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Chapter Text

It is a grisly, ugly end to what began with such promise.

First, a series of failures. The bulk of their forces are routed at Haven. Only a handful of refugees escape through the mountains to Skyhold. Somehow, in what must surely be a miracle, the Herald survives. They all think that his survival is a sign that they are blessed by Andraste, by some guiding hand pushing them to a glorious victory.

They are wrong, each and every one of their hopes dashed upon the rocks of brutal reality. The only hand guiding events is that of a corrupted ancient magister and the ends he aims for are his own.

Skyhold is crumbling when they arrive and their forces are so occupied with scrabbling for power and security that it remains an unsteady castle in the mountains. Barely more than a place with rooms enough to house them all, walls to keep the worst of the cold out.

It’s not what Dorian expected when he left his life as a wandering pariah to ally with the Inquisition. A little more coin would have helped, a few more alliances – any, really, beyond the obstinately devout and the wildly progressive.

The Inquisitor, once he is named such, seems equally perplexed by the state of things. “I’m a hunter,” he tells Dorian one afternoon when they’re hiking through the Exalted Plains, desperately trying to restore order to the war-torn countryside. “I know how to lead a group of six or seven, but I’ve never even been around more than a hundred people at a given time. I don’t know how to lead an army. I don’t know how to lead an… organization.”

Dorian almost tells him that it shows, that his insecurities are unbecoming, but Lavellan is already so close to being undone. His foundations crumble and Dorian would see him shored up, not torn down. They have so few hopes and all of them rest with a single elf.

Instead, Dorian cracks a smile. “Well, we’ve hardly more forces than that. Imagine we’re all one big happy family. Shall we bring some halla back to Skyhold with us? Let’s bring some halla.”

There are moments when he is certain that the Inquisitor is learning to lead. There are moments when he is certain that Mahanon will see them to victory.

They are few and far between.

The Wardens become an army enslaved to Corypheus, rabid dogs yoked to their master. The Inquisitor escapes the Fade – barely – and only because both the Champion and the last remaining unfettered Warden Commander sacrifice themselves so that he might live.

Mahanon finds him afterwards, his eyes rimmed with red, the angles of his face undercut by gaunt shadows. “They should have left me,” he says, voice rubbed raw. “Mythal knows either of them would be better suited to this than I am. We saw the future, Dorian, and I seem incapable of stopping it. You must think me a walking disaster – one that would doom us all.”

“Nothing of the sort,” Dorian insists, lying with the same honeyed words he lived and breathed in Tevinter.

He supposes that it may very well be Mahanon’s particular brokenness that stirs his heart. The man walks in shadows, uncertain of his footing. Dorian is able to provide a guiding light for at least a few steps. An intoxicating feeling, to be needed in this particular way. To be the only one who can listen so kindly to confessions Mahanon knows he should not be making.

Dorian cannot lead, but he can keep the Inquisitor from falling entirely into the abyss. And he’s always had a soft spot in his heart for lost causes. A man doesn’t leave Tevinter to be true to his heart without accepting that he may never see it again, not in the world in which they live. A world more often cruel than not, in which pretty stories – those like Varric tells – only ever occur between two covers.

They try to make an attempt on the Temple of Mythal after Morrigan shows up at Skyhold with her mirror, offering hope where there had been only ash – an ember unearthed beneath banked coals. Despite all that has led them to this point, the Inquisitor and his companions, few though they may be, believe that a place of such significance will hold ancient knowledge. That they may yet find a weapon that could see them to victory. One final push against demon armies and an unstoppable ancient magister, and the chance to perhaps snatch some sort of triumph from the fire of their failures.

It is a bloodbath. The few Inquisition forces they have managed to amass, most of them refugees Cullen has stubbornly trained to be equal to the lowest of foot soldiers, are decimated in endless blood and suffering. The Inquisitor makes it to the temple, inch by stubborn inch, only to find the guardians destroyed and the temple smashed into fragments of what it once was.

They are without hope.

“Surely,” Cassandra says, as they stand in the empty pool surrounded by emptier promises, “the Maker would not lead us all this way only to see us fail.”

Mahanon sits underneath a statue of a wolf, head tipped back and staring emptily at the sky above. “A cruel joke,” he says. “To see us to such ruin. Would that someone else had heard Justinia’s cries. Anyone else.”

They try to offer comfort in their own ways. Cassandra is steadfast in her faith, never one to be overcome by despair. Bull plies the Inquisitor with drinks whenever they have a few moments. Sera tries to hook him into her mad schemes, while Cole offers again and again to ease Mahanon’s pain.

Dorian offers himself. It is this source of comfort that Mahanon clings to in the final weeks leading to their final moments. He had thought at first to be but a friend and a body to warm Mahanon’s bed, but it is the Inquisitor’s heart that needs warming. It is a task Dorian finds himself more capable of than he’d ever have imagined.

In the end, none of it is enough. Their many attempts to salvage the world fall one by one, as pieces on a chessboard tipped by a merciless opponent. The few hopes they had gathered are systematically spoiled until nothing remains but the slow slide of the world toward ruin.

The last days of the Inquisition are frantic, panicked. Corypheus’s army advances, as certain in its arrival as the passing of seasons. They fortify Skyhold as best they might, but it is clear from the onset that it won’t be enough.

Solas disappears ahead of Corypheus’s army, as does Vivienne.

None of the others will go. Not even as the Herald pleads with them.

Dorian will certainly not be sent away.

“How I wish we’d met in different circumstances. In a different world,” Dorian says, breathing against the skin of Mahanon’s shoulders, fingers seeking the tangle of his hair, tracing the lines of his vallaslin.

Mahanon makes a small, broken sound, tucking his cheek against Dorian’s chest.

They steal what time they can, but time is their enemy in this. In all things. Whatever may have developed between them is rushed, a clamour at the end. It hurts, terribly and frantically and right down through bone and heart, but it is a hurt that Dorian cherishes. A pain that insists that what they have matters, even in the dying light of their days.

Corypheus’s forces crest the mountain and Mahanon finds him. “You must leave,” he insists. “I can’t have you – Dorian, I won’t have you fall to this.”

“If you think I’ll leave your side now, amatus, you’re sorely mistaken. Tevinter may breed many things, but cowardice is not one of them.”

His lover’s eyes soften, hands insistent as they press a token into Dorian’s hands. “This – It’s something of importance to me. I’d have you hold onto it for safe-keeping. For luck. I wouldn’t trust it to anyone else.” He disappears to rally the troops, to give one last valiant effort at leadership in the face of doom.

Dorian looks at the small leather satchel embossed with intricate knots that echo Mahanon’s vallaslin. A thin drawstring holds it shut, which Dorian unwinds. Several black pebbles spill into his palm. Each of them is engraved with a tiny symbol, none more intelligible than the vallaslin. A significance he cannot place, but one he will honour nonetheless.

Cassandra is the first to fall. The woman Dorian was certain would be at Mahanon’s side until the end, bloodied and steadfast, takes an arrow through a notch in her armour and is swallowed beneath the tide of red templars. A short, ugly knife finds her throat and blighted hands force it deep into her skin. He knows she is truly dead because she falls to silence, her rallying cry forever strangled to nothingness beneath the onslaught.

Sera perches on high ground, loosing arrow after arrow after arrow. They find their mark each and every time. Tears stream down her cheeks even as she shrieks with laughter, with the refusal to be broken by this. But what good are arrows against the rising tide? Against the turning of time, the inevitability of the end?

They have much the same effect as Varric’s traps, Cole’s daggers, Blackwall’s sword, Bull’s axe. Too little, far too late. One by one, they fall.

Still, they do not falter, not any of them. Dorian, who the Inquisitor has placed at a distance so that he might try to control the battlefield, throws up walls of flame or searing glyphs until his skin is sheened with sweat and his heart hammers against his breastbone. Until there is not even a spark left in his fingers. From the stairs to the crumbling castle, he sees Sera take a blade through the heart, the shocked and blank look on her face fading away to stiff nothing. Bull falls at the very center of a crowd, the bodies of his dead Chargers laid around him. He bellows as templars stick him with enough blades to make a halo of metal and blood around his huge body.

Like that, he’s dead. Like that, they’re all dead.

There is no one left, Dorian realizes, trying desperately to call forth whatever magic remains in his exhausted body. Scraping the marrow of his bones for flickering hope, for anything.

If he is to die, it will not be mewling in fear.

Mahanon appears next to him, emerging from the crowd below as might a demon from a rift – unsteady and furious. He’s taken a glancing blow to the side, fingers pressed hard against his hip. His skin is pale as milk and he gasps for air, hunched over. Still a sword dangles from his fingers.

He will never stop fighting, Dorian thinks. Whatever despair rests deep in his heart, Mahanon will always resist.

“Dorian,” he says, wrenching his hand away from his wound to push Dorian back toward the castle. “Go. You must go. This can’t be won. If you use the Eluvian –”

Around them, screams and the smell of blood and fear. The courtyard is overrun, Cullen desperately rallying his few remaining soldiers to at least buy them time. That is all this can be: a buffer between alive and dead, a few more moments wrested from the hands of fate.

“I won’t,” Dorian snarls. Still, Mahanon presses him back and they stumble into the cool keep. The stones muffle the sounds outside, but Dorian’s heart still hammers hard against his ribcage, Mahanon still gasps for breath. His hand is smeared with drying blood even as he grips Dorian’s arm.

There can be no respite. It is all an illusion. They stand upon the precipice of disaster with nowhere else to turn.

“We’ve lost Skyhold,” Mahanon says. “It’s lost and Corypheus will rise to power. But no man’s grip on power is absolute. No dictator endures forever. You need to leave. You will be needed, Dorian, in whatever comes next.”

“And you?”

Mahanon laughs. It is a small, bitter sound. “It is the misfortune of all the world that I was the one who answered Justinia’s call. I am no leader. So go, ma vhenan, and know that I will love you always.”

Dorian watches him, his spent lover. The shadows underneath his cheekbones, the hollow stare, the weary resignation that bends his body over.

“I –” Dorian begins.

But he hasn’t the time for protests nor confessions of affection. Behind them, footsteps ring out, the clamouring of boots up stairs.

They are not the boots of Inquisition soldiers, soft supple leather – the only thing they could afford with their meager coffers. These footfalls resound with the echo of metal, polished to a shine and tacky with blood.

“Go,” Mahanon insists, shoving a hand hard against Dorian’s shoulder. The Inquisitor turns and faces the templars as they crest the stairs.

It takes only the span of a breath. A tall templar, bristling with shards of lyrium, rushes at Mahanon, sword held in front of him. Dorian tries frantically to call up something, anything he has left, anything that might help Mahanon –

The blade cuts through the center of his lover’s chest, metal thrust clean through to the other side.

The Inquisitor crumples.

Dorian runs.

He flies through the gardens, leaping over shattered pots, broken statues they’d never had time nor means to repair. His staff falls from his hand, but Dorian rushes onwards. He cannot stop, not without turning to face his death. Dorian hurdles the low wall separating the rooms meant for worship from the garden and throws himself through the door that guards the Eluvian. Behind him, the air is thick with shouts, laughter, the smell of blood and bitter victory.

The mirror ripples like quicksilver.

He isn’t certain this will even work. He isn’t certain he wants it to work. Behind him, a dead lover, a broken body he’d cherished, its occupant hounded to the shadowy realms beyond death. Before him, what? A life in the shadows, always running from Corypheus, vainly hoping the madman might show weakness?

But he was entreated. Go and know that I will love you always.

The door behind him opens and Dorian leaps through the mirror.

He tumbles through darkness and a silence so vast that it deafens, beating uselessly against his eardrums. With a roll, Dorian finds his feet, surging up to scour his surroundings. In his hand, a little blade he keeps tucked in his boots. Should red templars follow, they will not find him easy prey, not here in the gloaming.

But around him, there is only silence and complete isolation. The strange semi-darkness of this world-between-worlds. It smells of nothing, feels of nothing. An endless place of gray without anything to distinguish it.

The mirror through which he tumbled has gone dark, flickered out like a candle in the wind.

Dorian stares, gaze darting desperately around him. The place is a forest of damned mirrors, each of them as dark as the one he just tumbled through.

He has nowhere to go. So he simply stands, waiting. All around him, the silence looms – dark and heavy as a wolf in the night, snarling silently through its fangs. The sudden perfect stillness after such frantic chaos, the grey nothingness after a world stained with blood –

He feels the weight of this place crushing down on him as might a mountain. Except madder, dizzying, hounding him with its perfect blankness. The echoing void.

The hilt of the blade cuts deep into the skin of his palm, his hand curled so desperately around it that his knuckles have turned as white as bone. His breathing, so uneven, so jagged, begins to smooth out, even as he feels his body sag lower and lower.

He cannot stay here. There’s no one coming and he can’t return. Around him, the sickening song of silence, thick with his failure to remain by Mahanon’s side. Dorian stumbles away through the endless gray. There is nothing here but emptiness, yet he can’t help feel his skin buzz with an awareness, the lingering sense that he is being watched. That danger will find him from the gray.

He wanders, blood pounding like sludge through his veins, the echo of his heartbeat loud against his eardrums. He stares at the dark mirrors that surround him as he wanders, but in their place he sees nothing but a trail of corpses. Cassandra with an arrow to her shoulder and a knife buried in her throat. Sera, run-through and foaming blood from her mouth. Blackwall’s head severed from his shoulders, blood matting his beard. Bull’s wide-eyed desperation as he takes yet another blade through his broad shoulders until he falls, the ground shuddering underneath his knees. Utterly broken.

Mahanon. The desperation in his eyes, the blood on his hand that still hummed with the Fade. His certainty, his self-sacrifice, as he turned himself toward templar blades and was rewarded with the slick slide of steel through his heart.

And yet here Dorian stands between worlds. His lover’s blood smeared upon his arm, his limbs trembling for need of mana, for exhausted desperation – but unharmed. Alone and intact.

Yet never intact again, not when his heart aches like this. Not when it will forever belong to a man beaten down at every turn, attacked and attacked and attacked until he finally fell to the sheer momentum of evil.

He takes another step, but it is his last. Dorian’s knees give way and he sinks to the dusty stones beneath him, head bent. The blade clatters to the ground, the sound sharp in the oppressive silence.

He left. He left and his punishment is to remain between worlds. Heartless Dorian, who abandoned his companions to their doom, who gave his heart to a man who then took it to the grave. A lover who even in his final moments thought only of Dorian. Dreamt only of a future in which things might be better.

Against all odds, Mahanon kept hope alive.

A hope Dorian cannot feel when all around him is endless gray and the weight of his failings. When he is watched and judged in this place, its silence like a rasped tongue licking against the contours of his mind. Exposed to the ministrations of this place in which he should not be. Trespasser, he thinks, and then traitor.

His fingers grow cold as he rests on the ground. His bones ache. His throat is dry as parchment, his body screaming for rest, for respite, after the desperation of his final fight at Skyhold.

There is no respite to be had, however. Not now, not ever again. Never here. Never in this place – and yet there is no other.

Dorian picks up the small blade. He turns it over in his hands.

Tevinter does not breed cowardice, he thinks. But is it cowardice to bring an end to an ignominious existence? To retreat from an endless gray misery? To leave a world in which there will never be anything but horror?

Surely not.

Dorian Pavus, killed not on the sword of a red templar but by the blade in his own hand. Killed not in the siege on Skyhold, but in the ancient elven crossroads. The thought makes his gut churn, and yet it repeats again and again and again in his mind, a litany of insistence and nauseating certainty.

A sad ending to a life that once held so much promise, he thinks distantly. With numb fingers, he seeks out the little pouch Mahanon had pressed so firmly into his palm. He rubs the worn leather, tracing the shape of the lines embossed deep into its surface.

For luck.

It is too much.

Dorian raises his eyes and looks around him again. The gray beyond presses in still, the only respite from the monotonous abyss the distant flickering of quicksilver mirrors.

He pauses. Squints through the haze of his sludgy thoughts.

The mirror he had come through stands before him. He thought he’d wandered away, but here it is. Haunting familiar – and it has bubbled to life.

Dorian pushes himself up, staggers toward it. The mirror beckons, a flickering moment of brightness in the endless gray. As he draws nearer, the light grows stronger. The surface of the mirror begins to roil like a pot of water over an open flame. All around him, the crossroads remain dark, quiet, endless in their awful solitude.

This is his doorway, this single, dangerous light. This mirror that was his way to nothing. That will be his way back to everything.

Well, he thinks, forcing his mind to settle from its haze of confusion, corralling his thoughts through sheer stubborn insistence, if I am to die wretchedly, I’d far rather it were there than here.

Dorian rolls his shoulders and sets them into a straight line, tucking Mahanon’s token back inside an inner pocket. The sense of purpose chases the shadows from his mind as resolutely as if he held a torch aloft. He will face whatever is on the other side with a blade in hand. With nothing to lose and everything to gain: an iota of self-respect, a death that makes him worthy in the slightest of the love and trust so freely given.

Around him, the gray screams in its persistent silence, but Dorian will not allow it to have him.

Go, Mahanon insisted.

No, Dorian thinks. I will not.

He steps through the Eluvian.

*

*

Nothing is the same.

Dorian falls through the ancient mirror to find himself – well, in Skyhold, but that is his only fixed point of reference. He bursts through the door and into the gardens, ready to fight tooth and nail through endless red templars and demons and to die gloriously.

In place of Corypheus’s endless horde, however, is an immaculate garden. Herbs of every variety grow in neat clusters around the edge, the air rich with the smell of spice and blossom. A delicate gazebo is nestled in the garden’s center, while pairs and trios of people sit quietly in the calm of this sanctuary.

All eyes flash to Dorian when he barrels through the door, blade in hand, blood staining the pale fabric of his robes.

It takes hardly any time for several of these onlookers to mobilize. Templars arrive at his elbows. They wear shining silver armour unblemished by shards of red lyrium, their faces indicating none of the frantic insanity that made the red templars so very formidable and so very awful.

But a templar is a templar and whatever world he’s fallen into remains thick with danger, however convincingly it’s prettied itself up.

They manage to wrest the blade from his hand, but not before he draws blood. He catches one of them with a glancing blow that skates down her jaw and neck. The woman snarls as she clamps a hand hard over the wound.

It won’t kill her, but it will scar.

Good, Dorian thinks. Let her scar. If he’s to be remembered, it will be as a man who’s marked those who ruined him. He struggles the entire way as one of the templars shoves him down the crooked and narrow stairs that lead the way to Skyhold’s dungeon. To come through a war, through the crossroads, only to be slammed into a dark, dirty cell.

“The Inquisitor won’t be happy,” says the bleeding templar, scowling at him through the bars.

He laughs and it cuts his mouth. “The Inquisitor is dead. And I imagine he’d be happy indeed to see trespassers and traitors dealt with appropriately.”

The woman stills, eyes narrowing. Blood trickles down to the edge of her strong jaw, where it beads and drips across her armour. Here in the damp air of the dungeon, the smell carries: coppery, hot. Nauseatingly familiar, this smell of blood and damp stone.

An anchor that ties him to whatever hell he’s stumbled into. Because this is Skyhold, and yet it isn’t. These are the dungeons he knows, but they aren’t. Gone is the rubble, the smell of mouldering rags. In their place, a clean, dim room. Bars that are newly forged, locks that open and close as they ought to. A white banner hangs on the wall, proclaiming this dungeon the territory of the Inquisition but –

A facade. An illusion wrought by some beast – whether demon or more worldly, Dorian cannot say.

“I’ll fetch her,” the templar says finally. “She’ll want a word.”

“I never trusted that blighted mirror,” hisses the other templar as the pair turn and edge their way upstairs.

Her, Dorian thinks. Who exactly do they intend for him to speak with? What creature stands at the helm of this facade?

His answer is a long time in coming.

The hours stretch before him, a barren wasteland riddled with hidden gullies. Far too long to be alone with his thoughts in the depths of a castle rendered unfamiliar, a castle no longer spattered with blood or echoing with shrill screams. He endures an eternity in those hours with nowhere to turn but back.

Mahanon, green eyes flashing with concern. One by one, his friends falling to their deaths, flickering out of existence. And here stands Dorian, alone and unharmed, cradled by a bed of lies whose truth he cannot yet ascertain.

He tilts his head back against the cool stones, eyes flickering with remembered horrors. Ears stoppered by the clash of metal, the sick thud of arrows puncturing muscle, and the slide of a sword through flesh. Scraping bone.

The world reels beneath his feet. His fingers tense against the rough stone, sloughing off soft skin.

It’s the pain that brings him back before the voice. The sharp feeling of stone cutting beneath his nails that draws him from the yawning abyss of his mind.

“– through the mirror?”

“Yes, Lady Adaar. And he came ready to fight.”

Dorian draws himself up, listening hard. The first woman continues, her voice steady as a heartbeat. “Find Solas, Vaira, and then see a healer about that cut.”

A murmured acquiescence and then a towering woman enters the room, her head crowned by curling horns that gleam in the torchlight.

“Oh,” she says, drawing up short. “I remember you. Dorian Pavus – you brought us warning of Corypheus’s army of rebel mages.” Her brow furrows as she moves toward the cell, blinking down at him. “You died.”

“I –”

Dorian stops. He tries to find footing, scanning the woman up and down.

Something tugs at him, pulls insistently at his core. A feeling so familiar it sickens. He recoils, eyes flaring wider at this woman, this imposter, this –

Her left hand glows.

This is the Inquisitor, the Anchor humming with energy at her side. He can feel it in his bones, feel the truth of it.

None of this is a trick. But –

“Where is Mahanon?” he asks. Desperately, almost; he can hear it in his own voice. “If you have the Anchor, where is he?”

She continues to watch him, her expression guarded. “I don’t know a Mahanon,” she says. “That sounds elven. We have a number of elves among our numbers. Perhaps if we asked Solas –”

Yes, that’s right. She said his name. The haze of war begins to clear, the dizzying cant of his thoughts slowing as he tries to focus on this place, this Inquisitor. “Solas is here? Yes, I imagine I might have a few things to say to him. Preposterous, bald little coward that he is.”

“Tell me,” she says, ever steady and unaffected, “how did you come to pass through my mirror?”

Such a small question, yet one that contains multitudes.

He tells her. Dorian is a man for whom words come easily, even words as wretched as these: he lays out the sequence of events, dead little sentences from which he surgically excises all emotion. He begins with the Conclave and concludes with Mahanon’s death.

She stands silently the entire time, looking down at him. Her shoulders are broad and straight; her gaze doesn’t once falter.

“I need to go speak with my advisors,” she says finally. She turns and leaves. Not a retreat, but a dismissal.

If this Adaar is Inquisitor, he thinks, if the Inquisition exists here, he must not have passed back to his world. He’s come to a variation on a theme. Instead of rearranging the strings, however, this world has put a Qunari at the Inquisition’s helm. It has seen Skyhold rebuilt, the Inquisitor allied with templars, the Dorian who belongs here killed. The world is rendered strange, like viewing a familiar face under dying firelight: the light and shadows make it at once beyond recognition and eerily, intimately known.

What other changes might fate have wrought here? What might yet remain constant?

He allows himself a moment of thin hope, one that churns his blood. If this woman answered Justinia’s call, Mahanon –

Surely killed at the Conclave. Surely.

It’s the first question he puts to Adaar when she returns. “Mahanon Lavellan,” he says, moving forward to the iron bars. “He is my Inquisitor. I would know what happened to him in this rendering of the world.” A pause, the words sitting heavy in the air between them. From the way Adaar has stilled, Dorian knows she heard it too.

“Was,” he amends. A syllable like a blow to the gut, the hot taste of blood on his tongue just the same.

“You’ll need to ask Lady Montilyet. I’m afraid I’m better at leading campaigns than keeping track of names.” She pulls a key from her pocket and unlocks the door. “My advisors await in the War Room. Let’s go.” Adaar tilts her head toward the long stairs.

Amazing that her horns don’t get caught on the low ceilings, Dorian thinks distantly as he edges out from the cell.

“Not worried I’ll attack?” he asks, arms folded across his body.

The angles of her face sharpen as she looks down at him. “No. And if you did, you’d pose little enough problem. I’ve put down my fair share of Tevinter mages this last year.”

She says it so very plainly. There’s no anger nor pride in her voice, only a simple iteration of the facts as they stand. Dorian takes note of the blade hanging at her side. Confident, he thinks, but prepared.

So he walks with her up the stairs and into a Skyhold made unfamiliar in its completeness. Gone is the rubble that choked the inner courtyards. White banners snap in the wind, proudly placed along the ramparts. Swords clash not in war but in practice as templars fight in an inner ring near the tavern. Around the fortress, clusters of Orlesian nobles and wealthy merchants linger.

Everywhere he looks, prosperity. Everywhere, signs of victory.

A cruelty to see Skyhold so prosperous when he last saw it so very spent. So utterly ruined.

“We couldn’t manage to convince any Orlesians to even speak with us,” he murmurs.

Adaar half-turns, tilting her head down as she listens. “No? We managed some alliances in our earliest days. I had contacts from before the Inquisition. They knew I was trustworthy. And you know what Orlesians are like – once someone of note proclaimed their support, the rest followed like a flock of birds. Magpies always after the newest and shiniest thing.”

Dorian stares at her, this broad-shouldered woman. This blunt creature. “From before the Inquisition?” he asks.

A small smile flickers across her face. “I was a Tal-Vashoth mercenary.”

A sword-for-hire turned capable leader, a Qunari who would defeat the man Mahanon had been unable to even approach. How unfair, Dorian thinks, that he hadn’t lived in a reality in which a more fitting leader had received the Anchor, where alliances had come easily. Where supporters were as numerous as a flock of birds. How unfair that he couldn’t have lived here and met Mahanon through other avenues, when this world was so much kinder.

The War Room stands in the far corner of the castle – a castle diffused with soft light through exquisitely-crafted stained glass windows. Such finery throughout.

It leaves him hollow and haunted. By all that could have been, by all that wasn’t.

They are exactly as he remembers – Cullen, Josephine, Leliana, Cassandra, and Solas –  except that none of them look weary in the way he’s grown accustomed to seeing them. Their faces have fewer lines, their shoulders are straighter. It is only their eyes that remain the same: guarded, wary. And that, Dorian realizes, is because of him.

“You came through the Eluvian,” Adaar begins in lieu of introduction. She would know he is familiar with those arrayed before him: he mentioned them in his long recollection of events.

“Yes. After Corypheus attacked Skyhold.”

“Corypheus attacked Skyhold?” Leliana stops her pacing. “What do you mean?”

Dorian shifts in the chair they’ve provided for him – perhaps as a means to set him at ease or perhaps because he looked ready to collapse. A kindness or a tactic, he can’t be sure. So odd to look around him and see the faces of friends turned into those of strangers. People of whom he must be wary.

“The Inquisitor –” He stops, shooting a pointed look at the Qunari who at once profanes and glorifies the title, who wears it with so much more ease than Mahanon ever has. Ever did. “My Inquisitor,” he clarifies, “did his best to hold off Corypheus’s army, but we hadn’t the numbers nor support to accomplish such a thing. We were overrun by red templars and demons alike.”

It is a reality unimaginable to those before him. Josephine murmurs something to Leliana, who nods. Cullen stands in the corner of the room, light glinting off his armour. Surely, he must be thinking, that would never happen here. How desperate, how weak that Inquisition must have been. That Inquisitor.

“A great deal of it lines up,” Adaar offers, turning to her advisors. She shows Dorian her back, though he gets the sense that it is less a dismissal and more a show of trust. She isn’t a woman who would often expose vulnerabilities. “He knows about Justinia, the Fade, the Conclave, Haven. For every victory we’ve had, however, they faced defeat. Until the destruction of Haven. In that, we both shared sorrow – though I wonder if there might be other parallels.”

“If you had not stopped Envy, Inquisitor, it’s hard to say what might have happened. But we may yet be able to glean information that will be of use.” Cullen’s attention shifts from the Qunari to Dorian. He draws nearer, his eyes narrow. “Haven was destroyed. Your Inquisitor retreated to Skyhold along with his forces. And afterwards?”

“Afterwards, everything was shit,” Dorian snaps. “We came to Skyhold without the resources to rebuild. No one would come near us. We faced defeat at each and every corner. Our numbers thinned until we were but a handful of refugees and steadfast companions. A bit hard to convince Orlesian nobles to lend support when you’re barely keeping your few troops fed. And it only got worse: Corypheus hounded us until we had nowhere to turn for quarter. Some did not stay for the final battle.” He shoots a dark look at Solas, who has remained quiet next to Josephine.

“You made it out.”

Simple words, but each is a twist of the knife that tears at Dorian’s heart. He looks up at Adaar, whose horns glint bronze in the light filtering in through the stained glass windows. This woman who was gifted an Inquisition ready to succeed. Who has led capably.

Dorian feels the unspoken question like hot needles prickling beneath his skin. A wound that will never heal, he is certain of that. “The Inquisitor insisted,” he says. The words taste like ash inside of his mouth, dry and bitter. “No dictator endures forever, he said. He thought I might be useful elsewhere. How foolish.”

Adaar draws herself up, angling her body backward so that she doesn’t loom. A woman aware of how she occupies space and the effect she has on others. “Solas,” she says. In his name, a question.

The elf finally has something to offer. “The Eluvians connect not only places in our world, but in many others. It is entirely possible that Master Pavus has fallen from a different version of the events since the Conclave and into ours. Although it certainly sounds as if we have been fortunate in the happenstance of our reality.”

“Yes,” Dorian says, his voice dripping with venom, all of the hurt and betrayal and fury he feels laced in each syllable, “How very fortunate for you.”

Solas stiffens. “I apologize.” He dips his head. “I did not think. Of course the pain would be fresh.”

“As interesting as this is, it’s of little relevance,” Adaar says, shifting smoothly so that she stands between Dorian and Solas. A move made for the best, as Dorian is tempted to use the little magic he has collected since he exhausted his reserves to set the traitor on fire. “Your reality is clearly very different from ours. I will ask you to sit with my advisors and more fully recount how your Inquisitor acted so that we might use any helpful information. Beyond that, you’re welcome to stay at Skyhold. In our reality, you died so that we might have advance warning of Corypheus’s attack on Haven. That is a sacrifice I will honour.”

Dorian watches her. He could, he realizes, do just that. Stay at Skyhold, complain about its library, wait for Corypheus’s defeat. Swaddled against the cruel realities of his world to dwell in the comforts of this one.

“You will defeat him,” he murmurs. It is less a question than a statement.

This woman is every inch a competent leader with none of Mahanon’s insecurities. Around her, Skyhold is a fortress. None of what he has seen indicates even lingering doubts about the Inquisition’s success.

“He has no forces. We’ve routed his commanders. We close on his location even as we speak,” says the Inquisitor. “So yes, we will defeat him. I will have his head.”

How very different she is from Mahanon. How very different this string of events.

It is a thought that brings him back to the hope, desperate, fragile, that drew him from the darkness of the dungeon.

“Josephine,” Dorian says, his body straightening of its own volition despite the weariness in his bones, “Do you know if he – if Mahanon – attended the Conclave? Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps they sent someone else.”

A shadow crosses Adaar’s face. “If he did attend, he wouldn’t have survived. But –” She shoots a fleeting look at the Ambassador. “Does the name sound familiar?”

“Yes, it does.” Josephine’s voice is quiet, insistent. “If you’ll recall, we had a letter from a Dalish clan outside of Wycome. I believe it was written by a representative of the Lavallens. I could check our records –”

Adaar nods and Josephine disappears into the next room.

Dorian shouldn’t allow himself to hope, but he does.

His Mahanon may be gone, but if he yet exists in this world – if he lives and breathes, then surely Dorian will be happier for having left a place with nothing but blood and heartbreak for… this place. However present the ghosts of his fallen companions, however surely their deaths have been embossed on the inside of his eyelids, there may yet be a spot of brightness offered to him.

He grasps the idea with all the desperation of a man clinging to the edge of a precipice, his feet dangling uselessly into the void.

Josephine returns with two papers in her hands. She comes to stand at Adaar’s side, fingers brushing the Qunari’s arm.

An intimate gesture. He might spare a moment of interest for what passes between them, except Dorian can’t bring himself to care. These are people he knows, yes, and yet they are decidedly not.

Mahanon, on the other hand –

If he can somehow undo the weariness that had weighed Mahanon down, if Dorian might find him well again and without the nagging sense of failure, his dark self-doubt and deep uncertainties –

Adaar scans the letters. “Your Lavellan wrote us in our fledgling days. Their First attended the Conclave and was killed. He sought to learn of his fate and to offer support. Yes, I remember now, Josephine,” her head dipping close to the diplomat’s, “we were surprised to have support from a Dalish clan.”

“And the second?” Dorian asks, his voice thinning to the edge of a blade. He hasn’t time for this. One moment, Mahanon is dead and all the Inquisition’s hopes stand utterly destroyed in blood and darkness. The next, a stronger Inquisition approaching victory –

But what of his lover?

“He wrote again to ask for our support. Bandits were harrying his people outside of Wycome and he noted that they were unusually well-armed. This came, when? Several weeks ago?”

“Just so,” Josephine says.

“And?” Dorian is tired of this.

Adaar’s features tighten. “We weren’t able to spare forces. Our aim is clear: defeat Corypheus no matter the cost. We can’t spare troops or agents to offer support to a group who can give us little in return. A hard decision, but if we lent out aid to everyone who asked for it, we wouldn’t have enough people left in Skyhold to fill this room, let alone patrol the parapets.”

Something snaps inside of Dorian. “You said no? To someone asking for aid? I should have known better than to expect kindness from a Qunari.”

His mind flashes to Bull, who was nothing but kindness underneath the steadfast resolve, but the words are out and he can’t bring himself to regret them.

They find their mark. The mercenary flinches, Josephine’s hand slipping to the crook of her elbow. “And what would your Inquisitor do?” Adaar asks, her eyes flaring wider. “Offer his help to anyone who asks for it? And you wonder why he met with defeat while we meet with victory. It may not be pretty and there will be no songs praising my kindness, but we must remain focused on our objective if we wish to see this world preserved from darkness. That’s the end of it, Master Pavus. I’m sorry. Lavellan is likely long gone.”

With that, she heads out the door. It slams shut behind her, hinges groaning.

Dorian remains where he is, staring at the shadows of those he used to call friends. “Well,” he says testily, “How many questions must I answer before leaving? If you won’t offer aid, I will.”

“A Tevinter rushing to help others,” Cullen says, his hands resting on the hilt of his sword. “How novel.”

“Ah yes,” Dorian snaps, “you wouldn’t have run through your long list of quips in this particular reality. Do keep them coming. It isn’t as if I’ve heard each of them before.”

It matters not. He answers their questions as truthfully as he can, even if each word leaves his mouth barbed. If he is able to offer help against Corypheus, he will, whatever the reality he’s in. Once the Inquisitor’s advisors have had their fill, he prepares to leave.

He remembers Mahanon receiving a similar letter in his own world, one sent from his Clan and asking for help. It took him little enough time to put together a retinue to move north and offer aid, though it had arrived too late.

And then in Wycome –

They’d been able to do little then. Leliana’s agents in the Marches retreated to Skyhold, husks of the people they once were. Entire cities, they said, mined for red lyrium. Corypheus had turned the Marches into his personal red lyrium garden. Wycome was simply one of the first. Duke Antoine lined the wells with red lyrium so that his citizens sickened in droves.

He’d burnt the alienage to the ground in an effort to place the blame firmly on the elves. To placate the ailing masses long enough to make the truth of the matter irrelevant.

If the same schemes unfold in this world’s Wycome, if this Mahanon has written, if he’s involved himself –

Maker help him, if Dorian needs to walk all the way to the Marches, he will. He’ll fight his way north and do whatever he can to offer aid. In a hesitant moment, Dorian even goes so far as to find Leliana and tell her what he knows. She turns aside the knowledge. “My agents will monitor any developments in the Free Marches,” she says, as her ravens squall ceaselessly around her. “Should action be required, I will inform Inquisitor Adaar, but a preemptive movement of troops is out of the question. She would call it wasteful.”

Wasteful perhaps for this Inquisitor, but it is utterly necessary for Dorian. This is the small thing that stands between him and the endless void, this the small hope he allows himself: that he might offer aid when none comes from Skyhold. That Mahanon might wake another day.

Dorian stops long enough to avail himself of a bed for the night and to study a map in the library. He knows how to find Wycome. The trick will be in finding Mahanon’s people. He learned enough of their ways to understand that they are… secretive.

With good reason, apparently.

If he arrives to find Mahanon dead, so help him. Dorian will personally use every last bit of power he has to bring hell down on those pretending at being bandits. He will hunt them down and destroy them, each and every one, leaving nothing but a trail of fire in his wake.

It would be too cruel, he thinks, to offer him a new world in which he might again have his lover only to wrest him away because of bad timing.

Dorian leaves the castle early in the morning – earlier than he likes to be up, but it’s hard to sleep soundly when one is barely on the other side of the systematic slaughter of all the people one has come to cherish. He somehow suspects he will never sleep soundly again.

The light is stark in the mountains, the air viciously cold. Dawn: a time he has had little cause to see until now. It is as chill and as wretched as he always suspected, but it’s a fitting tenor. A mirror to his heart.

He heads down through the courtyard to take his leave, but stops before he’s reached the bottom of the lower staircase.

Adaar waits by the gate. Towering and glowering.

“You came to bid me farewell? How remarkably noble,” he says when he draws near. It’s too early for sarcasm, the hours still muted, and yet he can’t resist.

“I came,” she grinds out, “to apologize.”

Her admission brings him up short. He blinks at her, this looming, broad-shouldered woman whose eyes are bright with intelligence. Hands calloused from wielding a sword. A mercenary turned savvy political leader and one not too grand to apologize. An unending novelty, this Adaar. But then one could hardly win Josephine Montilyet’s heart without having a few redeeming qualities.

He sniffs.

It is apparently the cue the woman has been waiting for. “You’ve just lost a great deal,” Adaar says in a tone gentler than Dorian would have anticipated. “It may not feel real to me – this is the only Inquisition I know of, ours the only world I’ve visited – but Solas assures me that your tale is very plausible. Probable, in fact. The things you know only make sense if you’ve lived them alongside the Inquisition, and you haven’t. Not here at least. Which means you’re one day into grieving your friends and I was quick to dismiss them. It was… uncalled for.” She shifts her weight, tilting her head and sighing.

“You sound like Josephine,” he intones.

The name curls her lips into a small and tender smile. “Yes, well, if ever there was a woman to school a Tal-Vashoth mercenary in the ways of words, it would be Josie.” A pause. “I can’t send troops to Clan Lavellan, Master Pavus. Nor to Wycome. Not based on what you’ve given us.”

She says it with such earnest regret that he almost forgets that he thinks her brutish.

“I can offer you supplies. A horse, a staff, some coin – and something a little more suited to travelling this time of year than your robes. However fine they are.”

“These?” Dorian plucks at the fabric, his skin already covered in goosebumps in the chill morning air. “Much more impressive when they aren’t covered in blood.”

He means it as a joke. Instead, he can feel his face fall as he says the words.

Covered in Mahanon’s blood.

Mahanon, who fell with a sword right through the heart that was so perfectly noble and good. Mahanon, whose last impulse was to protect Dorian, whose last moments had been filled with the hope that the world might one day be better.

The thought leaves his throat tight.

Adaar pretends not to notice. “Come back inside. I’ll have someone put things together for you. We’ll have tea.”

Dorian remembers belatedly that he doesn’t take charity, but only after he’s sat by the fire with Adaar as she fills the air with idle recollections about some of her misadventures as a mercenary captain. Nothing too close to the bone.

He has half a thought to turn aside her offer of a staff – a fine piece of craftsmanship shaped by steady hands beneath Skyhold – and the horse and the coin and the sumptuous cloak lined in soft fur. But, Dorian thinks, while the other Dorian wouldn’t have taken her charity, this is a new world and he is able to rewrite himself. He will do whatever is necessary to speed his trip to the Free Marches. To find his place at Mahanon’s side, wherever that might be.

Dorian leaves and he doesn’t look back.

It isn’t difficult to ride down through the Frostbacks with nary a glance at the keep. There can be no looking back because what used to stand behind him is gone. The Skyhold he knows, the companions who had stood by his side despite their endless failures and the brutality of their world, have all vanished.

All that Dorian has left is what might be possible: Mahanon, saved. Mahanon, alive.

If Dorian can see him to safety, if it can be Dorian this time who does the saving, he might finally be able to find some peace in his endless disquiet.

*

Chapter Text

He cannot outrun the beasts that chase him. For once, not soldiers speared by shards of red lyrium nor wardens turned empty vessels for demons dripping ichor and fury. It is not the slow slide toward inevitable destruction that chases him, certain as a landslide.

Instead, it is Dorian’s own mind that ghosts his footsteps.

He cannot ride fast enough to escape the guilt that pursues him, the recollections of his companions falling one by one. Dorian knows because he tries. He travels as quickly as he might when he rides from Skyhold, racing across the landscape that has been made tamer by this Adaar. The Frostbacks taper into jagged, rough-hewn foothills, impossibly steep and treacherous underfoot, though his horse remains steady and unaffected. In the distance, the ocean flashes, an endless brightness on the horizon.

Perhaps better things await, he thinks. A sign of what may yet come.

It is a hope so thin, so threadbare, that it does not last through the first night. He wakes, thoughts a thicket of brambles, each barb a grim memory ready to tear any small measure of comfort from him. To strip him of whatever peace this world could bring.

Dorian expects that his journey to the coast will be fraught with small challenges: clusters of bandits, rubble-strewn roads, collapsed bridges, villages gutted by fire and fighting. Instead, his path is clear, save for the wretched landscape itself – a thing even Adaar cannot tame. The roads linking villages to trade routes are clear, patrolled by neatly uniformed soldiers wearing Adaar’s sigil. Inquisition banners flutter at regular intervals atop signs that, to Dorian’s astonishment, correctly point the way onwards.

Instead, it is the challenge of his own grief, an impossibly dark and yawning wound, that renders the journey toward the coast vicious. The sea offers no comfort; it is not a beacon leading him to a brighter future, but a reminder of all that he may not have.

He’s been marked by the trials of his own world, the awful cruelties of fate or the whims of a god pricked into place underneath his skin – dark as ink and just as indelible.

Dorian manages to find passage across the Waking Sea in Highever, a squat, salty city with little to commend it beyond its access to granite quarries and trade routes. He intends to purchase passage with the coin Adaar provided. However, he soon finds that Adaar has not only tamped down fighting across the countryside, but has also won the hearts of everyone from simple farmers to captains. The woman turns aside his proffered coin as soon as she takes note of the Inquisition’s sigil on Dorian’s saddlebags.

“She’s done us a world of good, the Herald of Andraste,” the captain says, forehead wrinkling in earnest gratitude. “If you need across the sea, it will be done.”

He might turn her aside, but his need for swift passage outweighs his reluctance to trade in on Adaar’s name. He uses Adaar as he might, despite the foul taste it leaves in his mouth. She isn’t his Inquisitor, and his half-formed thoughts of her efficacy, her excellence as leader, feel too much like betrayal to ever be comforting.

Still, Mahanon matters more. He accepts whatever charity Adaar’s sigil might win him and travels across the sea.

As soon as they dock in Hercinia, Dorian takes his leave of the city for the wilder countryside, stopping only to replenish the necessary supplies. Once free of the city’s grips, he breaks out across the scrubbly countryside. Low, rolling hills shape the territory between Hercinia and the lands outside of Wycome. Stunted groves of trees grow more numerous away from the rockier terrain of the coast until Dorian eventually finds himself guiding his horse through old woods paths.

He travels quickly, consulting often with his oiled map. He may never have had cause to truly navigate his way through the wilderness before, but Dorian Pavus is a man of exceptional intelligence: even he can figure out which way to point his horse.

It’s the problem of finding Clan Lavellan that troubles him – and then finding Mahanon.

If he still lives.

He doesn’t, not in Dorian’s mind, not in his memory. Still, it is the hope that things might be different here that keeps him moving. Even when the rains begin.

Dorian cannot gallop long enough or fast enough to outrun what remains of his world. The misery of the weather, the oppressive rain and mud, the endless forest of twisted trees and ugly promontories, pull his attention from more persistent concerns for mere moments at a time. He might stop to complain about the foul weather or terrain, but his attention always circles back around to fouler things: death, despair.

Cowardice.

He is hounded by the omnipresent feeling of fear, of failure, and by the utter weariness with which he dragged himself into this place. A pursuer he cannot escape, whose tracking skills outclass any attempts at evasion he might make.

Several times, he finds himself circling around encampments of bandits – or men playing the part. His time with Mahanon necessitated that Dorian develop a few skills. They see him well-served now and he’s able to avoid any confrontations.

He almost wishes he might stumble into a group he cannot avoid. Ripping through a camp might blot the nightmares of all that’s passed from his mind. Blood and death of his own making. Caution wins out, however. The need to see himself to Mahanon first and foremost. To find the man he already lost a world ago.

Dorian stops sleeping, almost entirely. He might catch a few moments here or there when his eyes finally fall shut, but always he’s brought back by the scent of blood, bone-weary exhaustion, the fading light of his lover’s eyes. He hasn’t slept in ages, not truly. Not since well before he stumbled through the Eluvian and into this place.

Dorian realizes this one morning as he unwinds his knotted muscles in the damp, his body as weary as his mind, his eyes full of grit. He has not rested since he shared Mahanon’s bed.

Now there is no rest to be had.

He cannot sleep after all he has seen, so he travels instead and tries to outrun his nightmares. An impossible task, but still one he sets himself to. If he’s to be pursued by the memory of all he left behind, all he lost, he’ll do his best to turn to pursuit as well.

Dorian will find Mahanon. He can allow no other reality.

The land beyond Wycome is lousy with waterways. They make trying to find anyone, especially preposterously reclusive Dalish, difficult indeed. He draws near to the city described in Mahanon’s letter and then toward the interior of the Marches, looking for whatever signs he might find.

But Dorian meets no one, save for occasional clusters of bandits he dutifully avoids. He is alone with his horse, the damp, the endless trees with stunted branches and thick needles, and his thoughts.

In his solitude, he has become a specter of grim determination and grief, a tired reiteration of all the ruined men before him. How trite, he thinks. And yet his mind continues to circle Mahanon, a falcon in a gyre that will lead to nothing but pain. Each worthwhile memory is tainted, blighted, by what came after. He keeps going because there is nothing else for him here. Dorian Pavus is dead. In his place stands a ghost of a world long since lost to the shadows of darker realities. He walks forth from the abyss with little left to propel him beyond the hope of redemption.

A vain hope indeed.

The sky above begins to darken from the afternoon gray to a darker, more oppressive slate. Although he could keep going, there’s little enough point: his horse’s head droops, Dorian’s skin chafes from the damp, his cloak drips from the oppressive rains.

Dorian sighs, squinting through the gloom of the forest. Another river lies ahead, dark as ink.

He doesn’t have it in him to cross the waterway before setting up camp. He has used up every last inch of willpower and has to scrape against the very bottom of his resolve to even swing himself down from his horse and begin unpacking the saddlebags.

The horse, still without a name, seems unperturbed, blinking placidly at him through its thick eyelashes. It huffs out breath from wide nostrils as it sniffs around for its evening meal.

“I can’t see why you don’t set up the tent for once,” Dorian says waspishly, unrolling the oiled fabric. It will keep the worst of the rain from him, though the air – the air is impossible to escape. He pauses, pushing wet tendrils of hair from his face.

He must look like a drowned cat, he thinks. Dorian Pavus, in this state! The things he does for love.

It is a thought meant to be flippant, but instead it hits him as firmly as a pommel to the sternum.

He cannot breathe. Dorian’s hands still, hovering above the cloth of the tent, numb against the damp chill of this blighted forest.

Mahanon, with a sword through his heart. With such certainty still, such noble intention even in his failures. Such self-sacrifice –

And for what? So that Dorian might skip his way into a realm in which none of his struggles were real? In which a Qunari mercenary had reshaped the patterns of this battle and had single-handedly transformed Thedas for the better?

In the depths of the forest, now growing darker and fouler, a bird screeches.

It sounds so very much like a scream, so very much like the endless shrieking of that final battle, that Dorian’s hands start shaking.

Weakness, he knows, to be so vulnerable to a thing that hasn’t even happened here. That as far as this world is concerned has occurred only in his mind.

And yet his blood runs cold just the same and he sees behind his eyelids blood and death and misery. Dorian’s eyes flicker shut, hands still hovering above the tent. A moment, all he needs is a moment in which he doesn’t feel this, doesn’t see this, doesn’t recollect with perfect clarity the exact shape of his lover’s face as he fell into death –

“Don’t move, mage,” hisses a voice from behind him, a sliver of cold steel pressing suddenly and firmly against the wet skin of his neck.

Dorian’s eyes flare open, hands jerking and –

“I said,” the metal presses harder, biting into his skin, “don’t move.”

Perhaps because he’s dead in this world or perhaps because all of his loved ones have been murdered in his own, Dorian finds his mouth made reckless. Should he infuriate his assailant, that will be that. A minimal cost indeed. “It’s a hard reaction to suppress when someone pops up behind you brandishing a sword,” he snaps, eyes pinned on the ground before him. Water pools in divots in the soil, saturated by the endless rains. Droplets bead on tendrils of his hair, pattering across the back of his hands – which shake still, though he is not afraid.

He is met with silence, except for the distant sound of rain on trees. An unsteady, soft litany. Still, the blade is fixed in place.

His flare of furious abandon begins to subside, like the drawing back of tidal waters.

Dorian can’t die here. It would be absurd given everything else.

Besides, he has Mahanon to find. A last glimmer of brightness to try and salvage from the ash.

Another tactic then. “If you’re looking for coin,” Dorian tries, “I’m afraid I have little enough of that to my name. Charm aplenty, but alas – I am but a poor, beleaguered pariah fallen to the depths of indignity.”

The pressure at the back of his neck lessens. Dorian can hear the man behind him shift his weight on the sodden ground.

“If I’m looking for coin,” the man repeats, his voice surprisingly quiet in the ever darkening forest, clarity of tone lost in the damp air and the chorus of distant birds. “You think I’m a bandit. I – Mage, why are you here?”

Why is he here, Dorian wonders. The question is like the prick of a needle against his skin, an errant slip of the hand turned to blood and pain. Because I have nowhere else to be. Because my heart has been broken. Because I am dead.

He turns the question over in his mind, again and again and again. He has become a man of fixation, of singular obsession, unable to wrest his thoughts from the deep grooves worn into his soul.

A frustrated sound. “Why are you here?” repeats the man.

It is then that Dorian hears it, the particular quality of the vowels, the phrasing of the sentence. The sound of the rain, of Dorian’s pulse beating against his eardrums, had inured him to it before, but now the truth coalesces before him.

“You’re Dalish,” he breathes.

He’s done it. He’s found them.

“Why are you here,” repeats the elf for the third time.

Dorian huffs out a sharp laugh. It stretches his face into shapes that have become unfamiliar – perhaps even a smile, however fleeting – as foreign and misremembered as the hedonistic days of his youth in Tevinter. “I’m looking for someone,” he says, and now his heart hammers against his chest in a desperate, brutal hope. Something too dangerous to allow himself to fully feel. “I’m here to speak with Mahanon Lavellan. Do you know him?”

The sword drops down. Dorian shifts, preparing to stand, to turn –

“Don’t move,” barks the elf behind him. “I just – how do you know that name?”

Not a particularly easy question to answer.

“I’m with the Inquisition,” Dorian offers, a truth in his world if not this one. His knees hurt from where they’ve been pressing into the dirt, a pebble digging into one kneecap. Above them, the rain picks up its pace, cold wet droplets as unrelenting as they are miserable. He blinks his eyes as water gathers on his eyelashes, waiting to see if this is an acceptable version of the truth.

Hard to know where he stands when he’s staring off into the dark forest, when he can hardly hear for the echo of his heartbeat inside his own body.

“They didn’t send you,” says the elf finally. “The Inquisitor couldn’t afford to send help.”

“Well, no, but the Inquisitor could spare me. Mahanon is –” He pauses. The word is harder to say than he had imagined. “A friend. I came as soon as I could. There were… mitigating circumstances.”

“Mahanon was your friend?” asks the man.

Was. It is like another blow to the ribs: was. The staccato beat of sickening failure. The feeling of the ground dropping out from beneath him, the earth opening into endless chasms.

“I can’t see why he’d have been friends with a human mage,” continues the elf, his voice muffled by the sound of rain, the shock stoppering Dorian’s ears. The refusal to believe that this is real. Not again. Not here too. “In any case, Mahanon Lavellan is dead.”

He might cry out, except that there is no way he can voice this feeling. There is no word, no sound, adequate for this sort of destruction: a brutal end, hope offered, then snatched away just as it hovered before Dorian’s reach. His fists curl even tighter, fingernails cutting against the heels of his hands. Around him, nothing but the viscous pounding of his heartbeat against his ears, the numb cold, the looming darkness.

Mahanon, dead. Here and there. Here and everywhere. What is there left for him, what possible path for Dorian to walk?

But the elf, this man, at least he knew of Mahanon. Dorian surges to his feet, whirls to stare at the figure in the dark. “You must tell me how it happened,” Dorian insists, words rubbed raw like salt in a wound – a pain that insists he is still here and he is not done. “Tell me who did it and I will destroy them. I will scorch them from the earth. Tell me.”

If not love, then vengeance.

Wide, green eyes blink back at him from the gloom. Hair so very red that it’s almost the colour of blood, except longer than Dorian has ever seen it.

If the world had dropped out from under his feet before, he is now left floating in the void, in the green depths of the Fade.

Is he dreaming? Should he expect for this creature wearing his dead lover’s face to offer him endless affection in exchange for his soul? It would be a bargain Dorian might consider.

Instead, Dorian finds himself mouthing words numbly. “You’re awful,” he murmurs. “What a cruel thing to do.”

Mahanon’s eyebrows form an angry line, mouth twisting into a scowl. In his hand, a gleaming sword. “I’ve no idea what you mean, mage.”

“Mahanon, stop,” Dorian snarls, skin flushing even in the cold – at once, shock, relief, outrage. “I came to help. I came for you.”

Except this is a stranger wearing Mahanon’s face. Where Dorian once found soft eyes, a gentle smile, there is nothing except the flash of wariness, posture taut as a bowstring. The voice Dorian ought to have recognized, that ought to have been a balm to each and every wound his life has inflicted upon him, is made unfamiliar. It is unburdened – and suspicious. Two things Dorian has never known Mahanon to be.

If Dorian is perplexed, this specter of all he has lost is even more so.

“How do you know me?” breathes Mahanon who is not Mahanon. “Tell me, else I’ll cut you down. Inquisition or not. I won’t have someone try to claim friendship when they are a stranger. And you, mage, are a stranger. And strange.”

Dorian barks out a laugh, pressing a hand to the slick skin of his forehead. His robes cling to him like a second skin, but nothing is nearer than this feeling: sickening relief. It lodges itself under his breastbone, like the tip of a blade but inches from bringing death.

To be so close and yet so far. To have found Mahanon, and yet not his Mahanon. Never him, Dorian’s lover who has fallen.

“You,” Dorian repeats, “were my friend.” A simple lie, a misnomer, but one that wounds in the voicing of it. He pushes onward; this is a pain he can endure, an ache that is dwarfed beneath the enormity of the other, deeper hurt. “It’s complicated and involves no small share of ancient elven magic. I’m more than happy to explain, but I’d rather not do so in the rain or the dark. Nor when you’ve threatened to cut me down. I do best when I’m not rushed, threatened, or wet.”

This tone is familiar at least, an anchor tethering him to place.

Mahanon watches him, eyes narrow, attention skipping for a moment to the stave strapped across Dorian’s back. To the Inquisition sigil on the horse’s saddle blanket – a horse who has, throughout the entire interaction, continued to stand quite patiently, waiting for dinner.

“And I’d best feed my horse,” Dorian adds belatedly. He would give anything to end this dreadful silence, this intermediary space between unknown and familiar, between the way things were and this new reality in which Dorian finds himself.

For once, cooperation. “We can’t have your horse go hungry,” says Mahanon, face still stiff with suspicion, confusion. His voice softens into a tone almost recognizable, as sweet as a touch in its proximity to what was.

But the sweetness is a lie, one that makes the ache of this palimpsest all the more wretched.

They stand, staring at each other: Dorian wounded, Mahanon lost.

How badly Dorian wants to tug the blade from Mahanon’s hands. He’s done it before. He could reach out, press his fingers to the bones of his wrist, carefully pry the sword away, pull him into a long embrace – to feel the warmth of his body, to inhale the particular smell of his skin –

But he can’t.

To this man, Dorian is a stranger. Worse, a stranger professing absurd tales, imagined friendships.

He must offer what he has travelled all this way to bring.

“You must think me mad,” Dorian says. “A forgivable thought. If you might permit me to share the information that saw me here with such haste?”

Silence is his answer.

Better that than a sword through his heart, Dorian thinks.

A memory that wounds surely as a blade. He presses it to the back recesses of his mind.

“You’ve rightly identified that the bandits are not simply in pursuit of coin. They’ve been hired by the Duke, who seeks to drive your clan from the area. If they’re killed in the process, so be it; Duke Antoine cares nothing for elves.”

Still, Mahanon watches, face shadowed in the growing twilight. A specter eerily familiar, any of the strangeness of his expression softened by the darkness here under the trees.

For a moment, Dorian can almost believe this is his Mahanon.

But he shifts and straightens, sword still neatly extended toward Dorian. “Continue,” he says, finally sheathing the blade.

The illusion shatters. With it, whatever small measure of comfort Dorian has found.

He clears his throat. “Corypheus uses red lyrium to create and fuel his soldiers, but it is a hard mineral to find. However, it can be grown much as a garden, but inside of living people. In my reality, Duke Antoine had allied himself with Corypheus and the Venatori – a cult of my countrymen, deluded and mad for power. He infected the wells of Wycome so that he might cultivate a verifiable bounty of red lyrium for Corypheus. But the seeds take time to germinate: first, the citizens sickened. Next, he turned the city against the alienage and its occupants, blaming the mysterious illness on those most vulnerable. Antoine called for a purge of Wycome’s elves. I cannot say if this Antoine devises similar schemes, but if the bandits are his men, he may. Should that be the case, we must intervene.”

Mahanon’s eyes stay fixed on Dorian, shuttered and dark. “How did you come by this knowledge? If the Inquisition knew, certainly they would have sent word through more – reliable means. Means less likely to be gutted by bandits on the road in pursuit of his imagined wealth.”

“As I said,” Dorian begins.

“Your world, yes. Do you think me simple? I’m not a child listening to stories around a fire.” He takes half a step closer. “And yet there are things you’re not wrong about: a sickness afflicts Wycome. The citizens do blame the alienage elves. Tell me how you know me. Tell me how you know this. And, Andruil help me, should you be involved I will hunt you down.”

Words spoken with such fury cresting the surface that Dorian knows they’re true.

He has run out of half-truths, scraped raw by this reunion that is not a meeting of lost lovers, but the ghost of Dorian staring wildly at the specter of a man who should be dead. Who lives, but not as Dorian needs him to.

“I came through an Eluvian,” Dorian says. “I – We lived in a different version of this world, though there remain overlapping aspects. I knew Mahanon; I knew you. I remember when we received the letter from your people asking for help. We were too late in the world in which I lived – but I thought there might yet be time here. In this world. A small measure of time might make all the difference.”

Still Mahanon stares. Still he stands silent, wary.

“Do you need proof? Very well. You had an older cousin who used to tease you mercilessly,” Dorian offers. “You thought it wise to rumple the fletching on her arrows so that her shots would go wide on a hunt – a hunt on which she died. You’ve always blamed yourself, though you were only a child. What if her arrows had found their marks when the beasts of the hills were in pursuit?”

A long, unbroken silence in return. A wide stare.

Dorian continues. The echo of this intimacy aches at the same time it soothes: repeating these secrets, which Mahanon shared in the dim light of dawn. Returning them to him as he might a borrowed treasure that he hasn’t realized was missing. “When you received your vallaslin, you chose Mythal because she’s a protector – though sometimes you feel as if you would have done better with Elgar’nan. More vengeance might have helped, you said.”

It is this that finally provokes a reaction.

“I don’t like this magic, mage,” spits Mahanon, his hand again falling to the hilt of the blade at his side. He bristles. “You’ve no right to claim these things –”

He has other intimacies to offer, but if these secrets have not undone the suspicion knotted deep in Mahanon’s heart, the others will not

Dorian is without quarter. Without means of winning a place by Mahanon’s side again.

Except, Dorian thinks, for his very last momento. A final attempt.

“Here,” Dorian says, reaching in to the inner pocket of his robes, the one that hovers just above his heart. He pulls out the leather satchel Mahanon had pressed into his palms so insistently in their last moments together. With a tentative gesture, he tosses it to this other Mahanon.

The elf catches it, stares wide-eyed at the object.

“You said –” Mahanon frowns. With slender fingers, he unwinds the tie on the pouch, spilling the black pebbles out into his waiting palm. He flicks through them quickly, eyes jumping over each sigil. “You said we were friends – well, you and this… other Mahanon.”

“Yes,” Dorian repeats. “We were friends.” The lie becomes easier, familiar even, the more he repeats it. A torn muscle worked to the numbness of deadened nerves.

“Why did you come here?” He shoves the pebbles back into the pouch, wrapping it up again. When Mahanon looks at Dorian, his eyes are bright with anger. “Why did you come here when you should be with him?”

Dorian blinks. Glances at the pouch that should still be nestled near his breastbone, but which is clenched desperately in Manahon’s palm. I would trust this to no one else, said Mahanon – but surely Mahanon would trust it to himself.

Its absence still aches. The last piece of his Mahanon that Dorian has.

“He died,” Dorian says. The words taste like ash in his mouth, threaten to get caught in the cartilage of his throat, and yet he says them because he must.

Because it’s true. However alive this Mahanon – however blessedly breathing, warm and steady – Dorian’s Mahanon is dead.

A truth there can be no escaping, no outrunning.

“He died, and you – came through an Eluvian,” Mahanon repeats.

The rain has slowed again, though water still trickles in rivulets down Dorian’s back. His hair is lank in his eyes. His bones ache with cold. “Yes,” he says. “They connect many worlds – a crossroads, of sorts. I left my own realm and travelled to this one. And so here I am in an effort to lend whatever help I might should you still need it. I may not have been able to help the Mahanon from my world, but I would do whatever I might to help you.”

Mahanon turns away, looking out to the endless dark of the forest, jaw tense. When he looks back, however, his stare has lost some of its wild danger.

It is almost familiar, that look. Uncanny.

“I won’t turn aside help, not when you clearly have knowledge of this… mess,” he says finally.

“Then you don’t think I’m mad?” asks Dorian.

A shake of his head, dark and wet tendrils of hair clinging to the sharp bones of his cheeks. “There are tales we share: visitors come through the mirrors. Sometimes they come to help, sometimes to hurt. We’re always wary. But you –” Mahanon sighs, a sharp, frustrated sound so very familiar that it loosens the knot in Dorian’s heart.

“You,” he continues, “seem to be precisely what I need, and I trust in the providence of the gods. There have been… problems. My clan wasn’t impressed that I sought out the Inquisition’s aid independently. I’ve been asked to step away for a time. The Keeper thinks she’s sent me to a clan less – complicated by the past. By what’s happened. At least for the time being, I’m meant to be elsewhere. And yet the bandits still riddle the woods and tensions still grow in Wycome. Someone must set it right and if your hand is bent toward sheltering the vulnerable rather than moving against us, I would have your help.”

“I am yours,” Dorian says, “in any way you would have me.”

Mahanon thrusts back the pouch that Dorian trusted to him, reaching then to push his wet hair from his eyes. “Then I am glad to have you, mage. You would have a name?”

How foolish that Dorian has forgotten to introduce himself –

How foolish that he should need to.

He swallows around the tightness in his throat, forcing his features into his brightest, most charming smile. “You have the pleasure of being in the presence of Dorian Pavus, most recently of another Thedas.” A small flourish with his hand, a stiff half-bow.

Mahanon makes a sound in his throat, low. With that, he turns and grabs the horse’s reins. “To camp, then,” he says, leading the way through the grasping trees toward whatever lies in the distance. Whatever lies before them.

And in that way, Dorian finds himself once again at Mahanon’s side. Once again working against the dark forces of the world.

This time, however, Dorian stands by himself. There is no gentle touch to his lower back, no reassuring smile, no secrets spilled in the gray light of dawn. It is Dorian by himself, save for the stranger at his side.

But now, he thinks, they have a chance of success. That is a hope worth pressing against the tattered flesh of his heart, a living thing with feathered wings and bright potential.

Something worth cherishing.

*

Chapter Text

Of course, it cannot be as simple as picking up where they last left off.

There was no leaving off, not here. Not with this Mahanon.

Between them, a distance grows – though that is inaccurate. It has always existed with this Mahanon, but it still feels new and awful to Dorian. This series of valleys and hills Dorian cannot see his way through, a terrain of ill-remembered conversations and secret knowledges he has no right to, not in this world. All of his words are rendered jagged by the collision of there and here, past and present. This strangeness scrapes against Dorian’s mind until he feels raw with ceaseless vulnerability to this man who is not Mahanon. Who is.

Mahanon does not ask any questions about the world from which Dorian tumbled. He is fixated entirely on the problem at hand.

It is a singular focus that Dorian understands instinctively. The same focus drove Dorian across the continent to find the man before him.

They speak instead of mundane things. Not mundane, not precisely, but smaller than Dorian is accustomed to: chasing after Antoine’s men, stopping the plots at work in Wycome. When to break from camp, how long before they should head to Wycome for supplies, for information.

They do not speak of love, nor of fear, nor of the looming threat of Corypheus’s army.

Unfamiliar territory, a graveyard haunted by all that Dorian recalls, by the patterns he knows that have turned insensible here.

Still, Dorian came for this very reason: for Mahanon. If not this one, who stands always at a distance, his neck stiff, his shoulders tense, then for Dorian’s lover. Selfless, soft, good.

They track Antoine’s hirelings through the forest, over craggy hillsides and across the narrow slivers of meadow that offer respite from the endless dark forest.

Mahanon disappears one day and returns with the head of a scout, throwing it hard against the earth. The man's head rolls toward Dorian's feet, eyes and mouth agape in endless horror.

"He was Antoine's," spits Mahanon, a dark specter of fury. “I found the missive bearing the Duke’s seal. They’re still in pursuit of the Clan. Kill them if you can’t drive them far enough with appropriate haste. They hunt us as though we’re beasts. Prey flushed from cover.”

Dorian’s eyes stay fixed on the head before him. The clotting blood beading against ragged skin has gathered soil, prickling with stray pine needles.

“I know where they are,” Mahanon continues. “And so we’ll kill them. Hunt them for a change.”

Dorian tears his gaze away, because already he has started to see Blackwall, already he hears the clash of steel, distant screams of the unprepared. He clears his throat. “You realize that if Antoine finds his guards missing, he will send more.”

“Good,” says Mahanon. “I’ll kill them too.”

“And when they keep coming?” Because Dorian has seen how Mahanon’s will can be worn down against the relentless onslaught of battle. No man is a fortress; no single person can withstand unending pursuit.

“I’ll kill him too. If all of what you’ve said is true, he moves against not only my clan but my people. May Elgar’nan guide me: I will have his head before this is through. I will take his life for all he has done and all he plans to do. He thinks us beasts? I will show him just how savage we can be.” His eyes flash, body rigid as a blade –

Dorian does not doubt for a moment that he means every word he has said.

It is this vicious insistence on vengeance that startles Dorian most about Mahanon: certainly, his Mahanon had voiced a desire to be more vengeful.

This Mahanon is.

The clarity carries through to battle. When they finally find Antoine’s men, Mahanon launches himself into the fray without a second thought for his own well-being. He becomes a wild creature carved of fury.

Something else animates him. He does not live on fury alone, lit up by a second passion that burns as brightly as the sun: joy, unfamiliar and unsettling.

How very different they are. How very different he is from the man Dorian left behind.

Dorian’s hands shake the whole time, his legs trembling beneath him as he throws barrier after barrier around Mahanon. Mahanon, who laughs as he thrusts his sword through one woman’s chest, who tosses Dorian a bright grin as an assailant’s arrow deflects off the barrier keeping him whole.

Alive.

By the time they’ve finished, half of the camp is burning, set alight when Dorian slammed down a sigil in a blind panic as two men came at Mahanon from behind.

“You’re impressive,” Mahanon says, once he yanks his sword from a man’s body and wanders back toward Dorian.

At one point, Dorian might have simply agreed with the assessment and continued.

Not now, though. Not while his heart still hammers frantically against his ribs. “You shouldn’t do that,” he snaps. “Throwing yourself into the middle of things! I barely had time to cast a barrier around you – and no plan beforehand, just – You can’t, Mahanon. I won’t have it.”

A shadow darkens the warrior’s face, blotting out the searing light from a moment before. “No? You won’t have it? Why – is that not something he did?”

It’s the first time he’s referred to Dorian’s Mahanon.

The hurt in Dorian’s heart flares, a hot and immediate pain. At times he thinks that surely he has reached the limits of what he can feel, that he has been wrung dry of his capability to hurt in this way. And yet another twist reveals new depths of tremulous grief.

Dorian huffs, his arms folding across his body, tight bands that keep him in place. “No, it’s not something you did. You were – We wouldn’t afford for you to be so reckless.”

Mahanon’s eyes narrow. “You couldn’t afford for him to be reckless,” he repeats. In the asking, an unspoken question.

The terror of losing Mahanon again, the blind panic that has made Dorian weak, undoes his restraint. Unknots his reticence. He is left splayed open, ribs cracked to expose the place where his heart used to live. “You were Inquisitor,” Dorian says. “We could hardly afford to lose you to some stray arrow, not when you were our only hope. And so I’d ask that you show some caution here as well.”

Silence. Mahanon becomes perfectly still, features stiff.

A ghost of all that Dorian has lost, similarly stripped of life. They stand facing each other, Dorian folded in on himself, Mahanon holding his bloodied sword.

The space between them is an impassable gulf. Once, Dorian might have stepped in closer. Once, it would have been Mahanon who shook uselessly, Mahanon who turned to Dorian for comfort, for strength, for stability.

Now it’s Dorian who needs the ground beneath his feet to steady once again. His turn for the whispered assurances – but it’s an exchange he made with a dead man in a different world.

There is nowhere for Dorian to find respite.

“Well,” Mahanon says, shifting to peer at the ruin around them. The line of his throat shines with sweat, a smear of blood across one cheek. “We don’t have the same luxury. There are only two of us, mage, and I’m not about to ask you to run into the middle of a fight. Besides,” and here he glances back at Dorian, the facade of a crooked grin shaping his features, “you’re quite capable. You helped, with the fire. And if you keep that up – the setting the whole place aflame and making sure I don’t die horribly – I think we’ll be fine.”

Making sure I don’t die horribly.

Again, thinks Dorian.

It is a thought that might send him toward the abyss that lives in his heart –

But something in Mahanon’s posture loosens the knot that dwells inside of Dorian. Perhaps it is the sudden languid line of his shoulders as he rolls them back, or the bright grin he puts on just for Dorian’s sake, or the softer shape of his eyes. No matter what does it, the poison that always lingers on the back of Dorian’s tongue fades away, leaving only a memory of its bitterness.

They may not be able to pick up where they left off, Dorian thinks, but they can begin anew.

In fits and starts, in smudged lines and smeared ink, Dorian begins to map out this new terrain, to commit this Mahanon to memory. To learn his intricacies, how he moves through the world. Mahanon may not be Dorian’s lover here, but certainly he can be a friend. The lie Dorian told brought to life, only far truer, far better than Dorian could ever have imagined.

The crooked smile, the wild joy, the reckless abandon – new things. At first like rocks that might twist ankles, unseen rubble over uneven terrain. With time, landmarks Dorian can use to navigate. Ways he can make sense of being thrust from his world into this one.

It is not the same. Dorian doesn’t expect it to be the same.

But perhaps the differences can be good.

That night, he sleeps soundly for the first time in weeks. Dorian listens as Mahanon’s breathing evens out, his body tucked but an arm’s length from Dorian’s. The air smells like pine needles, smoke, distant rains. Dorian listens to the slow, regular sound of Mahanon’s breath, uses it as a guide to his own. Memorizes it, presses it deep into his heart.

When Dorian falls asleep, it is into the deepest sleep he has had since he last laid by his lover’s side – only this time, he doesn’t fear Corypheus’s army will descend upon them in the night.

This time, he sleeps without dreams. Just blessed darkness. Just the promise of a living Mahanon next to him when he wakes.

*

“How did he die?” Mahanon asks one night as they’re camped outside of Wycome. They’ve come to the city to ascertain whether Dorian’s version of events has bled into this world as well. Crucial answers to questions from another realm.

“How did who die?” Dorian asks, head tipped back as he stares at the stars above. Finally, a clear night.

“Him. The – your Inquisitor.”

Mahanon says the title like it’s a bitter thing. A title readily discarded, as was the man. That iteration of Mahanon tossed aside by the vagaries of fate while Dorian has clawed his way to this one’s side.

He could lie, Dorian thinks. Come up with a suitably heroic tale, a grand end to an exceptional campaign. A final battle made victorious because of the Inquisitor’s noble sacrifice.

Dorian glances at Mahanon, who’s perched next to him by the fire. If Dorian wanted to, he could reach out and touch Mahanon’s knee. His skin would warm under Dorian’s palm. Certain.

He can’t. He won’t.

Dorian’s throat is thick with the lies he might tell. Despite that, the truth finds its way out. “Our campaign was doomed from the beginning,” he says, voice quiet, as if speaking this truth is a dangerous thing. As if it invokes the demons of that world into this one. “We hadn’t Adaar’s initial numbers nor allies, nor did you have her… knowledge of how to lead an army. Of how to win a war.”

Mahanon scuffs his feet in the dirt. His fingers seek out one of his braids, which he undoes and sets to work rebraiding. “So he lost,” he says. Sharp little words, certain and unflinching.

They lie with their simplicity. Mahanon has always liked having something to do with his hands when he’s nervous.

As Inquisitor, Mahanon had taken up whittling after studying Blackwall at work. He carved out intricate, stunningly-shaped animals. A herd of wooden halla gathered on his desk; druffalo grazed on his windowsill, while fennecs pursued tiny and perfect mice.

This discussion unsettles the elf, Dorian realizes. As it should. Dorian has been undone by everything he’s encountered here. It is but a fair exchange. Mahanon so easily leaves Dorian in a state of disquiet: expressions one moment familiar, the next rendered strange; little phrases slipping from his lips that summon the ghost of Dorian’s lost lover; the angle of his eyes; the curl of his lips. Fitting that Mahanon might have a portion of the turbulence.

“We did. We lost. An inglorious end – nothing like the novels.” Dorian turns his attention to the stars once again. They stand overhead, tiny pinpricks of light: impassive, distant, cold.

He might find it ill comfort, but thinking that all that he has felt, the hurt and wretched misery, is dwarfed by the size of the world –

It feels smaller, somehow, his pain. All that they suffered. Put into perspective by the scope of all potentialities. Not even a note in the margins of history’s records. Not even a dot of ink.

The words come more easily when they feel so very small. “Corypheus attacked Skyhold. We’d known it was coming. For months, in fact. You tried to find a way out, but – Well. There was no escape.”

“And so he died at Skyhold.” Still, his fingers twist his braid into a tight, perfect plait. A complex piece of weaving unfamiliar to Dorian.

“Yes, you did,” Dorian says.

Mahanon sighs, a sound sharp as the edge of his sword. His dark eyes flick to Dorian. “So this other Mahanon was Inquisitor, but useless. He didn’t lead well; he didn’t defeat Corypheus; he died.” His fingers still, his expression softening. “But you – you were still his friend.”

He doesn’t need to voice the why. Dorian hears it just the same. A wounded question, a frail thing.

I may have loved him, Dorian wants to say. Just as badly as he wants to reach out, take Mahanon’s hand in his own, press it to his lips.

The need reopens the wounds he has been diligently stitching shut, tearing sutures apart under the weight of memory and desire.

What he would give to have that closeness. Instead, Dorian offers what he is permitted to share: what he loved, not necessarily that he loved.

“You were kind,” Dorian says. “Generous. Not once did you turn aside someone needing help. You welcomed allies who Adaar would have sent away. Why, you not only allowed a Tevinter mage into your inner circle, but called him friend by the end. Generosity of heart should never be something to regret, Mahanon. It was just that the shape of my world did not treat it kindly in turn.”

“Perhaps a little less kindness would have changed everything,” Mahanon says, blinking through the dark. “Perhaps he would still be alive. Perhaps you would still be with him.”

It is a thought Dorian has often nursed.

If only Mahanon had been a little more like Adaar. If only their forces had been a little more robust. If only they’d made alliances in the earliest days. If only –

If only Dorian hadn’t given his heart away so readily, he might be more intact. He might still have a foot in this world, rather than his world, rather than whatever lies beyond. More than half-dead, barely alive here.

Barely here.

None of the permutations of how things might have happened are reality, however. Things unfolded as they did: inevitable and awful.

“If wishes were horses, Mahanon, I should never have cause to walk another step in my life,” Dorian says finally, into the dark of the night and under the enormity of the sky.

He can change nothing except what is before him. That is the small measure he has been permitted and, though it is meager indeed, it is an opportunity of which he will take full advantage. How rarely anyone is afforded such a luxury: to start over, however differently one must begin. To try to be better for all the misery one has seen.

Surely it is what Mahanon intended when he sent Dorian through the Eluvian.

Another kindness to add to the sum of his debts. The tally grows so very substantial that it threatens to overwhelm the weak grasp Dorian maintains on this place.

“Still, here I am,” he continues, a reiteration he must speak and know in his very bones. “Here we are and, should we be successful in Wycome, we will aid a great number of people. We will save lives that, if events had gone differently in my realm, would not have a chance to survive in this one.”

“A small comfort,” says Mahanon. He ties off his braid, hands dropping down to his lap again. His face is a mask of the yellow light of the fire and dark shadows, his vallaslin spreading like ink beneath the shape of his eyes.

“It is not small to those we’ll save. To them, it’s everything.”

Mahanon makes a sound in his throat, low and warm. He tilts his head, tosses Dorian an inquisitive stare. “You’re not what I expected, mage,” he says.

He doesn’t intend for it to be a lifeline, but it is: Dorian reaches, grasps the phrase, and begins to pull himself from the darkness. “I should hope not,” he says brightly, even if the words leave his mouth gilded in gold that masks their hollow core. “How distraught I would be to think myself predictable!”

The crooked smile returns, though it’s softened. “Predictable, no,” he murmurs. “Irritating? Perhaps.”

“Irritatingly charming,” Dorian corrects.

When Mahanon laughs, it is a bright sound, a free sound, a silver arrow arcing toward the heavens.

A sound unlike anything Dorian has heard.

The small measures of comfort offered by this world. The tiniest slivers of brightness that, nonetheless, keep the darkness at bay.

*

Chapter Text

Wycome is a foul city at the best of times: muddy, damp, overcrowded. Now, however, it smells sweet and sickly, as if death lurks around each corner bearing wreaths for mourning. The citizens have taken to burning flowering boughs and incense – prayers to the Maker or else ill-remembered healer’s tricks.

None of it will mean anything. If they’ve been infected with red lyrium, continued exposure will certainly kill them. A wretched and painful death.

The threat of it hovers above the city, a dark demon blotting out all brightness. With it, the incipient threat of revolt, of violence.

Wycome is a dangerous place, a city doused in oil that but awaits flame.

It is madness, but a madness Antoine has cultivated carefully. The Duke sits atop his hill, looking down over all that he has created, waiting for whatever it is he hopes Corypheus will grant him: immortality, perhaps, or simply power. A place in the new regime.

The man must be mad. Several times over, in fact. In Dorian’s Thedas, his ambition was almost understandable: he cast his lot in with the winning bet, sacrificing decency and integrity for the sake of greed. Here, it is unthinkable. Corypheus loses ground each day, hounded by Adaar’s troops, by Adaar’s endless victories – and yet the man still sickens his citizens and plans genocide in the hope of winning favour with a losing tyrant.

They have to take a hidden route to the alienage. The entire city bristles with hostility and sickness. The air is thick with both the sound of crackling coughs, lungs lined with tiny red lyrium crystals, and strings of curses directed toward the alienage. If they walked the streets, it would be an invitation for attack.

“And I know how you worry,” Mahanon says, tugging Dorian along behind him through a series of grimy, shadowed alleys used primarily for refuse and, Dorian imagines, illicit activities. A sneaking glance, a tiny grin. “I can’t have my mage fretting. Half of the city would burn.”

My mage, he says.

It is a hopeless thought, one that sickens and uplifts.

Dorian won Mahanon’s heart through proximity, because he was needed and he was available. This Mahanon –

Well, if Dorian has learned anything, it is that he has not been broken in the same way that Dorian’s lover was. He stands upright, certain. Reckless, yes, but confident.

Dorian once thought he found Mahanon so appealing because of his brokenness, his weaknesses, the particular ways in which he needed Dorian.

He now knows this is wholly inaccurate.

Thoughts he does not permit himself to turn over in his mind. A feeling he turns away from – this need.

Instead, Dorian focuses on what lies at hand: Wycome, red lyrium, the alienage elves. They draw nearer, stepping down a series of impossibly narrow steps and emerging into the distant, dark quarter that Wycome’s elves call home.

The alienage is every bit as miserable as Dorian has anticipated. A cluttered little collection of hovels that look more likely to fall down than remain upright for another year, all centered around a dead, twisted tree. Even the lights and lanterns hanging in the tree look worn: the colours are faded by sunlight, made sodden by rain.

It’s worse for the people who call this dank neighbourhood home. The elves here look nearer to death than those riddled with shards of red lyrium. Though none of them rattle with coughs, their eyes are dull, their limbs sagging, their bones painfully evident. Their eyes, wide and deep-set into their heads, swivel to Dorian and Mahanon as they emerge from the shadows.

The city elves are suspicious. They are afraid.

Dorian feels sick.

“Mahanon!” A woman waves from the stoop of a house, its lintel cracked and sagging above her head.

“You can wait here,” Mahanon says. “She’ll speak more freely if you’re not listening.”

Mahanon wends his way around broken bodies with singular purpose. He is like an arrow: true to point and certain. Dorian watches the line of his back, the flash of his red hair in the distance.

Dorian cannot be offended by being left on the outskirts of this place. He waits near a tall pile of broken and splintered crates, observing. These people have every right to distrust him, even if he has come for them.

For them, he thinks. It is a lie: he’s come for Mahanon. Not even for this one. For his Mahanon.

Dorian would like to think his intentions noble, but they are selfish. He wishes for redemption. To be salvaged from his own self-loathing. That those who suffer here will benefit, be protected –

It is good, yes, but not his purpose.

Dorian scuffs the heel of his boot against the dirt, turning away as Mahanon draws to the woman’s side. His attention flickers over the scene, its emaciated people, its decrepit housing.

He’s left his world for a better one, but it’s not better for everyone.

A child crouches in the dirt, playing with what appears to be a piece of trash, humming happily to herself. When she feels Dorian’s attention, she stops and stares up at him, mouth agape. She shuffles a little closer. In her palm, she clenches a piece of broken clay; a strip of tattered fabric hangs from either side. A sad excuse for a doll.

Dorian isn’t particularly good at talking to children. He hasn’t had much need for it in his life: in Tevinter, children are seen and not heard, spending most of their time with care-takers. And without a sibling of his own –

Still, he can make an effort. Dorian clears his throat. “Hello,” he offers.

The girl blinks once, her eyes huge and bright. “What’s on your face?”

He smiles, unbidden. “A mustache,” he says. “Though it’s usually in much finer shape. Travelling has limited my access to proper grooming supplies – although I carry a small kit with me at all times. Naturally.”

If any of that meant anything to the child, she gives no indication. Instead, her focus remains fixed on his face. She stands, knees grubby from crouching in the dirt for so long. “Can I touch it?”

Perhaps he’s been weakened by the events of the last two weeks, because, despite himself, Dorian crouches in front of the child. “I’m afraid it’s not nearly so exciting as you seem to think, my darling,” he says as she stretches out her free hand and brushes a tentative finger to the edge of his mustache.

She squeals in delight, snatching her hand back. “It tickles,” breathes the girl. Her bright eyes flash and make her look hale, despite her messy, lank curls and dirty little hands. “And it curls, like a kitty’s tail.”

Dorian’s smile widens. Such a small thing, this child. Despite the misery arrayed around her, a joyous creature. “Why don’t you tell me about your –”

Well, he’s not going to call it a piece of trash. “Toy,” he finishes.

The child launches into a long, involved story about her toy – which is, he learns, a princess who is also a bear – that continues in unintelligible phrases and endless enthusiasm until a shadow falls across the both of them.

Dorian tilts his head to look at Mahanon, who stands to the side. His stare is open and curious. Surprised, even.

The girl stops speaking and pivots to look at Mahanon.

“Da’len,” Mahanon says, “Go to Jira’s house. I’ve left her some coin. She’ll see that you’re fed.”

Like that, the child disappears in a flurry of delighted exclamations.

Dorian stands, flicking dirt from the hem of his robes.

Still, Mahanon watches him.

“Only some children run screaming from the evil magister,” Dorian supplies, crossing his arms. The air is chill, determined to cut through cloth and right down to bone. “You needn’t look so surprised.”

“She didn’t surprise me,” Mahanon says.

“Ah, well.” He is exposed under Mahanon’s gaze, the endless green of his eyes.

Thankfully, Mahanon is singular in his focus. He glances back at the hovel belonging to the woman Dorian presumes is Jira. “They won’t leave. She doesn’t believe that Antoine would kill them. He’s always been good to us, she said. As if tossing them the occasional burnt loaf of bread constitutes charity or kindness.”

Sharp words, bitter words.

He expected more of them, Dorian realizes.

Dorian is intimately acquainted with that particular disappointment: of seeing those to whom you claim kinship fail to live up to your hopes.

“If we can’t get them out, Mahanon,” Dorian begins.

But Mahanon understands already where this is going. “We’ll need to fight, yes,” he says. “I don’t know if Antoine intends for a purge or if he’ll use it as a way to release the tension growing here. In either case, we’ll have to stay and wait. But first –”

He stops, brows angling downward, mouth twisting into a hard line. “We need to speak with Clan Lavellan. If several parties of hunters could come, we might be able to hold the alienage. It must be why Antoine wanted us gone. If we hold off an attack long enough and can reveal the Duke’s involvement, we might stand a chance.”

It sounds simple, and yet is anything but.

“If we’re to hold against Antoine’s men or, Maker forbid, an angry mob of citizens riddled with red lyrium, we need soldiers,” Dorian says. “If the Dalish will help, excellent. But still we’ll need more soldiers.”

How often he has had cause to say that. How familiar and worn the phrase is in his mouth. But Adaar has provided none, just as fate, it would seem, had provided none for Mahanon – neither in Dorian’s world or this one.

If it comes down to it, they will make a stand in this quarter.

Dorian has never been afraid of losing battles –

Only now he’s been made softer, more vulnerable. Now he is afraid of losing a person. He’s already lost the world. Funny, almost, to think that losing one more person would be the loosed stone to bring the whole of his foundation crashing down. The very last scrap of what he can bear.

He swallows thickly. “Allow me some time to examine the wells, Mahanon, and to see what doubts I might cast on the Duke’s good intentions. Perhaps if we were here for several days, we could work to see if we might cultivate some soldiers. I’ve some connections yet. If you can find Clan Lavellan –”

“No.” Firm and unyielding. Mahanon’s arms cross, forehead creasing. “You’ll come with me. This city isn’t safe, not even for you. Do what you must here. I’ll try to gather some aid, but then we’ll chase after Clan Lavellan. They’re somewhere near Hercinia.”

He is so very determined, so perfectly calm and commanding, that he’s made unrecognizable for a moment. Steadfast. A dizzying nexus of familiarity and strangeness.

Dorian fights to find footing in this world again. “Shall we plan on returning to our camp before sundown, then?” he asks.

If Dorian sounds as unsteady as he feels, Mahanon gives no indication he's noticrd. Instead, his forehead smoothes. He expected more of a fight, Dorian realizes, though he can't imagine why. “We certainly won’t stay here, not if we can help it. You’ll meet me outside the gates.”

“Of course,” Dorian murmurs.

Already, Mahanon’s eyes flash with cunning, chasing endless chains of thoughts, his mouth twisted into a determined line. “At the very least,” he says, “I can gather what evidence there is of the Duke’s corruption. Even if the city elves won’t lend their help, someone will listen. Antoine’s not a popular man, not with those who are less used to being beaten like dogs.”

It is meager indeed as far as plans go: work within the city to redirect small slivers of animosity; try to bend attention back to the man sitting atop the hill and away from those suffering at its base; find Clan Lavellan and try to win further aid.

They part ways and Dorian turns to setting the odds in their favour once again.

He may have been able to do little before, not when Corypheus came crashing down on Skyhold, but in this? A small, dirty city led by a man whose mind is fatted with greed?

Dorian understands politics as intimately as the corners of his own mind. These are waters to which he has a map and he will see them past shoals and sandbars to safety. No matter the cost, Dorian will not see Mahanon fail in this as well.

*

It’s like treading water the whole while. Dorian lines up visits, spinning out pretty tales of a dashing escape from certain death to those who know his name but have believed him dead. Correctly.

Far easier to do that than explain that he’s fallen from another world.

While Dorian talks in endless circles, Mahanon flits through the city. What it is precisely that he does is beyond Dorian, but each night they meet outside of the city walls and Mahanon looks at once grim and determined.

“I might be able to get weapons,” he explains one night. “There’s a visiting merchant from Emprise du Lion who seems to have heard a fair bit about red lyrium. He has family in Wycome. They’re all sick. He said he’ll work on his guild members.”

“Even with weapons,” Dorian says, toeing a dry stick toward the edge of the fire, “we haven’t the hands to wield them. And there remains the general atmosphere of prejudiced animosity we’ve to overcome.”

A bitter smile. “I can see why a Tevinter mage and a Dalish elf would be well-suited to that task.”

In truth, they fumble in the dark. Even with a sense of Antoine’s scheme, even with what few alliances Dorian can cobble together without clearer evidence of the Duke’s affiliations, it’s an uphill battle. They need bodies.

It’s why they must chase after Clan Lavellan. If anyone will come to the aid of the city elves without being promised a mountain’s worth of gold or waiting for the gradual redirection of centuries-old hatred, it will be the Dalish.

“We’ll want to move quickly.” Mahanon says it in lieu of a greeting when Dorian finally emerges from the dark walls of Wycome. They’ve done all that they might in the city; the time has come to seek allies outside of its grubby walls. Mahanon’s impatience has grown thorny. He continues, face shadowed, “It’s impossible to say when the Duke will move against the city elves; we’ve wasted enough time already. He might strike at any moment, and we’re ill-prepared.”

“No,” says Dorian, filled with certainty and far heavier for the weight of all of the favours he has promised. “We’ve a sizeable enough window of time.”

Mahanon stands between the two horses, eyes narrow. He’s bronzed by the afternoon sun, hair burnt to a red so vivid is looks like blood against his skin. “And how do you know? Is this – something you carried with you from your world?”

“Oh, nothing so insightful,” sighs Dorian, drawing near enough to take his own horse’s reins. “I have contacts, even here. I’ve managed to plant some seeds of doubt as to Antoine’s virtue – though few enough protested the suggestion that he’s as vile as he is. They may have required me to make promises I’ll be likely unable to keep, and I’ve traded liberally on Adaar’s good name, but I have the surety of several prominent citizens. Antoine will need support if he’s to purge the alienage elves. He won’t find that aid readily, and making such a move without more support would be idiotic – though certainly the man has shown himself to be foolish indeed.”

“But –” Mahanon stops. The doubt he begins to raise is silenced, bitten off. Mahanon nods, tugging his horse toward the woods road.

A show of trust, despite his doubts. The choice to simply believe Dorian, this curious mage who he’d found in the woods, who’d fallen through from another world. Who claimed friendship, though it was a lie.

It is a trust Dorian feels, desperately and insistently, that he must prove himself worthy of. That need burns at the inside of his chest, replacing some of the endless ache with a different sensation entirely.

As soon as they fall beneath the shadows of the trees, Mahanon draws to a stop once again, his face open with curiosity.

“How could you do all of that with words?” he asks.

“Ah, well, you’ve heard me,” Dorian says. “I do have a way, as they say.”

He is unsatisfied. It’s written as clearly across his face as script across parchment.

A sigh. “My family is rather prominent in the Imperium,” Dorian offers. “We’ve ties to many families throughout Thedas. Those to whom we can’t claim kinship certainly claim economic ties of some sort of another. I’ve traded in on my good name. That’s it.” He pauses, then adds, “Though the extent to which a dead man may have a name remains open to debate. And I am dead in this world – long since.” He laughs, then, a short and sharp sound. “What feats a dead man may yet accomplish! Why, I ought to have died years ago. I’ve never been more useful.”

The shadows falling across Mahanon’s face deepen to twilight tones. “You’re not dead,” he says. The words are firm, unflinching.

They’re also inaccurate. “I’m afraid I am. Here, at least. I died warning Adaar of Corypheus’s approach. A rather nobler end than my flight from my own Thedas.”

He does not say that he’s also a ghost walking on weary feet. A man who yet lingers in a world long since torn from him, whose eyes flicker with the dead and dying. Whose ears echo with screams, the clash of swords, and rumble of a trebuchet cresting the hill to tear Skyhold apart stone by stone.

“No.” It is an insistent syllable, unyielding, a sound like a hammer striking hot steel. Dorian tears himself away from his dark reality and back to this one, turning his attention on Mahanon.

“It is but a statement of fact,” Dorian murmurs.

Still Mahanon stares, wide-eyed, jaw set in a tense line. He shakes his head. “You don’t understand. You’re not him. He wasn’t you. We’re made by what we experience – and so you’ve never died. He did, you didn’t.” Then, in a fluid movement, Mahanon pivots, swings himself up on his horse. He pauses to spare a sharp look for Dorian, one that cuts with its purpose. “Understand,” he says, “this is a thing I’ve had some time to think on. You’re alive, Dorian. You are.”

Mahanon would know. If Dorian lives under the shadow of what was lost – there and here – then Mahanon surely dwells there too. Surely he understands what it means to be seen as himself and as someone else, to be always limned with memories he has never lived, words he has never breathed.

Love he has never felt.

They do not speak of it again.

*

If Dorian was running from something before, he is now running to something: they ride through the forest toward Hercinia, pursuing Clan Lavellan and the hope of aid with an urgency Dorian feels in his bones. They can’t trust the bonds of promises made over wine or through insipid smiles, a thing they both recognize. Dorian may have placed a haphazard dam in Wycome with his politicking, but they’ll need more than vague agreements with nobles to hold back Antoine’s schemes.

How curious, Dorian thinks, this change in direction. If he’s hounded by anything now, he has Mahanon to keep it from his heels. A comforting thing, to be the one protected from his own darknesses.

Mahanon keeps them at bay with bursts of idle chatter as they ride, comments on landscape or small stories from clan life. Bright smiles, sly jokes. Slow, teasing compliments like candles in the dark, driving demons away.

Dorian has always suspected Mahanon had a sense of humour. It’s only here that he finds it.

“You’ve handled all this far better than I’d have anticipated. Minimal fussing for a noble,” Mahanon says as he slides off his horse to ford a river. He reaches and takes the reins of Dorian’s horse as well, gesturing at Dorian with a flick of his hand. “Don’t bother getting down; you’re not nearly as much fun when you’re wet.”

“Flattery, my dearest Mahanon, is something you might have cause to practice. As it stands, a rather poor effort,” Dorian says, eyes pinned on the stripe of skin at the back of Mahanon’s neck. The way his hair slides over his shoulder. The quiet certainty of his steps, though he finds footing in cold water and over round stones.

Mahanon is steady here – but he’s also as bright as the sun. He burns against the skin of Dorian’s eyelids until all he can see is Mahanon. This brilliant sunburst of a man blots out all others, blinding Dorian to other potentialities.

He has stopped thinking of Mahanon as an imitation of Dorian’s lover.

It rather seems the opposite now, Dorian thinks.

A thought that is a betrayal, bitter and dark. As persistent and inescapable as quicksand under foot. Once the misplaced step has set his mind to the past, he feels himself falling downward, drawn into suffocating darkness until he chokes to death on each distinct moment of failing. All the ways in which he has betrayed his lover.

“I haven’t had much cause to practice,” Mahanon offers. “But now that I’ve a mage more a peacock than a man about? Well. There may yet be hope.”

Through the shadows, a flickering light. They reach the bank, Mahanon hopping up. He pauses, holding Dorian’s horse in place as they linger. His fingers rest for a moment against Dorian’s as he slips the reins back into Dorian’s hands.

A touch of fire. The warm glow of sunlight.

Dorian glances at Mahanon, whose fingers are callused. Whose touch is still soft.

“Who’d have thought a Tevinter mage would be such a capable traveller,” Mahanon murmurs.

In this way, he pulls Dorian back from the abyss. “I have yet to discover a skill I cannot master, given appropriate incentive,” Dorian says. “Should travelling be beyond me, I would have genuine cause to feel ashamed.”

A flash of teeth in a wide, crooked smile. Mahanon’s hands drop away. “We can’t have that. Your shame should only come from how long it takes you to break camp in the morning.”

“If you paid but a moment’s attention to hygiene and personal grooming,” Dorian blusters as Mahanon swings on to his horse, smirk still firmly in place, “you, too, would find that it takes more than three breaths to ready one’s self for the day.”

“I might be offended, but I know that you like me just as I am,” Mahanon tosses over his shoulder.

It is enough to bring Dorian up short. Perhaps because it’s true. Perhaps because it’s more true than Dorian would ever have been able to anticipate. The two of them in the wilds, working against a scheme at once crucial and small enough to be manageable. Perhaps.

Mahanon continues, unaware of the peculiar turn of Dorian’s thoughts. “Why, imagine how much shabbier you’d look if you didn’t have me to put things in perspective. Even with your mustache curled – though how you’re managing that in the woods remains beyond me.”

“A man must have his secrets,” Dorian says, this exchange so very natural that he can hold it while his mind has already pivoted in another direction.

All of it, Dorian thinks, is a matter of perspective, as Mahanon has suggested. Should he have met Mahanon in this world, should he have stumbled into the hunter on his way south when Dorian intended to warn the Inquisition, he might not have given the man a second thought.

And yet this Dorian –

One is made by one’s experiences, Mahanon insisted. Shaped by the path one takes, the people one loses.

The Dorian Pavus who yet lives, who has fallen from his own world and into this one, who travels next to a Dalish hunter at turns wild and gentle, is a man whose perspective reveals the truth of Mahanon’s heart: he is good. Generous. Endlessly bright.

A terrifying revelation. That Mahanon would reveal himself even better than before, ever more transfixing.

He cannot lose Mahanon. Not again.

Never this one.

If Dorian’s thoughts turn endlessly on death, he can forgive himself. Death has been his way of life for a year. Endless suffering. Too many losses. The obliteration of hope under the heel of the cruellest villain of them all – fate.

Always, he is tugged toward the abyss of what he has lived. Always, Mahanon waits to bring him back –

But that night, Mahanon’s thoughts turn in similar directions.

“He died,” Mahanon says while they sit next to the fire, the sky yawning an endless, overcast black above them. “The Inquisition fell – and yet you didn’t. How?”

Dorian watches the fire. Far safer to stare at that light, which ghosts his eyelids in less dangerous shapes than the light of the man sitting next to him. A figure cut of heat and shadow in the firelight, whose skin would be warm to the touch. Who would be pliant under Dorian’s palms.

But the question asked is one Dorian will see answered. He cannot flinch, not even when the blade of his own failings threatens to cut him to his core. “He told me to run,” Dorian says. “He insisted. And I, ever the fool, listened.”

A sharp exhalation. Mahanon scuffs his feet against the soil. He mumbles something under his breath, elven words Dorian cannot understand – though he hears their incipient darkness, the jagged frustration.

He can imagine, however. Dorian has thought much the same thing.

Tevinter does not cultivate cowardice, Dorian had said.

A lie. Now he knows this.

“You must think me wretched. Believe me when I say that any ill will you have toward me and my failings is tripled in my own heart. We Tevinters do nothing halfway; that includes regret.” And, Dorian thinks, self-loathing. His chest constricts until he feels as though he may never again take a full breath. Until he feels as though he may suffocate under the weight of his failings.

“What?” A soft sound, and Mahanon shifts to Dorian’s side, body tucked very nearly against his. A hand reaches out, fingers brushing the shape of Dorian’s knuckles.

Dorian stiffens. The world narrows: the touch of fingertips against his skin, tentative. More tentative than Dorian has ever seen Mahanon.

His Mahanon was often tentative. This Mahanon – the bright, flashing one, furious and alive – has shown no such hesitation. Not until this moment.

“I said, at least he did something right.”

Always pulling him back from the darkness and toward the light of the present. Such kindness. Such noble impulse.

An excellent friend.

But Dorian cannot breathe. It’s too much. He knows his lover is dead, he knows this – feels the hole in his chest, feels the loss of his place in the world – and yet still his heart hammers, still his skin prickles with heat. Still, he feels his blood pounding in his ears, wants to lean in closer, turn his head –

Dorian stands and brushes imaginary dirt from his robes.

He cannot bring himself to look at Mahanon. “I’m afraid I must retire if I intend to be awake before you. After all, if I’m to redeem myself, I must break camp on time.”

“Good luck, mage.” Tight words.

“I needn’t have luck on my side,” Dorian says, trying for brightness. “Not when I have skill and stubbornness.”

A sharp, short laugh that sounds almost uneasy.

It is a note Dorian is happy enough to end on – better than the dangerous heat beneath his skin, this frantic, ugly need – and he retires.

Once again, however, sleep deserts him. Even when Mahanon folds himself up next to Dorian, even when Dorian listens to Mahanon’s slow, even breaths, when he matches his own to them –

Even then.

He is once again pursued, but now he is chased by things he cannot have. Things he should not want.

A traitor and a coward, whose attempt at redemption reveals a new host of failings.

*

He is not alone in his failings.

They find Clan Lavellan in the rough scablands outside of Hercinia, only to be turned away by a sea of sharp words Dorian cannot understand, arrows held in tension and threat. One woman, crowned with gray hair, watches in silence from the center of the camp with its circle of dark aravels and darker fabrics. Her eyes, Dorian thinks, are lined with shadows as someone eles might don kohl. She has seen much, and the world has left its mark.

“Da’len,” she says, once Mahanon has spit a long, vicious string of words at the hunters who keep him on the edge of the camp. Her eyes flicker to Dorian, who watches the entire thing with a sick heart. “We wish no ill will with Wycome,” she says in the common tongue. For his benefit, perhaps. “This year has been difficult. We must withdraw.”

“If you withdraw, Keeper, innocents will die!”

He holds his body like a weapon, a line of barely constrained fury. His fists tremble at his sides, his breaths coming in sharp gasps.

It is like wildfire, Mahanon’s rage. Dorian feels it kindle similar outrage. To come this far.

“He does this for your people,” Dorian says.

At once, all of the sets of eyes flicker to him. Narrow, suspicious. “You’ve no right to speak of our people,” spits one of the hunters – an angular man whose nocked arrow points directly at Dorian’s heart.

Mahanon shifts, positioning himself before the taut bow.

It will not stand. Magic crackles beneath Dorian’s skin. Should he have need, he can have a barrier thrown around Mahanon before the hunter so much as thinks of loosing the arrow. He can have half the aravels on fire. He can –

“They’re not our people.” The Keeper speaks with a soothing voice, warm as a cup of tea, though she studies him with wary eyes. “It is not a distinction I would expect a shemlen to understand. Alris,” with a word to the hunter who burns with a dangerous anger, “if you would go check on the children.”

A prudent dismissal, and one the man accepts. He disappears into the shadows of the forest, throwing a final, furious glare at Dorian.

The Keeper ignores it, just as she ignores Dorian. “Mahanon,” she says, discarding Dorian as if he is of no worth, as if he has nothing to offer.

Perhaps he doesn’t. Nothing save memories of what will never be here, not if he has anything left in him with which to change the unfolding of events.

“We head to the north. Leave your worries behind: come with us. These efforts will not restore what you have lost. Thellan is gone.”

A barked, wild laugh. One of the hunters edges closer and Mahanon’s hands snap out, tearing the bow from her hands. With a furious gesture, he smashes it against the ground. A crack splits the air as the wood splinters against a sharp rock.

“I’m aware that Thellan is gone, Keeper,” he snarls, “as I’m aware that it was your choice to send him in my stead. I ask for help in saving those who are still of this world – not to change the past. That is not something I wish. My concerns are for the present and the future.”

She sighs. Shakes her head. “So be it. You may find us again once you’ve regained your senses. Dareth shiral, Mahanon.”

He leaves in a trail of fury. That flames do not drip after him as he walks is a miracle.

They move through the woods in silence. They both know what this means: even with the groundwork Dorian has laid in Wycome, even with the doubts he has cast upon Antoine, they will not have the forces necessary to hold the alienage. Dorian can hardly expect the nobles he’s begun to win over to throw their lot in with a Dalish hunter and a Tevinter pariah if they haven’t the forces to win.

It will be a hopeless battle. Brutal.

Once again, doomed to failure. For hauntingly familiar reasons.

Mahanon says nothing until they reach the place where they’d tied their horses, a shadowed gully overgrown with bushes that cling to the small patches of soil still set into its sides. “I must be rather disappointing, all things considered,” he says, running a hand thoughtlessly over his horse’s neck. “He had the power to sway nations. I can’t even convince a Keeper to lend some swords and bows to a fight to save our own in a grubby little city.”

Dorian stills. Mahanon’s shoulders form a tight line. Although he speaks the words as he might any – casually, as if discussing trade routes or mineral deposits – he stands as if awaiting a blow.

I must be rather disappointing.

“You hardly disappoint,” Dorian says, folding his arms. Mahanon turns his head, making fleeting eye contact – a nervous, unsteady look.

So unlike him.

And yet a thing Dorian knows how to address. A vulnerability he has seen intimately, has known intimately.

“You,” he continues, “are alive. You’re good and noble-hearted, and you didn’t kill me on sight – although I am a big, bad Tevinter mage and said a great many peculiar things. I’d say that this puts me well ahead of where I’d even hoped I would be when I set out from Skyhold intent on finding you. When I woke to this place. You rather exceed all that I’d hoped for, Mahanon.”

His hands stop moving. Mahanon turns more fully, the shadows overhead parting at the behest of an errant breeze so that he’s crowned in thin sunlight. “And there’s nothing else you hope for?” he asks.

Quiet words.

Words Dorian cannot answer with the truth.

He smiles. “I wouldn’t say no to a hot bath nor a copy of Adicci’s Musings – but no. Nothing else. Though should we be able to concoct an appropriately brilliant scheme and save the day, I would be very pleased indeed.”

Mahanon makes a low sound in his throat. His fingers pick at knots in his horse’s mane.

Always, he likes to keep his hands busy when his mind is made restless. Vulnerable.

The thought catches on Dorian’s thoughts like a burr. Why should he feel exposed?

“I may be able to do something about two of those requests, Dorian,” Mahanon says after standing in silence, gaze distant.

Any will do, Dorian thinks as they begin their ride back to Wycome. Even none. All he asks is that he might remain by Mahanon’s side. This is his insistence, these his demands: that he not be sent away again, no matter how dark the hour grows. That he remain by the man who is a beacon of light even in the abyss of despair.

Here he will remain, whatever comes. Dorian will not again be turned aside.

*

It turns out that one of Dorian’s hopes that Mahanon can satisfy involves hot springs – and Dorian couldn’t be any happier for it.

Though, for all of their sakes, he hopes that the second is not a book that Mahanon happens to unearth from their saddlebags. Dorian would far rather a brilliant plan. Though he saw little enough evidence of it in his own world, Dorian has hope – a startling thing, soft and tentative – that Mahanon here is a man of planning.

“You,” Dorian breathes, sliding down from his horse, sore muscles complaining at even such a slight movement, “are a delight.”

A crooked smile. “If I can’t please my clan, a Tevinter mage who’s fallen through worlds will have to suffice.”

Already Dorian is tugging at the fastenings of his robes, moving toward the deep, dark pool. Steam curls from its surface and disappears into the chill air above. Mahanon sets to piecing together the components for a fire in the small circle of stones left by some kind traveller. Once in place, Dorian sets it with a flick of his fingers.

The water is bliss. Endless heat uncoils all of the tension from his muscles, sucking anything but contentment from his bones. It leaves no space for anything else: not grief, not concern, not doubt. Not the hollow fear that he may lose Mahanon here as well. This Mahanon, who is bright as the sun.

This Mahanon, who tugs off his own clothes in the evening dark. “You know,” he says, twisting as he pulls layers of cloth over his head, “you don’t exactly look like a mage.”

Dorian spares an appreciative glance for the planes of skin, the hard angles of his body, the sinewy muscle cording his form, while Mahanon’s attention is preoccupied with wiggling out of his travel-worn clothes. “No?” he asks, once again turning away as Mahanon frees himself.

“No.” In a splash, Mahanon slips into the water next to Dorian, ducking his head and scrubbing hard at his face. When he settles, he perches on a smooth rock close to Dorian’s side. “You’re –” and here Mahanon spares him a sly, teasing grin, “well-formed.”

A heat prickles beneath Dorian’s skin that has nothing to do with the hot springs. He laughs, a sharp sound. Flattery is a language Dorian speaks fluently. And yet the ease with which the tone shapes his mind is one that prickles: with his Mahanon, Dorian hadn’t the time for such things. Theirs was a courtship shaped by war, terror, doubt.

If this is a courtship. The patterns are familiar, as is the man himself –

But the world is a different place than the one Dorian recalls. Dorian is different. Still, he makes the effort. “I should expect so. War leaves no room for softness – and I have been fighting a war for more than a year. Though I should say I’ve always ensured I was well-formed. One gifted with such a face would be terribly remiss if he didn’t ensure his body kept apace.”

Bright words, glittering syllables, and yet a shadow falls across Mahanon’s face. He glances away. “I forget sometimes that you were in a war,” he says as steam curls against his skin. Licking the planes of his shoulders, his face. “That you were there.” He says it more softly, a thought given breath rather than words spoken with intent.

How Dorian wishes he could forget the long, brutal battles. The campaign fuelled by nothing but fleeting hopes – hopes that dwindled with each passing day. The long nights spent comforting an Inquisitor who did not know how to lead. Who’d been given an Inquisition already doomed to failure, a sickly beast, and expected to lead it to victory.

“I almost forget it myself,” Dorian lies, hoping again to slip into a quiet banter, one as light as the steam rising above the water. “The concerns of the present are rather more pressing. And you are an admirable distraction – flattery and gifts! Why, this is practically paradise compared to the special little hell I came from.”

He has lost his touch entirely. Mahanon huffs, the darkness of his eyes deepening, the crease in his forehead still firmly in place. “How unexpected that the world I thought was my hell should reveal itself the far kinder of two paths.”

Dorian watches. “How do you mean?”

A shrug, loose. He tilts his head back against the rocky edge of the pool. “Thellan.”

At Dorian’s blank look – the name the Keeper had said, but one that means nothing to him – Mahanon narrows his eyes. “The Clan’s First. Don’t you know this?”

When Dorian shakes his head, Mahanon continues, the confusion resolving itself to something darker. “He was my lover. I argued endlessly with him, with the Keeper. I should go to the Conclave, I said. Far better to lose a hunter than one of our few mages. Than our future Keeper. But, no, Thellan insisted. Leading means shaping the future of our people, he said. This is how I might begin.”

“You never –” Dorian begins.

He stops. Shifts.

“I didn’t know,” he says instead.

“Strange,” says Mahanon, his features less stiff than his voice. “I’d have thought he would have told you. But there you are – Thellan went to the Conclave and was killed and Adaar became the Inquisitor. I would have thought there could be nothing worse than losing the person I loved. Apparently it would have been immeasurably worse if I hadn’t.”

The heat that has loosened Dorian’s body has also loosened his heart. He feels the grief he keeps knotted there slipping apart, becoming a larger tangle, one whose knots catch on every stray thought. One he cannot press to hidden places and ignore. “It’s not a pain I would wish on anyone,” Dorian says as the blackness opens inside of him. “Regardless of the larger effects, the pain of losing a loved one –”

He cannot finish the thought.

Mahanon sighs. His hands seek out the wet tangle of his hair, which he begins picking the knots from. “You lost someone,” he says. A statement, not a question.

Such a small way of putting it. Such a simple way to give voice to the hole in Dorian’s life. Inadequate. Entirely inadequate.

Still, he says, “Yes.”

“Who?”

A straightforward question. The sharing of intimacies in exchange for their revelation in turn. But Dorian cannot –

“Someone in the Inquisition,” he says.

Because Dorian Pavus is a man who can lie as easily as he breathes, even if he hates himself for it. Tevinter has left him a coward, a traitor, a liar.

How perfectly he might once again fit in should he return.

“But there are many kinds of love,” Dorian adds. “So I also lost him. And many others.” He swallows, throat tight and yet far too open. He cannot catch the words before they fall from his lips. “There have been few enough people in my life who I might call friends. I lost all of them.”

Silence in the black of the night. Mahanon’s restless hands still, then drop to the water. “Dorian –” he begins.

No. Dorian has revealed enough for one evening. He has come close enough to voicing the blackness of his heart, to naming the terrors that hound his steps. Far better when Mahanon chases them off without asking what they’re called or whose faces they wear. He pushes himself out of the water, using a rough cloak to scrape the dampness from his skin.

All the heat has faded. In its place, an unrelenting chill, sitting cold and heavy as a shard of ice in his gut. “Shall we discuss strategy?” he offers brightly, tugging on his clothes. “After all, we’ve an alienage to save, you and I. I’ve grown rather accustomed to failure, but would not be averse to the notion of victory. Especially a victory that sees you still breathing, yes?”

Mahanon twists in the pool, resting his chin on his folded arms. “Oh, I intend to still be breathing at the end of this. A little bloodied, perhaps, but I’m sure it’s nothing my mage won’t be able to fix.”

A laugh tears free from Dorian’s throat, jagged. My mage. Mahanon’s words. Mine.

“My dearest Mahanon,” Dorian says, swiping back damp hair from his eyes. “As much as I hate to disappoint – and believe me, I do – my knowledge of the healing arts is limited indeed.”

“Then you’ll just need to set a great number of people on fire. And make sure no one runs me through with a sword. You’re good at that, Dorian.”

No, Dorian thinks, I’m not.

But for Mahanon, he might pretend to be.

A lie he can perhaps become, because Dorian Pavus is no one at all here. A figure coalesced from expectations and hopes, from intentions and debts.

Should that mean taking the sword himself, so be it. He will not fail in this again.

Never again.

* 

Chapter Text

It isn’t the most cunning plan Dorian has ever had a hand in, but then clever tricks so often amount to nothing in the real world. It’s a lesson he’s had cause to learn again and again – a hard lesson for someone so confident in his own wits.

In the end, they seek out allies.

In the end, they find them.

The little seeds Dorian planted when leaving Wycome have grown into weeds of doubt. While Mahanon scours the darkest and most dangerous parts of town in search of whatever might pass for weapons, Dorian stops by salons and intimate house parties. They even cobble together a miniature spy network, a few nimble-fingered children from the alienage slipping about the city looking for anything that might become weapons against Antoine. One child, a slip of a boy, works his way inside Highbank Hall – the towering fortress that Antoine calls home. He emerges with long, sentimental letters about the Elder One, scraps of paper that concretely link Antoine with the Venatori. Little scribblings that tie the man to Corypheus.

Antoine is not a man grasping after a failing mad magister: he is a true believer. Dorian can’t decide whether that’s better or worse.

Still, a stack of paper cannot turn the mind of a city, not when the man at its helm has amassed considerable force and has thickened his own home with Corypheus’s agents.

Dorian thought his days of politicking over. His life had long since dissolved to war, the time for clever little alliances passed.

Now, however, he finds himself able to turn small minds to matters of more significance. Yet another difference between there and here.

Once he’s secured noteworthy citizens of significant merit – which in this case means coin – to stand against the Duke and lend their personal guard to Mahanon’s cause, merchants and labourers follow.

Indeed, Dorian had expected more of a fight, a more significant struggle against prejudice. But those already at the bottom of Wycome’s food chain are eager to move against the Duke once they learn of the secret at the bottom of the city’s wells. Particularly when Mahanon is able to guide them to the wells that remain untainted.

A strategic move of Mahanon’s own devising. “They need to see an elf leading them to safety,” he explains. “If we expect them to join arms with the city elves, they must think of us as allies.”

It works. For the first time Dorian can recall, a plan falls neatly into place.

Still, even with their haphazard army of merchants and select guards and city elves, of masons and shoemakers and dock workers, they stand against a formidable force.

Dorian is used to significantly worse odds. Fewer allies and a great deal less hope.

Wycome divides into tiny nations within the city walls, a map whose lines have been drawn and redrawn enough times that the parchment of territory grows ragged. The Duke perches atop his hill, staring down at the neighbourhoods he once intended to use as lyrium gardens. Quarters that have instead become home to haphazard alliances.

Some of the nobility remain by Antoine’s side, but those who defect – those who make good on the promises made over honeyed wine and delicate pastries – bring with them glittering forces and coffers that glitter even more brightly still.

To support Antoine is to move in desperation. Small wonder that his most steadfast supporters are those who have little to lose except any final scraps of integrity and decency they may have once possessed.

Mahanon posts sentries on rooftops of street corners that demarcate the Duke’s city from the people’s city. “Our city,” he says as he explains it to Dorian.

He becomes one of them as seamlessly as an actor might transform into a character – only this is a transformation far more genuine.

Heads begin to crane as Mahanon passes through neighbourhoods, examining stockpiles of weapons, placing troops of trained guards by small crowds of scrappy supporters. As he observes those who have never before wielded weapons eagerly learning from those who know little else.

“Mahanon,” calls one guard after him as they patrol a neighbourhood that had, until today, been filled with the Duke’s forces.

He pauses as the woman draws near, plying him with questions about ideal patrol routes and systems of communication as Dorian looks for any traces of those who’d only just vacated the neighbourhood. When the guard finally disappears through shadowed alleys to do something suitably guard-like, Dorian catches a smile ghosting his own face.

One oughtn’t smile when the Duke’s guard and the Venatori threaten to descend.

Still, he can’t quite help himself. It isn’t a bright smile, nor one unencumbered – but it is real. Truthful. Perhaps even hopeful.

Mahanon glances at him, eyebrows tilted. “What?” he asks.

How remarkable you are, Dorian thinks. How utterly and completely singular. You lead as if born to it. He might say it, even if the words catch the tender edges of his heart, even if they leave him unsteady –

But in a distant section of the city, an alarm bell rings. Cold, silver tones that summon a spike of panic, the thrumming beat of impending battle.

Mahanon straightens, tense. “That sounds like it’s from the west. We should –”

To the other side, another bell. In the expanse of the emptied neighbourhood before them, the steady beat of boots on cobblestones.

For a moment, Dorian is in Skyhold and templars march on the softly-lit vestibule where he looks for the last time at his lover.

But Mahanon barks out a laugh, a sharp smile curving his lips. “So they emptied the neighbourhood to draw us in and flank us.”

Dorian swivels, stave in his hands. He scours the area for any signs of encroaching forces. He might call up walls of fire, buy them enough time to retreat, but –

“You don’t seem terribly concerned,” Dorian says, eyes narrowing. The tension in his shoulders recedes, like the drawing back of water when the tide turns.

This man is steady, as certain as the sun. His is a confidence in which Dorian can trust.

“I’m Dalish,” Mahanon says, blade already in hand as he walks languidly toward the growing clamour of boots in the distance. “We’re used to being pursued. Sometimes by the predators that lurk in the darknesses of the forest, in forgotten caves and lost corners of the world.”

“Fascinating though this is –” Dorian begins.

Mahanon tosses him a bright, crooked smile, green eyes flashing. “It’s something we’ve learned, Dorian, whether from wolves or from shemlens. When a predator tries to pull you away from your clan, you never go alone. It’s the Vir Adalhen: together we are stronger than one.” With a jerk of his chin, he gestures toward the tops of buildings around them.

Dorian looks up. They’re lined with crouching shadows, like dark and eager gargoyles – but instead of raining water down on those below, these figures will bring blood and terror.

The people of Wycome have waited for the chance at revenge. It has finally arrived.

“It was odd,” Mahanon says as Dorian draws to his side. The woman returns from the shadowed alleyway. Behind her, a dark-eyed group of people eager to fight, whose mouths curl in a gluttonous excitement, eyes flashing with anticipation. “This neighbourhood has three warehouses with sizeable stores. He wouldn’t sacrifice those goods to us unless he had a reason.”

“How very predictable,” Dorian says.

And yet, however apparent Antoine’s ploy, however self-evident the tactic, it’s one Dorian would not have noticed. He hadn’t the slightest idea where food stores were located, nor what small-minded schemes Antoine might hatch.

Mahanon, however –

He shrugs, as if privy to Dorian’s thoughts. “We know he’s not the cleverest man in the world.” With a small, intimate smile, even as his forces form an array behind him. Even as they become but two small parts of a larger whole.

Dorian’s chest aches, but it with a warmth he can barely place. Something so unfamiliar it gives him a moment’s pause.

The long stairway before them at the far end of the empty courtyard begins to thicken with Antoine’s men, clad in dark colours and sharp armour. Their helmets are plumed – showy, but frivolous.

The smile grows sharper. “Well,” Mahanon says, shifting his weight, “Shall we?” And then he turns back to Antoine’s forces and flies into the fight with wild shouts, a figure cut from fury and purpose, who moves as the embodiment of pure intent.

The city is a tinderbox. Mahanon provides the flame.

The scene dissolves into endless and brutal brawling as Antoine’s guards fill the courtyard, as Mahanon’s drop down from the roof to join the fray. Most of the swords and bows and axes Mahanon commands are in hands more used to working a forge or weaving, but still they slam hard against the wall formed by Antoine’s forces. The people of the city will not be turned away. Screams split the air, but these are screams of rage, of certainty. Of victory. Each citizen whoops with delirious delight when a guard falls.

Dorian moves next to Mahanon, refusing to be left behind this time. Dorian stays at his side, flinging up barriers around Mahanon, around the more vulnerable of their numbers. He uses his staff more often than not as a blunt weapon to bludgeon their attackers, casting fire mines beneath unsuspecting feet, slamming up crackling, searing walls of flame when the Duke’s forces draw too near.

This time, his hands don’t shake. This time, Dorian almost feels that same strange joy that animates Mahanon, that propels him endlessly forward in a blaze of brilliance.

They assault the Duke’s first line, one meant to form a noose around Mahanon’s neck. Venatori spellbinders appear out of shadow, coalescing as specters Dorian remembers.

He slams down his stave, electricity splitting the air. One of them flickers to shadow and disappears in the clash of battle.

Mahanon draws to Dorian’s side, sweat shining at his temples. “Can you deal with them?”

“I should say,” Dorian says between gritted teeth. He raises a crackling wall of fire that sections the other spellbinder off. The man’s eyes glitter like obsidian, even in the distance. He holds a barrier in place, eyes flicking –

Dorian drops the wall, spins, just as the other spellbinder emerges in a flutter of paper and shadow, appearing at Mahanon’s side. In his hands, a dark, jagged blade.

Dorian slams forward, swinging his stave up. The staff’s blade catches the man in his side as Mahanon scrambles backward and away from the spellbinder.

At once, the Venatori man is on him. Though Dorian has ripped a hole in the man’s side, he still pushes forward, swinging at Dorian, fingers crackling with energy.

But Dorian has come from a world in which fighting brutal battles was an everyday occurrence, in which he fought hard and close against the Venatori. He knows how to handle the man. With a sharp crack of his elbow, Dorian breaks his nose.

The spellbinder staggers, and Dorian burns him to ash.

Mahanon appears in front of him as the battle around them clarifies: the lines push forward, the other spellbinder trampled as the Duke’s men retreat. “Are you alright?” asks Mahanon, green eyes wide with fear. A hand flashes out, presses to the side of Dorian’s face.

It’s a touch like fire, one that will never fall to ash. Dorian shoots him a dazzling smile. “Of course. Did you think I’d allow a spellbinder to take me out of the fight? I’ll remain by your side the entire time, Mahanon. Never doubt that.”

A short, sharp laugh. Still, his hand lingers, eyes softened for a moment. “Good. I’ve a city to win. I could hardly do that without my mage.”

And then he’s off, thrusting his sword through the throat of the downed spellcaster. He laughs, bright as sunshine, as he spins and takes an arm off one of the guards, harrying them until they are nothing more than a collection of broken bodies. They continue their chase through the city in endless pursuit of the Duke’s men. One by one, the sections keeping Wycome’s true citizens from the Hall at its heart give way until they’ve broken the final line of defense. Until the city cracks open before them, exposed.

Mahanon stands among his own forces, smeared with blood, grinning and clasping his hand to the shoulders of those who’ve stood at his side.

Dorian would have to be blind to not notice the way those around him watch Mahanon: with admiration. Adoration.

Dorian is one of them.

In his chest, where once there was blackness, a warmth unfurling. Something tentative but significant; fearful but certain.

Mahanon is a man who can lead people.

He can lead, and he can bring victory.

But the shining light of victory cannot endure forever. One of their allied guards appears at Mahanon’s side, bloodied and clutching a broken arm to her chest. She leans in close, hisses something to Mahanon that is swallowed up by cacophonous cries of victory.

A shadow descends over Mahanon’s face as the forces he leads pause for a moment to be bandaged by those waiting in the wings, offered water untainted by the Duke’s machinations. To have weapons that are splintering patched together in whatever way possible.

They don’t notice, but Dorian does.

He moves in closer, once Mahanon has waved the woman away toward the area marked for healing.

“Problem?” asks Dorian.

A jerk of his chin, gaze far-away. Travelling through mental channels Dorian can’t begin to fathom. “They’ve rallied around the Duke’s estate. There are more Venatori with them – more than we’d realized.”

That he doesn’t group Dorian in with his fellow countrymen is a kindness. Dorian would think it intentional, save for the absent cast of Mahanon’s features.

“Shit,” Mahanon spits, pacing away several feet before turning back. “We can’t – Highbank Hall is a fortress. We won’t be able to breach it, not with our numbers, not while they hold the walls. If we moved on the front gate, they’d just be able to pick us off from above.”

“If we positioned archers on the roofs of the nearby buildings –” Dorian offers.

Mahanon casts the idea aside with a sharp shake of his head. “We’d need skilled archers, Dorian. We don’t have them – only merchants more liable to kill someone with the bow itself than any arrows. And if the Duke still lives, if he still commands his forces, the city won’t be safe. We’ve won a great deal of support, but that hold is tenuous. How long before our nobles decide that life was easier with Antoine? That it’s best to try and find their way to his good side and feign ignorance of his vices? How long before our merchants choose to pick up and leave? To head to Antiva or Rivain?”

Questions he should be asking. Questions he is right to turn his mind to.

But they’re also questions Dorian cannot answer. He has exhausted all he might offer.

Mahanon sees it in his face. His mouth twists. “Very well. We’ll need to rest for the night and then try to think up something halfway clever. Though,” he stops. Over his eyes, a darkness. “I know I’m not good at this. Clearly, I have no idea how to win a battle. Maybe we’ve bought enough time to convince the alienage elves to leave. Maybe –”

“If you even think of telling me I ought to go,” Dorian says flatly, “I will never forgive you. That’s a mistake I will not make again, Mahanon. I will stay by your side until whatever end we reach.”

Instead of insistence, however, Mahanon’s features fall to a soft, fleeting smile. He reaches out again, touches his fingers to Dorian’s temple, brushing a stray hair back. “It would do no good to have you mad at me, would it. I was thinking, Dorian, that perhaps if we could convince the vulnerable to leave, we might try and take the Hall. You and I. If not for the city elves, then for the Inquisition: any red lyrium Antoine might still cultivate could harm their efforts. Besides, we are an excellent team.”

“So we are,” Dorian says.

Endlessly noble, his Mahanon. So willing to sacrifice himself for the good of a woman who has single-handedly held the south together, all while refusing to lend aid to those who would do anything to see her succeed.

Adaar commands such loyalty.

Mahanon commands Dorian’s.

“Although I’d much rather if we were able to avoid going out in a blaze of glory,” Mahanon admits. “After all, there are a great many things I’ve yet to experience.” A warm, meaningful look, the familiar crooked smile.

In place of the blackness where Dorian’s heart used to be, something loosens – slowly but steadily. A promise once too knotted to breathe given space to become all that it might.

Mahanon sighs, a loud and long sound, as he surveys the Hall towering in the distance. “You don’t happen to have a squadron of Inquisition archers hidden in the woods, do you?”

“He doesn’t need to,” says a voice emerging from the crowd.

Dorian spins, fingertips already crackling with magic –

“Aldris!” Mahanon jerks back, hand flying out to catch Dorian’s forearm – to keep it in place.

Arranged behind the Dalish hunter, who’d trained his arrow on Dorian with such violent animosity such a short time before, stands an array of Dalish archers. They eye the raucous crowd, the dirty streets, with a skittish suspicion.

“Praise be to the Creators,” breathes Mahanon, half a laugh tearing free from his throat. “Why are you here?”

Aldris, whose pinched face still wears a mask of mistrust whenever his attention flicks over Dorian, holds his bow before him. “The Keeper was wrong in this, Mahanon, as she was wrong in sending Thellan to the Conclave. He was my brother: this is what he would have wished. Always he was going on about our brethren in the cities.”

“Always,” Mahanon says.

So it is the death of someone Dorian has never met that saves them twice: once, because he attended the Conclave in Mahanon’s stead; twice, because his brother commands the loyalty of Clan Lavellan’s finest archers.

Mahanon refuses to rest, not with victory so very close. He pulls his own forces back, using a troop of well-trained guards to divert attention from the front of the Hall while he positions the Dalish archers on the rooftops.

Once in place and under the cover of nightfall, the archers pick off the Duke’s people one by one. By the time the sun peeks over the distant horizon, Highbank Hall is without sentries.

Mahanon’s forces batter the front gate. It splinters beneath the weight of their outrage. Inside of the Hall, their forces split into small groups that crawl through the corridors and rooms, making prisoners of those who surrender, tidily ending those who don’t.

It takes little enough time for the cleverest of the Duke’s supporters to lay down arms.

This, Dorian realizes, is what it feels like to be on this side of momentum. This is what it is like to be endlessly hopeful. To be victorious.

It is so grand a feeling, so very substantial, that it surpasses the bounds of Dorian’s body, warming him from fingertip to feet, from head to heart, until there is no part of him that is not aglow.

Mahanon emerges from Highbank Hall dragging the Duke behind him. The man had hidden more carefully than a rat and Mahanon had taken it upon himself to find him while Dorian helped deal with the wounded outside. Prize in hand, however, Mahanon steps forth, smile as sharp as the edge of a blade. On the high steps leading to the Hall, he slams the Duke hard down on to his knees, a jeering crowd arrayed below. Watching, cheering.

“Duke Antoine,” he cries, forcing the man’s narrow shoulders forward so that his neck is exposed. It’s pale in the thin sunlight, the man’s face red and patchy, his eyes wild. The Duke is less impressive than Dorian had imagined: a pallid, sickly man. “You planned the execution of Wycome’s elves as scapegoat for your own crimes against its citizens. You stand –”

And here he pauses, glances up at the waiting crowd. “Kneel,” he corrects, the gathered crowd responding in a vicious laugh, all razor blades and blood, “a villain of the highest order. You’ve allied yourself with the Venatori and against the Inquisition. For these crimes, for your willing attempt to murder Wycome’s citizens, for the deaths of my people, you will be executed. Immediately.”

With a swing of his sword, the Duke begging for mercy, Mahanon makes good on his promise. Antoine’s head lurches down the stairs, trailing thick gouts of blood behind it.

It is a thing justly done, but still Dorian looks away.

He has had enough blood for the day. Enough blood for his lifetime.

When he does look back, however, the crowd’s pleased roar a joyous crescendo that echoes throughout the entire city, he’s met with a wide, crooked smile. A look just for Dorian: one warm – intimate. Mahanon raises one hand, presses it firmly to his heart. All the while, his gaze does not falter.

For you. Even at this distance, Dorian understands.

And though Mahanon is then swept off by a barrage of well-wishes, by cries of hero and saviour, Dorian’s heart is at ease. It is lit by a fire that will not go out, the tangle of grief burnt away in a blaze of victory, of affection, of – this. By a promise made at a distance and with a glance.

Mahanon will find him later. He will come to Dorian.

There is that certainty in his life – that this victory is not the end.

It is but the beginning.

*

The revelry carries on deep into the night. He recalls reading a scrap of verse in some obscure text, something that promised that the sun would always rise though the darkness of night might seem eternal.

It is a sentiment he shares for the first time in his life. Standing in the dawning light of victory, flushed with pride and with the promise of better days.

Dorian finds a room in one of the inns. The tavern downstairs is full to bursting, thick with laughter and the smell of ale. He retreats upstairs to the small, quiet room in the corner of the building. Outside of the window, the streets glow with lights. All of the houses have their shutters thrown open, curtains drawn back. Little bonfires burn on street corners.

If he peers closely at the dark recesses of the shadows, he can see awkward piles of bodies. Those less fortunate – who chose the losing side, or else who fell for their cause.

An inglorious end to an inglorious existence.

Still, even that sight cannot douse the brightness that lights him through.

Mahanon finds him. Of course he does. Dorian sees him walking up the street well before he approaches the inn, head bent close to that of Lady Wildar, one of Dorian’s contacts who had pledged support with very little need of convincing. She is a lady in name but a dragon in combat: she had shown up as forces gathered, clad in finely-wrought armour and ready to take back the city that, she said, should never have fallen into Antoine’s grubby little hands.

The firelight glints off her armour now. Even at the distance, Dorian can see the serious cast of Mahanon’s expression, the tension in his body.

She clasps a hand to Mahanon’s shoulder. He nods and splits off toward the inn door while she turns back toward the Hall.

Dorian knows Mahanon enters the tavern because an uproarious cheer makes the entire building tremble. The sound of mugs being slammed merrily down on tables, feet stomping hard against wide, wooden planks.

A man who has won the hearts of those he led into battle. Who’s captured the loyalty of the citizens of Wycome. A leader, well and truly.

How different this place is. How different Dorian is here than he was there. He’s been made giddy, deliriously contented – realities impossible to imagine a month ago, when he dwelled in the darkest of places, the worst of all worlds.

For now, this world awaits. Forever, he thinks.

Dorian waits in the dim room, the only light a small fire he’s kept crackling in the fireplace. A small thing, more ember than flame. It serves its purpose, however, casting the chill from the room, illuminating the shape of the low bed, the haphazard pieces of furniture strewn about the space.

All heat, no flash, he thinks, glancing at the glowing coals. How his priorities have changed. How he’s changed.

A gentle rap sounds against his door. Dorian moves across the room, sliding through shadow and light, and lets Mahanon in.

“You’ve kept me waiting,” he murmurs as Mahanon shuts the door firmly. With a flick of his slender fingers, Mahanon does the lock.

His hair is tangled, blood smeared on one cheek, and he smells like the smoke thick in Wycome’s air.

He has never looked more beautiful.

“Well,” says Mahanon, reaching with a calloused hand to push the tangle of hair from his face, “City to liberate. Noble to execute. Plans to lay.”

They hover near the door in the small and quiet room. In the darkness and the glowing light of the fire.

Dorian might make a joke about the burdens of leadership – but he doesn’t have it in him. Not now, not when his heart is so very warm. Now when Mahanon’s smile is so ready.

“You were incredible,” Mahanon says. “You are incredible.”

His hand reaches out, covered in soot and traces of blood, and brushes against the bones of Dorian’s wrist. Catches him, holds him.

An anchor to this place – this world, where Dorian wants to be.

“I’m afraid you may have us confused,” he says. “I wasn’t the one leading a force cobbled together from the dispossessed and the disenchanted.”

“If you hadn’t come –” Mahanon begins. He stops, looks away.

He doesn’t mean if Dorian hadn’t come with him in their battle, nor if he hadn’t come to Wycome. Rather, if he hadn’t come through the crossroads. If he hadn’t stumbled from the fire and despair of his world and into this one.

“A reality I’d rather not contemplate, if you don’t mind,” Dorian murmurs.

“We’re of a mind, then. On that, at least.” Mahanon’s fingers still dig into the delicate bones of Dorian’s wrist, indenting his skin. He blinks up at Dorian, eyes a gleam of light in the darkness. “Dorian,” he says, made familiar in an uncharacteristic hesitance, a trait out of another world, “I wonder – if I might kiss you.”

Something hard and brittle inside of Dorian gives way, a knot resolved. Something he’s been holding in place with sheer tenacity and the need to feel the significance of his hurt falls away.

“Amatus,” he murmurs, “I insist.”

It is not a gentle kiss. There is nothing soft or scared or tentative in the way Mahanon presses his hands to either side of Dorian’s face and fits their mouths together, a heat that boasts both dizzying slickness and perfect clarity.

Everything Dorian has held on to – the black abyss that has yawned inside his ribcage – gives way. In its place, an unfurling heat and brightness. The promise of better things. New possibilities, a future Dorian had not allowed himself to imagine before he fell into this world.

“You are exquisite,” Mahanon mouths against Dorian’s lips, his hands at work on the buckles of Dorian’s robes just as Dorian’s hands work to peel the layers and layers of battle and remembrance and spectral familiarity from Mahanon. Until he sees him perfectly as he is. Until he is here entirely with Mahanon.

His Mahanon.

“And you,” Dorian breathes, pausing for a moment to touch the soft knots of Mahanon’s hair, to run his thumb across his cheekbone, “are perfect. Exactly as you are.”

A bright smile. His beacon in the dark.

*

*

He wakes in the early gray hours of dawn, a muted quiet heavy over Wycome. At first Dorian can’t say what’s woken him, bleary-eyed, his body complaining loudly for the previous day’s long battles. He blinks, scrubs a hand across his eyes.

The space next to him in bed, where he expects to find Mahanon, where he’s used to finding Mahanon, is empty. Chill.

Dorian pushes himself up on one elbow, squinting through the dim light.

A shadow is hunched over in the windowsill, made a silhouette against the early dawn. Mahanon, whose hands turn something over endlessly, fingers picking away at it as if working a scab.

His head jerks up. “You’re awake,” he says.

“So I am. Even at this dreadful hour.” Dorian pushes himself up, folding his hands around his knees. The air in the room has chilled and he’s reminded, in a flash of sensation, of similarly grey mornings in Skyhold. Similarly chill, the fortress still a husk in the mountains, a mere echo of what it’s become under Adaar’s steady hands.

Except this morning, Dorian thinks, he’s awakened to victory. This morning, he’s awakened to hope.

Dorian sets a fire in the ashen hearth. A smile tugs at the corners of Mahanon’s lips, the flicker of gold catching his bright eyes even across the room.

Still, it’s a smile that’s not quite right, one that comes a little too slowly. That curls a little too much in one corner.

The warmth doesn’t reach his eyes, however beautiful they are in the light of dawn and illuminated by the flicker of embers.

“Are you alright?”

Mahanon’s hands still fidget. He looks away, peers out the warped glass to the still city beyond. “They asked – I’m sorry, I should backtrack.” He sighs, a breathy, pained sound. Hesitant, even.

So much uncertainty for a man who’s been singularly sure until this point.

It’s an uncomfortable familiarity, one made strange because it’s out of place. Like turning a corner with the belief that one would find one’s self on a familiar street, only to emerge lost along paths unknown. Directionless.

“Lady Wildar spoke with me last night. Wycome’s without a government at the moment. She’s installing a council, a select body of representatives. They’ve asked me to lead.” Mahanon’s eyes remain fixed elsewhere. His fingers still shape themselves into knots around the shadowy item in his hands.

“That’s good,” Dorian says. “The people of the city think you a hero – and rightly so. It’s an astute move; placing you at the helm of this council will serve as a clear statement of alliance with the Dalish and the city’s elven populace. Oh, and the Venatori will be furious.”

Mahanon says nothing. His hands still, a dark cord wrapped hard around his palms. Biting into their calloused flesh.

But this is an uncertainty Dorian knows how to navigate. “Did you know that they’re hailing Clan Lavellan as the saving grace of Wycome? That you’ve already acquired a title? The Guardian of Wycome. Finally, they say, a hero for us all.”

“But we know better, don’t we,” Mahanon murmurs. He shoots Dorian a fleeting, haunted look before untangling his hands from whatever he holds.

Dorian sits up straighter. “What do you mean we know better? Surely you realize how many lives you saved, Mahanon. It’s an admiration you’ve earned.”

“Surely you recall how many lives were lost when last I led.” It follows swiftly, words edged in steel. Unflinching, but wounded.

“Mahanon,” Dorian says.

“No, just –” He holds one hand in the air before him, a flash of skin in the dim light. “Let me say this. I have something to say to you.”

Again Mahanon hesitates, face shadowed. Now Dorian knows the source of the hesitation. Now he can place it.

Was the Mahanon Dorian first met, all those months ago in the other world, once so certain? Had he started so steady, only to be undone by failure? Has Dorian brought his Mahanon to similar ruin by telling him tales of the one who’d been Inquisitor?

Where Dorian meant to offer strength, instead he brought weakness. Instead he undid the foundations of a great man, the intricate latticework of confidence and assurance reduced to rubble under Dorian’s touch.

“I thought I could be different,” Mahanon says. “I thought that my steps made me, but I wonder if they just revealed me. If being made Inquisitor showed the fundamental weaknesses in me. I certainly seem incapable of diverging from familiar paths: here I am again, fallen into bed with you. Enamoured. And I told myself I wouldn’t let it happen – but here we are. I see no reason why my ability to lead would be any different, Dorian. None at all.”

His words resound in the small space, curl around again and again, so that Dorian hears them as if a litany. Here I am again, fallen into bed with you.

Again. Two little syllables that refuse to stop echoing inside of Dorian’s ears. Again.

“What do you mean, again?”

But of course Dorian knows. In a way.

Mahanon slides from the windowsill, feet falling silently against the wide floorboards. He settles on the edge of the bed, hovering near Dorian but not quite near enough to touch. His fingers untangle the long ties of the pouch and push it toward Dorian.

It’s a perfect match to the one still pressed inside the folds of Dorian’s robes, though they lie in a heap near the fireplace. Dorian takes it, running a thumb over the embossed sigil.

“We believe that a person is made through their steps in life – that we’re shaped by the path we walk,” Mahanon says, as Dorian undoes the top of the pouch and spills the dark pebbles across his palm. Like black pearls, warmed against Mahanon’s skin. “We record those steps. The elgar’durgen capture who we are: the stones of spirit, of the essential person. To share them is an intimacy. It means everything to trust all that you are, all you’ve been through, to another person. Ma vhenan, we say, because we give of ourselves. We place who we are in the hands of another.” He huffs, shaking his head. “I didn’t even give mine to Thellan when he left. And yet you materialize, holding my heart and claiming friendship. He would only have given it to you if he loved you desperately.”

“I… had no idea.” At once, the full scope of what Dorian has lost rushes back – the endless beating of black wings, numerous enough to choke the sky until nothing remains but darkness.

To be loved so fully. To be trusted so completely.

Only to turn, to run. To be so entirely taken with another iteration of that heart – only one Dorian has come to think of as better.

He has become a traitor in every way. A weak, fallible, wretched man.

“I gave you no hints, neither here nor there. How could you have known?” Mahanon shifts his weight. “How odd it was to have a man materialize out of the gloom and to know that you’ve already fallen in love with him. I thought, well, the me who loved him is separate from this self. Surely I’ll walk a different path. And yet here I am, moving in the same patterns. Falling yet again to the inevitable. I thought I guarded myself against you, Dorian, and yet despite my very best intentions, you – caught me nonetheless.”

His tone is a beacon through the dark, the flame that draws Dorian from the clotted darkness of his own world and to this one, to the present moment. To the man spilling his heart’s content out before him, whose heart rests quite literally in the palm of Dorian’s hand.

“You’re nothing like him,” Dorian says.

It is a half-truth – and Dorian wishes to be truthful. To rectify the sins of his past, to atone. So he amends, “You are somewhat like him, and yet you remain fundamentally different. Yes, you have the same name; yes, a similar heart. And you certainly share his desire to sleep underneath the stars and stay miles and miles away from anything resembling civilization. But you are different.”

Mahanon studies him, face an inscrutable mask, one that fell into place as soon as Dorian began speaking.

So he continues. He will say his piece and be done with it. “I can’t say whether I ever loved him, Mahanon. We weren’t given the chance and hadn’t the time for… finding out. He was broken. At his core, he’d been broken. Whether it was the Conclave or the destruction of Haven – I’m unsure. But when I met him, he was a man already in pieces. You stand intact. Where he was hesitant, you’re certain. Where he was reserved, you’re reckless. You are – may he forgive me, wherever he is, but you are so much that he was not.”

“You say such things.” Mahanons hands knot the blankets.

“I say them with intent, amatus.” Even then, the word is a betrayal – at once traitorous and an avowal. A solemn upholding of this as his world, this as his place. “They cost me a great deal: I have lived long enough and have passed through enough realms to see myself turn traitor. To turn my back on such trust, so freely given in the worst of all possible times.”

A hand seeks his own, tugging him back from the precipice. Warmth and soft skin that tether him to this world rather than drowning between them. Gulping endlessly in the bleak gray of the crossroads. Outside of the window, the sky is streaked with pink. Below the horizon, the sun inches its way toward the sky. Slowly, yes, but steadily.

The promise of sunrise, Dorian thinks, even in the darkest hour.

“It won’t be easy here either.” Mahanon shifts, moves up the bed to tuck himself next to Dorian. “Marcher cities have no patience for the Dalish. Once they hear – it may yet be war, Dorian.”

“War is something at which I excel. Against all odds, it is a pursuit at which I am rather experienced.”

Again Mahanon glances away, though he folds his body into a tight shape next to Dorian’s, though he becomes the perfect tangle at the heart of Dorian’s life. “I won’t be his ghost,” he says finally, as the sun finally crests the buildings of the city. “You know that. Either I am him or I’m not. And if I’m to believe you – if I’m to believe my own heart – I must insist that I’m not him. So I can’t – not even for you.”

It is a reality Dorian has already acknowledged. He lost Mahanon the moment his lover stepped before a templar’s blade. Perhaps before then, even. How impossible a thing, to name the moment a war became unwinnable. When a fate was marked as doomed.

He’d hoped, when first he stumbled through the crossroads, to find some reiteration of Mahanon. An echo of what he’d lost, something near enough to comfort.

“I would have you no other way, Mahanon. I would have you as you are, not as the man I left behind.”

A soft smile, a gentle gaze. “Well, then,” Mahanon breathes. He reaches, pushes Dorian’s hair from his forehead. “Have me you shall.”

How easy it would be to allow the moment to melt to warmth. Still, Dorian has learned enough to know better than to permit such simple resolutions.

He pushes the point. This is what he has learned. This is how he has changed. This marks the Dorian he was from the Dorian he is, the then from the now. “And whatever follows, understand – I will not leave your side. Don’t think to send me from it, Mahanon. No matter what comes.”

Mahanon’s lips curve into a crooked smile. “Of course. He was much more cautious than I am. If I sent you away, Dorian, I’d be dead in minutes. Fighting is much more fun when I have a mage setting all my adversaries on fire.”

“So long as you’re having fun, amatus.” His body curves toward Mahanon’s, leaning against the solid weight of the man who shines as brightly as the sun.

“More than that,” Mahanon murmurs. “Never just that.”

A hero, a leader, a man transformed. From ghost of the past to living embodiment of the best qualities Dorian might list.

He presses the leather pouch back into Mahanon’s hands, a firm insistence.

Mahanon fell into his arms before. The pressures of war shaped what little time they had. If Mahanon professed love, it was because he had nowhere else to turn.

This intimacy will be one Dorian earns. This heart one he wins without war pressing down upon them. Should the currents of the world cooperate, he may finally have the time he so wished for. How I wish we’d met in different circumstances. A different world. Dorian had breathed those words against Mahanon’s skin once.

A hope fulfilled through blackest means – but a hope snatched from the flames is one he will cherish, despite the burns on his skin.

This is a brightness he will not turn from.

Here he stands and here he shall remain.

*

*

Chapter Text

The city draws itself to some semblance of order, like a woman gathering apples she’s spilled across cobblestones. Mahanon stands at the helm, gilded by the glories he wrested from the dark possibilities of other worlds. He brings sense where there is none, insight where there is only chaos.

Dorian does his best to aid – and his best is considerable indeed. Once he’s written the appropriate letters to reestablish himself in this reality, he sets out to making good on his promises.

Lady Wildar secures Mahanon a house.

“How odd,” Mahanon says, wandering about the empty estate – a tall and narrow building near Highbank Hall, one whose chandeliers are in desperate need of polishing, with curtains so heavily lined in dust that they may have long since crumbled away to nothing beneath the liberal grey of decay. “I never dreamed of owning a house. I thought an aravel would be more than sufficient. Though,” and here he shoots Dorian a look, Dorian who wanders with an eye much more critical than his lover’s, “I suppose it pales in comparison to a fortress in the mountains.”

“No,” Dorian says plainly. “It doesn’t. Skyhold was a crumbling shitheap when we found it; a crumbling shitheap it remained. The only difference was that, when we were done, it had a great deal more blood spattered across the walls. I should say this is a step up.”

Mahanon stills, pausing as he traces a dusty railing with his hand.

They stumble on these darknesses, these little voids in Dorian’s heart, from time to time. They surprise even Dorian, words falling from his lips that strike him, each of them, as if they were blows. Little knives in the dark, revealed only by the blood they call to the surface of his skin.

But, as much as Dorian has become a man of infinite darknesses, Mahanon is a man of infinite patience and light. “Rumour has it that there may be a library on the premises, Dorian,” he says, moving to take his place at Dorian’s side, hand fitting smoothly around the shape of Dorian’s bicep. “Shall we find it? I’ve heard you like books.”

“There’s some truth in that,” he admits, though it sounds hollow.

Mahanon is kind enough to pretend he doesn’t notice. He is always kind where Dorian is concerned.

It’s not that Dorian heals. That’s what people tend to say when a person has lost someone beloved. Time heals all wounds.

It is a lie. Some wounds are beyond healing. Some griefs are too large for the world to swallow up. Some sorrows too substantial for even the night sky.

One keeps moving. One moves on – but the blackness stays in pursuit.

It simply stops nipping at Dorian’s heels quite so often. Still it lurks, but it grows lazier. Less persistent. The darkness still finds him: sometimes in the middle of the night, waking Dorian with a dizzy gasp, or else at some particularly nasty turn of events when other cities test the strength of Wycome’s walls. Sometimes when he receives an ugly piece of news about the Inquisitor’s own steady and dogged war efforts. Now, however, he can be brought back from the void by a simple touch. A quiet word. A breathed assurance.

Dorian needs, he realizes, a firmament beneath his feet. Mahanon becomes that guarantee, that promise.

Of course, they didn’t expect it to be easy, any of it.

It becomes clear, however, that things will be more difficult than they anticipated when they receive reports from other Dalish hunters – hunters sent from various clans throughout the Free Marches to give advance warning – of the armies marching upon Wycome. The nobility of the other cities cannot stomach an upstart savage leading a city to prosperity.

Corypheus still moves unseen through the political waters of Thedas. He may be on the run, but always he finds vulnerable minds. Hearts made reckless by fear.

Mahanon laughs when he receives word, a bitter, ugly sound. “Of course. Of course. It could never be any other way, could it, Dorian? Never just love; always war.”

They both knew it was coming. Mahanon has prepared the city’s walls, readied her forces, handsomely supplied her food stores with the generous coin the Duke had ferreted away. He has prepared for a siege as best he could – laudably, in fact – but it will not be enough.

One city against the might of several.

They sit together in the dark of the night, armies but several days’ march from Wycome. Mahanon stands so very tall, so perfectly confident for his troops.

But it’s a lie Dorian has seen before. A duplicity made necessary by his office.

In the quiet intimacy of the night, Mahanon sheds the mask. He scrubs his hands over his eyes, sitting on the floor next to the fire Dorian keeps burning in the small library. “I can’t do this,” he breathes. “I can’t. How very disappointing I must be. How very underwhelming.”

“You never disappoint, amatus.” This time, it is true. Dorian’s mouth no longer shapes lies. It can’t. A lost skill, one readily forsaken.

Mahanon stares up, the light cutting his face into lines of darkness, angles of light. “You mean that,” he says. In his voice, a distant wonder. A persistent shock.

“I do,” says Dorian. “Never once have you disappointed – and I have a remarkable memory, Mahanon. Very nearly as remarkable as this peculiar optimism I’ve unearthed. We will yet find a way. Surely, we’ve come too far to fall to schemes this singularly petty.”

Even Dorian’s confident smile cannot pull Mahanon from this shroud of his own making. “I don’t know how to save a city, Dorian. If I couldn’t save anyone when I had the whole Inquisition at my back –”

“He may have had the Inquisition, but he also had an entire world to save. A city is not the world, and you are not him.” Dorian will not see his lover fall to the ghosts from a different past, not when he stands so steadily on the foundation of this world.

A long, rattling sigh. Mahanon glances up. Under Dorian’s gaze, he softens. His hands reach, seek out Dorian’s – Mahanon’s anchor, as Mahanon is Dorian’s. To give one moment and receive the next.

“Lady Wildar thinks we should set torches to the forest,” Mahanon says.

“Does she?” A smile tugs at Dorian’s lips, even in this dark hour. “Well. She fancies herself a hunter. I imagine she would find flushing game from ash rather easier than from thickets. She’s always been a woman who favours blunt force, Mahanon. Don’t be taken in by it.”

Mahanon’s lips form a matching crooked smile. “I’m sorry – because setting the forest on fire is different from setting an entire camp aflame because someone made the mistake of aiming a bow in my general direction?”

“I should say so,” Dorian insists. “I act out of love, she out of simple-minded brutishness. I react out of impulse, whereas Wildar’s crude schemes are the very best she has to offer.”

“Out of love,” Mahanon repeats. His eyebrows shoot up, smile growing wider. “Is that so?”

It isn’t precisely how Dorian intends to confess grandiose feelings more befitting some insipid piece of poetry – but then, armies march on them and this is his second attempt at this whole thing. He may have scrambled hastily to rescind the sentiment previously, but that Dorian is not who he is now.

“It is entirely so. Now prove yourself worthy and live through the next few days. I demand it.”

The smile falters, but Mahanon’s lips are warm just the same when they brush the back of Dorian’s hand. An unthinking intimacy. “If you demand it, ma vhenan, I have no choice but to comply.”

The odds grow thinner still. One of their sentries spots a scout running ahead of an encroaching army. “We had days still,” Mahanon hisses, patrolling the walls, eyes pinned on the horizon.

The onslaught of the inevitable – something that ought to feel familiar, and yet doesn’t. Still, Dorian refuses to believe this is how things will end. Again. He won’t let it happen.

Through the thick forest, white banners jut through the canopy, hoisted high through the sparse leaves but occluded by shadow. The sigils are unclear but the numbers are not – a smaller force than they anticipated. “Perhaps they come to test our walls,” Dorian offers.

Beside them, Lady Wildar sniffs. “Or to distract us. I told you we should have burnt the forest.”

“It may provide us cover, should things come to that,” Mahanon says, eyes pinned on the rustling of trees as the army approaches. However small, it’s a force that will set into motion the events of whatever will follow.

They must be successful. Dorian stands, neck stiff. His knuckles whiten.

Slowly, the first foot soldiers emerge from the shadows of the woods. Spears bristle against the pale light of the sky above as the army trickles forth from the woods.

It is a far smaller force than they anticipated.

A far smaller force carrying unanticipated banners.

At once, Dorian laughs, jagged and surprised. His hand slips to Mahanon’s shoulder, a bright and golden feeling resting heavy against his heart – a weight that is comforting, a steadying promise. “Adaar,” he says as the Inquisition banners flutter in the errant wind. How welcome the syllables are in his mouth.

The Inquisition has come in the end, except this Inquisition is a force to be reckoned with. Their commander is welcomed with loud, rousing cheers when she strides through the city gates, crested helmet tucked neatly under her arm. She dips her head when Mahanon strides forward to greet her, the crowd parting around him as though he shapes them with but a thought.

“My lord,” she offers. Her dark hair sticks to her cheeks, temples slick with sweat. “Inquisitor Adaar sends her greetings to you, and praise for your admirable actions against corruption and the exploitation of the vulnerable. She also speaks highly of the virtues of the people of Wycome, for having the courage to stand steadfast against the forces of our enemy. In this we are united: to see evil rooted out of every city throughout Thedas. To see that Corypheus has no safe harbour, not in the Marches or Orlais or Nevarra. Not the Imperium or Antiva or Rivain. He shall find no safe harbour if we stand together. Those who resist him will always find a stalwart ally in the Inquisition.”

It is a move entirely mercenary and entirely befitting Adaar. By sending a small force, she risks little while making it clear that any force that stands against Corypheus will receive the Inquisition’s support, however radical its construction. If a council headed by a Dalish elf of no true standing wins the Inquisitor’s attentions, the other nobles through the Free Marches will be sure to work tirelessly to appease their own citizens. To drive Corypheus or his allies from their borders.

Dorian laughs again. How very like her, he thinks. It’s why she’ll win the war – and he cannot bring himself to resent her that.

Wycome is, in this way, saved. They’re spared a war, their adversaries scattering to the four winds as soon as Adaar makes the alliance clear.

It is a promising end to what began with such ugliness, Dorian thinks. In place of endless darkness, light. In place of endless sorrow, hope.

When Adaar defeats Corypheus – and she will, of that he has no doubt – the world will pull itself back from the brink of chaos and ruin. This world will recover, while his could not.

He thinks often of the place he has left. Of the shadows that still hound his footsteps, however tame they become.

Had he lived here, had he not been killed during the assault on Haven, the man he would have become would not be the man he is now. He would not have Mahanon, who would not be the same for having failed to save his people. Even had Mahanon somehow succeeded in Dorian’s world, nothing would be the same.

Only through their suffering were they brought to this point: the gradual washing of blood from the streets by warm, soft rains; the clearing of the sky after a storm.

It is a promising end, Dorian thinks, and also a promising beginning. He wakes next to Mahanon and it is without nightmares snarling at the edge of his mind, nor the looming threat of death on the horizon. Instead, soft light, a crooked smile, and the unfolding of all the endless possibility of this world.

*