Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It begins with a promise that neither of them enters into genuinely, not in the way that heroes and heroines do in books or songs. There is nothing heroic about what they do, nothing noble. Instead, they swaddle the truth in lies that rest sweet on the tongue, that are redolent with the patterns of myth and great romance. As if narrative might somehow offer protection.

She says, I hadn’t even dreamed I might find someone I wish to marry. If you would take my hand, Tyr, it will be yours. She means, I hadn’t even dreamed I might find someone who could offer me a way out. Your hand in mine, the key to the lock.

He’s not stupid, whatever they say about his family, whatever depths the Emulari name has fallen to. He knows she’ll use him for her own ends – but if those are ends from which he benefits, he can hardly protest. Still, he smiles, clasps her small hand in his own, and says, Then let us be wed, Xenia. Against all odds. He may murmur that he loves her when she leans in and kisses him, her curls a distant tickle across his cheek, her skin smelling of dusty marigold and jasmine.

It’s then that he lies, but they are both of them aware. A falsehood that gives courage, that allows them to move toward their own ends. If they act for love, then surely their odds improve – even if it is only in their imaginations.

Besides, Tyr thinks when finally she comes to him with the news of her new engagement, no one deserves to be married against their will. And Xenia’s been kind to him, even if it is to a purpose of her own making. So he takes her hand in his, says, If this Orlesian wishes to marry you, he’ll have to fight for you.

Her smile is a sunrise, a flush deepening the swell of her cheeks. You’ll come, then, to the Hall? Next week?

For her, he might. For his family, he does.

It would have been wiser to think of himself. Then he might have avoided the rest.

*

Chapter Text

He wakes with a scream on his tongue, the taste of blood smeared across the inside of his cheeks. He hurts, a pain larger and whiter than the sun. A pain that’s hungry. It swallows him down, this agony, and refuses to cough him back up. It makes him less than he’s ever been, a raw animal incapable of anything beyond ragged gasps and the desire for the end.

But in the middle of the yawning canyon that is his existence, a hovering voice. The only thing that is not another searing ache, not needles to the backs of his eyes.

this, low and steady;

this, hushed,

surely something else to take the edge off

A second, but an echo, distant,

only if you want his mind gone by the time he heals

and then, syllables a rumble that eases some of the urgency from the snarling pain,

that would rather defeat the purpose wouldn’t it

If the words once meant anything, they’ve become hollow. Too far removed from all he is – endless scrape of pain across every sinew – to translate through the haze. Only this: that the tone becomes a balm and he reaches for whatever might offer sanctuary, the barest and thinnest respite. His body, a collection of agonies, his self, that which they’ve been inflicted upon. He reaches, jutting desperation and

he’s –

the voice softer, ground against the whetstone of shock

doesn’t know what he’s doing, Clarin

I don’t know how you stand it, to be immersed in such – immediate pain

but I can’t, Shuri, it’s –

cold weight against the hot flare of pain, leaching of the immediacy from the hurt but

find me when he’s coherent, when he can

make sense of this

without grasping after whoever’s nearest

and then silence

The movement, a frantic chasing after fresh air when he’s choked with clotted blood and the faint tang of magic, has led the beast back to him. Again he is nothing but this: a wretch, held in the jaws of his body, gnashed between the teeth of shame. The pain chokes him down, and when he falls to its gullet, he finds the blackness he desires.

Chapter Text

Tyr becomes a man again.

It is the only thing familiar to him: to come once again to consciousness, to thoughts beyond the yowling of his mind. Everything else is stranger than the Fade, world reeling around him as a child’s top sent spinning. Flashes of light, an off-kilter and tinny song, the constant threat of its gyre toward ruin.

He would shatter across the floor, too sorely abused, spun far too fast, but he’s been cradled in soft blankets and warm light. He would fall to pieces, but that isn’t a reality permitted him.

Instead, he blinks awake and stares at the window nearly within arm’s reach, the world obscured by a thin panel of fabric. He could push it back, but he doesn’t. He stares at the gauzy panel until his eyes ache, his mind catching on all he can remember like soft skin against barbs. Xenia, her wide eyes, her flushed skin.

Don’t come, she’d said after they’d already laid their plans. It’s too late for us.

I either succeed or I die, he’d thought, staring after her narrow, retreating back in the shade of the fountain. One way or another, it has to be better than this. So he chose to chase after her, despite her breathy warnings. Perhaps because of them. What had he to lose beyond his life? Measured against what he stood to gain – a title, his family’s honour, a place in the glittering social heavens of Minrathous, a wife who professed love, who wouldn’t pursue him unless that were true at least in potentiality – it stood a wise enough gamble.

He hadn’t realized there was a third option. What a wretched discovery.

He should be surprised when he sees what his father has done, when he finally rolls his head away from the soft light filtering through the thin curtains, but he can’t pull himself from the haze of what was for long enough to feel anything at all.

Xenia, watching. Her brother emerging from the crowd, dark hair a halo around his face, shoulders set with an easy confidence that should have scared Tyr but didn’t. The taste of electricity on his tongue, the jagged beat of his own heart, the hiss of the crowd around him and the moment when he realized he was going to die.

Then blackness.

His father must have done it then.

All of it coalesces, the frantic collision of what was and what is and it comes down to this: Tyr may have survived, but what lays before him is a grim landscape. A desolate world.

What possibilities await a mage who can’t cast a spell?

Possession, he thinks distantly. Surely there would be a demon somewhere in the Fade who would want even a vessel as broken as his body.

If this is what surviving has meant, if all he recognizes is the cadence of his own thoughts, it will be a sacrifice small enough to make: his misery for the void. His soul, ground to nothing but dust beneath the heel of abomination and blasphemy.

Good. He’s ready to stop existing.

The door to the room opens, a dark woman stepping through. She hesitates. “You’re awake.”

“Unfortunately.” The syllables scrape against his throat, his voice reduced to a rasp, something equal parts wild and ruined.

A small crease appears between her eyebrows, which arc like lines of ink. “And the pain?”

“What do you think?” Chased with a bitter laugh, a sound he can feel edging toward something far worse – something broken, something limned with horror and despair, and so he chokes the rest of the sound down. It dusts his throat like chalk, and he has to look away.

She moves toward his bed, one hand outstretched toward his arm –

He rolls to his side.

“I should –”

“No,” he says.

Silence, thick as the layer of cream atop milk. Then, “Clarin’s asked me to keep you well.”

Tyr stares hard at the curtain. Shadows cut it into rectangles of light. The window on the other side must be mullioned.

He has no idea where he is.

Except –

“Clarin Laminus?” The name is bitter in his mouth, because he remembers that much: travelling to Praeclarus Hall, waiting for the announcement of Xenia’s engagement. The challenge, when his heart had fluttered against his ribs, and the feeling when it was answered by her brother. How readily he’d stepped to the center of the room, and then led the procession to the middle of the courtyard, where the moon had hung high overhead like a pearl against velvet. Where the crowd had trilled with a nervous energy, a flock of carrion birds hungry for blood.

A name he’d hoped –

Tyr rolls over again, staring up at the woman. The crease remains fixed in place on her forehead. “Is that where I am? Why?”

“I’ll tell you if you let me look,” with a gesture of her hand, a tentative reach.

It sends a sharp arrow of panic straight through his heart. “No,” he barks, jerking away.

A sigh, quick and hard, tears from her throat. She turns, simple robes flaring around her, and leaves. She doesn’t close the door, and Tyr is left staring out the door frame into the hallway beyond. It tells him nothing: plain white walls, bare. Even the room is spartan: on one wall, a portrait of some obscure ancestor. On another, a mirror.

Not very Altus at all, and he would know. His family has spent every waking moment trying to seem like what they once were. His house, though its foundation sagged, though its roof needed retiling, though its floors were scuffed and its reflecting pool murky, was piled high with finery. If the silver was tarnished, or the paintings fake, or the tapestries so threadbare as to sag in the middle, so be it.

Appearances mattered. Being more than his line had been reduced to mattered.

But what has he been reduced to now?

Nothing. A ruin of even the little he’d been able to claim before.

Footsteps echo up the hallway, at first faint, but steady as a heartbeat.

He sees the shadow before he sees the man, long and lean against the white wall beyond the confines of this bright room. And through the doorway emerges the specter of his ruin.

“You didn’t kill me.” Words that make him taste blood again, a desperate want.

Clarin Laminus ignores him, walking around the foot of the bed and throwing open the curtains that remain shut. The windows are a wall of light, blue sky and sunlight stripes of pain against his eyes.

Tyr turns his head away. The pillow is too soft, its fabric too much like the stroke of a finger against his cheek.

He tries again. “I expected to be dead.”

Silence, in the warm room, where the linens smell of poppy and cedar. It’s broken by the sound of boots against the marble floors, the weight of the other man unsettling the still air. He comes to hover by the side of the bed. “And it would appear that you’re still set on that outcome. Shuri tells me you won’t let her examine you. She’s very skilled – an artisan, really, in the study of healing. It’s why I bought out her contract and offered her a position here.”

It’s a tone less haughty than Tyr is used to, one that’s warm and measured. Almost soothing, were it not that he knew whose mouth the words came from.

“And where’s here?” he asks, pinning his eyes the edge of a gilt picture frame, though the man stands just at his elbow.

“My home. In Asariel. Xenia’s ball was more than enough of Minrathous for me and – well. More than enough for you as well, I’d imagine.”

Tyr swallows around the tightness in his throat. He can hear Clarin shift his weight, can almost see his hands curl and uncurl in his peripheral vision.

“My sister is hardly worth this level of wallowing,” he says after a long pause. “Believe me. I’ve known her all of her life.”

Still, silence. He can hear birdsong through the panes of glass, muted. The purity of the notes dulled, brought to ruin by the glass cage he’s been placed inside.

“Come now, you didn’t love her.” Said firmly.

Said so certainly that it wrenches Tyr away from the prowling darkness of his thoughts. He flicks his attention to the man who brought him to this awful in-between place, this ending he couldn’t have anticipated.

A man who looks just like his sister, Tyr thinks. The same angular body, the same dark hair, the same inky black stare.

“And how do you know that?”

The faintest of smiles flickers across Clarin’s face, which he smothers out the instant he realizes Tyr has caught it. “A man fighting for the woman he loves wouldn’t dare look quite so resigned to failure as you did after our first exchange of spells.”

It’s a statement on his proficiency and character that Tyr can’t allow to stand, however far he’s fallen. “Isn’t it a noble thing, to fight a losing battle because of what’s in your heart? To intervene when someone is being dragged into a union against their will?”

For a moment, a shadow flickers across those angular features, before resolving itself in a careful guardedness. “Perhaps if you’re Ferelden. Here? Hardly. And as much as you may have framed that entire little interchange as being exemplary of true love, you’re far too clever for that. Oh, you thought you might be killed – but you also would have anticipated that a victory would win you no small fortune and my name in place of yours. A glittering prize indeed.”

It’s close enough to the truth that the need to deny it surges up inside of him. “I didn’t care about your name,” Tyr says, though of course it’s a lie. He betrays that by looking away once again – knows he betrays it, but can’t help himself.

What good is there in obfuscation when he can’t possibly fall any further? Game be damned, he’s entered other realms entirely, ones where deceit has as much value as flowers plucked from lush gardens: pretty things perhaps, but soon enough to wilt. Soon enough to reveal the decay always waiting in the wings.

“You may be interested in knowing that you very nearly succeeded.”

He’s not interested. Instead, Tyr stares at the weave of threads in the blanket that cocoons him, the tight warp, the tidily patterned edges.

Clarin continues, though. “If I hadn’t decided to come at the last moment, it would have been Nikon forced to step in on behalf of our soon-to-be Orlesian relative, and he’s a horrible duelist. Far too concerned with wine and women to ever devote time to disciplined study. By the time he was fourteen, he was already dreaming of the day he’d inherit the Hall. Why train your mind when the world’s presented to you on a platter?”

The words prickle at him, like ill-fitting wool. He pulls his stare away from the sheets and toward Clarin Laminus. The man has drawn up a chair to the edge of the bed, hand resting on the back as though he might sit – but also as if he can’t quite bring himself to.

“And what,” Tyr says, “would you know about having to struggle for anything?”

Clarin shrugs where he stands, slender hand still lingering on the chair. If expects an invitation to sit, it will be a long time in coming. “There have been a few challenges here or there. Not quite the same as your own, which are another league removed from those Shuri’s had to face. Who, by being born a mage, managed to escape the plights particular to her people. And so I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective. Hardly the time for self-pity in any case. Tyr,” he adds, an afterthought meant to be – what? An intimacy? A friendly gesture? Something to disarm and unsettle?

In any case, it is the use of his name that jars him more than the little speech, that starts the snarl of electricity beneath his skin – a buzz that grows to a thunderous roar. His fingers tighten against the blankets. “Right,” he says, thick-tongued with the bloat of distant outrage, “because I have nothing to be upset about. It’s only that I’ve been disowned. That I’ve had what little lay in my favour cut away from me.”

Unintentional words, but they summon something deep and furious inside of him. The rage, bright with lingering agony, roars up inside of him and he finds himself thrusting his right arm – what’s left of it – into the air. “What good is a mage who has one hand, Clarin? Tell me that – what have I left in my life besides misery and shame and the memory of my failure?”

The last words fly from his mouth as a shout, hoarse and vulnerable.

He’s ashamed as soon as he speaks them. How dreadfully –

Genuine.

His ruined arm, hacked off just below the elbow, falls hard against the bed. It doesn’t hurt, not beyond the distant ache of what should be there but isn’t. The memory of the pain stings the back of his mind, though – and what it means cuts as a knife. Tyr stares, wide-eyed, up at Clarin, daring him to respond, because what can he have to say to this? What can he possibly –

“You could be dead.” Said simply, certainly, though of course his gaze skitters to the bandaged limb at Tyr’s side. Something unsteady in that look, which the man self-corrects, once again meeting Tyr’s empty eyes. “That would much more effectively cut away any possibility for much of anything. You’re clever. You’ll figure something out.”

Tyr doesn’t move. His mind buzzes with inarticulate thoughts, the enormity of this feeling gouging away his ability to form words. To make even an attempt at coherence.

Clarin’s fingers are tight against the back of the chair he won’t sit in, like brittle sticks. “In any case,” he continues, “dying because you wouldn’t let Shuri take a look at how things are progressing won’t do anyone any good.”

Someone else would look away, Tyr thinks. Clarin doesn’t. Keeps his gaze steady and level, unrelenting.

It’s a generosity, one that leaches some of the frantic clamour from his thoughts. Tyr couldn’t stand to be unseen, not quite yet. Not while this – hurt gnaws at his bones. Not while he teeters on the edge of honesty, a dangerous and foreign realm for any Altus.

Heady, almost, the feeling of truth on his tongue. Like the first summer wine of the season.

He might as well drain the glass. “My father would seem to disagree. Disowned and disfigured. He did do his best, didn’t he? Forgive me; I can’t recall. I may have been unconscious at the time when I presume I was forced to yield.”

The silence stretches, grows wide and heavy. Clarin shifts his weight. Tyr’s is an earnest admission – one he seems to struggle to find a response to. Finally, with a sigh, “Maker, you should consider yourself lucky.”

Tyr’s eyebrows shoot up.

“To have missed that spectacle,” Clarin clarifies. “He was dreadfully dramatic about the whole thing. His monologue might very well have been out of a Veroni play – especially the bit with the hand. A traditionalist, I take it.”

“It’s all we have,” Tyr begins. A stumble, a misstep he tastes it before he realizes, one that rests like blood on the curve of his tongue.

Tyr is no longer part of a we. So he amends, “All he has: the way things used to be.”

“But not you. Not any longer, I don’t suppose.”

A blunt way of getting to the point, so he’ll be blunt as well. “Is that why you brought me here?”

Clarin shrugs. “Well, you were bleeding out all over my parents’ courtyard. The guests were watching. Xenia might have tried fainting if someone didn’t do something, so I gathered you up and brought you here. Someone needed to show a little decorum.”

For a moment, something like a memory flashes behind Tyr’s eyelids: a steady hand tucked around his waist, the low and rushed tumble of words – like a distant waterfall. Darkness and the sound of hooves, a cold moon so far overhead as to be nearly a ghost, the phantom of summer nights turned foul.

All of it, wrong. He’d wanted Xenia’s hand; he’d lost his own. That was never meant to be the gamble. This was never meant to be the price he paid.

“You should have left me,” Tyr murmurs. “Better yet, you should have killed me. If you’d used a glyph instead of –”

“I know what I did.” The thin fabric of Clarin’s shirt rustles as he folds his arms, shoulders straight and solid as the foundations of the Senate. So certain.

Tyr runs his thumb across the soft blanket, rolling his head so that he might look out the window. Outside, the sky is an impossible blue, the blue out of fairy tales and oil paintings. Branches, thick with olive-green leaves, stretch toward it. Grasping.

“I don’t suppose – your sister didn’t say anything, did she? Hasn’t said anything since then?”

There’s a beat of quiet, filled only by a chattering finch that’s landed on a branch just past the glass. Then, “No. And she’s been whisked off to Orlais now, my parents in tow. Quite enough drama for this marriage – and no doubt she’ll cause another stir there, being a mage from Tevinter.”

They dwell again in the silence. Tyr watches as a distant breeze pushes the trees outside to a gentle swaying – the same breeze that hurries the clouds across the sky, that ruffles the feathers of the tiny bird that tilts its head to and fro. All animated by the same force.

And what’s breathed life into him? What keeps him breathing now?

Not Xenia, nor the Emulari name. He can’t claim either.

You could be dead, Clarin said. That would much more effectively cut away the possibility for much of anything else.

His mother always insisted he was stubborn, and Tyr supposes it must be true: why else would he chase after the mad chance that he might win something worthwhile for his family? Why else would he risk his life for the father who’d been so quick to excise him from their line, like diseased flesh?

But if Tyr is an infection, it’s one that grows on stock ready to be culled. A mean thought, hard and sharp as a shard of glass, but one he keeps hold of.

He might try living for himself. At least for a little while. If it doesn’t take, he can always offer himself up on a platter to any of a host of demons. Even one hand short, he’d still make a lovely vessel. And that, Tyr thinks, can continue to be a point of pride.

“You can send her in,” he says finally.

“Shuri? Excellent.” Said with a smile Tyr can hear rather than see, one that shines through Clarin’s tone as a lantern in the night. Another scrape of boots as he retreats. “No more designs on dying miserably as your father hoped, then?”

Tyr turns his head to look again at the man who ruined and saved him in the very same night. He huffs a half-little laugh that scrapes his throat raw. “If I disappoint him in this, I suppose it will just be the final line on a tally card marked ragged. What’s another failure to add to the pile?”

Clarin stills, hesitating in the doorway. He half-turns. On his face, something that might be a smile were it not quite so hesitant, were it not as bitter as old and forgotten tea. “If there’s one thing I understand, Emulari, it’s what it means to disappoint one’s family.” A pause, then, “Have Shuri send for me when you’re feeling up to a walk. The grounds are lovely here, and I’ve a grand library – one that almost rivals my parents’. You’re welcome to it.” And then he’s gone, nothing to indicate he was ever there but the chair, never sat in, that still hovers near the edge of the bed.