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There is a feeling Cassandra knows all too well, of dread settling into the pit of her stomach with the heaviness of certainty. She felt it when she saw that her brother was dying, when she was just barely old enough to understand what death meant. She felt it when she fell in love, or more precisely when she staggered unwittingly into a youthful infatuation with a square-jawed templar woman who bore angry scars across her face. She felt it when news of the uprising in Kirkwall had reached her, long before she knew what it all meant, where it would lead.
The feeling never comes when she expects it. To grieve the betrayal of her fellow Seekers would have been only logical. To mourn the loss of her friend by her own blade would have been human. This? This mere...collection of pages? What power could a book hold? What sinking certainty?
But for all her bluster, Cassandra knows to trust the feeling when it comes. When they return to Skyhold and the others retire to catch a moment's rest, Cassandra opens the book she acquired from the Lord Seeker, and she reads.
There is another feeling Cassandra knows well, of receiving a terrible shock with no time to process it. Cassandra has witnessed enough atrocities, has survived enough massacres to know that she cannot stop moving, cannot stop reading just because—because...
She was lost when she came to the Seekers. Not even grieving, for she was hardly there. She was hardly anywhere she went, for a part of her had stopped moving when she saw her brother cut down before her. Her body kept moving, but her heart stood paralyzed in the fields where it happened, fire and blood and screaming all around her, all of it too much to take in, too much to fully understand and yet too close, too real, too heavy to deny.
Cassandra believed that the Maker had spared her for a reason. She believed that she had borne witness to such an atrocity to give her life purpose. That was what Lord Byron had told her, and what else could she bear to hold in her heart? That Anthony—that all those people—had died for nothing, and that Cassandra had been left standing, left with nothing and with no one, by mere chance?
Cassandra turns a page. Dread settles cold and heavy in the pit of her stomach. She does her best to ignore it. She squeezes her eyes closed and inhales slowly before she continues. She can't imagine why the idea of reading about the training process she herself underwent should inspire fear in her, but she has learned to trust the feeling when it comes.
At the age of thirteen, Cassandra remembers how frustrated she was by Lord Byron's private sermons. Every conversation, from official lessons to mealtimes, always turned to the will of the Maker. She hasn't thought about it in such a long time, but her uncle was never particularly religious, and nor was her brother. All that talk of the Maker seemed performative to her at first, a tangential part of the culture of military organizations related to the Chantry, not to be her primary focus when all she wanted to do was to learn their skills and enact justice.
Eventually she began to agree, albeit reluctantly, and with the primary goal of advancing her training, but once she agreed, she had seen how much easier it was to agree, and after some time...a few months? Weeks? She's not certain when she stopped pretending.
When she became an initiate, Cassandra felt suddenly overwhelmed by gratitude for Lord Byron's teachings. She was grateful for the comfort that faith brought her, grateful for the camaraderie of her fellow Seekers and Chantry initiates, and most of all, she was grateful that Lord Byron had nourished her soul back to health before throwing her into the arduous process of proper Seeker training.
She makes to turn the page, but her fingers catch upon the corner. She wonders—sees, and cannot bring herself to unsee—that it could not have gone any other way. It was all a part of the same strategy. She could not have been trained as a Seeker—trusted as a Seeker, treated as a Seeker, controlled as a Seeker—without religious fervour. It was not merely a piece, not merely an option, but inextricable from the Seekers and the Order as a whole.
And now that she sees it, cannot bring herself to unsee it, Cassandra wonders at her own faith. Can something that was never truly an option, something impressed upon her when she had nowhere else to turn, ever bring her comfort again?
Cassandra doesn't turn the page. She rests her head in her hand and closes her eyes against the truth.
A Seeker of Truth who cannot bear what she uncovers. What a travesty.
"Cassandra?"
Cassandra feels cold, her limbs heavy. She cannot bring herself to look up. "Inquisitor."
"It's...I didn't see you at supper. Are you all right?"
The Inquisitor, the holy Herald of Andraste, is not religious, does not believe in her own story. She does not believe in anything. She would not believe in Cassandra's justification for her own continued existence, if Cassandra were to tell it.
Does Cassandra still believe in her own story? If she did not survive the death of her parents, her brother, her Order, the Conclave, by the Maker's will, then why? If Cassandra is not meant for anything, then why is she still alive?
"Cassandra?" A hand on her arm, warm and real and heavy and shocking.
Cassandra looks up.
Words catch in the back of her throat. She forgets sometimes how young the Inquisitor looks, never had the time to stop and wonder what her life must have been like before the incident at the Conclave, before Cassandra held a blade to her throat and before millions across Thedas bowed at her feet. But she sees it now, the wide-eyed uncertainty of youth in the way the Inquisitor looks at her, worries for her, when Cassandra almost asked her whether she ever wonders why she was left alive when so many are dead.
A selfish question. Cassandra ought to remember what it was like to survive a massacre at such a young age, ought to think of her own betrayal in being groomed to believe something when all she wanted was the truth.
The Inquisitor does not believe in a divine purpose or the Maker's will. The Inquisitor does not believe in anything, and yet she has not run away, has never once hung her head in despair for anyone to see.
Cassandra stands, and she bows her head. "I am here," she replies at last. For now, at least, this is enough.