp where the forward scouts watching, moving, and relaying what spare information they gather.  He tells himself that he must distance himself now.  He isn’t standing over her with a circle of his brothers as she tests her mettle in the Fade, but he must prepare himself to kill her if she should wake as something…other than herself.  And he is deciding what to do if she wakes as herself.

 

It is difficult for him, in the throws of need, to understand why he wants to revel in this -  her small and limp against him until that lyrium smell soaks into him enough.  Then he realizes himself with a jolt of clarity and feels the sharp pang of shame that he should be so wanting and erect with her injured and vulnerable in his possession.  This quiet little secret inside him sent him running for the Order the moment his manhood began to awaken.  Thirteen, his ****** stiffening at the mention of a mage and he knew it was in him to guard them, to use them the way other Templars did, to command them, to control them utterly, to possess every aspect of their lives in the real world lest demons possess them from the Fade. Those threads in him are the strongest in forming the skein of the man he's become, affirmed by his vows, his Order, his faith.  He breathes in deeply then lets the cleansing breath judder out of him quietly.  It’s always been mages, hasn’t it?

 

At the end of his exhale he feels her.  She is limp as a rag doll and still against him, but he feels a weak surge from her, the barest flow of mana that snakes its way into him, shimmering along his lyrium-starved nerves, feeling hot and sullied to his senses, yet filling him with a mild buzz of delirium.  He feels her breath gushing patterns against his throat and feels the twist of his heart at the broken softness of her words.

 

“I have burned you, Ser.”  She lifts her hand and traces the line of blistering where her magic arced from his armor to burn exposed flesh.  He loosens his hold on her enough to pull her away from him, ever so slightly, to look into her eyes.  He finds her small and pale, clinging to life just the same way he found her in the snow after Haven fell.   She finds his gaze, fierce, ferocious in caution and worry, hungry, hurting the same way they hurt when he confided the trials of his life.  And she holds his gaze as she lifts her voice from a whisper and speaks what she believes he will understand.  “Foul and corrupt are they, Who have taken His gift, And turned it against His children.”  There isn’t much left, but what breath is left scrapes from him as she finishes.

 

Everyone comes to a halt and Cullen reigns his mount to stop.  They are all watching as he dismounts with a display that could never be mistaken for anything but purpose and pulls her down to him.  His command straddles the border between bark and growl as he takes her in his arms and carries her, his horse heeling behind, off of the road toward the shadow of the woods.  “You men move on to forward position!”

 

Once they are swallowed up by the cover of the trees and the Chargers having nothing left to watch, they look at each other.  No one moves on until the Iron Bull makes it clear.

 

“Let’s move!  You have your orders and the Chargers follow orders.”  It takes a threat to prod some more interested, or invested, parties to move.  “Dalish, get moving before your bow starts looking too much like a staff.”  The pace goes, but it’s slow and listless until they realize that The Iron Bull has stayed behind at the point where the Commander carried the Boss into the woods. 

[QueenCrow]

Chapter 10

 

By My Will Alone is Balance Sundered

 

 

He remembers the time when everything was different.  That’s something he remembers very well.  Everything was louder then, and distracted by the clear-ringing knell of duty resounding in his Templar blood.  The moments in which to quietly contemplate the philosophical differences of the world were rare, with lyrium reverberating in his body and filling him with something other than the uncertainty he feels now.  It was easier, in the Gallows, to diminish the extremes he didn’t want to see, and enflame those his lyrium-leashed eyes wanted him to see.  How many punishments had he justified, allowed, encouraged, administered in the interest of keeping the world safe and sinless, in the name of his ever-encompassing duty?  Mages cannot be treated like people. They are weapons. They have the power to light a city on fire in a fit of pique.

 

His strides into the shade of the wood, with her held tightly in his arms, have the snap of purpose in them.  The easy work of his lean, solid body is the realization of his tension, tightening, flexing, and bounding with each step of his march forward into further uncertainty.  Flora and fauna scatter and the forest falls quiet, save for the sound of his heavy boot falls onto the receiving ground.  Then he speaks to her.  There is the sound of purpose in his voice too, and anger.

 

“Speaking that particular part of the Chant of Light when waking to an ex-Templar guarding your unconscious body is …inadvisable.”  He is a man who is swift of mind, who never surveys a situation without thinking of strategy, tactics.  He knows she is being provocative and intends to do what his nature compels him to do; command, control, dominate the mage.  Since the day he began his Order training, he has been tempered and honed to duty driven by a righteous soul that has a cutting edge as sharp as his sword.  This nature is his birthright.  Command is his biology. 

 

He turns his head to look at her, but held against him as she is, he ends up speaking into her hair and inhaling that scent again without knowing the draught of the sullied perfume fuels his senses in ways that enhances his darker nature - a streak of red already inside him, one that rises up in response to the smell of red lyrium in her hair.  The dust on her skin, that smell, reminds him of the time when his duty was clear and his obedience was easy, and Templars only carried apostate mages into the woods for a few simple reasons.  It swells and throbs with quickened pulse through his body and behind his eyes.  “Never speak those words to me again.  They are not for you.”  His growls into the the tendrils scented with lyrium-gone-wrong, and his grip on her tightens.  Dalish girl spouting the Chant of Light.  Apostate mage.  Unknowing, untrained savage. Danger.  Risk.  Faith in Duty.  Duty.  Silently, he provokes himself with something hot and swift as a blade.  His want.  His need.  That smell -  red lyrium maddening him slowly, and it takes the time following the sound of the stream’s babble for him to realize that his anger is building and, perhaps, is becoming unreasonable.  Is it the blighted lyrium on her or my craving for it?  Hazel eyes flash to his gloved hand on her thigh as he carries her and he is mildly startled to see his fingertips burrowing hard grip into her reddening skin.  The scent hits him again with the shift in the wet, cool wind drafting up from the stream they near.  He suddenly remembers smashing his lyrium kit against his wall.  I have the power to crush her in a fit of pique.  It is not a slowing of metabolism in him that causes him to loosen his grip on her, or repentance of his force, or softening, or even sympathy.  She, in his hold, pulses another wave of her magic into him and it washes over him as if she has doused his being in soundless cool.  It is only that coolness, and restraint of monumental strength in him, that allows him to let go of her and place her on her feet in the green loam on the stream’s bank.

 

She can feel him.  None but one pulled so close to him that she is almost of his flesh could feel the twitches, tremors, the greedy inhales and halting exhales.  And his hardness is undeniable.  His hardness prods her.  The movement of his sinew snaps and recoils, and she knows that his rising strength is a distant and thunderous forewarning of some kind of coming storm.  She sways on her feet as he places her down by the slow-moving trickle of green waters only for a moment, then she lowers fluidly to her knees at his boots.  Small hands plant into the forgiving loam on the ground and her head bows.  Conscience commands her, instinct that will not be gainsaid compels her.  And she can feel him, hard, heavy, hot and full of old hate –she has seen the birth of those old hatreds in his nightmares, so she recognizes them as enemies.  She feels in him what she felt in the Red Templars – splintering rasp, cutting and clawing, cauterizing compassion, and her perception sends her to her knees at his feet.

 

“I ask your pardon for losing myself, Commander.  I beg your forgiveness for burning you.”  He is above her and though her eyes are fixed to her own slender fingers clawing into the soft loam under her, the hard stare and serious expression pouring down on her is hammer heavy.  Trembling fingers inch toward the road-dusted toe of his boot and just at the moment of contact, she attempts another ripple of peaceful cool into him. “My restraint was lost to the lyrium momentarily.  The red…”  Boot toe presses almost imperceptibly into the ground.  His thighs tighten; she senses though she cannot see them and retreats her touch from him as she continues.  “The …”  What word is there for the voluptuous rage of the red lyrium and the Templars who filled themselves so fully with it?  ..."it felt as if it was inside of me, drumming a deafening dirge in my head.  In pain, grief, and torment, I could not control the power that was fed me and it was the pain, grief, torment and rage that I reflected when I called to the Fade.  I lost control.  Please forgive me for hurting you. ”  She hears metal clattering softly against metal and she lifts her gaze from the ground to see him working at the buckle of his breastplate.

 

Kneeling before him, her small body coiled back on her heels, her hands timidly trying to touch her magic into him, he stares down on her as he begins removing his armor and it strikes him as absurd – this genuflection coming from one who was, just a few short weeks ago, the Inquisitor to whom he answered.  But the criss-crossed and crooked welts and wounds are cleanly visible as he stands over her and the vicious latticing in her flesh hints to him with clear sight of horrific wounds.  She’s too injured to stand?  Maker’s breath.  How could she ever trust Templars again?   His brow furrows deeply into a contemplative frown – the same near-scowl that sets on his expression when he’s planning sieges – he watches her and even the distraction of his want for the lyrium dust on her can’t hold back his empathy.  She speaks his story, their story now.  Memory, confined to nightmares and black thoughts return him to Kinloch, to the pain, the torture, the death of kinsman Templars witnessed one by one, the ruin of his trust, the refuge of his rage.  If there’s anyone in the world who could understand what has happened to her in the hands of the Red Templars, it is him.  How can someone be the same person after that? 

 

“Are you able to heal yourself?”  He nearly calls her ‘Inquisitor’.  She nods silently.  Looking down on her reminds him that she is no longer his superior in the Inquisition ranks.  She is a mage kneeling before him, begging his forgiveness for turning her magic against him.  And, listening to her, the way he in particular can relate to her ordeal, his empathy allows him to understand why she lost herself momentarily.  He has lived that terror.  “Then do it.”, he speaks and immediately regrets the cold sound of his own voice.  Perhaps she can heal her flesh, but her mind?  It’s a heavy thought that weighs on him as he surveys this war map in womanly form on the ground before him.  “What did the Red Templars demand of you?”

 

She doesn’t rise, but instead turns toward the stream and slinks her way to the edge on her hands and knees.  Hips roll, the soft flesh of her breasts, constantly lured by gravity, move with her.  He feels another pang of regret as she enters the stream, like an opportunity drifting by, uncaught, and just out of reach.  His view of her is inhibited.  She will wash off the dust.  Lyrium flowing away.  The tip of a single, slender finger trails into the water and the current rushes with light before she cups the liquid to her lips.  The answer comes in soft, unsteady voice to her wet palm, where the anchor pulses faintly.  “They wanted a way into the Fade in search of their Master.”

 

“Their Master?”  He blinks in disbelief.  The way her wet mouth bows into a little frown captures his attention and he sees her eyes flicker to him as she reaches back to the water.  Nothing can hide in those wide, gleaming elven eyes – they are no comparison to the eyes of humans, so much more expressive that he believes he can see the uncertain soul of her in that one little glance.  “Corypheus is dead.  You killed him!  Didn't you?”

 

“Do you know how many times I’ve heard those very words, Commander?  ‘But he was dead’, they told me.  ‘I was sure we killed him’, they said.  I even saw him dead once in the Temple of Mythal.  And then he is there and living and trying to destroy all that is beloved.”  She quiets for a moment, as if silently calculating this puzzle in her mind one more time.  “I believe I killed him pushing him into the Fade, but I have believed what was not true before, and many have believed him dead before only to learn their error. The only answer I can give you with any certainty, is that I don’t know.”  Another cupped palm of light-glowing fluid wets her lips.  Faint fog of misted light rolls from the stream to surround her and he watches as the lacerations on her back begin to mend themselves, closing, fading from shades of blood crimson to welts of faint blues, yellows and pink.  “In any case, the Templars believe him to be living and they want a way to the Master they believe is retrievable.”

 

The buckles work under his fingers until he lifts the breastplate from his chest and places it down on a patch of moss.  He could take off his armor and put it back on again in the dark.  As his body flexes and his arms rise with the lift of his tunic, her liquid eyes turn to him and lock on the stretching definition of his form.  When the tunic clears his head, he sees her looking at him and is witness to the expression that fills her elven eyes.  An expression of want that he saw in her once after he kissed her in his office transforms to sorrow and shame before him.  Lightly, he runs his fingers over the hot blisters and deep burns that she has given him, the part of him where her gaze of want has transformed to sorrow.

 

Hesitation has always plagued him, though not in the way that would hinder a warrior.  When it comes to duty, he strikes with the force and fury of the sure and merciless.  A year ago, in the Gallows, he would have sentenced her to death or tranquility and then been the one to strike the blow.  He never would have kissed her then, or tasted her lips.  But things were louder then, and now he is the quiet that allows him to listen to her, to hear her.  Back then, lyrium flowed in his veins.  Now, his blood is full of want for the things he has always told himself he could never have.  He drops his sword belt and the stream ripples with the flinch of her body under the surface.  The windows to her uncertain soul leave him, and she begins the healing caresses into the water that swirl around her, glinting like current in the full sun. He discards his boots next to his plate and moves after her into the slow-moving waters in nothing more than his small clothes.  He comments, now that he, and she, are quiet enough.  “You have been using magic on me without my command or consent for a long time.  The explosion you created with the Red Templars, the way you…I believe you’ve been hiding your abilities from me.  That must change”…if I am to protect others from you, and you from yourself.  “Where did you learn the kind magic you push into me?”

 

Current parts for her as she turns to his advance and begins her own approach.  She is timid as she lifts dripping wet fingers to the burn at the base of his throat.  “ May I?”  With his nod she begins, though the reluctance she feels in the hardness of him so near cautions her to a slow start.  Her words are even and unwavering as she speaks softly to him while mending what she has done.  “No one has ever asked me why Keeper Deshana sent me to the Conclave to…”  She trips over the word ‘spy’ and instead chooses one that would bring a diplomat’s nod.  “…observe.”  The way she enters him is so different this time, than any other time she’s done this before.  It is a sharp point of entry- the difference between drafting him with a cool breeze and penetrating him with a icy finger.  But the pain disappears and he begins to feel the exhilarating tingle in his skin waking over him in waves of her energy.  Breaths come deep and vigorous as she mends him, and she speaks on in the soft song he missed when she was gone.

 

“Many in the Inquisition assumed it is because I was First of Clan Lavellan, apprentice to the Keeper, and that my clan had an interest in human affairs.  Some of my clan probably assume it is because I was new to the clan, still rather expendable to most.”  Jewel green blue flashes at him with her glance and he feels her uncertainty again.  “I was given over to Lavellan when Clan Sabrae sought refuge in the Free Marches.  I was a peace offering, one of alliance, a usual exchange of a mage between clans to avert Templar notice.”  She pulls her gaze away from him again and he knows.  She has lived in fear of notice from men like me.  “And I was given over for bonding with Clan Lavellan’s strongest hunter.”  She moves her focus to the burn on his wrist, seared well into the muscle and tendons and he turns his stare there to watch his own flesh mend under her magic.

 

“I’m sorry for the loss of your clan…your…”  Husband?  Mate?  ‘Hunter’ is the only word he can find and when he finally speaks it, he is remembering the hunter’s ruined body found at the entrance to the Red Templar’s cave, and the word jerks out of his mouth awkwardly.  She nods her acceptance silently, but says nothing about the hunter, or her dead clan.  Dead Hunter.  Absent Solas.  Elves.  All Elves.  He is listening, but not really listening as he counts the dead and gone in his mind.  Her light diminishes and the touch of her long-fingered hands pulls away as she turns in the water to wade deeper into the flow.  She moves away from him to mourn for the moments allowed.  He suddenly realizes what it is about the way she moves that draws his eye.  It is so elven, so natural and easy, yet so perfect, so precise.  She, they, are the embodiment of unpracticed grace and he then realizes how unashamed she seemed when she stripped herself of the remainder of her mutilated armor – the sight of her slenderness as she bared herself to him unabashedly, making her nakedness feel appropriate.  And he begins to see her for what she is, a wild thing, untamed, like an exotic, uncaged creature.  How did I not notice?  And how could she not confine herself to her own, exotic uncaged beings just like her?  Then he catches her eye and suddenly feels subtly invaded as her story continues, seeming directed to his inner thoughts, as if she has sifted thought his mind. 

 

 

Still vibrating with the  rush of magic she struck into him, he is buzzing with vigor, and silently repulsed by the idea that she may be able to do what the maleficarum of Kinloch Hold did to him – search inside his soul and find all the naked vulnerabilities of his innermost thoughts.  Yet her magic lingers in him like a peace that washes through him, ripples in his mind.  He feels this, wrestles it in, dispels it out of some unbidden instinct, and in so doing, realizes that his abilities feel enhanced – strengthened and shoaled up in him as they once were in a loud lyrium-infused world.  Her magic.  Awakened somehow inside his healed body, he stares at her mouth as she speaks, at the way full flesh purses and spreads for the words he isn’t truly listening to at first.  Then he starts listening to her and everything shifts ever so slightly.   The world begins coming into focus.  He can feel the relevance in her direction, and some timid song of urgency building in her voice.

 

“But I was sent to the Conclave because it has always been easy for me to love.”  It feels like there is a word left from the end of her comment.  Cullen’s focus on her mouth sharpens, and on her words.  “I loved a human.  When the Sabrae and Lavellans met for the exchanges at Sundermount, there were Templars there.  They were Kirkwall Templars, Ser.  They were your Templars.  I loved one of them and he loved me enough to protect me, guide me, help me, teach me.  A Templar helped me learn the beginnings of the magic that I have used to ease your …”

 

The word, bearing the same edge as his sword, cleaves her phrase to a swift end.  “ WHO?”  In the single sound, the single syllable, she hears hints of the betrayal he feels at a man, or men, who dismissed their duty, at their disobedience, deceit, at having denied himself while others skulked about attending matters of love with beautiful Dalish girls, and that men under his command were consorting with apostates and he knew nothing, not a single thing, about it.

 

“Ser Thrask”  Two syllables, and they come as a strike of lightning that illuminates the world and sends all to stillness while the air smolders from the hit.

 

“Thrask”  He begins to understand, wades his way to clarity as the pieces of the puzzle tumble together.  Sudden building understanding renders him temporarily mute.  Always rumored to be a mage sympathizer. Decent man despite this discovery of his dereliction in duty.  Cullen listens.

 

“He came to us on Sundermount once.  Afterward, when Clan Lavellan moved north, he came to me.”  The delicate lines of her face brighten and blush from the muted hues he has seen in her since he carried her from the cave.  Then she looks away into the distance, to a smooth spot in the stream’s never-ending flow, as if remembering.  “The Fade always reflects what we are.  It is like glassy still waters, Commander.  And when I was with Ser Thrask, working the tiny sparks of the Fade that came to me, learning under his protection, what the Fade reflected was beautiful and wonderful.”  The trickle of the stream passes by the time she slows to a stillness - she would linger in that world forever if she could, but time must tumble forward.  “With the Red Templars, it was terrible and I will live my whole life regretting that you were there to see that, to feel that.  Please forgive me, Commander.”

 

His stare skewers her momentarily and then softens as she speaks on and weaves a tale of Templar duty – of a guardian who safeguarded her and those around her while she learned her skill.  As he adds Thrask to the butcher’s bill of the dead and gone in his mind, he discovers.  She loved a human. She loved a Templar.  She loved enough to want peace between Mages and Templars, enough to leave her clan and go to the conclave alone.  And as a Templar's charge, under the guardianship of one of his kind, she learned her determination, her willingness to fight and die for those she loves so easily, and those she has yet to love.  Suddenly, with the vigorous focus riding his bloodstream and filling his mind, the pieces fall and fit into place. 

 

The Commander rises on his footing to the stream bed and moves purposefully toward her.

[QueenCrow]

Chapter 11

 

Threnodies

 

 

“Are you sure about this?”  Dread is written all over Cullen’s face.  The only reason he’s considering this is because of her.  It’s her asking.  He has made his demands of her clear, again, and a part of him believes she’s trying to meet them just as she has met his insistence each and every time before.  Another part of him, a darker spirit on his shoulder, whispers to him that there are hints of something inappropriate in his building desire for this Dalish creature he has in his possession.  Would Meredith have seen a demon behind that sweet face?  “What comes in my dreams has never been…well…”  He shakes his head slowly.  The fine hair on the back of his neck stands to attention, as if some spirit has trickled cold water down the collar of his gambeson.  “…it’s not something I would like to experience again on purpose.”

 

“I know, Ma Vhenan.”  The terms between them have become increasingly familiar during the ride into the Wilds – the pivotal point came when they made love one starry night under the shelter of an ancient tree’s branches.  ‘Yes, Commander’ and ‘Yes, Ser’ are far gone between the two who have exalted in each others’ intimacies.  She speaks to him in her usual soft song – that magic-laden tone that mothers use to soothe fussy babes, that soldiers with horse-sense use to calm skittish mounts, that young men use to talk pretty girls out of their maidenheads.  “I have seen your dreams, dreamt those terrible moments with you, and fought by your side.”  She smiles a hopeful and encouraging smile at him and reaches to tenderly touch his cheek.  He flinches.  Part of him knows she strokes subtle caresses of pacifying energy into him.  Part of him knows that the fears he has carried through the years have their rightful place in the world.

 

“No”, he says.  “Don’t do that.  You’ve made your vow to me.  No more magical touches that calm me enough to keep me complacent and ignorant.”  Though he believes she means him well, he balks on occasion, at her touches.  The pain of lyrium withdrawal he felt while severing that Chantry leash has made him wary of any other possible leash.  The way to the glade, pressed against his unarmored back and rocking to his rhythm in the saddle, she explained the way of her proposal.  And he believes that what she has proposed is a means by which she is able to provide what he has asked of her, insisted he have from her. 

 

When they finally arrive at the glade she has chosen, they are alone.  The Chargers and their chief have been ordered to return to Skyhold.  It is the most prudent move, Cullen insisted, and perhaps his motivations were driven by a pang of guilt that the Commander of the Inquisition forces was not present to command.  But he has made demands of her.  Hard Demands.  Inwardly he remembers what Leliana said to him.  ‘The Inquisitor is becoming dangerous’ and the meaning is not lost to him.  She is a mage and all the evil in the world, to him, has been born of magic.  Even the latest threat to the world was wrought at the hands of a magister turned monster.  But the better nature of his being reminds him, too, that she is the one who tore down the monster and his demon armies.  She is the one bearing the mark that, for all magical its power, he believes to be divine.  It doesn’t matter that she has never proclaimed herself to be the Herald of Andraste.  He believes her to be.  She is the answer to his prayers – a weapon sent for him to wield against the wicked and unrighteous of the world.  And inside himself, he is driven by the desire to know what this weapon he intends to keep wielding is capable of, and ensure solution to his belief that this weapon should not be allowed to wield herself – Leliana sensed that the Inquisitor’s becoming danger appeared with the Inquisitor's desire to leave the influence of her advisers.

 

 As they begin setting up camp, he admits he never suspected she was capable of recreating the kind of explosion that occurred at the Temple of Sacred Ashes, as she did with the red templars.  And his face takes on a suspicious, fleeting bearing as he wonders aloud why there was no accompanying breach in the Red Templars’ cavernous hold, as in the Temple of Sacred Ashes. 

 

She admits, “There was a breach.  I stopped time and closed it before the red templars could act upon it.  It is a magic learned by necessity from the Tevinters, Dorian Pavus and Gereon Alexius.  A knowledge of magic forged in the fires of our struggle.”  The fine hairs bristle at the back of his neck again and his gloved hand lifts to tame them down as he considers that she had no choice lest she enable the red templars nefarious purposes.

 

“I don’t like to be shown that you act so subtly upon me so that I might not notice you’re using magic and if you’re capable of using that kind of power while surrounded by dozens of templars I need to see that too .  I want to see all that you’re capable of.”  For the third time he made his demands, his eyes piercing into her, his iron clasp holding her slender arm.  Rules for a mage.  Restrictions from one who, despite his departure from the Order, is still a templar in his marrow.

 

“Then you shall see and know all that you desire, Vhenan.”  She agrees, once more, to show him all she is capable of in the world and beyond.  His grip on her loosens as he feels a compulsion to take her again, taste her mouth, feel the hot embrace of being inside her.  And perhaps he would have, right there, right then in front of the half-erected tent, had he not seen something a little off in the glint of her wide, elven eyes – the shining orbs seem to him incapable of hiding anything she feels -  and the curving smile of her moist lips.

 

Leaving the mundane work of making camp for the moment, she raises her long-fingered hand to him, shows him her glowing mark, the anchor bestowed unwittingly upon her by an ancient magic.  And as she enflames the mark with her will, urging it’s blue-green light to flare and spike tiny arcs into the air of fading daylight, she calls to him in the language of his world – Threnodies, though it’s counterpart rests in the Elvhen Beyond. 

 

“From the Fade I crafted you,
And to the Fade you shall return
Each night in dreams
That you may always remember me”

 

 Swirling light, threads around her tiny wrist and the lifts from her to form dozens of floating wisps that dance around them playfully before shooting off into a forest that is increasingly shadowed with dusk. 

 

“Maker’s Breath” he murmurs as he moves toward her slowly.  That’s what the light she emanates looks like to him as sings the chant of his faith – something he’s never seen from the circle mages who were his charges.  He is caught on the words etched into his soul, though, and as the wisps disappear into the thick foliage, he his questions return there.  “How does a Dalish girl know Threnodies?” 

 

“Ser Thrask’s teaching, however incomplete they may have been when I last saw him.  And also from Mother Giselle.  She thought that the Herald of Andraste should hear them, know them.”

 

Cullen takes her into his arms and holds her – an act of possessive affection from a man who revels in his divine right of dominance over mages, and though even his conscious thought would never admit it to him, there is a trace of his belief in a human’s dominance over a race that has been relegated to servitude for ages.  She makes him stronger by wrapping him in her embrace and a thought needles its way into him. 

 

“ Perhaps I … “  He stops and starts again, pulling her tighter to him in a way that tells her without words – whatever he’s feared of magic, he is not seeing it in her.  “Perhaps I could be your...  I could...”

 

The most gentle smile blooms freely over the bow of her mouth and she nods and raises to her toes to reach for the warmth of his neck, the stubble of his jaw, there to bless him with tender brushes of her mouth and warm-breathed words.  “You have been faithful in your service as Commander, avowed guardian, and yes, you shall be that and much, much more.  Thank you, Cullen.  I accept.”

 

Their work is interrupted by gestures of affection from time to time.  When the task of setting up camp is done, she rebuffs his suggestion that they bring their embraces and kisses to full fruition under another ancient arbor.  His hand lifts again to rake down the tension building at the back of his neck as she tells him what she has done, and what he can soon expect in answer to the demands he has made of her.

 

“My summoning will soon be answered.  The wisps are already doing their calling.  We must begin preparing for the vigil.”  Again, she speaks the language of his world – his Templar sensibilities more likely to accept a call for vigil from the Herald of Andraste than if she’d told him she intends a spell that will take days, weeks perhaps, to cast.  Something deeper in his soul, however, a place where he remembers that his fears have their rightful place in this world, whispers warning to him.

[QueenCrow]

Chapter 12 

Here Lies the Abyss

Here lies the abyss, the well of all souls.
From these emerald waters doth life begin anew.
Come to me, child, and I shall embrace you.
In my arms lies Eternity.

—Canticle of Andraste, 14:11

 

Part I

 

For each of the wisps that he witnessed lifting off from her fingertips, an apostate answered its calling - witches hidden in the hollows and crevices of this wild place.  Many are Dalish mages, but there are a few humans among them too.  With each new arrival, slithering her way out of the forest – for they are all women who answer the Herald’s call - his dread builds inside him like an acid slowly eating away at the ends of his nerves.  After the twelfth, he sees no point in standing aside and tightening his fists in silence while his camp fills with apostates.  Inside him, the nature of a Templar roils in response to the changes in the field on which he finds himself.

 

“What are you thinking, calling mages running loose with no oversight here?”

 

He has said the words to her before, or something very like them.  His anger flared when she called the mages of Redcliff to an alliance with the Inquisition.  He doesn’t remember he’s said the words to her when they come from him again, his tone sharp and touched with the acid in him.  She remembers, and she repeats herself too.  Why?  Who knows?  Perhaps it’s a foolishness in her, to approach him the same way and expect a different result.

 

“They’re not monsters, Vhenan.  They’re people and they deserve the same respect as anyone else.”

 

Something has ignited in his eyes.  His lips tighten and nostrils flare.  The words are sharp as his blade and she feels the anger in the syllables as he tells her, again.  “This is not about respect.  Even the strongest mages can be overcome by demons!  In conditions like these, I won’t be able to protect all of us alone.”

 

She cants her head, looking as if she is seeing something in him for the first time in this interchange that has played out once already between them.  There is nothing new in this from him.  She knows this.  She felt this streak of red in him from the beginning.  “Cullen, do you not remember?  I told you that I will fight demons by your side always.”  The way she moves to him sends a peaceful aura painting the path toward him and by the time she presses herself to his hard, armored body, and lifts her slender fingers to trace over the line of his tense mouth, he is resisting her already.  She feels the shield of his defense rise up between them.  Then his amber eyes, threaded at the irises with gold and green, flash up beyond her.  She feels him take aim at the thirteenth arrival, his eyes pinning to his target, such as a predator’s gaze before he leaps for the killing blow.  Just after she is witness to the sneer twisting on his scarred lips, she looks back to find Morrigan following a wisp into the camp.

 

A hard shove of fist-filled gauntlet throws her aside and then the blinding flash follows.  It only takes a moment.  The whole turn only takes the space of a heartbeat and breath.  She turns her wide eyes back to Cullen and sees him suspended in a whirling maelstrom of magic - Morrigan’s magic, and the others who followed the wisps to camp begin combining their imprisoning streams of light to hers.

 

The lion of Skyhold roars at his Herald, she who brought him to the wilderness, she who called the witches, she who stands aside where he shoved her.  “You swore you’d never use your magic against me!”

 

Morrigan’s chuckle is barely heard over the sizzle of the light cage shaping and strengthening around the Commander of the Inquisition Forces.  Her words are clear, however as she answers the lion’s roar.  “I, however, made no such vow.”

 

The sneer on his scarred lips has turned into a grimace of teeth-clenched rage by the time he blazes a cutting stare to Morrigan and turns it slowly through the numbers of apostates that slowly surround him, restrain him more tightly with each passing second, use their magic to confine him.  He tests the bounds of the magic’s imprisoning with Templar skill, no longer enhanced by lyrium, fails, then finally searches for the Herald of Andraste with the fury-eyed scowl born of what he senses as betrayal.

 

“Have you brought it?”  The Herald is watching Cullen as she questions Morrigan - feeling him with her senses, and it takes no deep listening to understand that were he free of the magic that has made him into a helpless captive, he would do his best to kill her – to do his worst to all of them.

 

There is a pause before Morrigan’s husky voice rises over the hum of the magic cage that descrescendos into a harmonious throb of droned notes as the witches synchronize their focus.  “It is nearly here, yes.”  Yellow eyes under shocks of loose raven fringe turn from Cullen, from the cage of Morrigan’s making and the witch watches as the Herald nods her thanks during her approach to the cage and the man within.

 

“Cullen, my Heart.  You complained once to me about Morrigan’s presence in Skyhold with her eluvian.  You said it was dangerous…”  He tests the bounds of the magic that crackles around him again.  The look in his eyes is merciless.  He feels him straining, using the skills that the Templar Order perfected in him to bash himself against the walls of witches’ magic.  She steps back once, thinking he will charge through, but the magic holds.  She speaks softly, then, so that he will have to quiet himself to hear her.  “But you never understood that that it’s no coincidence that the eluvian is a mirror.  Eluvians, like the fade, reflect what is before them.  When you look into the eluvian, Cullen, it is dangerous.”

 

“Quiet, Mage!  I’ll no longer listen to anything you say!”  He begins his spiritual thrashing inside of his magical cell again and she, for the first time since she agreed to this, worries for him.

 

She turns as if to leave him - and indeed she does intend to leave him trapped in the confines of magic woven by those she has called - she pauses to give him her best council.  “Perhaps it will help if you pray, Vhenan, for soon, your marrow will be laid open and reflected for you to see.”

[RoughTumble]

You ever gonna finish this?