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Cole sits above the gates, watching. The brim of his hat shades not just his eyes, but most of his face, giving him a covering veil of shadow behind which to hide his thoughts. His legs dangle over the edge, warmth of the sun-struck stone seeping in behind his knees and along his calves. Legs are a strange thing, he thinks; they don’t seem as though they ought to hold bodies up, like the slightest breeze should topple a person forward and back, and yet they don’t.
Skyhold is almost empty now, the nobles vanished back to their estates and the soldiers to their barracks, wherever those might be. There’s a strange feeling in Cole’s chest, as though he’s lost, but what it is he’s lost—or who has lost him—he doesn’t know. He feels hollowed out, like Skyhold itself, the furniture and trappings of the Inquisition removed from him, leaving bare spots in him, free of dust and oddly bright where the everyday parts of him are comfortably faded.
Even as he thinks it, another group of laughing people passes through the gate, carrying carved wooden chairs and overfilled chests and all manner of things the Inquisition needed once and is now shedding like a heavy coat in the spring sunlight. Skyhold is a shell, the Inquisition a living thing inside it, and Cole wonders—has this thing they’ve built died or only outgrown its home?
He wonders the same of himself. Would he know? Or would the Fade reclaim him, just as he is now, real and unreal merging and melding, a bright spark only he himself can see?
He hears a voice nearby—not spoken, but felt—and, moments later, a warm presence touches his. He knows this one, worn and weary, all threaded through in gold and blue.
Cullen comes to stand beside him as though taking up a post. It fits, Cole thinks, like the armour he still wears even now. The Inquisition may no longer be responsible for holding up the sky, but Cole knows that, as long as there is a sky, Cullen will carry it on his shoulders.
“This must feel very different,” says Cullen with a smile, weak and wistful, and Cole knows he doesn’t mean it. Or at least, if he means it, he doesn’t realize. It’s a thrown rope, a bridge, something Cullen says only so that he can say another thing, a bigger thing, like each thought he has is transparent and only by layering enough of them over one another can he make them real.
Cole understands the feeling. He, too, is often transparent, layering himself into thoughts and feelings until he becomes real.
“Feels like fading,” Cole says thoughtfully. “Like finishing, but the sky doesn’t end.”
Cullen blinks. Cole is expecting a question, or perhaps to be asked to speak about something else, but neither comes. Instead, Cullen asks, “What will you do?”
Cole doesn’t think that way, in lines of time and truth and intent. The question brings with it a sense of the ephemeral, as though anything Cole says will be true for this moment only and, in the next, he might be anything, anywhere. Right now, the warm stone tethers him to the earth, drawing his roots down into the depths of Skyhold’s history, until they reach the place where what he was and what he is diverge. If he lets go…
“I don’t know,” he says, because it’s true and because he doesn’t understand the question and because he knows that Cullen, too, is searching for a tether.
For those who have joined the Inquisition along its journey, this is natural—a shift, a change, from one world to the next—and their departure is as much joy as it is sorrow. Cullen is not one of them. As far as any man can be, Cullen is the Inquisition—more than those who began it, more even than the Inquisitor who led it. Each person who enters Skyhold’s gates becomes Cullen’s responsibility and each person who leaves is a stone pulled from his foundation. Who will he be when all the stones have been taken?
The smile on Cullen’s face becomes softer, more genuine. “Neither do I.”
Cole says, “It’s lonely.”
“What is?”
“Leaving,” says Cole. “Losing, looking forward, looking for something new. It starts so small and finishes just the same. Was it ever more?”
Cullen sits down beside him, letting the stones’ stored sun warm him, ground him. It’s a rare gesture from someone built to stand tall, a precious thing because it means.
“What do you think?” Cullen asks and means that, too.
Cole looks at him, searching. In many ways, he and Cullen are the same—formed in fire, faded in flame, until they were forgotten. Where there is neither peace nor purpose, Cullen finds one and Cole the other. But is that all they are?
His question echoes back to him. Was it ever more? Were they?
“I think,” he says, and looks deeper, climbing the walls Cullen has built—and everything, to him, is a keep, a tower, a cage—not to enter, but to sit on them and warm himself in the pale sun. There’s an answer there, not his own and perhaps not Cullen’s either, but it’s something Cullen has kept here nonetheless and that makes it matter. “I deserve a happy ending.”
He understands it better then, hearing it the way Cullen does. Not a folk tale, not a song, not a story that follows rules that should be instead of the ones that are. Just an ending that asks nothing of Cullen, that doesn’t leave him whole but hollow, a lantern in late autumn.
Cullen says, “We all do.”
“What happens?” Cole asks. “In a happy ending?”
“Well,” Cullen says, “I suppose that depends on you.”
Cole says, “What’s yours?”
Cullen’s answer is silent, a lance through the weak light. It’s hungry, haunting, this thing inside him, laughing and longing, the ghost of an old song hidden behind a smile. He knows the old song, even if he doesn’t know it; Cole can hear it sometimes, in his mind, in his bones. Cullen tries hard to forget, so Cole doesn’t talk about it.
Instead, he says, “Skyhold is different now.”
Cullen says softly, “It must be strange, not hearing everyone and everything at once.”
“It was made for great deeds,” says Cole. “Great and terrible and necessary. But it’s not that anymore.”
It isn’t only the fortress Cole is talking about.
“It’s almost empty now,” says Cullen thoughtfully.
Cole tilts his head as if listening to a sound beyond the edge of hearing. “Some of them are still here,” he says. “Some of them want to stay.”
The shape of Cullen’s thoughts shifts at that—a lake, a dock, the quiet darkness. Sanctuary. He doesn’t say the word. Cullen wouldn’t want him to; it would crack the fragile shell that surrounds this peaceful place inside him and let the world claim it, like everything else. But Cole knows—has always known—the silhouette of Cullen’s hurt, sharp-edged and severe, held inside himself so that the cuts bleed only where no one can see.
You could stay here, he thinks, but it’s the wrong answer. It won’t fix the hurt; it will make it worse, because Cullen’s one uncompromising truth is that what he wants and what he can have are always separated, two constellations reaching for one another across an empty sky.
Cullen reminds him of another man—not the templar, but the mage; the first, failed, feared. Like him, Cullen has the old song in his blood, not by birth, but by necessity. Like him, Cullen has been filed away, forgotten, freed from one prison to fill another. Like him, Cullen has wounds that bleed, and bleed, and bleed, and never heal.
When they met, Cullen would not have thanked Cole for the comparison. Today, he might understand.
“This is a refuge now,” he says, speaking to the mage in his memories, to the soldier at his side. “It needs protection.”
Cullen says, “You think people will stay even when the Inquisition…?”
Cole hums. “Lingering, longing,” he says. “Last and lost, but they found something here. It can be safe. You could make it safe.”
“Skyhold doesn’t need me,” Cullen says. “I’m a soldier without a war, Cole.” It isn’t said with sadness or self-pity, only resignation, threadbare and comfortingly familiar, like the mantle that covers his armour.
“You could be something else,” says Cole quietly. “I was.”
“I don’t think it’s that easy.”
A group of Cullen’s recruits passes under them, almost in formation, but not quite; for a moment, it’s like they’re going to war, shields raised and muscles taut, but then they pile the shields on a waiting cart and turn back, unprotected. Cullen sits up a little straighter as he watches them, and Cole wonders—does he know he has already changed? The soldier fits him well, but Cole can see the way the outline of it settles around him, can see it’s something he wears, not something he is. Not anymore.
Cole says, “I could show you.”
Cullen looks at him and there’s a long moment of silence. Time moves in lines here, but Cole feels for a moment like if he reaches out, the Cullen he touches will be the one that arrived here so many months ago, hopeful and frightened and hurting and needing and standing so far, so far away from everyone else in the middle of the courtyard, in the middle of the crowd. Cole found him then, too, but the walls were too high, the sun too fierce, everything old and far away and edged in furious blue.
He could be something else. They both could.
“Will you stay?” Cullen asks him. “At Skyhold.”
Cole says, “I can help here.” It’s a question, even if it doesn’t sound like one, because nothing is as sure as it should be, because these are the times when this world is like the other, shifting and shining, ready to be shaped. This is a fortress, but its gates are open and unguarded. It could be something else.
Cullen says, “Then perhaps I can, too.”
Is this a happy ending? Cole wonders, soft and sun-gold. Is it enough?
He knows there are no answers for questions like these. He knows there are hurts too old, too important, for him to change. But right now, beside him, Cullen is warmer, somehow, brighter, solid enough to stay.
It’s a beginning.
Cole thinks most endings are.