Chapter Text
The carriage jostled furiously on the uneven stones leading towards the Gilded Quarter. Dorian’s vision, blurry and disinterested, stared at the man sitting in front of him. All he found was another magister who looked at him the way a pompous sculptor looked at clay– like he knew better what it ought to look like.
All of the movement made Dorian feel like a bottled letter being tossed around by the sea. But that was a childish thought. He could never be anything except a Pavus. The spiced wine was leaving his system, though the buzz from the adrenaline was satisfying enough. If he closed his eyes, he could just remember the last tongue that touched his, the way someone else’s hands felt sliding across his back.
“So, how did the elusive young Pavus end up in a brothel?” Alexius asked.
Dorian scoffed and crossed his arms. “Why, isn’t it obvious? The Order of Argent, of course. First they get you hooked on Andraste, and once that high wears off, it's onto whores. A completely natural progression.”
Alexius laughed. “Is that so? Any other pertinent lessons?”
“Let’s see,” Dorian replied. “Well, there’s those bits about why we have the only true Divine, precisely why the Maker created our ‘infinitely wondrous’ world- ”
“And do you believe that?” Alexius interrupted.
Dorian felt the carriage hitch underneath him, catching on something. Do you believe that? In order to answer yes, he would have to make a great number of concessions. Firstly, that there was a single unfathomably powerful god, more ancient than any mortal mind could fathom. Secondly, that this Maker had crafted everything that there ever had been, from sweeping tundras to skittering nugs. And finally, that Dorian himself was a grain of sand in the universe. More interestingly, an intentional one. In Andrasteism, he wasn’t a failure of the great Tevinter experiment in selective breeding. There was no way he could’ve turned out any differently.
“I believe that we know only a tiny drop of what our universe even is, nevermind beginning to parse how it functions. Anyone peddling totalities is either a con or a fool,” Dorian replied.
Alexius sat back in his seat. He almost looked proud. “A healthy perspective. Setting aside absolute certainty, do you think it could be true?”
Dorian ran his fingers over his family’s amulet hidden inside his robes. He imagined what it’d be like to feel intentional. “Yes,” he said. “There’s every possibility.”
—---
The cathedral was swallowed by a whirl of green spirals, reflecting the rippling terror of a rift. Dorian had heard of the Herald in vagueries only, but then he was with him, pressed back to back, sending off flurries of magic towards the malevolent escapees from the fade. Their closeness was unnervingly comforting to Dorian. He could feel the humming of mana across Alendis’s arms. He could see, through selfish glimpses, eyes that stared towards Andraste and refused to blink.
A wraith lunged towards Dorian, but Alendis got to him first, spiraling out a protective rune underneath his freshly-polished boots. The wraith phased back and Dorian took the opportunity to twirl his staff out, banishing it back to whatever plane manifested it. The jagged fractals of the rift loomed overhead. Alendis cast his hand upwards, and the rift eagerly sent out a beam of green light to meet it. Dorian could tell it hurt even as the elf’s face was fighting not to show it. Alendis swept his eyes closed, his eyebrows twitching. He pulled back in a jagged motion and the rift closed. He stumbled in the recoil and Dorian jumped to steady his back. He felt warm. Alendis was the first to step away.
“How does that work exactly?” Dorian asked with a smile he hoped came across as dashing.
Alendis’s face looked puzzled as it caught the glow of the stained glass. It was apparent that he had no idea how to answer. Of course. Why should he be able to explain this? Would Andraste explain even one of the infinitesimally small wonders of life? Dorian was looking at a saint and managing to hold his gaze
“You don’t even know, do you?” he followed up, wishing more than he ever had in his life he would never get an answer.
—---
Felix’s funeral had been greatly overshadowed by the relentless political maneuvering of Tevinter. His body was met only with murmured heresies about his extremist father and the now vacant seat in the Imperium. Hardly anyone cared about the boy- and why should they? He’d barely been a mage, marked from birth for mediocrity. Politics over humanity, politics over religion, politics over everything.
Dorian had only been able to visualize the funeral through patchworking different throwaway lines in letters together. No one found it a singularly important event worthy of documentation. Dorian would have. But he couldn’t leave the Inquisition- not now, not when he’d actually been to the world where they fail. It’d been a cruel truth that Alexius had tried to usurp reality through their shared work. Now Dorian was beginning to understand something he’d only begun theorizing in his days living at the Alexius estate: time travel was only capable of being invented by someone who couldn’t deal with the present.
No content and regretless person would devote months to late nights pouring over tomes in dead languages, clawing to find a way out of time. Felix would sit in the study with them and pretend to keep up. Half drunk and existential, Dorian always spent a portion of these sessions wondering what it was for Alexius. Dorian was sure his own reasons were painfully obvious- if he could have just had that conversation with his father differently, or if he hadn’t had met that boy in Minrathous, or if he could have been less obvious at so many parties. Anyone could pass by Dorian in a market and guess their way into at least one of his sins. He might never know what it’d been for Alexius back then, but he was certain of what pushed those magical abstractions into reality. Felix’s life was in the balance.
What Alexius failed to understand was that it was a non-commutable sentence. Felix was already on the gallows, just waiting for his neck to break. Alexius had thrown away his life, and happily sold out all others, as a symbolic gesture to fight against a solidified fate. Against the thorny will of the Maker himself. There was a time Dorian would have deluded himself into thinking Alexius could be something closer to a father than a patron. Those days were past. Maybe all fathers were the same, unable to see their sons without the filter of should be . Dorian should be married, Felix should be alive, and no one in their unhappy quartet would ever die content. Dorian thought about Alendis’s eyes. If the Maker sent him, then He must have crafted him with the gentle obsession of an artisan. His eyes would be meant to be that gray-green, and they would be meant to meet Dorian’s gray ones, and they would be meant to stare at each other for that long.
Dorian started his way down the stairs of the Skyhold dungeon. The air was damp with must and wood rot, the cobblestone slick with moss. He started thinking about Andraste. How did it feel to look at her? When the sunlight claimed the tips of her hair, celestial light shining against her back, did she look already on fire?
—---
The light from the sunset, angry and swollen, made it hard to tell which parts of the bandages were actually red, and which just seemed to be. The windows of Val Rouyeaux were renowned for their ornate frames, their oil painting views. Dorian couldn't see the appeal right now. He kept alternating between them, his amatus's sleeping face, and the empty spot of the bed where his left arm should be. He kept choosing the windows.
A cold feeling on the back of Dorian's neck gave away the approach of someone else. He turned to see Cole in the doorway. Marvelous. Precisely what he needed right now, another reminder of Solas and those easier days in Skyhold. Dorian never imagined he could feel nostalgic for the end of the world. Alendis had trusted Solas with all of himself, even when it came to encouraging Cole to embrace his identity as a spirit. And where had that trust gotten anyone, but with the three of them all becoming wraiths of their former selves.
"Slumbering, sliding, slipping against the tide. The Keeper said this was too dangerous. A dagger tucked in a belt, a long goodbye met with No, I promise I'm coming back . The sunset, red, growing redder still," Cole said.
"Is that what he's thinking of?" Dorian asked.
Cole stepped further into the room, eventually settling on kneeling by the foot of the bed. "Not thinking, no. Not remembering. More like... feeling."
Dorian looked at Alendis's face. It kept twitching, undoubtedly in pain (even if Dorian would prefer to pretend there was any other excuse). He had known the anchor was killing him long before this. He had just hoped that maybe,
"Maybe you could have slipped it into your palm, just for a night. Take the burden, leave the glory. Let him sleep," Cole finished for him.
On any other day, Dorian would have unleashed some biting witticism at Cole, and Alendis would have forced him to apologize. But Alendis was comatose, Solas was making plans to extinguish reality, and Dorian knew he had to go back to Tevinter. In some perverse way, it felt nice to have his folly haunting him aloud. Those elfroot balms and massages and nights spent spindling healing spells over his hand were never going to fix anything. Every story needs a martyr. Besides, hadn't he told Alendis long ago he believed he was sent by Andraste? And who was she, but another romantic idealist failed by a man from Tevinter?
The light from outside was growing dim. Dorian rose from his chair to light the candles on Alendis's nightstand. By the time he turned around to reply to Cole, he was gone.