Chapter Text
Chapter One
How long had he lain here, staring at the green glow in his hand. His fingers twitched with every ache of it. Every searing flare. His face was against a damp, cold stone floor, and how odd was it that the last thing he felt was the first thing he felt, coming back to a world of cool winds against his face and creative thought.
Jacen Trevelyan could feel the chains around his wrists, a heavy burden telling him that he was in deeper trouble than he’d ever been in before. The clothes he was in were unfamiliar, though the roughness against his cheek told him that it was because they weren’t the robes of the Circle. They were clothes fitted to someone who was used to using swords and bows. Leather armor that had once belonged to someone he loved.
Someone who, even in his sleepwalking, dreamless and dead-eyed state had done everything in his own power to make sure Jacen stayed safe.
“Protect yourself, my love. That is the one thing I need you to do. I will see to the rest.”
It was a hazy, detached memory. A man with sea-green eyes who had relentlessly trained callouses into his fingers and hands. Who had pushed him hard to learn how to keep himself alive with two swords after he’d been stripped of everything that made him a person.
Jacen touched his forehead, his cold and wet fingers touching the bandana that his once-lover had put around it to hide the mark. The sunburst that marked him as ‘dead-inside’ to anyone who looked. Expressions of horror and pity and pain all came with that mark. The only smiles he received had been sick, twisted things from Templars who’d known what he once was.
Those who’d bestowed the punishment on him for loving someone marked as forbidden.
Lallek .
Jacen took a shaking, sudden breath, sitting up abruptly. There were instantly swords pointed at him. The chains on his wrists rattled and looking around he again realized how much trouble he was in. A cold lump of fear rose into his throat, and Jacen took a moment to revel in that emotion.
That he felt anything at all…
...It was a gift.
“Tell me why we shouldn’t kill you right now.” The accented voice of a woman said as she stalked, in armor, into the room. There was another silhouette behind her, somehow softer but Jacen knew without a doubt that looking one way did not preclude someone from being the opposite.
She continued. “The Conclave is destroyed. Everyone who attended is dead.” She paused, sensing that Jacen wasn’t really following her.
“Except for you.”
He was paying attention. Definitely. He’d learned that he couldn’t not pay attention. It had been what had sentenced him to a fate worse than death before, and now with a second chance that no one like him had ever gotten? In no way would he squander it.
He just needed to figure out how to do that.
She was waiting for an answer, and Jacen swallowed the bile in his throat, summoning whatever wit he’d had. It had been over two years since he said anything as himself. The first thing in so long...it couldn’t be wasted.
“You think I’m responsible.” It isn’t a question, his own voice pulling itself from his throat like a strained, melodic ribbon.
The woman suddenly seized his chained wrists, holding up his left hand. The one with the glowing green mark that he instinctively knew... The Fade. At least, it had to be. No magic other than healing magic glowed with that sort of soft fire, and Jacen remembered that he would call upon the fringes of The Fade to sucre together skin and bone and muscle.
As if on cue, it flared to life, answering his call.
Jacen wanted to answer the question, and he felt his brow furrow, trying to remember what happened and yet...there were holes. Blank holes with nothing and just flashes of action and suddenly desperate elation. Otherwise, there was nothing.
“I...can't.”
It went downhill fast from there. “What do you mean ‘You can’t’?”
“It means I don’t know what that is, or how it got there.” Only that it was his salvation. It had to be. It was the only explanation.
His thought was interrupted by the woman grabbing him by the collar. He could feel his instinctive reach for whatever magic was there, only to find that nothing came of it. He was...depleted. Or maybe he just couldn’t access it. “You’re lying .”
“I assure you I am not ….”
The other figure from the doorway was suddenly between them, her accent vaguely Orlesian but tinged with some other place. Her armor was leather, like his own, and hooded. “Cassandra. We need him.”
Wait.
They needed him?
For what purpose?
Still, at that moment he put together what she’d earlier said. That everyone at the Conclave was dead. Everyone. Save for him.
Lallek.
“...All those people. Everyone?” The grief was overwhelming, suddenly. Lallek, who’d returned to the Circle at the end of things. When the Circles had disbanded and there had suddenly been so little for him to do other than just...exist. Lallek, who’d returned to Ostwick and taken him from what would have likely been a slow, forgotten death.
The other woman turned, and Jacen could see her face. Pretty, delicate features and a tease of red hair beneath the lavender hood. The sigil of The Divine was emblazoned upon her chest just like the other one, but when she knelt in front of him there was none of that anger.
Just a ruthless determination, and a touch of empathy. “Everyone.”
Jacen had to cover his mouth as if it could hold back the torrent of pain and By The Maker how glorious was it, to feel that pain. Even if the cost had been so high.
So very high.
She gave him a moment to compose himself before speaking again. “Do you remember what happened? How this began?”
Jacen swallowed, gathering himself again. Every feeling felt so intense. So new, as if it was the first time he was feeling it and then there was Lallek….Ser Lallek Nerita, who had been transferred from The Circle at Ostwick to another place, but not before the Knight-Commander had let him see what his sin had wrought.
That he’d come back for Jacen, a year and a half later? It meant something. What, Jacen still couldn’t know. But it meant something.
She was watching him, and he had to try. He had to try to remember something--anything--because Lallek was dead . The one person who’d made life in that place bearable was now gone, and Jacen owed him that much.
To find out what happened, and to see Justice done.
“I...I remember...running.” He took a breath, wiping his eyes with his right hand. “There were things...chasing me.” It was hazy. So hazy. Like a dream.
Maker, how wonderful it was to have that thought.
“And... a woman?”
Her eyebrows raised, and Jacen could swear he saw...something there. As if he said something important. “A woman?”
He nodded. Surer now. There had definitely been a woman. “She reached out to me, but then…”
Cassandra suddenly interrupted. “Go to the forward camp, Leliana. I will take him to The Rift.”
The red-haired woman--Leliana--left, and Cassandra dismissed the soldiers from the room as well. Her deft hands released the chains from the floor, though she left them around his wrists. How much of a danger did they think he was?
“What did happen?”
“It will be easier if I show you.”
With that, she grabbed his upper arm and led him out of the...dungeon. That was what it was. There were cells around them, but he hadn’t been in any of them. Instead, he’d been in the center of the floor and chained to it. How odd.
The hallway was long, made of a sort of stone he hadn’t seen before, and the air had a chill and dampness that was odd for him. Then it was up the stairs and into the main hall of a chantry. The chantry at Haven, his mind supplied. The Temple of Sacred Ashes was above them in the mountains, but Haven was the town he and Lallek had come to before the Conclave.
She pulled him outside, and Jacen had a moment to enjoy the sunlight on his skin. The coolness of the air caressing like fingers through his hair. People took for granted that the sun and sky would be there for them when they opened the doors to their homes, but not Jacen.
This was the first time since he was twelve that he’d felt it and was able to truly revel and enjoy it. If nothing else came of the Mage Rebellion, there was this.
Such a small thing, but it meant everything.
He looked up, remembering the last time. It had been tinged with fear and loss, and his desperate desire to see his brother again. Janus, who’d fought against the strong grip of their father as the Templars took him from his home. His identical twin brother with all of the ruthless fire and none of the magical ability he’d once had.
Above them though, wasn’t flawless blue sky. It was ripped asunder by a green, glowing light and a sucking void. Ripped apart and bleeding into that void was piece after piece of their world.
“Maker…”
Cassandra looked at him, raising an eyebrow before she stepped forward and ahead of him, looking up at the thing. “We’re calling it ‘The Breach.’. It is a massive rift into the world of demons that is grows larger with each passing hour.”
She turned back, fixating him with her stare. “It is not the only such rift. Just the largest. And all of them were caused by the explosion at the Conclave.”
He blinked, eyes finding it again. “An explosion can do that?”
“This one did.” She stated. “And unless we act, The Breach may grow until it swallows the world.”
Jacen couldn’t look away from it, that world of demons and spirits just beyond that green void was both terrifying and beckoning to him. Dreams were things he’d been denied for two years now, and it was as if he could hear the things beyond whispering. Begging. Asking.
There was a sudden pulse from the Breach, and his glowing green mark answered with painful alacrity. He cried out, falling to his knees as he felt it tear just that tiny bit more before it calmed and he could breathe again.
Cassandra was there, looking down at him. “Each time the Breach expands, your mark spreads...and it is killing you.”
The finality of that statement--the inevitability--sunk his stomach. To come back from a fate worse than death, only to be promised a slow and painful one seemed cruel, and all in one go it was a gift.
If this thing killed him, at least he would die as himself.
“It may be the key to stopping this.” She explained. “ But there isn’t much time.”
Jacen blinked at her. “You say it might be the key. To what?”
“Closing the Breach. Whether that is possible we will see.”
He looked down at his hand. At the mark that seemed to glow and pulsate with his heartbeat. The world was slowly being swallowed by the Fade, and this might be the only thing that could stop it.
“Alright then.” He closed his fist, looking up at the thing again. If this was how he died, then perhaps it was all worth it. “Take me to it.”