Chapter Text
With the conclave set to begin in a bare few hours, Haven was a mess of milling bodies. Weaving knots of mages and templars trying to keep as vast a distance between each other as possible, not daring to break the Most Holy's ordered truce, but not quite trusting the others to do the same. The Seeker's men were focused far more intently on the uneasy masses than they were on one lowly, and rather slippery, dwarf - not that Cullen blamed them on that account. Nearly three years of open warfare would make anyone wary, if not outright paranoid.
Cassandra was less than pleased with the oversight, however, and had enlisted Cullen’s help in tracking down her misplaced charge. He could have told her outright where to find Varric, but given her current temperament, that hadn’t seemed the safest course of action. At least not for Varric’s sake.
The little tavern didn’t have a name. Didn’t even have a sign. It sat up on the second tier of the village, just under the bare courtyard of Haven’s Chantry. The barkeep, Flissa, a pleasant, round-shouldered woman with dark hair, nodded and smiled as Cullen pushed through the door. In a corner by the fire, crammed into a tall-backed chair with a seemingly untouched tankard of ale, Varric Tethras sat staring disconsolately into the flames.
“I thought I’d find you here,” Cullen said, coming close enough to warm his hands.
Varric grunted. “On a scale from one to ten, how much of a dead man am I?”
“Eight. Eight and a half, maybe. I thought it better for your health if I were the one to find you.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t just send Leliana to materialize in my drink and shiv me in the nose.”
Cullen shook his head. “The diplomat she enlisted finally arrived. Lady Montilyet. Leliana’s helping her settle in.”
“So both of the Divine’s hands are full for the moment. Good for me.”
Cullen cast a disapproving glance at the tankard. “I thought you’d dried out.”
“I did,” he said, nodding begrudgingly. “I hear I’m not the only one.”
Cullen scowled, shifted his eyes, and nodded.
“Huh. Good for you, Curly,” Varric said with a touch more sincerity than he expected. “I don’t plan on drinking it, if it makes you feel any better. I did when I came in, I think. But now I don’t think I have the stomach for it after all. Maybe that’s all I wanted. A cliff to climb up so I could look down off the edge and scare myself shitless. Maker’s breath, how the hell did we get here?”
“You’re asking me?” Cullen scoffed. “I think ten years of bad decisions about covers it.”
The tankard hit the floor with a bit more force than was entirely necessary. “Hawke didn’t-”
“I wasn’t talking about Hawke. I share enough of the blame myself.” He sighed, rubbing at his temples, trying to allay the headache that was already forming. “Bad bloody decisions all around.”
The dwarf grumbled, indignant but apologetic. “You were doing good work back there in Kirkwall before we left, Curly. I haven’t forgotten. Some days it seemed like you and Aveline were the only ones keeping the fucking walls up.”
Cullen smiled thinly and without even the vaguest hint of humor. “Some days we were.”
Varric sank into the chair, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Andraste’s ass, Curly, have we got any chance of fixing this shit?”
“Cassandra seems to think we do.”
Varric gave another irritated grunt, then fell into a troubled silence.
Cullen put his back to the wall, meaning to tell the dwarf he’d give him another five minutes to collect himself and then they’d need find Cassandra before she found them. And then he froze, eyes widening. The lyrium still lingered in his body - would yet for months, he knew - and he could feel a vibration, sudden and deep. It resonated in his bones as if he was a tuning fork, making his teeth hum. In his periphery he caught a flash of green through the window, sparking against the greying sky. Not lightning, wrong color for lightning , he thought, the hairs on the back of his neck rising.
“Oh Maker, no .”
Varric looked up at him, puzzled. “What is it, Curly? You look-”
And then the world came apart in a thunderclap of force that blew the tavern door half off its hinges, the bottles on the wall behind Flissa shattering instantly. All sound was swallowed up in a horrible, familiar tuneless ringing as everything shifted, rocking eastward with the shockwave that blew out the fire in the fireplace. It sent Varric tumbling to the floor and drove Cullen into the wall with a jarring force. His knees gave and he crumpled to the floor, vision gone a bright and blinding white.
Shape and color bled back into the world slowly. Cullen stared up at the mountainside through the open doorway as the first of the screams, muffled and distant to his damaged and bleeding ears, began in earnest, picking up others as the panic and fear caught like embers in dry hay. A creeping cold seized his insides that had nothing to do with the wind that blew snow across the floor in little eddies. First Kinloch. Then Kirkwall. Now this.
The sky above was wrenched open, an ethereal laceration of fade green that flashed and swirled and pulled up chunks of rock and stone toward it like a hungry mouth. Below it lay what remained of the Temple of Sacred Ashes. A flattened scar on the mountainside, a carcass picked clean by a devouring sky.
"Oh, Blondie," Varric said weakly beside him. "Tell me you didn't. Not again."