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Asaaranda Adaar
The clomping of sabatons echoed my way, slightly muffled by the dirt floor of the dungeons.
My face leaned against the cold bars of my cell, giving me a decent view down the hall. Two templars - former ones, anyway - carried a scrawny human woman between them by her armpits. Her feet dangled in a wasted effort to drag them along the floor; her captors raised her higher, not inconvenienced in the slightest.
A sad example of the stunted critical thinking of a circle mage, conditioned to believe she had no real chance to fight without magic. She protested on principle only.
These small observations were already draining what little hope I had. I used my disdain to mask my regret.
They stopped in front of my cell, unlocking the door long enough to quickly toss her in. Catching herself on her hands and knees, she turned in time for one of the men to hock a loogie at her face through the grates, while the other locked up again.
She didn’t even flinch. Simply got up to close the gap between her and the bars that kept them apart. The mage wore his mucus and saliva like it had always been there - was always a part of her.
“You couldn’t stop, could you?” snarled the spitting templar. “We put all that shit behind us, but you?”
The other man was looking at me, so I rolled my eyes at him. Too far.
“Leave it,” he sighed toward his comrade, taking my hint. “I’m hungry. Tormenting her won’t bring him back, right?”
Spitter sneered, but backed off. “Yeah. Alright. But Fiona better not interfere with justice.”
“She can’t, she’s got too much to lose. Let’s go already.”
They exchanged a few bitter remarks as they left, but had managed to change the subject to lunch and Chantry women, before the heavy door at the end of the hall thudded shut. They were off to brighter days up in Haven, leaving us with nothing but shadowy reminders of a dragon cult to keep us company. Well, that and straw.
And burlap - which I tugged across my shoulders and buried my gloved hands in, for some semblance of warmth while eyeing the human who stood still at the bars of the cell.
She wore the dirt of the roads she’d traveled to get here from Redcliffe, coating her frizzy mop of hair and woolen farm skirts in varying shades of dust. Nothing labeled her as a mage, obviously. Her features were difficult to discern in this dim lighting, however there was something about her skin… underneath the spit and grime, she seemed to be covered in scars. What I could see of her hands looked similar.
The woman reeked of burnt hair and flesh - not her own, I already knew. The rebels had only arrived today, so this one had barely made it through the gates before causing trouble.
“Roasted a templar?” I asked.
“Qunari or Tal-Vashoth?” she fired back.
“Vashoth,” I slightly corrected, not that she was in any frame of mind to notice. I repeated my question.
“Yeah,” she shrugged. “That dickhead was right. Can’t take the rebel out of this mage.”
Hm.
“What about you?” the rebel asked. “Why’s the Herald locked up?” I stared at her blankly until she offered a small smirk, adding, “Maybe that’s what you get for aligning yourself with my lot, eh?”
“For a second I thought you really believed there was only one qunari in all of Haven.”
“I could feel the joke fall flat as I said it. What’re you really here for?”
I paused for what seemed a suitable few seconds. “Stole shit.”
“Eh, sucks for you. Now you’re stuck with a murderous mage as a cellmate.” The murderous mage finally looked at me, with eyes as bland as the rest of her. “That’s life.”
“You gonna roast me?” I asked.
“You can’t perform the Rite. So unless you try something stupid, I don’t have a fuck to spare for you.” Her voice quickened as she started to look around for the first time. Finally accepting where she was.
“So I can sleep, then. Good.” My yawn echoed outward as I pulled the burlap off my shoulders, rolling it around one hand to form a makeshift pillow to lie on. I closed my eyes against the scratchy fabric and breathed, my back complaining about the hard floor of dirt and straw.
The mage paced the length of the cell, alone with her thoughts. She may have been thrown off by my abrupt end to our conversation, combined with my total lack of fear.
Good.
She started kicking at dirt around the bars, eventually stubbing her toe and cursing. Wanting attention, not wanting to ask for it. Perfect for spilling her whole story, or so I hoped.
I sat up, pretending to be annoyed that I wasn't able to rest while she remained restless. “Alright, out with it.”
That was all the invitation the human needed. “Fiona’s just a sequence of bad decisions fueled by blind optimism. First Tevinter, and now this shit.”
“The woman the templar mentioned?” I feigned ignorance, earning a nod.
“Rebel mage leader. Or she was . Dunno what she is now. We just got here and I barely had a chance to settle in before…” she paused. “Before I saw him. ”
The woman sat abruptly on a dry patch of dirt a few paces away with a phwump, facing outside the cell again, scowling.
“Go on. What happened?” I prodded.
“ I happened.” The rebel mage lifted her hands, holding straw out in one and snapping her fingers with the other. “We’re surrounded by ‘former’ templars, but they’re still on bloody lyrium. They can still do what they do best. I wondered if I might see anyone from my old Circle here. But him? How’d that asshole survive the war?
“He used to beat the shit outta me, but… he didn’t even recognize me. That’s how little it all meant to him.”
Her scowl deepened as she stopped snapping and began to toy with the straw between her hands. Weaving it here, bending it there. Mumbling, “How can Fiona make us work for them? What’s the difference between this and what we fought against?”
“So that’s the templar you killed?”
“Anyone would’ve. The way he’d corner me at night, threaten to recommend me for the Rite if I didn’t… he liked the way I cried. That I wouldn’t cry for him as a Tranquil, and that’s the only thing that stopped him…”
The straw bent between her fingers. “Age and experience made tears harder to come by anyway. He had to get creative - burn me, slice me, dump alcohol on my wounds, stitch me.” So those really were scars. Wow. “But pain is relative. You get used to it, or at least get better at escaping it. Imagine yourself elsewhere, whisk yourself away. How could I not? How’s that my fault?
“Something about the way he wanted it, made it harder and harder to even fake it. I knew I should try, to keep myself whole, but giving him the satisfaction was breaking me in other ways too. It was lose-lose.”
She was starting to go back there in her mind. That wouldn’t do, so I yelled a bit too loudly, “Hey, you killed him! Good for you! ” I might have even meant it. What would I have done if this man were still alive, and I had learned of his past another way? I was selfishly grateful to avoid answering that, for now.
The mage startled at the volume of my approval. She turned to me again, scowl disappearing as she snapped her fingers a couple more times.
“Satisfied?” I asked, hopeful.
It took a moment, but… “No,” she admitted, returning to bending and twisting straw. “He’s just one of many. They’re all like this in their own special ways.”
“You sure? Some say all mages are power-hungry, one bad day away from dealing with demons.”
“Don’t be stupid. I grew up in the Circle - wouldn’t I know? What do you know, Vashoth?”
A biased answer, littered with defensive rudeness. No point debating, then. I raised my non-pillowed hand in defeat. “Alright, alright. Well, maybe these folks will understand.”
“Everyone gets a clean slate here. I murdered an innocent man, according to them.” She snorted.
“A policy you benefit from too, rebel mage. You must have murdered a whole lot of templars.”
“That was war, for a good cause. That was not the same.”
“Sure, I hear that.” And I did. She lived through her trauma, and found a way to put her pain to productive use with the rebellion. Only to be asked to forgive and forget, by a leader who had already sold her out once.
Still… “So you can’t let it go, then? Not even to spare your life?”
She bent more straw into unnatural shapes. “I can’t cry anymore, you know. At all. I used to wonder if I’m even still in here, or if I’m just a stuffed thing, made for beating. Maybe the real me left when the crying stopped.”
Oh.
“Perhaps that’s how the Tranquil feel?” The mage lowered her voice to nearly a whisper. “But then I saw him , and it all came back. I felt… more than I had ever felt during the war. Alive.” She was collecting a pile of bent, twisted straw in her lap. “I existed, at the right place and time, to give him the end he deserved, and it was divine. I could have continued feeling empty before. But now, still fueled by that moment of raw, burning life?
“I feel almost whole again. But it’s already ebbing. I’ll become nothing, again.
“Until I do the right thing. Again.”
She loosened her shoulders, looked at me, and tilted her head. “I’m like this for a reason. The rest of you can turn your back on that dark underbelly, pretend the horrors that templars commit don’t matter anymore - won’t happen again. But I feel the truth, and I’m not afraid to act on it. Someone has to.”
Did she just giggle? “I’d rather die feeling this today, than live forever feeling empty again. Maybe I can’t cry, but at least I can do this.”
She snapped her fingers, and the pile of twisted straw in her lap began to smoke.
“Cullen!” I shouted. My cell mate’s eyes widened, before narrowing on me as she leapt up. The straw around her was already fizzing out, smoke denied, as Cullen came into view from one cell over.
“Herald!” she hissed at me, before focusing on the Commander.
I stood as well, letting the burlap around my hand slowly slough off and fall behind me. “Yes,” I confirmed simply, clearly, and I held her gaze when she turned back to me. Stepped slightly closer.
She snapped her fingers, madly now, since it was never going to work with Cullen keeping his eyes on her from just outside the cell.
A sad day. But there was danger in the way that she was right, standing there glaring at me, drying templar spit cutting patterns into the dust on her scarred face.
I wouldn’t have trusted anyone who said the things this woman had. But a mage, especially, could not afford to indulge in these raving passions. Meanwhile the Inquisition could not afford to indulge in her justifications, in the ways she was a little bit right.
I swiftly weighed alternatives. Confinement. Compassion. Years of wisdom and aid from… who? Chantry sisters? Could they help her?
A crystalline crimson doomsday flashed before my eyes. We don’t have years to spare for an internal liability.
I knew that, and hated myself in this moment for knowing it. The world could not afford our soft, forgiving mistakes so long as Corypheus remained a threat.
Now that she was fully aware of the position she was in, I gently requested final clarification. “Between the Rite and death, would you still rather die?”
The rebel mage snapped her gaze back to Cullen. Stomping up to the bars of the cell, she finally wiped her face, collecting muddy grime into her hand before swiftly flicking it through the bars, straight toward the man’s eyes. The Commander did flinch.
“If I can’t kill you , you had better kill me!” she nearly screeched at him.
She was looking the wrong way. I moved toward her.
My marked hand, free of burlap and wielding a dagger, flashed across her throat in one smooth motion.
Cullen wore her heart’s contents on top of her grime before she fell, emptied.
“Well,” he stammered, after a moment of silence, “this example will send an appropriately sobering message.”
“If only it weren’t needed,” I sighed, wiping my blade while deciding how to make the most of this. “Tell them it was me. I agreed to ally with the mages - but if they start murdering our templars, I’ll distribute justice myself. Mage to mage.”
“You’ll win back some former templars who may have begun to doubt your judgment,” the Commander muttered, unlocking my cell. And your girlfriend too, he didn’t need to say.
“I didn’t do it for any of them.”
This man had only helped me, only saved my life by hardening reality while I tried to give a traumatized woman a chance. The fact that he agreed to give me this chance spoke volumes about his character, all things considered. Still, for who he was and what he may or may not have done in his own past, I couldn’t look at him. Not right now.
He opened the cell door, and I forced out a hollow “Thanks.”
Then I left without another word.
In the back of my mind was an idea that shook me, something I had to actively squash deep into a corner. Something I thought I’d never ask myself under any circumstances.
What if re-education could have saved her?