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Trevelyan’s smile curdles when Corypheus introduces her to the leader of his Templars. She supposes she wanted a monster, but instead there is only a man. Handsome, in his way; his features common and rough. No second son of a noble family here, she quips to herself. Here is a lout who must have truly believed. Her smile returns, sharp around the edges but pleased enough. The smile she learned when she was young and still a lady of Ostwick rather than the timid, mewling thing she perfected in the Circle.
He does not look at her, gaze cast down and to the side as if he might be invisible if he avoids her eye. It makes her smile all the fuller. Yes, yes, she can deal with a man like this. Weak and foolish and hollow.
“Evelyn Trevelyan,” she says, holding out a hand so soft and white it would be entirely foreign to someone as lowly and wanting as him. He will take her hand, she thinks, and he will fumble out his name over it, and he will kiss it because he thinks that is just the proper thing to do, and he will glance up at her through his lashes, and she will smile, smile, smile down at him, and it will be as if the Maker has returned to gaze upon his flock. Because she is beautiful and graceful and powerful. She is above him, and what more does a man like that want but to sully something more than him with his lowly touch.
“Knight-Commander Cullen,” he says, eyes still askance. He does not take her hand. He does not peer up at her timidly. He does not kiss her hand and fall thrall to her intentions. She pulls her offered hand back and holds it in a fist until her knuckles ache, her wrist screams, her palm bleeds.
-x-
He doesn’t talk to her. He doesn’t look at her. Trevelyan hates him for it. In the breaths between missions and tasks and battles she sits by herself and reads ancient Tevinter histories and theories, or dances her magic between her fingers. It’s almost as bad as being under watch in the Circle. Templar eyes silent and judging, waiting to smite and ruin, hating and wanting like the vile creatures they are. He doesn’t watch her. But he does hate her. That's enough to satisfy, to quench the thirst of anger between her kind and his. To a point she doesn’t even understand why Corypheus needs him, or any Templar. She isn’t stupid so she doesn’t ask, but she does wonder. If they’re going to remake the world in the image of Tevinter, then why bring along the Chantry’s dogs?
“We don’t need you, you know,” she snaps once when the sharp-edged silence between them is too much, too heavy, too close to leaving her panicked and afraid.
“Someone needs to take the Red Lyrium,” he responds, voice like a corpse, eyes never leaving the middle distance he seems to take pleasure in staring into. Trevelyan gasps and turns her back.
-x-
She screams in a rage so hot that she tastes blood on the edges of it. Books go flying from their places, papers dancing and taunting. She shatters bottles and vials. The room stinks of mixed ingredients, thick and heady and nauseating. Thunder looms in the vacant recesses of her body and with every furious gesture a streak of lighting arcs. It was supposed to be his! theirs! hers!
She wheels around at the sound of Templar footsteps thunking like mules hooves in the lazy rush to get to her. Clank, clank, clank; she hates it! She hates the way her skin prickles and her spine shrinks and her shoulders lock in a fear so deeply ingrained she cannot purge it with all her power. Cullen appears, face stern and hard as ever as he takes in her tantrum with blank, weary eyes.
“She stole it from me!” She screams and another crack of lighting sizzles through the air. A book between them catches fire and he comes closer, bringing his foot down on the flames and stamping them out. He still doesn’t look at her. Damn him. Damn him! “Are you too addled to care? Too broken to understand? You fool, idiot, Ferelden dog!” She closes her eyes and fists her hands, hears her joints crack loudly at the force of it. She’s going to scream again, going to start all over. Calpernia, that stupid slave. What right did she have? Trevelyan was noble born. She was cultured. She was beautiful. She was perfect, and the Anchor should be hers. “It should always have been--” She works her way towards another breaking point, opens her eyes so that she can see him flinch away with his sensitive little lyrium filled ears like the kicked mongrel he is. But instead of standing and sulking like he always is, Cullen has his sword drawn on her.
The indignant anger flows from her. She might as well be a part of the wine pooling on the ground at her feet. He is looking at her, and she was right, of course, he hates her. He hates her more than he has hated anyone. The pleasure she gets from that is a balm to her fevered thoughts of plans gone awry.
“Stand. Down,” he orders. Trevelyan unfists her hands and holds them where he can see. His gaze flickers from one to the other, checking, she assumes, for signs of cuts and blood magic. Spurred by his inspection and her own contrary nature, she reaches out with her left hand, wraps it around the sword’s blade. Its edges dig into the clefts of her fingers, the meat of her heart line. Will this change my future? She wonders, giddy as if drunk on this encounter she has waited for since their introduction. “Stop,” he orders again, voice a slurried mix of power and fear.
“I will not stop,” she states, squeezing the blade a fraction tighter, “until I get what I deserve.”
He grunts and pulls back, sword slicing through her flesh just as he desperately wished she would not do herself. Pain flashes hot like fire all the way into her elbow. She makes a sound, halfway between pain and surprise, and feels tears unbidden in her eyes. She makes a fist and the pain lances harder, stronger. Her heart beats double-quick and the blood spills faster through her clenched fingers. She stares up at him, sees terror and fury in the creases of his brow. The first honest emotion he’s had since Corypheus brought him here. Blood dribbles onto her boots, a stain that will last forever on the soft calf’s leather.
“Do you fear me, General?”
“Knight-Commander,” he chokes, throat bobbing as he corrects her. She grins. Her blood gleams on the buffed metal of his Templar’s sword. She recalls waking to the sword at her throat after her Harrowing, a blade leveled with her chest when the Circles fell, all the blades that sat and shivered in their scabbards her whole time as a mage, begging their Templar animals to let them out to drink. Power, the pulse in her temple bleats, power is all they ever wanted and they knew all along that it was the mages, it was Trevelyn that had the real power, here, in her blood, the power of nobility and rank and ancestry, and oh how they envied it, how they lusted for it, how they wanted this very moment to play out before them, to watch her raise her bleeding fist above her head and call out to all the forces from beyond the Veil--
She remembers to breathe and her lungs thank her for it. She realizes her fist is above her head, blood leaking down her arm into her sleeve. She blinks, lowers her arm and forces her hand open. A wave of warmth surges out of her and she feels dizzy and weak. He did something to her, she thinks, looking at him with blurring vision. But no, the look on his face tells her everything she needs to know. She puts her bleeding hand to her face, pressing against the headache that is blossoming behind her eyes.
“I don’t need blood magic,” she consoles him mockingly. “Get out.”
Surprisingly, he obeys.
-x-
The Venatori squabble like children, pulling at her skirts as if she is an old schoolmarm. Blood, they whine, it must be blood. She has blood, she wants to tell them, all the blood they will ever need, but it is only truly powerful when it stays inside her veins. Lineage. Do they not understand? She knows that they do. They arrange their marriages and dowries around magical ability, around blood inheritance. So why do they pester her? Why do they dares to insinuate that they have demands she must fulfill? Would they rather be carried on the back of that Tevinter slave? It is she who needs blood magic because her blood is worth nothing, has proved nothing, holds no use aside from an alchemic force.
She dismisses her Venatori and stalks through the grounds with her teeth on edge and her temper close to boiling over. Everything reeks here. She misses the gardens at the Ostwick Circle, the flowers and their warm smells. She misses stained glass and music and the way it felt to bounce her shoulder against her friend and laugh for no reason at all. Laugh because they were happy. Laugh to keep from crying in front of their captors.
Around her the Red Templars grunt and keen like animals. Her lips pull back from her teeth and she shudders at the sight, the sound, the feel of them. The air isn’t right, here where the Templars stumble and swagger. Everything is stretched wrong as if she’s peering through a mirror at a carnival.
“Lady Trevelyan,” and she almost doesn’t recognize her name spoken from this mouth that has avoided it for so long. She turns her head and glares at him, at Corypheus’ general, at Ser Cullen. “You should not be here.” His gaze is focused on her hand, the one she cut on his sword, the one she has kept covered in a band of lace since she decided to keep the wound open and sweating. His voice is so, so very hollow, merely an echo of sounds that this man might once have made. But his eyes… they are alert as they trace the pattern of the lace, spy the blood that rises through the fabric. He is such an empty creature. All he has inside him is fear and loathing and need.
The thought of filling him and emptying him and filling him again flushes through her. A whisper in the corner of her ear, the very back of her brain. Is that what you desire most? She swats away the demon straining at the Veil. They come so eagerly now, so hungry for the Venatori and their offers.
“You do not tell me where to go,” she has to bite back the word serah. He does not deserve any title, any courtesy. He is a Templar but he has no power over her now. “I outrank you, I think.” His expression remains blank, unreadable and so she prods him a little more. “How does that feel, I wonder, to know that magic is not made to serve this man.” She places her cut hand on her side, rubs it down the dip of her waist until it comes to rest on her hip. He follows the movement with his feverish, haunted eyes. Eyes the color of the dandelion honey she used to spread on her toast. Eyes flecked with red like an egg yolk taken from the wrong hen. Eyes that silently scream at her to make him a victim, please.
His mouth curls slightly into a smile, a grimace, some expression she has never seen on a human face before. “Magic has never served me before. I am not fool enough to think it would start here, now, with you. You make the Templars uncomfortable and so I ask that you leave.”
“I think it is the Red Lyrium that makes them uncomfortable,” she retorts, staring at the protrusions steadily growing from his forearms. He looks into her face, locks his eyes on hers, and she can feel the edges of his Templar power pushing back the natural flow of her magic. Her joints lock. Bile rises to the back of her throat.
“You reek of magic and lyrium, and that is what they crave, and I cannot be held responsible for what any of them might do to get at it.”
It takes only a moment for her to be able to breathe again, for him to pull back his unnatural power. She fists her hand and feels her nails dislodging the viscous scab from the gash in her palm. “Dog,” she spits at him and then, literally, spits at him. He looks away from her but does not move. She is forced to retreat back to her books and her study and her magic. For dinner, she eats honey and eggs and imagines she is eating him alive.
-x-
She must go to Redcliffe to recruit more mages to their cause. Circle mages. Her mages. She tosses and turns in her bed, unable to sleep, unable even to listen to the incessant cacophony of demons peddling their wares. She must go to Redcliffe for mages to fight with them, to die for them, all while he is going to Therinfal Redoubt for more Templars. More Templars. More! They don’t need more of those hulking brutes, moaning and groaning beneath their Red Lyrium carapices.
After all that Templars have done to them over the years. How can she rightfully go to the mages and offer them power and freedom with the caveat of more Templars? It isn’t right.
She sits up and throws the sheets off, doesn’t care if they get filthy from this vile place. She has to do something otherwise she’ll never find peace. She goes to her desk, sits in her chair, runs her fingers over the papers and inkwell and sighs, knowing that her mind is too overrun to accomplish anything like that. She looks into her mirror, runs a finger along the bags beneath her eyes, pressing against the hot skin and wondering how long until she looks as wasted as the rest of them. The war will have its effects on her, she knows that she will not be an exception to it all. She pulls her braid forward and deftly unknots it, lets her hair flow over her shoulders. How much longer will they have access to soap and oils and scented powders? How much longer until she needs to live in her own odor like the common pions beneath her? She can’t wait for this all to be over so that she can have power and righteousness. So that she can be a lady of Ostwick again.
That makes her think of Cullen.
How dare he mock her, and she’s certain that is his intent when he calls her lady. How dare he sully the term and her name. Because she is a lady, whether his Chantry and his arrogance want to believe it or not. Being a lady was all that protected her, sometimes, while in the Circle from the Templars and their inevitable hunger for things above their station.
Cullen, she thinks and her blood burns. Her heart is hammering with a hunger of her own, a need for vengeance, a need to put this man in his place once and for all before he drowns them all in the Red Templars horrorshow Corypheus intends to have him bring back. Why is he even here? She wants to scream, but the Elder One has already told her to keep her focus on the Venatori and not concern herself with all the details of his machinations. Where Cullen and the Templars fit is for him to know and not her.
She looks in her mirror and pushes her shoulders back, her chest forward, watches the subtle movement of her pulse in her throat. She waits for the fire inside her to die down to embers, waits for the demon susurration to leave her mind, waits until she is calm enough to come up with her plan to deal with this Fereldan commoner.
-x-
Her Orlesian velvet slippers pad silently across the quiet stones. There are torches here and there, Red Templars guarding, and in the darkness and the fire light they look no different than any other Templar ever did to a mage sneaking out at night. Monsters. They have always been the true abominations. When any of them laboriously turn their head in her direction she brandishes her stave, sneers, and continues on with purpose. They cannot hurt her here. For now, anyway.
She feels chilled to the bone. Ativan satin does little to keep out the Fereldan damp. She does not know where the general sleeps but she summons a spirit wisp that guides her. His door is open, slightly ajar from where the wood is warped and cannot properly close. She touches the handle and feels all of her nerve falter. This is a thing that she intends to do, a thing that cannot be taken back, a thing that cannot be undone. Is this what she wants?
Yes, she admits and every bone in her body feels electric.
She presses into the room and half-closes the door behind her. The hinges squeal. He is up before she has removed her hand from the door. In the low light of his guttering fire and the magic of her staff she can see, truly see, the Red Lyrium making its way through him. He is not like the others, horrific and shattered and bulbous, but he is like them all the same. His eyes flash red, the hard growths on his arms glow, his veins hum for a moment in a dissonant, bloody chatter that is entirely different than everything she has experienced with lyrium.
When he recognizes her it almost looks like he relaxes, but his body is still hard and ready and tense. Each muscle jumps with every step closer that she takes, her footsteps whisper soft and her face a perfect mask of beauty and terror. His breath whistles through his nose, a puny squeak that reminds her that beneath all of his armor he is a man, a common man, a man who has never seen the type of woman that she is, standing before him.
He swallows and it is a loud, dry click. “What do you want?” His voice rasps. No Lady Trevelyan now, she smirks.
With careful, perfect fingers she unties the sash that holds her robe closed. His eyes follow the movement and when the silk falls open his gaze does not drift away. She has always hated how he keeps his eyes from her, respectful, infuriating, demeaning, but now he is looking and she does not think he has it in him to look away again.
She lunges and his hand is at her throat, holding her his arm’s length away. He does not squeeze, though it would be an easy thing with her slender, noble neck and his large, butcher’s hands. Slowly, he looks up at her face, a trail of devastating heat exploding across every inch of her skin that his eyes perceive. His chest heaves as if they have had some long and trying battle. His grip shifts, she can feel his thumb move itself directly over his pulse point. His eyes are no longer gold or red but black, black with the emptiness she knows exists within him, black with the hunger that exists within all men and all Templars.
His grip tightens when she leans her staff against the wall as if he suspects some trick, some deceit. She smiles at him, gentle and wonderful and fake before she lets it melt into the scowling smirk of disgust she feels for this man that has his skin touching her skin. She presses forward, into his hand, feels the rush as for a moment her breath is gone, but then he loosens his hand and bends his arm at the elbow. He lets her draw closer just like she knew he would. She places her bound hand over his mouth, watches his nostrils flare as he smells her perfume and her blood.
“I’m here to do to you what Templars do to mages,” she says in a lover’s coo.
-x-
Corypheus gives them their instructions and leaves. They will go their separate ways today, recruiting their own kind into the forces, hoping in their hearts to outnumber and outperform the other.
Or at least that is what Trevelyan hopes.
“Lady Trevelyan,” Cullen states, the barest of inflection in his voice. Intrigued, she looks his way, raises a brow, and projects the utter waste of time that she feels this interruption is. He looks off to the side, as he always does, and rests his hand on his sword, as he often does. “Did that happen to you? When you were in the Circle?” For a moment his voice almost sounds human. Trevelyan balks at the richness in its tone, shrinks into her shoulders and snaps her eyes away from him with snort.
“Not me,” she says after a moment spent wondering if she will say anything at all to such an indignant question. One does not speak of the punishment after it has been given. One does not inquire into the reasoning behind it. “Friends of mine,” she elaborates finally and looks at him from the sides of her eyes the way he looks at the world.
His shoulders drop an inch. His chin touches his breastplate. He nods faintly, to himself, as if to a voice in his head rather than to her.
“Enjoy Redcliffe. It’s near where I was born,” he says instead of anything that makes sense. She furrows her brow and looks at him straight. His voice is still not quite dead enough to be normal and it is making her on edge.
“Would you rather you were going in my stead, so that you might die there as well?” She mocks, hoping to to draw out his hatred and set things right. He looks up at her and his eyes are tired, so tired, so tired she wonders if he has ever slept in his life.
“Yes, my lady.” Then, he is walking away and Trevelyan is left to worry on those words for the rest of her journey.