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There’s no smell to the Fade. If he had to imagine one, it would be wet, Weisshaupt stone, or sweet, cool, Nevarran bonedust.
Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
Zael stares into the ceaseless black and gray until his eyes start to cross. He’s not a panicker, never panicked in his life, and not about to start now; but if anything could get him damnably close, it’s this.
There’s no reason you couldn’t… stay back a ways?
With no way to tell time he’s unable to guess how long he’s been wandering, aimless, seeking something in the vast desaturation stretching before him. He keeps his mind busy with questions, and his feet occupied with walking forward. At least, he thinks it’s forward-- it’s hard to say.
The Fade always provides a way forward. We just have to find it.
If I’m trapped in the Fade forever, am I still mortal? Do I need to eat? Drink? Sleep? So many questions. He should ask Emmrich.
Emmrich.
Zael pauses, head cocked, listening to the silence. If he listens too closely, he can hear what sounds like a distantly whistling wind, like a far-off ringing in his ears after a Hurlock blow to the head.
I will lose you to time, Rook. What if I can’t bear that for eternity?
“Well,” his voice sounds strange in his own ears, warped, warbled by misplaced, miskept emotion, “you should’ve thought about that before you became a fucking lich!”
It’s not giving up, but he does sit down-- plops, really, all the frenetic energy burst out of him in one moment-- cross-legged, on the rough ground. Just to take a break. Just to focus on a way out of this stupid regret prison. Life was so much simpler when he was running sword drills and cleaning latrines. When he was just some guy, just a Grey Warden, and not a piece on a chessboard. Not someone who mattered. Not Alizael Tabris-Theirin, child of the Hero of Ferelden.
It’s not panicking, it’s not giving in to grief, but he lies back, head pillowed against the curve of his shield. If he closes his eyes and imagines hard enough, he’s not in the Fade, but somewhere in the Anderfels, camping in a Deep Roads cavern mouth, listening to water dripping and the creak of leather; he’s in a spacious bed done in Nevarran green-and-gold silk sheets with a pale hand splayed against his lower abdomen; he’s anywhere, anywhere, but here.
♠
He wakes with something in his mouth, something scratching at his tongue and pressing against his teeth. There’s a sharp sting on the inside of his cheek and he is hooked, and tugged. A heavy weight crushes down on him, like hands slipping between the caverns of his ribcage and pulling in opposite directions as hard as they possibly could.
“WAKE UP.” The words are hissed and wreathed with the taste of blood and the smell of the grave. “NO CHILD OF MINE WILL DIE HERE.”
Zael coughs and chokes and spits, eyes flying open. Something looms above him, a flash of red fire and dark bone, curling vertebra as an eyeless socket tilts down to look at him. Spiraling horns peel up and away from the ivory. The creature pulls its clawed finger from Zael’s mouth, smearing his own blood over his lips, and stands. “WHAT KEEPS YOU HERE? REGRET? A WEAK SENTIMENT. A FOOL’S WEIGHT TO CARRY.” The beast has a goat’s skull for a head, Zael realizes, and a human body, fleshless from the neck to the waist, then clad in torn, black and red cloth from waist to foot. It is wreathed in red flame. “THERE ARE NO BINDS REGRET CAN CREATE THAT RETRIBUTION CANNOT BURN THROUGH.”
Zael pushes himself up on his palms, Fade-stone biting into the skin of his hands. The taste of blood is heavy in his mouth.
He’s never been afraid of anything in his life, and he’s not about to start now. “Tell me how to get out of here,” he says, voice even, unphased even in the aura of the beast, “if you’re so sure.” He can’t fight the streak of sarcasm that slips through his tone like a lash.
The creature’s eyes flash with something… fond, perhaps, though it hisses, malice and clacking teeth. “HAVE I NOT DONE ENOUGH FOR YOU. HAVE I NOT BROUGHT THE WORLD TO BEAR FOR YOU. HAVE I NOT PAVED YOUR WAY.” A low, eerie moan entangles itself in the wraith’s words, something akin to sadness, the ghost of the ghost of a feeling. “MY BLOOD SOWS THE GROUND UPON WHICH YOU WALK. MY RIBS ARE THE CROWN ABOVE YOU. I AM THE SINGULAR FORCE OF YOUR EXISTENCE-- OF ALL EXISTENCE.”
The wight twists, lashes out again, slides claws through the checkered fabric at Zael’s throat, and hauls him-- all fifteen-plus stone of him in full plate mail-- up with one, boney arm.
“LOOK UPON ME AND DESPAIR.” Hot breath rolls over him, diffuse sulfur and bone, the tang of iron, the salt of flesh. “I AM THE HORROR WHICH HAS WROUGHT THIS WORLD, AND THAT WHICH THIS WORLD HAS WROUGHT.”
Zael swallows the blood in his mouth-- his toes are dangling off the ground-- and is about to reach for his broadaxe when--
“Zazie.” A voice, familiar enough that it makes his heart squeeze, and from his position above the creature’s head he can see a form materialize out of the formless gray. Zael’s mouth drops open. The malicious aura lifting off the wight is cut, sharply, like a knife through hot butter, and Zael can feel the temperature begin to warm; the firm pressure of the revenant’s anger lifts, and the flame around its head is extinguished. All at once, Zael goes from staring between its horns, to staring into open space, as its head has dropped down about three feet, though it still lifts him with ease. Bone has been replaced with sleek black hair, dark skin, and pointed ears.
“You’re wearing my armor,” Alistair said, grinning up at his son.
“I am,” Zael said, simply and with all the weight of hey, the ghost of my mother is still holding me up like a wet kitten left unsaid.
“Zazie,” Alistair repeated, setting his hand on the woman’s shoulder, “let him go.”
Slowly, Azazel lowered Zael to the ground. He stood above her, now, taller than her, if not by much. She released the cloth around his neck and her very normal hand smoothed the fabric down before pulling away. Alistair put his other hand on her opposite shoulder, and for the briefest, most hilarious second, they were the picture of matrimonial bliss, her head barely coming to his clavicles, his thumbs thrumming along the sides of her neck.
The strange, malicious force is still there; it tickles at his ears, hums beneath the soles of his feet, like the geas of distant Darkspawn. But it is clear that Alistair’s presence… combats it, somehow; tempers it, tampens it; a bond of love forged in the dark fires of a blighted war and made permanent by death.
Zael regards his parents for another long second, then turns his head to the side, spits watery blood, and clocks his father across the face with a fist mailed in Alistair’s own armor. Alistair grunts and goes down, ass hitting the gray Fade ground and knocking up dust. Azazel’s mouth splits into a bright grin.
“You left me,” Zael says, and belatedly realizes the desaturated air has taken on a decidedly orange tint, like the embers of a cold fire breathing back to life.
“I did,” Alistair admits, thumbing at the split in his lip. “I did tell the Inquisitor to take care of you.”
“You are my father. I was eleven.”
“Oh, is this the part of the reunion where we just state facts?” Alistair is picking himself up off the ground. “I can do that, too. My name is Alistair, I was a Grey Warden, and I had a dog once.”
“Fuck you.” The world was steadily continuing to color, to warm.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you!" Alizael says, more insistently. He was not an emotional man; he was bound by duty and driven by logic; but Alistair’s abandonment had hurt , and wounds long buried were festering to the surface. “Why? Why did you do it?”
Alistair opens his mouth and starts with, “Well--
“Because I left him,” Azazel says, and her voice is an uneven warble again, something human and soft but also demonic and gleeful. “Because I pulled you from the bloody recesses of my Blighted body and died so the rest of the thankless world might live.”
“--yes, there is that.” Alistair steps back up to Azazel and the world goes purely gray again. His hands find her shoulders, like he can’t not be touching her, and Zael’s eyes go wide and blank as he is hit two-fold with the deep-seat of his parents’ devotion to each other-- the love that pushed them to their respective deaths-- while also being broadsided by images of green spirit butterflies and the soft glow of gold in Veilfire. “But, also… would you hit me again if I said… it felt right?”
“Felt right?” Zael barks, contempt and shock all rolled into one.
"Don't-- don't do it, I bruise easily!"
“I-- you were all I had.”
“Oh, come on, that’s not true. You have Rian and Nissa and Varric and Varric’s kids, and Morrigan and Wynne and Shale-- and the Wardens, whom I vividly remember spending eleven years warning you away from.”
“I vividly remember Inquisitor Lavellan telling me you volunteered to stay in the Fade.”
“Touche.”
“But, also,” something pings in Zael’s brain, something soft and small like a snag in silk, the echo of a mirror of the speech patterns he inherited from his father, “fuck you-- and you, too--,” he barely resists shoving a finger into the chest of the mother he never met, “--because you just fucking said I was born with the Blight in me. I had to be a Warden.” And all at once Zael feels really tired, because he’s just burnt through the next several years of his available emotional reservoir in about five minutes flat.
They fall into a silence that would be uncomfortable for any other family of misfit toys, or anyone vaguely in touch with their own emotions. Zael blinks through the yellow-tinged air.
“What do you mean, felt right?” he tries again, flatter this time.
“I-- well, I guess I don’t really know.” Alistair quails a little, eyes dropping down to look at Azazel, where his hands are idly running through her hair. “I wish Leliana were here. She was always better at explaining these… weird emotion things.”
“She was?!”
“But when Hawke came to me and asked me for help… I just felt like… this was the last thing I had to do. I’d already fought the Blight, and lost your mother, and raised you-- you were basically self-sufficient by the ripe old age of six, anyway.”
“Amazing what children can do when you don’t lock them in dog pens,” Azazel said.
“Hush, you. It built character. But, in any case. I felt when I stepped into the Fade that I… wouldn’t be going back out again.” He drops a kiss to the top of Azazel’s head-- she is so much shorter than him-- then looks at Zael and says, “I missed your mom, Zael.”
“I know, father. You said that a lot.” And he had, over the course of Zael’s childhood. But standing before them now, in the latent heat of Azazel’s burning wrath of whatever she’d become, and the way Alistair’s very presence calms it, Zael realizes he’d truly had no grasp on the depth of the void Azazel’s death had left in Alistair. It was like seeing his father as a fully-formed person for the first time.
“And, anyway,” Alistair pipes up again, “if I hadn’t left, where would you have gotten your daddy issues? You know, the ones that caused you to hook up with someone almost forty years older than you--,”
“I’m going to punch you again.”
“You needn’t bother,” Azazel says, stepping closer to Zael-- flames lick around her ears again, growing with every inch she moves away from Alistair-- “he was just leaving, anyway.”
The annoyance Zael felt at his father dissipated immediately, leaving him feeling bereft. “You are?”
“Well, you’re stuck in here, aren’t you?” Alistair sweeps a hand at the wide, gray nothing, falling back as he does. “Good luck saving the world from inside a prison built of regret.”
“Paper chains of aN INFLATED EGO,” Azazel says, grabbing the plate at Zael’s shoulders, hair burning into embers and floating away on an invisible wind, “A FOOLISH GOD’S FEEBLE ATTEMPT AT CONTROL HE LONG SINCE CEDED.”
“You’re going to need something a little stronger than fatherly love to bust out.” Alistair raised a hand in farewell. “You’ll do fine, kid. I believe in you. And I have a feeling we’ll see each other again, sooner rather than later.”
“WE WILL MAKE A MOCKERY OF THE DREAD WOLF’S POWER, AND DANCE AND LAUGH IN HIS SMOULDERING EMBERS.”
“Yeah, what she said. Love you, Zael.”
Zael’s breath catches in his chest, as Alistair’s form begins to shift and fade. His mother is eight foot tall and burning again, her head replaced with the facsimile of a ram’s, curling horns like flaming tapers; the emotion in Zael’s heart is being tampered by duty, once again. As it always will be.
As it was meant to be.
He looks in the black voids of his mother’s eyes as her wight leans over him, and thinks of the world she died to save; and where her clawed hands once cut him, now they solder him, reinforce him.
“Love you too, father,” he says, words carried away like ashes in the wind.
“GOOD. NOW WE WILL BE FREE. LET US CARVE THE WOLF FROM THE INSIDE OUT, THE FIERY WYRM AT THE CORE OF HIS ROTTEN HEART.” Azazel’s fire wreaths around him as Azazel turns away.
The gray ground begins to shimmer and shake. The gray walls of the prison warp and turn black, flaking like burning paper; the paths and the stones and the riddles smolder away as he walks through them, all the extra magic and the tricks and the hooks keeping him there melting and dripping away like droplets of quicksilver.
As they stride forward, burning the Dread Wolf’s prison down around them, Zael drops his head and embraces the flame. “Solas said he swapped places with me. But there’s more to it than that.”
“SOLAS!” his mother shrees, echoes of mocking laughter bouncing off the clouds of smoke. “HE CHOKES ON HIS OWN PRIDE SO AS HE TAKES IT FOR HIS NAME. WE WILL USE THE BONES OF THOSE SACRIFICED FOR HIS CRIMES TO CUT OUR WAY FROM THE BELLY OF HIS DELICATE REGRETS. THERE IS NO LAMENT STRONG ENOUGH TO HOLD BACK FURY.”
Heatwaves blur the air in front of them as Zael climbs up a path forming as they walk, the silver rock burning at the edges. “He tried to mould me into… something like him.”
“AND HE IS A FOOL. HE SEES US AS ANIMALS, NOT FIT FOR SAVING. BUT WE WILL SAVE OURSELVES. YOU ARE HIS SCAPEGOAT, ALIZAEL, BUT THIS GOAT HAS TEETH, AND HORNS, AND FIRE.”
“Solas said this prison was built to hold gods.” Zael is trying not to doubt the somewhat terrifying flame-covered wraith of his mother, the demon literally perched at his shoulder. “If anger was the answer, what was stopping them from burning their own way out?”
“HA! ANGER!” His mother shrieks, her voice the screaming hiss of exploding, burning Blight boils bursting under extreme heat. “THEIR ANGER IS AS CHILDREN WITH LOST TOYS. MINE WAS IMBIBED STRAIGHT FROM THE CHALICE, FED BY THE FLESH OF MY ALIENAGE, FUELED BY THE COUNTLESS SACRIFICES THEY FORCED ON ME. OURS IS THE FATE OF THE WORLD AND THE SAVING OF A PEOPLE WHO DO NOT DESERVE TO BE SAVED.”
“Not true. Bellara deserves to be saved. Harding deserved to be saved.”
“THE MERIT OF LIFE IS A FICTION. THEY MADE YOU THE CHAMPION OF A DYING WORLD AND PUT LIVES YOU DID NOT ASK FOR IN YOUR BLEEDING PALMS. THEY GAVE YOU A PATH THAT LEADS ONLY TO DEAD ENDS. YOU MUST MAKE YOUR OWN PATH.”
Bellara’s face, wrought in stone, appeared in a climbing pillar of flame.
“I’m sorry to make you sad. But I told you the enchantments were dangerous. You chose me anyway.”
Azazel reared up behind her.
“THEY LAID THE BLADE OF THEIR LIVES DOWN AT YOUR FEET AND THEN BALK WHEN YOU PICK IT UP. THEY HAVE GIVEN YOU A TOOL ALL THE SAME. USE IT.”
Zael regarded the statue of Bellara, embers crawling from her eyes like fiery tears; and whether he liked it or not, he was finding it ridiculously easy to see what his mother was trying to say.
“I’m not sad, Bellara. I’m angry. I’m not going to stay here and feel bad. I’m going to break out and find the people who hurt you and… burn them to the ground.”
“YES!!” His mother shrieked, as Bellara’s statue exploded into flying shrapnel. “FIND THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE NOOSE AT YOUR NECK. BURN THE WICK BACK TO THE FINGERS THAT LIT IT.” The world spun with heat and light and falling flame, and more stones rose into an array of a forward path. Zael strode forward again.
“You taught me it was okay to be angry,” Harding’s voice calls, now, from the whistle of the fire in his ears.
“THEY CARVED THE DREAMS FROM YOUR HEAD AND FED THEM TO US AS POISON.” Every time a statue of Harding manifested, his mother was behind it, draping over it as a stole of fire, white-hot flame licking at the feet of the stone. “MY WRATH IS THE WRATH OF THE TITANS. OUR WRATH IS THAT OF EVERY CHILD WITH NO STORIES OF ELVHEN HEROES.” Azazel appears before him. “ YOUR WRATH IS THAT WHICH MAKES YOU KILL FEAR.”
Maybe he imagines it, but there’s a slight pause, a hiccup in the very air. “...but that it shouldn’t destroy you,” Harding’s voice says, sounding, for all the world, slightly perturbed.
“A CORPSE CANNOT SPEAK ANY LONGER, AND SO HER WORDS MEAN NOTHING. IT WAS NOT HER ANGER WHAT DESTROYED HER." Zael can't, unfortunately, argue with that. "THERE CAN BE NO CREATION WITHOUT DESTRUCTION. WE WILL BURN THE VERY TREES THEY HUNG US FROM. OUR ANGER HAS SUSTAINED US AND WILL SUSTAIN US, STILL.”
Azazel steps back, form breaking around the final statue of Harding, blackened rib cage bracketing the dwarf like armor.
“I’m going to get out of here. Stop Elgar’nan. And stop Solas,” Zael says, searing his promise in the burning blood dripping from the points of his mother’s bones. “I’m going to make them regret ever crossing me.”
The ribcage constricts, and Harding’s statue shatters, as Bellara’s did. The path ahead is forged from flame. At the top of the stairs, there is a slash of light-- small, bright, and pale in comparison to the saturation of his mother’s fire. Zael climbs towards it. He doesn’t startle when the sound of familiar footsteps fall in stride with his own.
“Good job, kid,” Varric says. “Proud of you.”
Nearer the slip of light, at the top of the steps, Azazel appears next to Alistair, her flames diffuse in an instance.
“You know, I never did get to thank you,” Varric says, looking up at Alistair. “Your sacrifice gave me a few more good years with Hawke. With my kids.” He reaches out and grips Zael’s shoulder-- their uneven standing on the stairs puts them at a height with each other-- and squeezes.
“I never got to thank you,” Alistair echoes, arm going around Azazel’s waist. “Hawke gave me back the love of my life.”
Zael looks at Varric. He can’t muster the emotional wherewithal to be sad.
“I think I knew,” he says. “I think I knew this whole time.”
“Yeah, I think you did, too.” Varric shakes his shoulder a final time and steps away. “I think that’s why you didn’t need my help to get out of here.” He takes a place next to Alistair-- another father figure lost, and found, and lost-- and looks back at Zael.
“I’ll kill Solas for what he did to you.”
“Feed the dog his own heart !” Azazel says, shrill with glee (Alistair looks at her with unabashed fondness).
“Well, see, that’s why I’m here.” Varric slips his thumbs into his belt loops and smiles, sad. “To ask you not to kill him.”
“You can’t be fucking serious,” Zael deadpans.
“Not for my sake. For Rian. For the Inquisitor.”
Zael swallows down the vitriolic remark loaded in the back of his throat. He closes his eyes and his mother’s form is burnt into the blackness there.
"Rian helped raise you. Nissa is like a sibling to you,” Varric continues.
“So are Ripley and Beth,” Zael counters, watching Varric’s face twist with slight sorrow at the names of the children he will never hold, whole and physical, again.
“Right, but, what are you going to do about that? I’m already dead.” There’s a noise from off in the distance, like something ripping, tearing. Soft, like steps in snow, or ash. “Look, I can respect this whole… burning vengeance thing. But I like to think that not everybody has to end up miserable in this story.”
“Solas killed you. His friend. You tried to talk to him. To reason with him. And he cut you down.”
“Pretty sure he didn’t mean to.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re still dead.” Zael looked at his parents for help.
Azazel tilted her head, considering-- and, for the first time since Zael met her for the first time, not so long ago, looked perturbingly mortal. “If you kill the wolf he will be scattered to the winds across time… deliver him unto the Fade whole, instead. So that I may partake of his heart unceasingly.”
Alistair sighed, stroking her back with affection. “I remember when you talked about normal things.”
Zael fought back a roll of his eyes (because of course the first time his mother vouched for mercy would be when he disagreed with her).
“Just… remind him who he really is, okay?” Varric said, and there was that noise again, the ripping, the tearing, but closer this time. “He might just listen.”
“Fine. So, how do I get out of here?”
“Burn through the fabric of the worlds and make your presence known,” his mother said, flame spitting from her mouth.
"Listen to your team. Like you always do,” Varric suggested.
Alistair looked between them both, then stepped to the side. “Or, just, use the door?”
Because there, behind him, was one: pale wood and brass doorknob, with carvings of fire around the jamb. Voices were echoing from beyond it-- familiar ones.
“This way! It’s thinner here!”
Emmrich.
Zael’s chest hurt.
“I hate all of you,” he said, unable to fight the catch of affection hidden within, like a snare. His mother’s grin was maniacal, sharp canines and ember breath, while his fathers-- plural-- chuckled, and exchanged a knowing look.
The doorknob rattled as he reached out to turn it.
He stepped through a veil of fire into the color of the waiting world, and Emmrich’s arms.