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Chapter Text

When I awoke, my body felt trampled—as if a million horses had used me for a road. Then I felt the cold jagged flagstone pressed into my knees. I remember shifting my weight experimentally, and there was the clink-a-clank of heavy chain sliding against heavy mage-shackles, which explained the heavy weight I was beginning to feel on wrist and ankle, and why when I searched inside for my wellspring of rage, it wasn’t there. And then, finally, I became aware of the pain, and that the stifled whimper in the background was my own.

The pain pulsed, keeping time with my heart—or was it that my heart was forced to beat in time with the pain? My entire left arm seemed to be aflame, and not in a good way. It pulsed and rippled and pulled at me, a phantom force trying to draw me to… something. I didn’t know what.

Then a cold, armoured hand came down upon my shoulder, grasped it, and shook it, hard. I groaned, but refused to open my eyes. I remember thinking that if existing was going to hurt this much, then I didn’t want to exist.

“She’s awake,” said a voice, then. A man’s. Fereldan accent. Rough, weary, cold, and…

My eyes snapped open.

… Familiar.

Cullen?

Fear, immediate, crashed over me. I remember observing that I should already have been afraid. Chained, helpless, disoriented, bereft of my rage, experiencing excruciating pain and phantom forces and all that... But actually, for me, only one of these was a novel experience. Which, I supposed, said something unfortunate about me.

But now that I knew who it was that had me chained, helpless, disoriented, bereft of my rage, experiencing excruciating pain and phantom forces and all that, I was very, very afraid. Now I knew they—Templars, probably—planned to kill me.

He came into focus as I blinked my eyes against prison light too dim to make out anything, yet too bright for me; and for the first time in a million years, I saw him. Golden hair, a little longer now, tamer than it had been. Shoulders, broad and draped with furs, filled-out since his youth. Armed with a broadsword, as always. In fact, I thought it might be the same broadsword. Did swords last entire decades?

I blinked as he turned toward me. He wasn’t wearing his armour. By which I supposed I meant that he wasn’t wearing his Templar armour. He was wearing something, and it was armour, but it wasn’t his armour. I braced myself as he made eye contact…

And showed absolutely no sign of recognition.

His gaze shifted ever-so-slightly, as if he were gazing through me rather than at me. And I remember feeling crushed. Absolutely crushed. Here was a man who once and still had such an impact on my mind, my nightmares, my identity; and he clearly had no idea who I was.

Beyond him, a heavy door, reinforced, swung open and then shut. Two women entered, and that crushed feeling deep within me began to turn into something else.

“Good,” replied one of them. Nevarran accent. Armoured in black with an imposingly open eye blazoned upon her chest. “We will re-join you by the Breach, Commander.”

The what-now?

As if to reply, the pain flared from red to white, and I screamed. My left arm—no, my left hand—had something on it—in it?—glowing an ominous and writhing green, dripping viridian embers on the floor beside me. I screamed again, and clenched my fist tight around the offender.

By the time I’d regained my coherence, Cullen was gone, and in his place stood these two women. Silently watching, and waiting.

~~~

The one who hadn’t spoken yet stepped forward, cold voice dripping with venom. There was shadows moving in her wake, clinging to her footsteps, peeling off the floor. “Tell us why we shouldn’t kill you now,” she commanded. Orlesian accent. It was a multicultural bunch, I’d give them that.

“Um,” my voice came out as a squeak. I coughed and tried again. “Why, um... should you?”

"Divine Justinia is dead!" The Nevarran snarled, lunging forward, and roughly grabbed my wrist, shoving my own glowing fist toward me, "explain this!"

I refused to open my hand and face the strange something in my palm, so I ended up punching myself. In the face.

“We need her, Cassandra!” The Orlesian swept forward and grasped her companion by the shoulders, pulling her off me.

“I can’t,” I replied, scrunching my face around to relieve the sting of a bruised nose. “Explain, I mean. I don’t know what that is, or how it got there. And what do you mean, the Divine is... dead?”

The Nevarran—Cassandra—scoffed again and rolled her shoulders in a way I found unnerving, shrugging off the other woman. She turned to her. “Go to the forward camp, Sister Nightingale. We will meet you there.”

And then the Orlesian—Nightingale—was gone, and it was just me and this woman, who’d just implicitly accused me of murdering her pontiff, and made me punch myself. By accident. Probably.

~~~

It wasn’t until we’d left Haven and gotten halfway down the main trail to the temple that I dared to open my fist. Unfortunately, the glowy thing was still there, and I still didn’t know what it was. Other than what Cassandra had explained to me, which was that it was connected to the Breach—that was the giant demon-belching hole in the sky that we were on our way to check out nice’n’close—and that it was slowly killing me. Which was not much information at all... I could have figured all of that out myself, just by looking up and remembering the pain that I was in.

The green mark twisted and shifted under my skin, sometimes a light, sometimes a shadow, sputtering with instability and occasionally popping through the surface of my palm as if to say hello. When it did that, it shuddered green sparks onto the snow that sizzled. It seemed almost alive, and when I felt that phantom force—drawing me, as it turned out, toward the Breach—it spasmed and clawed desperately to follow it.

To say that I was disturbed would be an understatement.

There are some things you experience that you forget, because you must, because to remember them will drive you mad. And other experiences you never forget though you wish you could. The first time I faced a demon, unarmed and cut off from my rage by mage-shackles, is one of the later.

I remember studying this twisting, roiling mark as we crossed the bridge, wishing I could close and open my fist and find it miraculously disappeared. I even gave it a few more tries for good measure. And then suddenly, a loud boom, and a horribly crumbling rumble, and I was tumbling alongside rock and dust and grit. I hit an icy hard surface with a concerning crunch-and-crackle, and I realized that I was on the frozen river’s surface, and that the ice was somewhere between thin and thick.

At first, I didn’t stand, because as any good Fereldan lassie knows, you don’t stand up on ice that’s somewhere between thin and thick. You belly slide. But before I had gathered the wherewithal to start dragging myself to shore, a dark shadow bloomed under the ice beneath me. Not unlike the mark in my hand, it roiled and twisted, then sputtered through the frozen river's surface to say hello, and I screamed, slapping it away from my face with shackled hands and scrabbling away as fast as I could.

I heard the ring of steel being freed, and Cassandra’s voice bellowed, “Stay behind me!”

But the fool was standing up, on ice somewhere between thin and thick. And then charging, on ice somewhere between thin and thick. Oblivious to my Fereldan sensibilities, she collided full-speed into the demon, just as it finished clawing its way through the ice. But behind her, another shadow had begun to move. It broke free of the frozen surface and fixed its many, many eyes upon her back.

I remember thinking that I was becoming a Nevarran idiot, as I surged up to my feet and charged across the ice toward it. I raised my shackled hands up high, and just before I collided with it, I threw their heavy weight up and over what passed for its head, thrust my feet forward and my shoulders back. We tumbled backward into a heap, demon on top of me, my shackles pressing into what would have been its throat had it had a throat. I was looking at the back of its head, then I blinked and I was staring straight into a gaping maw.

I shrieked and jerked my knee up into it, and then around, managing somehow with a strength born of desperation to flip us over so that I was on top, straddling it, but nowhere near in control. Its many arms were tearing at me, lacerations opening up my shoulders. I remember beating my heavy shackles into its face, watching as it evaporated and reformed around my strikes.

What saved me was the realization that my shackles suppressed not only my rage, but the very existence of my adversary, and I thrust my arms into its mouth, pressing all the way down to the ice, then ripped up and down and over and out. Which, in retrospect, was a really bad idea. But hey, it worked, and I’m alive, so…

Anyway, I ripped it apart from the inside. And then I knelt there like an idiot until Cassandra hauled me to my feet and swung me around by my lacerated shoulders so she could glare daggers into my eyes.

“I told you to stay behind me!” She hissed. Then, abruptly, she released my shoulders, gloves coming away with blood on them, dark eyes hard and unreadable. “You’re half dead,” she observed.

“I did stay behind you,” I spat back, feeling the tiniest flare of my rage, mage-shackles be damned. “It wanted to take a bite out of your butt! Besides,” I took a deep breath and pulled my rage back into my core, “half dead is better than full dead. So let’s get off the ice.”

It took every ounce of my willpower to neither run, nor belly flop, my way off that river that wasn’t frozen quite as thick as I would have liked.

~~~

I noticed, after that, that my shackles had weakened. It seemed that using them to rip apart a demon resulted in a lovely shade of wear and tear on their enchantments. Which explained why I could feel my rage returning, in an ever-so-quiet trickle. I, of course, kept this to myself.

And of course, every time we fought demons on our way to the forward camp, I found an excuse to stick my wrists into their jaws. Cassandra was not pleased. Nor were my shoulders, nor my sides, nor any other part of my body, really. But I didn’t care, because the only thing that really mattered was regaining my rage and filling the emptiness its absence left inside.

By the time we reached the forward camp, I was feeling much more like myself. We’d also picked up a Solas and a Varric, neither of whom seemed much pleased with my wrists-into-mouth strategy, either. But at least where Solas and Cassandra seemed fixated on preserving the mark living in my hand from a demon’s hungry jaws, Varric seemed more concerned that I would be eaten alive. Which I remember thinking was a very sweet, if very misplaced, concern.

Because, as I said, by the time we reached the forward camp, I was feeling much more like myself. Which meant that when the Chantry chancellor named Roderick suggested that, despite all the hard work we had all just done to get me up to the forward camp, we should turn around and march back down to Orlais so that the Templars could execute me, I seriously considered eating him alive.

But that would have been gross, and likely morally wrong. So I didn’t.

~~~

“We need to get her closer to the Breach,” Cassandra stated.

“That is obvious, Cassandra,” Nightingale replied, dryly. “The question is, how.”

The Seeker—I’d learned from Chancellor Roderick’s barbs that Cassandra could also be called ‘Seeker Pentaghast’—bristled at that. “Our soldiers,” she answered, stonily. “They clear the approach. We ensure her safe arrival.”

I scoffed. I no longer felt a need to contain it. They ignored me.

“Or,” Nightingale replied, unruffled, “the soldiers charge as a distraction, while we take the mountain path.” She gestured toward an icy pass.

Hell naw, I thought, inside. And then out loud, I said, “No.”

They both turned and looked down at me perched haphazardly on my half-crushed supply crate. Their eyebrows rose so high that I wondered if they’d lose them. Clearly, I’d interrupted a conversation to which I had not been invited.

But I had been thinking. A lot. Call it brooding in the shadow of the Breach. And though I recognized that I had been brought here as a prisoner and an instrument, without a single thought given to my rights as a person, I nevertheless recognized that I had a purpose in this moment. I was an instrument. Of what, I did not know; but I was carrying a strange glowing light within me that seemed almost alive, helped me close rifts, and clearly wanted to return to the Breach.

I would take it there. Because, why not? Besides, if I didn’t close the hole in the sky, apparently nobody would, and it would swallow the world whole, and that would be bad.

But I had also ruminated myself into a bit of a martyrdom complex by this point. You see, I thought that closing the Breach would kill me. So I had decided that I didn’t need soldiers to fight and die on my behalf. Not as a distraction, not as the bulwark. I’d been watching them. They were too young—and inexperienced—for that. As backup, I had decided, would be acceptable.

I stood up, stepped toward the two woman who had been discussing my fate, and held out my shackled wrists.

“Unbind me. Now.”

In retrospect, it was an entirely undiplomatic way of phrasing my request. It probably had them immediately convinced I was about to run for the hills. Which was technically true, but only because the Breach was on top of a hill. And I am not a diplomat.

In any case, nobody moved. I sighed, and kept walking, past them and toward the rows of soldiers, who were waiting for an order to charge. Cullen, at their fore, waiting patiently for a signal to give an order to charge. His presence initiated a familiar twinge of fear. I felt, rather than saw, Varric, then Nightingale and the Seeker, then Solas move to follow me. Perhaps to restrain me.

But I kept walking, not slowing as I reached the soldiers, weaving through them as I made my way to the front. It was actually Cullen who nearly caught me as I stepped clear of them, onto the pristine snow between us and the Temple of Sacred Ashes, where a Breach was waiting for my strange little green passenger, not-so-patiently.

He started to say something—I’m not sure what—and his gloved hand reached out for my shoulder, but before it could make contact…

I reached deep inside myself, deep into my wellspring of liquid rage, and pulled it into my shackles.

Shattered chunks of red-hot iron sizzled into the snow at my feet, and I took off at a run, charging up the mountainside, feeling free and, finally—mostly—me.

Chapter Text

It was a furious battle to get to the Breach. Lucky for me, everyone else did in fact follow me ‘into the hills’. There had been an awkward moment where I wondered if they’d actually let me charge off into the sunset to die an ignominious and entirely useless death. Then their battlecry shook the mountain, and I became more worried about the rising risk of avalanche.

Certainly when I had woken up that morning, I hadn’t been expecting to lead those imprisoning me in a battle charge up a mountain. But of all the things that happened on that day, I think what amazed me most was the first time I actually closed a fade rift.

It was well before we risked everything in an all-or-nothing charge unto the Breach, of course. On our way to the forward camp. Which meant that the only witnesses were Cassandra and Varric and Solas. Which means that we already know that the three of them will have their own, inconsistent versions of the story. Which means that I can tell you anything I damn well please.

But I’ll settle for the truth, because the truth was wonderful enough. And you’ll just have to trust me.

I felt the rift well before we got there, and as we approached I also began to hear the sounds of furious battle. Cassandra and I crested the ridge, and that was the first time I saw Varric and Solas. Varric’s crossbow was singing, and Solas’ level of magical precision was something to weep tears of joy over. I was faster, even, than Cassandra, charging into the fray, eager to get my shackled hands into another demon’s mouth.

As I barreled into the tangle of shadow and teeth that was a demon, and pummeled my shackled wrists into its face, I became aware that the grey-robed elf, whose name I didn’t yet know, was working his way closer to me, feet weaving steadily toward me. I hadn’t regained true access to my rage yet, but even then, I was fire, explosive and unconstrained, and he was lighting, focused and deadly.

My demon was probably the last to die, and without a moment to spare, the elf was upon me, hand on my wrist without asking, sweeping my gory hands up toward the rift.

A conduit of green fire flared into being between my little passenger—the green mark on my hand—and the tear in the veil.

“Close it,” demanded the elf.

I glared at him, even though I truly did want to close it, and snapped, “And how do you suggest…”

And that was when the layered voice burst into my mind for the first time. A trinity of vaguely female voices, repeating the elf’s command, but more gently, and with love, and in different words.

Pierce it. Bind it. Mend it. They—she?—said.

I think my jaw went slack, as I repeated, How..?

You carry the Needle. Pierce it.

You carry the Loomstone. Bind it.

You carry the Thread. Mend it.

A multitude of images were flooding my sight, and I simply do not know how to describe it. It was as if these concepts, and others, all superimposed yet crystal clear, were being delivered directly into my mind. Ways of piercing and binding and mending and closing and fusing and merging and loving and dying and… everything, everywhere, all at once, and yet perfectly crystal clear.

Yes. The triune voice encouraged me.

I remember closing my eyes and reaching out with my mind to the rift sputtering above me, feeling the contours of its sharp, broken edges, as if my own fingers were gently tracing this wound in the world. And as I did, I felt the horrible, awful, despairing curiousity bleeding through from the other side. It didn’t want to destroy. It didn’t want to kill. But it was desperately curious.

Once, when I was a little girl, I had shattered a vase into pieces, because I desperately wanted to know if I would be able to put it back together. And when Ashalle had found me, sitting there on the dirt floor of our little shed, I was surrounded by the little fragments of clay, bawling my little blue eyes out. Because I hadn’t meant to destroy the vase; I had only wanted to learn how to fix it.

Ashalle had taken one look at me, and at the shards, and had swept down into a crouch and pulled me into her warm lap. “It’s alright, da’lan,” she’d said.

        “It’s alright, da’lin,” I said.

“Ar’an saron ladana, da’lan,” she had said.

        “Ar’an saron ladana, da’lin,” I said.

“We will fix it.” And together, with painstaking care, we had pieced the broken vase back together. We had painted the mended cracks black with kohl, and agreed that they made the vase all the more beautiful.

I let my hand and fingers splay open, and I imagined picking up the broken pieces of the veil and piecing them together with painstaking care, moving them and shifting them, making sure they fit just right. In the end, I painted the mended cracks green with Fade-fire. And then, the rift was shut.

When I opened my eyes and lowered my shackled arms, a beautiful tapestry of mended cracks glowed above me, fading slowly into the clearing sky. The living light in my hand gave off a pulse that seemed... happy? And I smiled, for the first time in a million years.

It was beautiful, but it did take something from me, and I sagged into Solas at my side. And I remember that when he looked down at me and I at him, he looked stricken and utterly devastated, and I didn’t know why.

I expect that, for my part, I probably looked equal parts enamoured (with the rift) and annoyed (with him).

You see, I’m not one for sagging into unknown men who grab my wrists like they aren’t mine.

~~~

So there we were, charging a Breach. And, honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be. With my rage unleashed, I simply set my sights on the nearest cluster of demons and streaked ahead to engage.

I say ‘streaked ahead’, because if you’ve seen me fight, truly fight, you know that somewhere between the forward camp and the entrance to the temple, I reached deep inside myself for liquid rage and cloaked myself in flame. I wasn’t pulling any stops because, remember, I’d chosen the way of martyrdom. This was a one-way trip. My goal was to become a ballistic bolt that, on its way to the Breach, knocked as many demons off-balance and off-kilter as possible, so that when backup arrived they would face the least organized resistance I could muster.

I took the main steps to what should have been the temple entrance in twos, and raged at the destruction. It had been a beautiful archway when last I’d walked through it, flanked by my sisters in magic and hoping for peace. There had been reliefs of pilgrims journeying to pay Andraste homage in the stonework. All gone, now.

There was a rift ahead, and I crashed through three demons on my way to it, howling like a wraith. The first one actually disintegrated on impact. The other two were knocked aside. I skidded to a stop beneath the wound and reached for it. When it came, the force of the connection thrust me back several paces, heels leaving streaks in muddy snow.

Loneliness crashed over me, taking my breath away, doubling me over inside. It was unbearable, and so real, and so much my own, coloured with anger.

Before Ashalle and I lived in that little shed with the dirt floor, we were part of Clan Sabrae. I would wake every morning feeling loved and cherished, not only by my guardian, but by each and every adult in the clan. Not that the Dalish were always angelic; they’re mortals just like everybody else. But it’s a cultural thing. Children of one were children of all.

And yet all of that changed, the first time I set myself on fire.

It had certainly been an accident. It had also certainly been amazing. The feeling of being cradled and embraced by living fire was so beautiful that it shocked me right out of feeling furious (that stupid boy had stolen my favourite wooden halla, again) into bubbling over with joy. I remember laughing with delight and running straight to Ashalle, totally nude apart from the fire that had burnt my clothes off, to show her. She’d cooed over me from a safe distance and called me beautiful, and lovingly said to me, “Let me know when you’re done burning, da’lan, and I will give you a hug!”

But by that evening, I had realized that something was wrong with the Clan, and that the way people watched me had changed. The next day, they led me deep into the wood, and abandoned me.

Ashalle hadn’t found me until several days later, I think. She found me shivering with cold, hiding from the rain in the hollow of a rotting-out stump. Her voice was hoarse from calling out for me in the wilderness, and she started sobbing when she saw me, which I’d never seen her do before. At first, it had been alarming.

But she’d swept me out of that rotting stump and into her arms, ignoring the moths that fluttered away as she pulled me free. She tugged me out of my wet clothes and into something wonderfully dry, wrapped me up in her cloak and held me like she would place entire worlds between me and danger if she had to. Instead of cold rain, warm tears caressed my forehead, washing my fears away and making me, for the moment, safe.

I wept my tears into the rift. Imagined streams of gentle warmth coursing from my eyes, down my arm, along my fingers, travelling up to caress this tear in the veil. Imagined it cleansing the wound, and filling it with comfort. My living mark hummed with contentment.

I opened my eyes, and watched the last green drop drip upward from my fingertip into a sideways lake of hovering Fade-fire. I felt the rift close. Watched the lake shimmer away into nothingness…

… And was knocked off my feet by a flash of shadow and limbs.

We tumbled into the snow, several of its arms wrapped around me, me wondering what demon would taste like if I sunk my teeth into its shoulder-thing. Instead, I reached inside and pulled rage to the surface, relishing the demon’s shriek as it suddenly came skin-to-skin with fire. Still, it would not let go.

I put my hand to its face and reached again into my liquid wellspring, teasing out wires of molten iron, thrusting them through my fingertips, red-hot claw-blades sinking into demon flesh. I ripped it off of me, following up with a haphazard glob of hurled fire as it reeled away. It crumbled into charred ashes, black viscera in the muddy snow.

~~~

Gross, is the eloquent thought I had, as I let go of my rage and let myself catch my breath. My heat had melted through layers of ice and snow, and my elbows were digging into temple flagstone. I groaned and let my head roll back…

… And there was Cassandra, looking down at me, with a mixture of bemusement and concern. I immediately summoned my rage again. It was the only clothing I had left.

“You fight like a madwoman,” she said. It was an observation more than it was a judgment.

“Thank you,” I replied, accepting her offered hand and letting her help pull me to my feet. “I think.”

And yes, I did de-flamify my hand before taking hers, thank you very much. I’m a professional firebrand.

Anyway, her solemn lips twitched, and I thought she might be smiling. Behind her stood Varric and Solas and... well. Everyone else. It was halfsies split between who was staring and who was averting their gaze. Cullen was one of the later. Apparently they'd caught up just in time to watch me decapitate a demon with my bare, flaming hands, then lapse into the flame-less nude. Lovely.

But I wasn't done. I still had plenty of ballistic bolt left in me.

"Let's go," I said, and this time, they didn't try to stop me. This time when I burst into motion, Divine Justinia's holy army had my back.

~~~

When we reached what should have been the temple's atrium, I skidded to a stop and put my hands on my hips.

"Alright," I called back, turning to face Justinia's holy horde. "Which one of you has a brilliant plan to get me up there?" I gestured up at the hole in the sky. The Breach.

You could have heard a pin drop. I wondered if they had all expected me to simply levitate myself into the sky? Eventually, Solas stepped into that awkward moment.

"No," he said, shaking his head, walking forward. There was no plan. "But the rift below is the one you fell from, and it seems to be in resonance with the Breach above."

I groaned and turned away, walking up to the railing and surveying what had once been a beautiful internal courtyard, polished granite and holy fountains galore. There had been beautiful morning glories winding their flowering way up every single intricately-carved column, tenderly placed there and cared for by the Sisters who called Andraste's final resting place their monastery.

All dead, all gone, replaced with jagged outcrops, fallen stonework, demons, and the mother-of-all-rifts. Its resonance with the Breach pressed into me, first pushing me away, then drawing me in. Its roar filled my ears.

"They can't feel us, this close to the mother-rift," I observed, as Solas came to join me. Cassandra stepped to flank me, and I clarified. "The demons. The mother-rift is so loud, and heavy."

They looked at me like I had sprouted a second head.

"The air is very still here," Cassandra finally contradicted me, "and utterly silent."

"Oh," I replied. "Then I-.."

Solas interrupted me. "This rift is closed, but improperly. It may be the case that if we re-open it, we can seal it again, properly this time."

"And perhaps we close the Breach," Cassandra nodded.

"That means more demons," I observed.

"Yes," Nightingale's voice snuck up on me from behind. "We will be ready." Her voice was already in retreat, and when I turned all I saw were the shadows that swirled in her wake.

To cut a long story short, we charged in there. Everyone got to hear the Divine Justinia, now dead, call out to me for help, pinned in place by something demonic, preparing to tear her head off, or something to that effect. It was a moment in time pulled out of place and deposited before us for our entertainment.

Highly disturbing entertainment. But they decided that, actually, it hadn’t been me who’d killed the Divine, after all.

Then they got to watch me barrel through our enemies, fire-cloaked and lethal. That made for fluffier viewing, in my personal opinion.

I slid into a crouch beneath the mother-rift and looked up, chest heaving. The thing was huge, and I could feel it bearing down on me, crushing me. In every direction, the former-courtyard had dissolved into chaos. Holy horde against demon horde. Solas tracing glowing sigils in the air, and Sister Nightingale wielding throwing stars and katana with deadly grace. Varric's crossbow cranking bolt after bolt into place. Arrows streaming down from snipers stationed up above. Cullen calling on the Maker as he slashed with one arm and hauled a wounded soldier with the other. Cassandra pounding her breastplate with gloved fists as she challenged a fiend to have at her.

I closed my eyes, offered up a prayer to whomever was listening, and—anchoring my claw-blades deeply into courtyard rubble—opened myself to the mother-rift, and it to me.

~~~

The rush of power, and paralysis, was immediate. Every joint in my body locked up. Every bone screamed. And, just my luck, a giant demon popped out of the Fade, straight out of the birth canal and practically into my face.

I was frozen. Nothing, physically, that I could do. Totally exposed, trapped in the grasp of this demon's mother. I couldn't even scream.

I dove into the space between moments. Watched the world slow. The giant lazily turned around, slowly ever-so-slowly coming to face me. Its claws extending, mouth opening wide.

I dove deep within myself, to my wellspring of rage. Coiled like a spool of red-hot wire, it was still there. But surrounding it, cradling it, bathing it... Was something new. A new pool, of liquid Fade-fire, concentrated at my core and in the living mark that flared, trapped yet permeating every fiber of my being, and connected to the mother-rift above.

Take it. Guide it. Channel it.

The triune voice had returned.

How..?

Images began to flood my mind again, but with my concentration broken the demon slammed into me, reeling back from the impact as if I were more solid than iron or stone, and I was entirely unable to react. Motionless and frozen as I must have appeared, being body-slammed by a giant demon still bloody-well hurt.

Another body-slam would kill me. Any time for thinking or guidance was over, the space between moments gone. Holy Mother of God, I prayed, Holy Creators and Sanctifiers, I brought my attention back to my new Fade-fire core. Imagined reaching with one hand to receive from the mother-rift, and with the other to give to the demon.

Let me be your holy garden hose of victory!

I was mostly joking. But the imagery did it.

Fade-fire poured through me, pulling as much as I could take from the mother-rift, pouring as much as I could give into the demon. I watched it shudder and glow green from within as Fade-fire filled it up, too much for even its demonic form to handle. I watched it explode into a hundred smoking pieces of well-done demon flesh, scattered across the battlefield.

I immediately severed both connections. I stopped giving to the non-existent giant, and I stopped taking from the mother-rift. I took shears to the garden hose that linked me to the Fade and snipped it, letting it fall to the ground. I seared the mother-rift shut with pure heat, Fade-fire and flaming rage bearing up on it together.

Sealing the mother-rift was not at all gentle, like how I had done the others. There was nothing loving about what I did to her. Every rift is different, and the mother-rift was an aggressor to be put down, locked away for good. I forced her shut with iron and fused metal-to-metal with rage. Bar-by-bar, I built a cage.

And when that was done, the mother-rift had shut.

But every fibre of my being still screamed. Suddenly, I was no longer a holy garden hose, but rather a holy water balloon about to burst. I needed somewhere for the power to go, and I began to draw molten wires of Fade-fire out of me, out through every inch of my skin. I sent them questing, writhing through the courtyard for sanctioned targets, and into each one I found I poured everything I could directly into its shrieking shadowy form, tearing it apart from within.

And when I lost consciousness and released the rest, my shockwave reached all the way to Haven.

Chapter Text

The silence is the first thing she notices.

Not the good kind, not the soft hush of snowfall or the sigh of a sleeping forest—this silence rings like a bell struck in reverse, hollow and deafening. It presses at the inside of her skull, thick and cold.

She opens her eyes to find herself standing barefoot on the fractured floor of Kinloch Hold, or something that once pretended to be it. The air smells of stagnant lyrium and smoldered parchment. The high arches above her are cracked open, but the sky beyond them is not sky at all—just endless black, like the Fade gave up pretending.

Underfoot, the stone tiles are not just broken, they are mirrored. Dozens of shattered panes reflecting moonless moonlight in shards, and more unsettling still: each mirror reflects a different version of herself.

One is blood-soaked, eyes purple with rage.
One kneels in Templar chains, her magic gone.
One wears Keeper’s leathers, her vallas’lin unbroken and glowing like emerald fire.
One looks like the girl she once was, hiding behind Ashalle’s skirts.

All of them are whispering without moving their lips, but she cannot hear the words at first; she can only hear their tone. Accusation. Grief. Awe. Fear. And then they speak in unison, lips motionless, voices twisting together like smoke.

You burned too hot to be held… and we all paid the price...

The air shifts, weightless and dangerous, like a fire about to flash to life, and she turns, instinctively, the way a wounded animal does—no thoughts yet, just movement. Feet slap bare against mirror-glass and cracked stone as she flees through one of Kinloch’s broken archways. There should be stairs there, and a hallway she remembers from years of pacing it, trailing Wynne’s lectures in the air behind her like incense.

But the hallway isn’t there.

Instead, the moment she steps through the arch, she finds herself back inside the hall again, standing once more in the center of the mirrored floor.

And now, more reflections have gathered, dozens of them, filling the broken tiles like a mosaic. Her selves across years, across choices. Dalish orphan. Alienage child. Circle darling. Circle heretic. Apostate. Fugitive. Healer. Weapon. Monster. Martyr. Mage.

They speak again, louder now, There is no out, only in. And one reflection—the girl in chains, the one knelt trembling, magic gone and eyes full of betrayal—begins to rise.

Her chains vanish like smoke. Her expression hardens. She steps out of the mirror, and her boots hit the floor with a crack.

The girl walks toward her slowly, as if across a battlefield, eyes locked. The girl's rage is not flame, but stone. Cold and steady. She stops just short of touching distance. You let it happen, she says.

"I didn't choose this," Her back hits a wall that wasn’t there before, slick and cold, curved like the inside of a great glass bowl. “I didn't choose any of it!” No way out. No more illusions of escape. Her breath clouds the air; the hall feels like winter now.

The girl—no, that version of her, the magic-stripped and chain-bruised self—stares with hollow eyes. As if she hears the words but does not believe them. Or perhaps believes them too well. No, she replies, quietly. But you didn’t stop it, either. And then she moves.

Not to attack—not yet. But to step aside, revealing something behind her: a long, narrow mirror, the kind found in the dressing chambers of Circle apprentices. It stands upright in the center of the broken hall, untouched by dust, not shattered like the rest. And in it, no reflection appears. Just swirling darkness. A curtain drawn on something waiting.

The other versions of her—still trapped in their tiles—fall silent, watching.

The girl in chains looks over her shoulder at the dark mirror. Then locks eyes again. Go on, she says. If you didn’t choose this… then what would you choose?

Breath trembles in her throat, but she takes the step. One, then another—the sound of her feet on broken glass, the whispers of watching selves. The self in chains says nothing more. She merely tilts her head, unreadable, as the other raises her hand and presses her fingertips to the dark mirror’s surface. It’s cold. Slick. But not solid.

It gives.

Swirls ripple outward from her touch like ink in water. The glass shifts under her hand, flowing in long, graceful lines. The mirror reshapes itself, arching taller, frame unfurling into a dark, ancient elegance that feels older than any memory she’s ever owned.

A mirror… no, not a mirror. Not anymore.

An archway, silver-veined, black-glass stretching across it, singing with something deep and sorrowful in the Fade. Unnamed, but aching with power. It’s like stepping towards the edge of a blade, or leaning over an abyss.

Behind her, the girl in chains whispers something too soft to catch. The other selves do not speak. And from the other side of the arch, a voice.

You don’t belong here.

It’s him again. Cullen.

But not as she last saw him—battle-worn, dirt-streaked, wary, unknowing. This voice is younger, laced with a mix of desperate certainty and grief.

You don’t belong here, he says again, firmer this time, as a shadow moves on the far side of the glass. Turn back. Please! His voice takes on an anguish, like he's seen this before and will see it again. Like it's torturing him.

But her hand is already on the mirror. And now the arch pulses, once, like a heartbeat. The glass surface bends like water around her fingers. Then her hand, her arm, her shoulder…

The arch takes her, without fanfare or warning, a soundless pull that feels like falling and drowning and burning all at once. The Fade folds inward, a whisper turned scream turned silence. And for a moment, there is nothing.

Another moment, and she is standing in Kinloch Hold again.

Not in ruins—not what the Hero of Ferelden left behind, nor the blood-soaked halls echoing with screaming ghosts. This Kinloch is perfect. Unreal.

The sun filters softly through tall windows; books line every shelf, sorted and dustless. The fire in the great hearth is banked low, casting warm light across old wood and worn rugs. She smells elfroot and beeswax polish. She hears laughter—her own—young and a still a little reckless.

Footsteps echo. Familiar.

And around the corner, he appears: Cullen, younger. Maybe twenty. Golden curls slightly mussed, robes half-askew over Templar armour he hasn’t yet grown into. He startles when he sees her, but his face breaks into a slow, earnest smile.

“You’re early," He strides toward her with none of the stiffness she knows now. His gaze is soft, shy. He carries a single white flower, its petals edged in frost. “I—I wanted to talk to you before… before the Harrowing.”

There is no mark on her hand. No Breach overhead. Her shackles are gone. The weight of years has vanished from her bones. She’s wearing apprentice robes—the purple-y lilac-y kind, a little threadbare, sleeves a bit short. She looks down at herself and remembers this body. She is who she was.

Cullen holds out the flower. “I’ve been… thinking. About what happens next.”

But something twists inside her, a bittersweet longing for what could have been but wasn't. She accepts the flower. "This isn't what happened," she says.

Cullen’s smile falters.

Not entirely—he still hands her the flower, and she still takes it, fingers brushing his, a fragile heat in the soft space between them. The bloom is cold but alive, as though drawn from some frost-kissed dream. A white lily? No, something older. Fade-born, maybe. Her grip tightens around the stem without meaning to.

“This never happened," she whispers again. It's a confession. Or an apology.

The room stirs. The warmth shifts. She hears the wind in the tower’s rafters, a sound that doesn’t belong, and Cullen blinks, confused. He takes a small step back, still watching her closely. His brows furrow, not in anger, but concern. He opens his mouth to say something...

But his voice comes out wrong. Not the awkward, tender cadence of a young man. It’s older. Sharper. Commanding. “You don’t belong here!"

The world glitches. The light from the windows flickers. The books twist on the shelves, reshuffling like cards. Cullen’s face warps, just a little—golden hair fraying into shadow at the edges, his eyes paling a little too much.

Black veins spider across its petals of the flower in her hand, as though her fingers are a harbinger of blight.

“You left,” says Cullen—the real Cullen, or the memory, or something else entirely—voice echoing now, angry and accusing. “You survived. I told them you were dead. You were supposed to be dead.”

A shadow spreads across the walls like blood in water, and the sound of distant screaming rises from below. The perfect Kinloch begins to unravel, and across the room, a door appears.

Not Kinloch’s heavy oak—something else. Twisted metal, glowing faintly green. Half-real. Faintly humming. Not a door to the Circle… a door to the Fade. Not like what she stepped through before, but something worse?

The flower hits the stone with a wet sound, petals already sludge. The stench of Fade-rot rises, copper and ash.

"You burned too hot to be held, and we all paid the price!" His words are sharp, cleaving. They echo in the unraveling room like a spell loosed with too much power, too much feeling.

She runs, and the door opens wide for her. The frame is silvered as before, but wrong—organic, almost, like bone turned mirror. As she crosses its threshold, the sound of Kinloch collapsing behind her follows: shattering glass, cracking stone, the howl of an angry, grieving wind. Cullen—not Cullen, not really—reaching for her, calling her name now, but it’s distorted, garbled, like a name half-remembered by someone who once cared for her and no longer dares to.

She doesn’t look back. She runs, and then...

Silence.

She is finally alone, in a place with no floor. No sky. Only a path, cobbled from shards of memory. Bits of Circle stone, bits of alienage brick, bits of snow-covered trail... They knit themselves together beneath her feet as she walks, but vanish behind her, leaving nothing in her wake.

The sky above is ink, pierced by viridian stars that weep Fade-fire droplets instead of shining. A black sun, unmoving, looms on the horizon. And ahead, a mirror. Another Gods-damned mirror. Floating in nothing. Whole, gleaming. Familiar.

It’s her reflection, again—but this time it’s older, war-torn, barefoot and wild-eyed, skin covered in green cracks like the first rift she ever closed. Something is wrong with her eyes. The reflection doesn’t mimic her. It stares straight at her, face entirely still, eyes judging.

And then the mirror morphs into a cage, and something about the woman within it shifts. It wears her shape, but its smile is all wrong.

“You keep running,” it says. Her voice. “From pain. From power. From people who might have loved you. You call it survival. I call it cowardice.” Its fingers flex, and it steps through the bars of the cage like they are nothing. Sparks crawl up its wrists like veins of liquid lyrium.

It hisses, “I am what you left behind!"

The cage flickers, the stars pulse green, and she collapses without grace, the cold hard stones biting through a cloak that’s gossamer-thin, like moth wings. She folds into herself like a wounded halla seeking shelter from the storm, and her breath comes quick and ragged as it steps forward, eyes narrowing with cruel satisfaction.

The air thickens with the electric scent of Fade-fire, the shards beneath her flickering green with every step it takes. Without hesitation, the shadow reaches out, claw-blades sparking with liquid lyrium, and slashes down into her fetal form.

Pain blooms like wildfire—sharp, searing, but somehow… familiar. And as the attack lands, she feels the sting not only on her skin but deep within her mind, a jolt that stirs something buried in the shadows of her memories. It snaps like a lash through her senses, and everything fractures.

Shards of shadow dissolve, the green stars blink out one by one, and the black sun fades to a dull ember. Cold air fills her lungs as she gasps awake.

Woolen sheets cling to her damp skin, the scent of elfroot salve lingering faintly. Her heart hammers, and the silence of Haven presses close.

But deep inside, the echo of her own voice still lingers...

You burned too hot to be held... and we all paid the price.

We are what you left behind.

Chapter Text

They carried my smoking body back to Haven, and for three days I slept in a cocoon of warm woolen sheets, crackling fires, elfroot salves, and nightmares. And when I woke, I was dressed in silks, covered in bandages, and had a horrible case of Herald-itis.

Something was wrong with my eyes, and I didn't know what. I could see with them just fine, even through the linen bandage Adan had tied around them. But he insisted that I keep it on “until they heal… if they heal.”

Thanks to the Creators—or was it Andraste, now?—Cassandra and company didn't need me for several days thereafter, and so I spent my time wandering around Haven like a strange spectre of eye-bandaged Justice, getting used to watching the world through fabric, and nursing a bad-dreams hangover.

"That's her," voices murmured as I passed, "the 'Herald of Andraste'!" "The Maker sent her in our darkest hour." "Some call her the Conduit." "They say the mark on her hand is an Anchor, gifted by the Maker's Bride!" "Blessed are they who walk in the name of the Lord..."

On the first day, I found Adan’s apothecary and showed him how to make mana potions. He remembered patching me up, so at least he knew I was made of blood and bones.

"I heard she was already supposed to close the Breach." "Chancellor Roderick says that the Chantry wants nothing to do with us." "Andraste herself sent her from out of the Fade!" "So we're heretics, just like that?"

On the second day, I found the blacksmith, and put in for some fire-resistant gear. If Andraste was calling me to become her personal holy garden hose, then I needed clothes that wouldn't burn to ashes each and every time I had to fight like hell.

"Have you heard about the Hinterlands?" "The mages are attacking everything that moves." "Where are the Templars?" "I didn't see good Templars and evil Mages in the Circles, Sister." "Why does the Chantry do nothing?"

On the third day, I went to Solas.

~~~

The man seemed always to be standing outside, staring at the Breach, and today was no exception, so he saw me coming. I was agitated, on the edge of panic, and when I stopped in front of him my breath was coming too fast, my heart galloping in my chest. "Something is wrong with me," I told him.

Solas straightened subtly at the sight of me—not with alarm, but with that quiet, preternatural attentiveness he seemed to reserve for matters of the Fade. Which didn't make me feel any better. His gaze flicked once to the bandage wrapped around my eyes, then back to my face.

"How so?" His voice was calm, detached, gentle.

I swallowed, trying to slow my breathing. “Everything feels… louder,” I said, voice low. “Not sound. Just... being. People hum like plucked strings, their emotions visible as color, their memories trailing behind them like shadows. The wind has shape. I looked at the blacksmith’s forge and saw it... remember its own making? I walked past a soldier, and I knew he was living a lie, even though he didn’t say a word.”

I hesitated, fingers twitching at my side. “I haven’t taken the bandage off. Adan told me not to. But I see through it, Solas. I see around it.” Another breath. “I’m afraid that if I look too closely at someone, I’ll never be able to unsee what’s underneath.”

Solas drew in a deep breath and held it, watching me with an unreadable calm that was a mite unsettling. He let out the breath. "That explains how you're up and about," he said. "I think they thought you'd be abed for weeks, blinded by bandages, and perhaps what lies beneath.”

He tilted his head toward me, a look of mild curiosity, and interest. “…You are still tethered,” he said at last, voice quiet and careful, as if choosing each word with intention, “to the Fade, and to the earth. You may have closed the mother-rift, but I have seen spirits burn less brightly than what flared from you that day. Whatever lingers now—it is not merely a scar.”

I couldn't breathe. "What do you mean?" It was a whisper.

"Telema sule'vi'in," he admitted, slowly extending his hand. He didn’t know, but this time, he was asking for permission before he touched, and his offering shimmered faintly—not with light, but with intention. Not skin and blood, but a contour of layered truths, the touch of the Fade pressed into his fingertips like old ink presses into vellum. He reached not only with his body, but with memory, and grief curled around his wrist like a shadow unwilling to be parted.

I let him take my hand and draw me toward his apartment, trying to ignore the way his footsteps echoed. Echoes of choices made and unmade, a burden bending his shoulders that didn’t belong in the present moment. The wooden door creaked with fragility as he pushed it open and guided me to the single chair within. "Sit," he said.

I sat.

"Breathe," he said.

I breathed.

While I breathed, he busied himself with other things. When he touched the fire, it flared in recognition—not of the wood, but of him. He seemed to be in silent communion with each and every element he disturbed. Water waited to be shaped, poured and placed to boil over the flames. Herbs yielded willingly under his fingers, the scent of rosemary and elfroot and lemonbalm filling the air. Even the shadows shifted politely aside.

Nothing in him vibrated with lies. But there was something missing, or rather, something sealed. A hollow where honesty should live, not born of deceit, but of concealment: a truth deferred. His whole self was curated. A mask crafted of sincerity and silence.

I decided that I was looking too closely, and tried to unsee what was underneath.

He brought me a cup of tea and watched as I sipped it down, leaning against the far wall by the fire. Occasionally, a lip or finger twitched. Which should have been unnerving, but instead was simply grounding. I think that in that moment, I needed a witness.

When I finished the tea, I was feeling much better. More grounded in reality. He took the cup and crouched beside me.

"I can look, if you would like me to," he said, nodding toward the bandage shrouding my eyes. His voice was unreadable in itself, but the air hummed with curiousity. Not overwhelming, as before, but palpable nevertheless.

Fear of the unknown seized my heart and squeezed it tight, but I nodded.

Slowly, reverently, his hands stretched out, reaching behind my head to undo the knot, wrists brushing my ears. I took a long, shuddering breath as he pulled the bandage away, and for the first time in days, I saw the world with total clarity, no fabric filtering my sight.

Solas froze, his intake of breath short and sharp. He froze not quite with fear, but a stillness born of shock and disbelief.

His hands hovered in the air for a beat too long after the bandage came away, as though reluctant to let the moment pass. His eyes—those quiet, considering eyes—searched mine with a hunger that wasn’t sexual, chasing the edges of something unexpected where my eyes were supposed to be.

The Fade around us thickened—not intruding, but listening. The hunger faded. And Solas, for the first time since I had met him, seemed vulnerable. Like a man who had seen a painting long thought lost, returned to him in altered hues. Slowly, his breath left him.

“…Ir abelas, da'lan,” he murmured, barely audible. Not a curse. A lament.

And then he returned to himself, indifference sliding over his features like a mask, and he returned the bandage to its place. Even his echoes became a thing unreadable.

"You would do best to keep them covered, lest you frighten the people," was all he said. And as he stood, a truth rolled off him like a wave, as if he had curated it carefully and loosed it upon me with full intent.

It was time for me to go.

I remember how rejection and horror gripped me, then, for clearly something unspeakably horrible had happened to my sight. The chair fell on its back when I stood, and the house shuddered when I yanked open the door. The winter wind blasted me in the face, whisking away traces of herbs and hearth smoke, and I ran.

~~~

Once I'd gotten ahold of myself, I chased Varric down for a drink.

I remember the tavern's fire crackling low, casting long shadows across the stone walls and making the bottles between them gleam like a guilty secret. Varric leaned back in his chair, one boot propped on the bench opposite, swirling his drink lazily. Someone in that chair argued with her lover once.

"You look like you lost a fight with a rift and woke up in someone else's legend," he said, as I burst into the Singing Maiden.

"Hey now," I said, plopping down across from him, glancing down at his boot to see the state of it. His laces were undone, and dripped with pain. "I won that fight, thank you very much. It's my own flame that beat the ever-living crap out of me." Well, that was, if the mother-rift’s fire could be considered to be mine.

Varric snorted and slid his bottle across the table with two fingers, glass whispering over worn wood, leaving a trace of recognition in its wake. “Well, congratulations on setting yourself on fire in the name of heroism. That’s gotta be a first, even for our Seeker’s freshly minted miracle.”

"It's not, actually. My first time on fire." I accepted the bottle, found a reasonably clean cup, and poured myself a double. The cup remembered its first drink. "First in the name of heroism, though. I'm not exactly a hero."

Varric raised his brows and took a slow sip of his drink, eyes glittering over the rim. “Funny, that’s usually what heroes say. Right before they leap off something tall or blow up half a battlefield to save everyone else's lives.” Marian charged the Arishok.

"Gee, thanks." I raised my glass and took a deep, narrow sip, savouring the way it burned the whole way down. I didn't know what it was, but it was good. It was made a long time ago, in a place far away.

I set my glass down with a heavy thump and glared into the golden liquid within. "None of this shit should have happened, Varric."

Varric leaned back in his chair, boot tapping the leg of the table in idle rhythm. “Yeah. That’s the worst of it, isn’t it? The world never asks if you’re ready before it shoves a glowing green mark into your hand and names you prophet.” A sash of office was lowered over Marian's head, and she glanced at him with misery.

That elicited a short, sharp, shock of laughter from me, and I looked down at my hand. The mark was dormant. "It's been quiet since we closed the mother-rift," I said.

Varric tilted his head, his tone softening. “And what about you? Been quiet since then, too?” He nudged the bottle toward me again. “You don’t look it.”

I looked up at him. "Who's Marian?"

His expression lay somewhere between confusion and surprise. "She was the Champion of Kirkwall," he replied, voice guarded. His threads hummed like wires now, sharp and defensive. "Probably dead now. Why?"

"Um, no reason," I poured myself another drink and knocked it back, enjoying the heady warmth of it. "Kept hearing the name crop up. You seemed like the right person to ask." Not entirely false. I changed the topic. Told him about how I'd been doing something that looked a lot like hiding at the apothecary's. About how awkward it had been to explain my needs to the blacksmith. Felt his threads relax.

He listened, swirling his drink slowly, then snorted into his cup. “So while everyone else is arguing about your divinity or kissing the ground you walk on, you’re making potions and asking for underpants that won’t catch fire. You're my kind of Herald.”

"I'd rather not be a Herald at all," I sighed, then looked up at him, sharply. "Any idea what they're up to, Varric?"

“Who do you mean?”

"All of Haven is holding its breath. Its people are standing on a precipice, souls humming like they’re ready to leap. Their echoes tell me not to worry, but it’s a lie. Am I the only one who doesn't know?”

He blinked at me. “Shit, kid. Did you always talk like that?”

I closed my eyes beneath their bandages, exhaustion slinking in. “No,” I sighed. “I think it’s something I ate.”

For a moment, Varric didn't speak. Instead, he watched me sit there with my eyes hidden by a shroud, and the walls around us thrummed faintly with the residues of laughter, tears, and song. Finally, he let out a long, sad breath.

"The Seeker’s got her secrets, and half the time even she doesn’t know what she's playing at until she's done it,” he observed. He took a slow, hissing breath in between his teeth, and another long pull from his mug. Not knowing hadn’t protected Marian, either.

“But I hear they're founding something called the Inquisition."

And it was true, as you well know. Founding the Inquisition is precisely what they did.

Chapter Text

It was a week before the Inquisition finally did something that included me. Every day before then, Adan had checked my eyes, and every day, he’d shaken his head and held his tongue between his teeth. Eventually, like a judge delivering a death sentence, he’d said, “I think they’re permanent,” as if I would know what that meant. But if it was a death sentence, it also set me free.

The world woke blue on the morning we were to leave; pale sky through frost-glazed panes. Snow crusting the rooftops in fine, sparkling layers. A hush that felt almost reverent—not the dreadful silence in the shadow of the Breach, but something gentler, more mundane. A village breathing before the day began. I remember sitting by the narrow window in the room they'd given me and dressing slowly, carefully, as if the act itself were sacrament. Each motion deliberate. Each layer earned.

Mostly because it still hurt to lift my arms over my head, or stretch around to clip a buckle, or bend down to tie my boots. But still. Sacrament.

The new clothes smelled of leather, soap, and forge-heat. Stiff canvas, padded at the shoulders. Fire-retardant, the blacksmith had promised, though his tone had suggested, mostly. There were char-stains on the sleeves already from where I'd tested it in the hearth. Still, it was better than waking up naked and reeking of Fade-burn.

I flexed my fingers as I pulled on gloves, and winced. The mark on my hand was still quiet, still sleeping since the mother-rift, and still there. Not cold, not hot, just there, like a second pulse. It didn’t ache unless I thought about it too hard.

I tried not to.

My other hand reached for the last piece of the ritual: the bandage. Off-white linen, folded smooth, gently scratchy. I’d begun to appreciate it, oddly—the small blindness it granted, the soft veil between myself and the too-much world. Sight filtered through threads made things slower. Gentler. Easier not to see things I couldn’t unsee. But I paused, the cloth in my lap, and turned my face toward the light. Just for a moment.

The sun hadn’t changed. That, at least, was a comfort.

Then someone knocked—a single rap, deliberate—and the door creaked open before I could answer. I rushed to cover my eyes, just in time. I didn’t want anyone else to see what I hadn’t.

Varric leaned in, bundled in a fur-lined coat the color of old wine, steam rising from the mug in his hand. “You decent?” he asked, and when he caught sight of me sitting cross-legged in armour and bare feet, he smirked. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You say that like it would stop you.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Fury,” he said, striding in. “But Cassandra’s pacing outside like she’s gonna punch the horizon if we don’t get moving soon, and Solas already gave me a lecture about ‘respecting the natural rhythm of departure.’”

I sighed. Tied off the bandage. My fingers were steadier than they had been.

Varric set the mug on the windowsill beside me. “Brought you tea. Or possibly poison disguised as tea. Haven’t decided. Smells like dirt and regrets.”

I picked it up and took a sniff. “Elfroot and bitterheart. Post-spirit trauma mix. Stabilizes arcane flow. Probably won’t kill me.”

He blinked. “You terrify me.”

“Get in line,” I muttered, taking a sip, and looking out the window one last time, watching as Haven stirred. Boots on snow. Shovels scraping roofs. Somewhere, a blacksmith's hammer rang once, like a bell calling me back to the waking world.

I drained the cup and stood, slinging my pack over my shoulder. The fireproof armour creaked faintly at the joints, but I didn’t feel powerful... Just dressed. Like someone heading out into the weather. “Alright,” I said. “Let’s go meet destiny and hope it hasn’t skipped breakfast.”

Varric offered a crooked grin and held the door.

The path from Haven unspooled like thread from a distaff, narrow and half-buried in the snow. Stone walls hemmed the trail on either side in places, relics of something older even than the Chantry. Now, they were just shoulders for drifts to lean against. The snow was crusted in places, powder-fine in others, and crunched underfoot like cracking sugar.

We traveled in loose formation: Cassandra at the front, posture stiff and upright, the wind threatening to disturb her short, dark hair. Solas at her side, hood raised, speaking little. He acted as though I had never come to him, had never sat in his chair, had never shown him my eyes. Everything was business as usual.

Varric was just ahead of me, making small talk with his crossbow.

And bringing up the rear was me. The Herald. Half of me present, half very much not. My bandage dulled the brightness of the snowfields to a bearable shimmer. That helped, but the wind did not. It moved through me like a memory, cold and too familiar.

I remember huddling deeper into my coat and trying not to imagine how it would feel if I let myself see it, let myself listen to what the worlds surrounding the world were whispering. The temptation came and went, curling around me like a fog.

“You know,” said Varric over his shoulder, and his voice reeled me in like a kite, “for a holy mission, this sure feels like the start of a long hike to nowhere.”

Cassandra did not turn. “This is not a pilgrimage.”

“Could’ve fooled me. We’ve got a mysterious elf, a looming sky-hole, and a reluctant prophet with a holy brand…” He gestured vaguely toward me. “All we’re missing is a chorus.”

Solas chuckled quietly. “Andraste’s Grace rarely includes a well-armed dwarf and a Dalish apostate.”

“I’m not Dalish,” I protested automatically, before thinking better of it. “Well, not entirely. No vallas’lin, and all that.” I waved a hand, dismissively.

Solas tilted his head, but didn’t press. Cassandra, mercifully, said nothing.

We passed a frozen stream where the water still sang beneath a rind of ice. Black branches rattled like bones above it. Solas, acting like a smug tour guide from hell, pointed us toward the pass.

“Maybe you should be the prophet,” I grumbled, as I walked past.

The sky began to open the farther we went. The trees thinned and the wind grew teeth. But the rhythm of boots on packed snow, the sound of Varric muttering epithets at every incline, even Cassandra’s stubborn, upright silence—they created a kind of perimeter around me. A fragile shape in which I could exist, for now, without falling apart.

Eventually, Solas slowed to match my pace. Again, acting like he hadn't crushed me. He walked beside me in silence for a while, gaze on the ridgelines. After a time, he said quietly, “You have not asked where we’re going.”

“I figured it would become obvious eventually.”

Solas glanced sidelong. “That’s either patience, or exhaustion.”

I smiled, faintly. “Yes. And gratitude that I’m not in chains.”

Solas’s expression didn’t change, but something flickered behind it—recognition, maybe. Or regret. “There is a village at the edge of the wilds,” he said after a beat, and he somehow made it sound like an apology. “They call it, simply, the Crossroads, in the Hinterlands. Many have fled there.”

Varric said, “We’re looking for some Chantry Mother who might actually know how to speak sense.”

"Her name is Mother Giselle,” Cassandra called back, and Solas nodded in affirmation.

I made a noncommittal noise. “Do you think she will? Speak sense?”

“I think,” Solas said, “that sense is rarely what people want from Faith. But they may listen to her. She has a history of being... inconveniently wise.”

That was as close to a compliment as I'd heard from him yet. I nodded, and kept walking.

We crested the final ridge at midday. Below us sprawled the Hinterlands—a wild, uneven quilt of forest, farmland, and flame. Thin trails of smoke curled from half-collapsed buildings, and mages fought Templars in endless waves of blood and ice and steel. It was a war zone, and somewhere to the east, I saw the telltale shimmer of a rift pulsing, making everything worse as demons fell from the sky.

Cassandra stopped at the edge of the rise, hands on her hips. “Maker guide us.”

“I think that’s her job now,” Varric said, jerking a thumb toward me.

“No, thank you,” I said dryly. "Divine inspiration doesn’t take requests!”

As we began the descent, and the cries of battle grew closer, my brain helpfully reminded me that I could open my inner eye, if I wanted to start hearing whispers from the other side again. Which was very tempting, if I was in the market for a breakdown. I wasn’t. Not yet.

“I think your holy hand just twitched,” Varric muttered.

“No," I said. "That was me preparing for the part where everything goes to shit.”

~~~

Surpise! Everything went to shit.

The rift bloomed green and angry over a sloped pasture, suspended between two crooked trees like a wound that refused to close. Shadows streamed from its center in twitching, oily bursts, and we hadn’t even made it halfway across the field before the first rage demon burst out like it was late to a wedding.

“Andraste,” muttered Cassandra, drawing steel. “Positions!”

Varric was already diving for a stump with a decent angle. “Didn’t you say we’d have time for lunch first?”

I planted my boots in the mud and lifted my marked hand, feeling the power surge through my bones like wildfire on a dry wind. The rift pulsed in response, shivering as if aware of our presence. But the mark inside me still slept.

I reached for it, willing it to wake up.

Nothing.

I coaxed. Nothing. I cajoled. Nothing. I bribed it with the spiritual equivalent of coffee.

Still nothing.

Fine. I shoved a metaphysical fireball down its gullet.

It woke up.

Badly.

A sharp, high whine pierced the air and exploded in a burst of viridian light. The ground cracked beneath me. Solas shouted something… too late. His barrier didn't make it up until a second after the shockwave had slammed outward.

It knocked one of the demons clean off its feet.

It also knocked Varric off his stump.

And I accidentally smote a sheep.

Yes, a sheep. The poor thing, grazing near the back of the field with a dumb, placid expression, lit up like a firefly and took off like an arrow. It galloped in frantic zig-zags up the hillside, leaving behind a faint shimmer of Fade-fire in its wake, bleating its way into legend.

Varric, from a bush: “We’re gonna get charged for that.”

I groaned.

“Focus!” Cassandra shouted, dueling rage demons like it was personal. She slashed at one with the edge of her shield, stabbing another with her sword in a simultaneous thrust.

“I’m trying!” I yelled back, staggering under the weight of the mark’s power. My palm burned like a brand, searing and unstable. I could feel it humming too high, too fast, like a lyrium fever with nowhere to go.

Solas hurled a lightning bolt that clipped a demon’s side, but his gaze was fixed on me. “Breathe! Anchor yourself!”

“Anchor this!” I snapped, flinging the mark toward the rift again.

I remembered fishing at the docks in Denerim, happy on days the net came back full enough to feed the entire alienage, going hungry on days when the catch was scarce.

A web of light settled around the rift, and I drew it tighter, pulling it in, the world warping with a sound like snapping glass. The remaining demons shrieked, one unravelling mid-lunge. Cassandra drove her sword into the last, pinning it through with a gout of fire. The rift convulsed once, twice, fighting the net like a giant fish, flopping to escape.

And the sheep still zig-zagging up the hill.

Then, silence. Burnt grass. Demon bits.

Varric sat up with a grimace, brushing crushed leaves and thistle juice from his coat. “I think your hand hates me.”

“No,” I said, breathless. “It just hates everything.”

Solas approached, eyes narrowing at the flickers still dancing along my fingers. The mark was receding, but not to where it should have been. It was shifting beneath my skin, like a dark green shadow, stretching after a long nap.

I'm hungry, it said.

"Oh no," I whispered. Looked down at my hand. Watched the shadow circle a few times like a cat readying its bed. Watched it settle into place, a place, not the same one as before.

Find me another one, it said.

“Time to make camp!” I said brightly.

~~~

Camp. Blessed camp. A fire, a blanket, and Varric sulking over his thistle wounds. I leaned against the trunk of a tree, breath slowing, fingers tingling. The mark had gone quiet. It was asleep again, but had the heartbeat of a dragon.

Varric stretched out in the grass with a groan, wincing. “I liked the part where I got launched into a shrub," he said to no-one in particular, voice dryer than a bone. "Really rounded out the experience.”

“There are bandages in my pack,” Solas offered without looking.

“I don’t want bandages,” Varric said, sitting up. “I want hazard pay.”

I laughed, the absurdity of my entire life flashing before my eyes. Hazard pay... If the world offered hazard pay, I would’ve been living like a queen.

What’s hazard pay? The mark asked.

My laughter became the sharp kind; the kind that surprises you, and has an edge, and feels just a little too big for your ribs.

Cassandra looked alarmed, but Varric grinned, and flopped back dramatically into the grass. “I'm glad someone finds my plight hilarious,” he flung a backhand over his eyes as if in a swoon.

I wiped my eyes. “You really look like you got mugged by a field, Varric."

“Okay,” Varric replied. “I’m not saying you’re wrong. But if that sheep comes back with eldritch powers and starts a cult? I’m blaming you.”

He means me, the mark said smugly.

Yes. Yes, I know.

We laughed again, and this time Cassandra did too. Then I looked up, and saw Solas. Definitely not laughing. Definitely still watching me from where he stood. Definitely still unreadable.

~~~

Night settled over the camp like a thick woolen blanket, soft and still except for the crackle of the fire and the low murmur of restless wind weaving through the trees. The sky stretched wide and dark above us, studded with stars like shards of broken glass.

I sat wrapped in my cloak, knees drawn close, the warmth from the flames seeping into the ache deep in my muscles. It was a good ache; the kind that came from movement and purpose, and not from pain. Idly, I watched the shadow of my mark explore the contours of my hand. For a moment, it dipped out of sight, into my sleeve, up my arm.

Nearby, Cassandra was holding court, voice clipped and sharp, the firelight flickering across the stern lines of her face. “Honestly, Varric,” she said, voice half-exasperated, half-amused, “Hard in Hightown hardly portrays a paragon of morality. You really expect me to believe your ‘hero’ was anything but a con artist and a thief?”

Varric grinned, leaning back on his elbows, one boot scuffed in the dirt. “Now, Cassandra, you’re just sour you weren’t the one swindled. The ‘hero’ had style, and that’s what matters.”

“This is exactly what is wrong with the world,” Cassandra muttered, but she was smiling.

Solas sat slightly apart, a small cup of tea balanced carefully between his hands. He lifted it to his lips with a grace that belied the subtle attentiveness in his gaze, the gentle focus he brought to bear on me everywhere I went, no matter what I did.

The mark returned from its foray into the unknown, settling back into the palm of my hand. Circling. Considering. Not unlike a cat who'd gotten familiar with its room and was ready to sally forth and expand its horizons.

What are you? I asked.

Call me Scaíth.

That... wasn't exactly an answer. Is that a name or a title?

Call me Scaíth, it repeated. It roamed up my arm again, and settled on—in—my shoulder.

I groaned, and looked up, and yup: Solas was still watching me. Enough was a enough, and I stomped over to him… And he, of course, acted like he hadn't been staring at all.

Instead, he tilted his head back toward the sky. “See that constellation there?” he said softly. “The one shaped like a white wolf, running beneath the moon?”

I followed his gaze, squinting through my shroud, but he shook his head.

“It does not exist anymore,” he continued. “Long ago, it was swallowed up by the Fade—erased from the memory of the waking world. But the spirits still speak of it. They remember.”

I closed my eyes and swallowed, feeling the weight of that loss settle beside my own—the fragments of things vanished or broken, and yet still held somewhere beyond sight. If I peeled back the layers and listened to the echoes of in-between, perhaps I’d see Solas’ white wolf. He was encouraging me.

“Did you doze off while I wasn’t looking?”

“Yes.”

I nodded. That made sense. Sleep was his way into the Beyond.

Varric broke the moment. “That’s the most Solas thing I’ve heard all day!" His voice was teasing as he waved up toward the sky. "The rest of us see stars, and he sees ghosts.”

Solas didn't laugh, but the corners of his eyes crinkled. He tilted his head forward with amusement, and I let out a little hmph of laughter.

I unfurled my bedroll, and went to sleep. It wasn't quite silence—never quite silence with these three—but a gentle pause, where no one needed to fill the space. The ache, the weight, the chaos... they could wait until dawn.

For now, Solas’ wolf could watch the skies for trouble.

~~~

We joined up with Scout Harding's forces the next day, and together we moved in to secure the area from what had become more of a mutual Mage-Templar Rebellion, than an organized Mage-Templar War. According to Harding, the mages were killing everything that moved.

“Magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him,” I groaned.

“Well, don’t worry, Herald. The Templars have stopped listening to the Chantry, and they’re killing everyone too!”

Lovely.

The Crossroads, when we got there, were less a village and more a handful of houses stitched together by fences, farm fields, and desperation. Snow hadn’t touched it much; just a rim of frost still clung to the shadowed edges of fences and rooftops. The rest had turned to mud under dozens of feet.

And there were so many feet.

Refugees moved like water in half-broken lanes, some bartering over smoked meat, others patching cloaks with whatever thread they could find. Children ran in wild arcs through it all, shrieking joyously, seemingly unaware that the world was ending.

What's wrong with them? asked the mark. Asked Scaíth.

They're playing, I replied.

Now?

Children are resilient.

I stood just inside the threshold of it all, letting the Inquisition pass me up, bandaged eyes catching flickers of motion. Sounds and smells swarmed me: soot and herbs, old sweat, spiced wine, damp wool. I felt each thing more than I saw it, each life humming faintly, a thread of story. A hundred threads of a hundred stories, all watching me.

Their stares were subtle at first. Then not. "That’s her,” someone whispered. “The Herald.” “She looks… young.” “Blind,” another muttered. “Is she blind?” “Why’s she just standing there?”

Cassandra moved instinctively to my side, hand on her sword hilt. Not threatening—just visible. Varric ambled forward, aiming a practiced smile at the nearest gathering of gawkers. “You people act like you’ve never seen a miracle before,” he drawled.

His quip was punctuated by the sound of hammer on nail, as a pair of Inquisition soldiers began tacking up officious notices claiming the Crossroads to be

        UNDER PROTECTION OF THE INQUISITION

and the mundane sound finished breaking the ice that Varric had cracked. A few people chuckled. People began again to move about their business. And from deeper within the village, a Chantry Sister approached.

“Herald?”

I turned.

"Our Mother is waiting for you," she said, and beckoned.

Mother Giselle came to meet us, and we met by a half-mended wagon. She was boots, mud, and a very sensible robe, full of pockets. She held in her hand a mortar full of poultice in the making. I liked her immediately.

She was younger than her Fade-threads had led me to expect, yet approached us with the calm dignity of someone who had never once in her life hurried. Her eyes, warm and clear, settled on us as we came face to face.

“I wanted to see for myself the woman they claim was seen fit by the Maker to return to us,” she said.

“And she was never his to keep,” Solas replied. It was under his breath, but the intensity of it surprised me.

I offered the Mother an awkward smile, and she extended her hands—not to embrace, but to see. A gentle palm grazed the edge of the bandage, then dropped away with quiet understanding. Though… I was not sure what it was she understood.

“Come,” she said. “I have tea. And far too many questions.”

We followed her to one of the larger buildings. Where by larger, I don't mean large. I think it was farmhouse, repurposed into a Chantry, repurposed into a place of refuge. Inside, blankets had been hung as makeshift dividers. Someone had managed a fire. And there, on a rickety table, sat a half-filled teapot surrounded by too many cups. She poured without asking, with steady hands.

“Word of your survival. and your stabilizing the Breach, has… complicated things,” Giselle said, sitting down on a sunken bench and patting the space beside her. “For you to rise when our Most Holy fell... But you know this."

She sighed as I took the offered seat, and continued. "Some even believe the Breach to be prophecy fulfilled; the Maker's day of judgment arrived, and we are all to be punished for our sins."

"That is ridiculous," Cassandra interjected. "The Maker is no vengeful god who watches us suffer without hope."

Mother Giselle nodded. "The truth, of course, will never be tidy enough to suit either—or any—viewpoint. If we can ever know the truth.”

“I refuse to believe that our fate is sealed by some divine punishment.”

The tea was hot and sharp with peppermint. I curled my fingers around the cup and said nothing for a while, content to listen to the Mother, and to my companions. They discussed the state of things. They complained of sharp fears, blazing needs, and horrific war. They sighed over the fragmentation of the Chantry, and the confusion of the Clerics.

Eventually, Cassandra leaned against the hearth. “Even here in the Crossroads, if we cannot speak with the leaders of these factions, we must at least speak with the people. If we are to restore order—”

“The people do not want order,” the Mother said, gently. “They want to be heard.”

“They are afraid,” Solas nodded. “Anger often feels like strength when fear becomes too much to bear.”

“Then what do you suggest?” Cassandra asked.

Mother Giselle turned to me again. “You have their attention. That is more than most can say right now. But it’s not enough to be noticed. You must be seen. You must be known.”

I blinked slowly behind my shroud. Being known sounded dangerous. “And how do I do that?”

“By, simply, being with them.” the Mother’s voice softened. “By walking the camps. Sharing their meals. Hearing their grief. Not as a miracle. As a person.”

“I’m not—” I started, then stopped. I was most definitely not a miracle.

But I also wasn't really a person. Did anyone in this room even know my name? It had always been Prisoner, then Herald, and Dirthamen-only-knew what next. At least Varric called me Fury. That was something.

Mother Giselle was right, but not for the reason she thought she was. If I was going to survive this, I needed to be seen. Otherwise, whatever was left of who I was was going to be poured out into the Fade, every rift demanding a libation of… something or other.

You burned too hot to be held... and we all paid the price.

I stood up. “Alright,” I said.

“Wait, now?” Varric asked, eyebrows lifting.

I reached for a loaf of bread cooling on the edge of the hearth, broke it in two, and handed him half. “No time like the present.”

He blinked, then gave a crooked smile. “You really are my kind of Herald.”

~~~

Cassandra stayed behind to work out sleeping arrangements with the Mother, and Solas wandered off to do his own thing. Which left me and Varric ambling around the village, doing our best to blend in. Which, as a rough-looking dwarf and a blind-looking Herald, was an entirely lost cause. But eventually, folks got used to us.

Some nodded. A few offered a friendly neighbourly wave. One little girl with a smudge of soot on her nose held up a daisy-chain crown and, with all the solemnity of a six-year-old, proclaimed that it was, "For the Herald."

I knelt down on one knee, bowed my head, and let her place it upon me like a coronation. I felt her fingers brush against my bandage. Then she giggled and ran off to join her friends.

We returned to the others well after night had fallen. The needs of the people weighed down upon me. Their resilience lifted me up.

Cassandra looked up when we opened the door, and her eyebrows twitched, “You realize that you look ridiculous.”

It was true. I had flowers in my hair, mud on my face, and someone had given me a large pendant shaped like, of all things, a nug rearing rampant, shrieking toward the sky. And, of course, I had a bandage around my eyes. To top it all off, there was a goat trying to follow me into the building. Varric helped me shoo it away and shut it out.

“Yes,” I replied, once that was done. "Good," I asserted.

Solas was taking in my appearance with a funny look on his face.

"Maybe they’ll stop calling me the Herald thingy and start calling me… I don’t know. Flowerhead.”

“The Flowerhead of Andraste,” Varric intoned solemnly. “I can work with that.”

Solas turned bright red, and began to stare intently at his staff. The wooden one.

I sat down by the fire, and the Mother sat down beside me, gentle lines of age and wisdom softened by the fire’s glow. She reached out, offering a small bowl of thick stew. Hearty and simple, the kind of food that grounded a body when everything else threatened to unravel.

I accepted the bowl, fingers curling around its warmth. She watched the flames dance, alive and unpredictable. Eventually, her voice broke the silence, gentle but probing.

"That was good," she said. "Now these people have seen some part of you for who you are. A woman not to be feared. Perhaps to be trusted. Possibly even believed." Her voice was cautious with approval, teetering on the edge of a choice of her own.

"I will go to Haven," she decided, "and offer my assistance however I might. And you... You must go do this thing with the Clerics, in Val Royeaux."

I froze, stew-filled spoon suspended halfway to my mouth.

“You must be known,” the Mother repeated.

We're going to what?! Scaíth was alarmed.

Me too, Scaíth. Me too.

Chapter Text

You know it's gone bad when the full quartet of Inquisition founders is there to greet you when you walk in. Into the Chantry, I mean. You see, normally, we'd have an appointed meeting time all professional-like, and we'd all convene at the appointed time and crowd into the war room before we got talking. But when I got back from Val Royeaux, we didn't stand on ceremony.

"That," I said, "went horribly! That was awful! Why did we do that?"

To give you the short version of the story, since you've probably already heard it: We did as Mother Giselle suggested, and arranged a meeting with the Chantry Mothers, and we went to Val Royeaux…

It turned out to be a public meeting. A very public meeting. And the Chantry Mothers denounced the Inquisition (publicly), and me in particular (also publicly). Then a Templar punched a Revered Mother in the face for literally no reason (you guessed it! Publicly). And to top it off, the Lord Seeker personally chastised our very own Seeker Pentaghast (yep—publicly).

As practically anyone could have predicted (which we had), my being an elf was brought up (racistly), as was my magic (prejudicedly), and the resulting whispers that followed us all the way out of town were wild.

Apparently, it was now my magic-elfy fault that a Templar had decided to sock a Matriarch of the Chantry in the jaw. And I was also, somehow, simultaneously, despite the apparent contradiction, nothing more Cassandra's puppet-servant-elf-thing.

I didn't blame Mother Giselle. I blamed the Inquisition leadership who'd set this shit up, and I blamed myself for trusting them.

We were walking the length of the Chantry at a rapid clip, angling for the war room with all due haste, and Josephine was scurrying a bit to keep up.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time, Mistress Lavellan," she said.

"No it didn't," I retorted. "We just didn't have any good ideas."

"For the record," Cullen interjected, "I agree."

"Sometimes in order to gather information, you have to act," comforted Nightingale.

"Oh, I see," I snapped. "This is the part where you explain that we have to try out all the bad ideas before we get to the good ones?"

"No," Sister Nightingale replied, voice firm, "it is not. But we do have information now."

And that's 'round-abouts-when my brain caught up. Mistress Lavellan?

We were in the war room now, so we were the only witnesses. "Mistress Lavellan?" I repeated, aloud.

Josephine cleared her throat. "Ahem. Yes? While you were gone, Sister Nigh-.."

"We received a letter from your clan," Nightingale interrupted.

"... Oh?"

"They are concerned about you," Josephine explained. "They wanted to make sure you are alright, that we aren't mistreating you."

"Uh-huh..."

"You aren't pleased to hear from them?"

Instead of answering, I turned my shrouded eyes on Nightingale. "You're sure you didn't... send out a million runners to hunt down the clans and bully the information out of them?"

The Sister sighed. "We... may have," she admitted. "But we were nice about it," she was quick to add.

"I... see." I took a moment to collect myself.

You're angry, Scaíth observed.

"You could have asked me yourself," I said.

Cassandra coughed, uncomfortably. "We should have," she conceded. "Probably when we first met."

Furious, Scaíth noted.

"Or after I stabilized the Breach,” I agreed. “Or when you dragged me off to the Hinterlands. Or even—Maker!—before you sent me to Val Royeaux to be publicly tried in front of the faithful of the entire Holy City. And you set that up, what, so you could gather information?"

"Ellana-.."

"Don't!" I threw my hands up in the air. "Don't. You didn't even warn me that you'd arranged this Chantry meeting on a Gods-damned stage. And there are so many reasons you should have. Basic decency, for one. Risk of assassination, for another. Someone shot at me with a Gods-damned arrow, for fuck's sake, and if they'd wanted to hit me, they would've."

We could kill them, my mark interjected.

Don't encourage me, I replied.

"We're-.."

"You've all been so busy from the start," I hissed, forcing down the rage that was clawing its way up my throat, "calling me Prisoner and Elf and Herald and Mage and Saviour and Maker-only-knows what else, when you could have been treating me like a person!"

I left. The Chantry doors blasted open and slammed shut behind me.

We could have taken them, Scaíth sighed.

I know, Scaíth. I know.

~~~

I rounded up Varric, then Solas, and finally some hapless Inquisition scout that I drafted out of the tavern, poor boy. I’d seen him running messages for the Commander from time to time. "Where's the nearest rift?" I spat the question out.

It was truly a very long shot kind of question. But he actually knew, and the nearest one actually wasn't that far, and so we set off immediately, striding off in a rage-filled silence. We got about half a kilometer from Haven before Varric dared to saunter up to me.

"Fury. I hate to pry," he cautiously lifted a brow, "but to what do we owe the pleasure of this unexpected journey?"

I kept walking, didn't slow down. My rage was bubbling within, intermixing with Fade-fire in new and fascinatingly combustible manners in my core. "They don't even know my name," I hissed.

His mouth made a silent 'ah' of understanding. And then he looked concerned. "I... don't know it either," he confessed.

I smirked, darkly. "I know," I forced myself to say. "But you gave me a nickname. So it's okay."

And it was, sort of, okay. Subjectively speaking. My standards weren't very high at the time.

Varric muttered something under his breath. I think it may have been something like, Assholes.

"Hey. Fury. Look at me," Varric's voice was earnest, and he actually put his hand on my arm. I jerked it away, but came to a stop with a whirl.

"What?"

"I thought you didn't know it," he said.

I blinked, and repeated, "... what?"

"They weren't calling you anything, and it never occurred to me that they wouldn't ask," he explained. "So I thought you'd... the Conclave. The blast..."

Solas had slid up beside us. "Varric and I spoke of this after you stabilized the Breach," he took over. "You have had many things laid upon your shoulders, in a very short amount of time. We did not want to make it worse by reminding you of something so fundamental to you, lost. I am... sorry."

"We are sorry," Varric corrected.

I glared, then turned away. "Well they're calling me Ellana Lavellan now," I ground out, "so there you go. Mystery solved. Now come on. I'm not mad at you."

And I wasn't mad at them. Mostly. Subjectively speaking. Again, my standards were pretty low at the time.

But I was mad at something, or someone. I didn't even know which, anymore...

... And I needed to let it out.

~~~

I had been getting better at feeling Fade-rifts from afar, but this time I was blinded by rage. It bloomed like a bruise against the bright snow when it surprised us, a jagged wound of green, iridescent light hanging in the air like a portal just above the ground, pulsing slow and steady like it had a heartbeat. Around it, the snow had melted into black slush, steam hissing up from where raw Fade energy touched the waking world. The trees nearest had warped away from it, trunks bent as though recoiling, their bark etched with spiderweb cracks.

The rift didn’t roar. It hummed. A low, predatory murmur, like something pacing on the other side of a thin door—not in a rush, not loud, just present. Patient. The kind of sound that made your spine itch.

Yes! Scaíth flared to life and started dancing up my arm. Are we doing something?

Yes, Scaíth, we are.

My breath frosted the air in front of me as we stepped closer, and the wind shifted. My bandage filtered the worst of the glare, but the rift’s presence wormed through regardless—pressing down with the weight of a bad memory that I didn't remember being mine.

The hapless scout—whose name I had asked for, thank you very much; it was Laurie—made the sign of the Maker, and Varric muttered something I won't repeat. As if it had heard them, the rift opened a little wider...

... and a despair demon stepped calmly through.

It turned its eye-less face on me, and I felt my rage begin to drain away. Leeching out of my core and into the snow between us, letting the mountainous cold into my very bones...

Varric shot it in the butt.

With a shriek, it turned on him, and my rage flooded back, filling me to the brim, just waiting for me to set it free.

Let me at it! Scaíth howled, from somewhere between my shoulder blades.

I pulled my rage to the surface and charged.

I hope you've never seen a despair demon, and never get the opportunity to. They're the long-limbed spindly ones that look like a spider had a baby with a praying mantis, and the baby popped out all covered in weird leathery skin and no eyes.

It's generally considered a bad idea to grapple such a thing, but I was so pissed that that's precisely what I did. Or tried to do, anyway. Andraste's holy garden hose streaked into the despair demon in a flash of flame... and latched onto its ankle like a puppy.

It shook its foot, and I went flying. I managed to land in a crouch, and pulled myself to a stop with my claw-blades, screeching through stone and snow. When Solas slid a barrier over us, I took it as an invitation to unleash a wave of fire.

As the demon burst into flame, I charged again, this time leaping up and anchoring myself in its flesh with claw-blades, first with one hand, then the other, climbing up its leg, its side, its back. I grabbed its eye-less head, and screamed into what should have been its face.

Down below, Laurie bravely hacked at one of its legs, darting away from its slaps. Varric peppered its front with metal bolts, which drew Solas' electricity to them like… well, like lighting to a bunch of metal bolts. The demon screamed and stumbled as I let myself slide down its back, dragging gaping gashes open like some beast gone mad.

It was Solas who drew the killing blow down from the sky above, with a massive thunderclap that shook the mountainside. And I was already turning to the rift.

I flung out my hand, and Scaíth rushed down my arm to my fingertips. We connected with the rift like a harpoon flung into a beast. And terror, pure terror, washed over me.

I was nineteen when the Templars locked the doors of Kinloch Hold for the third and final time. The first was when blood mages took over and summoned a demon horde to eat everyone alive. The second was behind the Hero of Ferelden, when he braved the halls to bring an end to the horrible chaos, to ‘save us all’. And the third was when the Templars came en masse from Val Royeaux.

They didn't tell us why they were locking us in. But we knew, and knew knowing wouldn’t save us. It didn't take very long, after that.

The tremors started in the stairwell—a low, dull hum in the stones, like the Tower was holding its breath. And then a thousand stone-glyphs had flared to life with a sound like shattering glass. The Tower shook under the feet of Templars coming floor by floor, from bottom to top; methodical, armoured boots ringing in unison on the spiral stairs, cutting off our escape.

I didn't fight. I ran. I don't remember the path I took—only the heat of breath in my lungs, the flare of glyphs underfoot, the blazing heat of spells cast far too fast for any semblance of control. I remember ducking through the shattered remains of the library, books burning suspended in midair. I remember stepping on someone's body in the hall and not even slowing. I remember reaching the top of the spiral stair and watching the ceiling above split like rotten fruit.

Stone fell. The floor tilted. A body bounced past me. The Tower was, literally, falling apart.

I kept running.

I reached the observatory—a place I'd never had permission to be—and smashed open a cracked window with blood-slick fingers. No rope, no ladder. Just the outside ledge and a raging turmoil of wind and cold and sky.

I climbed out anyway. The stone bit into my hands. Freezing rain whipped my face raw. But inch by inch, I pulled myself along the ledge... until suddenly I fell. Panic flared as I scrabbled against the wall... And then found purchase. Something red-hot and metal and new sprouting from my fingers into stone, slowing me as I fell, sparks flaring from the stone as metal scraped on rock. By the time I reached the bottom, the Tower was already crumbling around me.

I flung myself into the lake. I did not know how to swim. They don't teach mages meant to live and die in the Tower how to swim across the moat intended to keep them in.

The waves closed over me, and rolled under me, and ebbed and flowed around me. Pushed me little by little toward the lakeshore. And, somehow, I did not die. I flickered in and out of consciousness, in and out of little deaths, one brief waking gasp for air, the next brief waking with lungs full of water. And when I washed ashore, I slept with fingers curled deep into warm, wet sand.

I imagined the rift a lakeshore, and myself an inland sea, cool refreshing Fade-fire coming off of me in waves, closing over, rolling under, ebbing and flowing around the Beyond. I nudged it little by little toward that lakeshore, to that lakeshore, guiding it up onto the land. I pushed warmth into glittering sands and smoothed them flat, packing them ever-tighter ever-hotter, until it fused to glass.

And then it was done. Sparkling, glittering glass hovered for a moment in that space where the rift had been, Fade-fire shimmering along its surface as it folded back into the Fade from whence it came.

That was interesting, Scaíth said. I was coming to realize that it must have been injured and weakened when first it marked me. The stronger it grew, the chattier it got.

“And how are you feeling now, Ellana?" The new name rolled off Solas’ tongue, false yet strangely beautiful, and he approached me with a reverence reserved for ancient things and aspects of the Fade.

I closed my eyes and searched my core. My wellspring rested quieter now, no longer demanding blood. "Better," I said, opening my eyes to look at him. "Much better."

My rage was back in its cage.

We returned to Haven, and collapsed into bed. At least, I did. I assume that's what the others did as well. And that night, I prayed to Holy Andraste that she would guard my dreams, and to Dirthamen to keep my secrets safe.

Because Cullen still hadn't recognized me. And for the first time, he actually had good reason.

Because my name was not, and never had been, Ellana of Clan Lavellan.

Chapter Text

This time, the war room in Haven was unusually quiet, the kind of quiet that clung to walls like frost. Outside, the wind pressed against the stones in low groaning bursts, but inside, tension held the louder storm. The long table was strewn with maps and coded missives. A few bore Redcliffe's seal, others Therinfall's. None bore hope.

Cullen stood stiffly behind a high-backed chair, gauntleted hands gripping the wood hard enough to creak. His armour was damp with molten snow and condensated air, and his mouth was tight.

“We're wasting time entertaining this parley with the mages,” he finally said, voice brittle with restraint. “The Templars are trained to face exactly the kind of threat this Breach holds. We need their strength, their order, their discipline... and their powers.” His hands were moving, cutting through the air. “If we could reach their leaders—”

“They do not want to be reached,” interrupted Sister Nightingale, softly but with the bite of a drawn blade. She didn't look up from the letter she held, though she’d clearly read it three times already. “They’ve made that very clear. At Therinfall, they turned away our messengers. They didn’t even open the gates! That is not caution. That is refusal.”

Cullen straightened, bristling. “They’re reorganizing after being abandoned by the Chantry. It doesn’t mean they’re hostile.”

“It means they are already lost to us,” Nightingale replied, still soft, but steel underneath. “Meanwhile, the mages have opened a door. We would be fools not to walk through it.”

Josephine, standing to one side, looked between them with the slightly pinched expression of someone stepping gingerly across a cracking lake. “The mages have invited us,” she said carefully. “That alone is a diplomatic gesture we cannot ignore. They have organized, settled in Redcliffe. There are formal channels we can follow.” Her upper half tipped forward, mere thought of ‘formal channels’ eliciting a quarter of a bow.

“And what do we know about them?” Cullen cut in, sharp. “About their sensibilities? Mages do magic, Sister. The Breach is magic. If the Herald goes to Redcliffe, we may be not only be legitimizing a mage rebellion, but also sending our only method of closing the Breach straight into the heart of the enemy!”

“I do not believe they did it,” Nightingale said, “and there were Templars at the Conclave, Commander. Do you not think they would have stopped the Breach then, if they could have? Perhaps they did not want to.”

Cassandra finally spoke, arms folded, her gaze on the center of the table where the Breach’s tendrils were sketched in a spidering green sprawl. “The truth is we don’t know what’s waiting for us in either camp. The Templars will not open their doors. The mages have, but we cannot know what their aid might cost.” She looked up, tired but clear-eyed. “At least one side has offered a meeting. A conversation. That is a start.”

Cullen paced a short step back, jaw tense, giving the chair a frustrated shove that scraped wood against cobblestone. “And if it is a trap? They say the Herald is welcome, but none of our lesser envoys have gained admittance.”

“Then we survive it,” Nightingale said, voice ringing softly like steel gently freed.

"I think you mean that I survive it," I said, reminding them that I was in the room.

Josephine turned to look at me, startled at my apparent return to existence. “We prepare for it, Mistress Lavellan, and make something of the opportunity. Our reputation grows with every step we take. A diplomatic envoy shows stability. Power. That we are not some wandering cult, but an organization with reach.”

“Ellana. If you go to Redcliffe," Cullen turned to me, arms crossing, armour clinking faintly, "you go as a guest of rebel apostates—and their allies. Think what that says to every noble watching.” He had to be truly desperate if he were pulling the noble-relations card.

“Think what it says,” Nightingale murmured, “if we let fear stop us from trying.”

I remembering drawing in a long, long breath as I considered my words, all too aware that, as when we had gone to Val Royeaux, there were no excellent options. No choice was good, but a strategy had to be decided. And this time, the choice was mine. I would no longer answer to those who didn't know my name.

"I once travelled with the rebel mages," I started, cautiously, bringing them back to my reality, sort of, with truths that weren’t fully true—I had been a rebel mage, which was a little different. "I was at the Conclave on their behalf." Cullen drew in a sharp breath, and Nightingale let one out. "I can't speak for the Grand Enchantress, but opening a portal into the Fade seems an awful lot like shooting ourselves in the foot," I glanced at Cullen. "Contrary to popular belief, most of us actually don't want to become an abomination."

Cassandra sighed with decision and leaned forward onto the table, looking at Redcliffe. "So we go to the mages," she said.

"No," I corrected, walking around to Therinfall Redoubt’s large blue ‘X’. "I go to the mages. You go to the Templars. She," I jerked my head at Josephine, "pulls in every connection she has to get you an audience with the Lord Seeker. And the Sister gets me as much intel as possible on what's going on in Redcliffe, before I get there."

It's petty, I know. But I'd stopped using their names altogether.

"What about me?" Cullen stepped forward, and I shot a sharp look his way. Of course his manly Templar-y feelings were hurt...

... But no; something flickering in his eyes reminded me of the younger Cullen, the one who was eager, and uncertain, and simply wanted to do the right thing. I softened, and sighed. "You, Cullen, make sure the troops are able, and willing. I want them ready to march if this all goes south."

~~~

"Why are you going to the mages?" Cassandra's voice was neutrally curious, vaguely confused, as we walked to the stables.

"Because they've opened the door," I answered.

"Why am I going to the Templars?"

"Because I want them on our side."

"What if," she spoke slowly, selecting her words carefully, "to secure the Templars, I need to make a choice?"

Methodical, armoured boots ringing in unison.

I drew in a shuddering breath. "Between the two of them?"

"Between the two of them."

On the spiral stairs.

I stopped walking. Looked up at the hole in the sky. Closed my shrouded eyes. Breathed in sharp, winter air.

"Ellana?"

"Seeker," I said, slowly, intentionally, making sure I believed every word I said before I said it. "If I had to choose between them…"

Cassandra eyes said she already knew my answer.

"... I would secure the Templars."

Surprise flickered over her features. She schooled them. "I thought you agreed with Sister Nightingale," she said.

"I agree with the Sister that the mages are not responsible," I corrected. "But I also agree with the Commander that what we need are Templars. This shit? A magical, giant, gaping Fade-hurricane that spits out demons and consumes souls? This is why Templars exist."

Methodical, armoured boots ringing in unison.

I moved to catch up with her, and Cassandra turned to walk alongside me as I walked past. She didn't say anything.

"Besides," I quipped, waving my hand even though Scaíth was roaming my back. "If you had something like this shoving Andraste-knows how much power down your gullet, would you really want a hundred mages slamming their collective will up your spine? I'd rather kiss a pride demon and ask it to 'be gentle'."

On the spiral stairs.

That startled a scandalized laugh out of her. I considered it a success.

We reached the stables and joined the others. Cassandra, Blackwall, and Vivienne saddled up. Solas, Varric, and I prepared to walk. They'd offered me a mare the first time we went to the Hinterlands, but I had politely declined. I didn't bother explaining why I didn't know how to ride them. We didn't have horses in the alienage, or the Circle.

They opened the gates and we left, striding out of Haven through dappled snow. When our roads diverged, Cassandra's party tightened girths and checked on saddlebags. I helped Cassandra pop the bit into her horses mouth, and gave her a boost.

Stone fell. The floor tilted. A body bounced past me.

"Seeker," I said, looking up at her, just before she left. My voice was serious as the stone. "I choose the Templars, in alliance, to close the Breach, but I do not support wholesale Annulment. They must respect that. The ends do not justify the means."

"Of course, Herald," she said, almost like that was obvious.

But it wasn't obvious. Not to me.

~~~

Solas, Varric, and I went to Redcliffe to speak with the Grand Enchantress—by her own invitation, I might add—and... she wasn't expecting us? Didn't remember us. Swore she had never reached out to us.

"That's funny," I wasn't laughing. "Because someone who looked exactly like you spoke with me in Val Royeaux, and invited me personally to Redcliffe to talk."

Confusion, regret, and a startling lack of lies all dripped from her like blood from an altar. "I hear what you're saying," she said, "but I'm afraid that wasn't me. I am now indentured to a Magister, and have been for some time."

For you see, the mages had gone off and done something incredibly stupid while we weren't looking, which was: Sell themselves to Tevinter. While occupying Redcliffe Village. Then they kicked the Arl out of his castle. It was not only horribly self-defeating, but also practically an act of war against Ferelden.

One good thing about walking around with bandaged eyeballs is that you can roll them around as much as you want, and nobody will notice. Eye-rolling became a necessity. It was either that, or crying, and it wasn't going to be crying.

We had been directed to the Gull and Lantern Inn for the meeting, and it was not the most august of meeting places. Dark and musty, echoing with pain and despair. But Grand Enchantress Fiona sat us down and assured us that her Magister was on his way to meet with us himself and, please, wouldn't we consider speaking with him?

I had the impression that sometime between signing away her freedom and the present, she had realized she'd made a horrible mistake. Perhaps an arrangement could be worked out by which their contract might be transferred to the Inquisition?

Someone brought us drinks, but as I moved to pick mine up, someone stumbled into me. My arm jostled away sharply, and I dropped the cup, the drink pouring out all over the table.

"I am so sorry," the server said, breathlessly. Immediately bending too far over the table to mop up the mess, shoulders working overtime, almost as if she were trying to put on a show of cleavage. Something fell into my lap, a thread of intent trailing it like a lifeline, binding it to the woman. "I'll get you another one, right away!" She scurried off. Everyone else toasted, and drank.

I looked down to find a key, with a small note on pale parchment, attached like a label.

        Meet in the sacristy. Your life is in danger.

I glanced around. We didn't exactly have a good exit, surrounded as we were by Venatori and indentured mages. I brought my eyes back to the table just in time to watch Varric slump in his seat, lips beginning to mutter things that didn't quite make sense. The woman returned with a new drink for me, and I picked it up.

I remember Solas looking at me, eyes focused and then... unfocused, gazing nowhere in particular. I blinked rapidly, looked down at the beverage. Raised it to my mouth and took a real sniff alongside a fake sip, lips pressed tightly closed.

Witherstalk and jimsonweed. Induces dry mouth, incoherence, and unthinking compliance. I stifled a grimace.

Solas’ clumsy hand—never before clumsy—knocked something onto the floor, and when a servant rushed to clean it up, he barely noticed him. My throat worked in a fake swallow. Varric had gone silent and was staring intently at the wall.

What's going on? Scaíth picked up on my tension with an anxious flare.

I don't know, I replied. Act asleep. He grumbled, but his green light faded to a dull rumble.

After what felt like hours but was probably just a few minutes, I let my jaw go slack and began tapping the table aimlessly. And shortly after that three of the Venatori peeled away from the walls and came to us, gently guiding us from our seats. My companions followed without complaint, so I did too, thankful that my keen eyes were veiled by my shroud.

"What are you doing?" The Grand Enchantress' voice. "Where are you taking them?"

"That is none of your concern," one of the Venatori replied, taking our weapons away. “Your part in this is done.”

Can I kill him? Scaíth asked.

Not yet, I replied.

They took us outside, us following listlessly, stumbling over our own feet. They pulled us down towards the docks, avoiding common byways, taking us through back alleys.

"Is the boat waiting?" One of them asked. The one guiding Varric.

A grunt. "Should be," said the one guiding me. We were in the lead.

We can take them! Scaíth began to move beneath my skin again. I didn't reply. You're no fun, he grumbled.

They pulled us between longhouses, and halfway to the other side, I stopped. Put a hand on my guide's arm. "I need help," I said, tonelessly. I felt the man following us collide with my back, surprised.

Now? Scaíth begged.

Yes.

That's when I twisted, my hand on his arm forcing him into the wall face first, my head simultaneously jerking back to drive into the other man's throat. My guide let go with shocked cry and the sound of cartilage breaking, and I bore down on him and grabbed him again. I smashed my elbow into the one behind me, claw-blades flaring to life as I pierced and tore the shoulder from the one before me. Faster than anything, I turned, stepped on the crumpled form behind me, and vaulted over Varric's clueless head to grapple our third and final adversary, my claws digging into his shoulders. He toppled over onto Solas, who made a mild noise of complaint, and I on top of him.

Growling, I braced my feet against opposing walls and pulled, lifting him bodily off of Solas and hurling our weight backward. Now he was on top of me, but it didn't matter. My fingers found his throat and tore it out, his blood showering down upon me like a waterfall.

YES, Scaíth was ecstatic.

You enjoy this too much.

It's your pleasure I enjoy, he corrected.

I groaned, pushed the man's body off me, and dragged Solas to his feet. Grabbed our weapons from the ground and shoved them into confused hands. And, somehow, got two clumsy oafs to the Chantry. We went around to the side entrance, to the sacristy door. I fumbled with the key, and we entered. There was a rift in the sacristy, and someone was already there, fighting a demon.

"You made it!" She said, "Now help me close this!"

I shoved my companions into a corner and leapt into action, charging the rift directly. Something was wrong with it. Something was off, and I could tell that I needed to close it. Immediately.

When I became Andraste's holy garden hose and channeled the mother-rift, you may recall that I found myself able to dive into the space between moments. Now, that doesn't usually happen when I link with a rift. That mother-of-all-rifts was a special, special woman. But when I linked to this rift, there in Redcliffe’s sacristy, I was immediately reminded of her.

Yikes, said Scaíth, helpfully.

Space-time sputtered, twisted, surged. But unlike with the mother-rift, I was not in control. I was not channeling this rift. I was along for the ride. The rift bucked.

~~~

And then I was in Kinloch.

I thought, at first, that it must be memory, or some sort of waking dream. But no, my eyes were shrouded so it wasn't a memory, and when I looked for the echoes of things—their threads—I found them to be of the waking world. Which was... unbelievable. But I had to believe it. I took a deep breath, smelling the air and listening to the walls. Kinloch before the fall... but not in a time of peace. There was blood magic in the air.

I was standing at the foot of a well worn staircase, and my steps echoed naturally as I took them one by one. Even though something was horribly wrong, even as I knew I should not be here, there was something sacred about walking those stone steps again. I reached the top of the stair, and that's when I saw it, saw him...

... and knew exactly when and where I was.

Cullen leapt to his feet, my name on his lips, heavy with relief. "Are you alright? What happened to your eyes?" He was trapped, caught in what appeared to be some corrupted blood-magic form of a crushing cage that was taking its time with the crushing.

I rushed up to it and brought fire and claw-blades to my hands, slashing at it.

"It's no use," he said, voice both boyish and exhausted. "We tried everything. Steel does nothing. Dispels do nothing. That mage tried a fireball. It rebounded and burned him alive." He gestured vaguely, and my eyes found the charred corpse.

He was alone in the cage. He hadn't always been, but was now. The rest were bodies. I didn't ask about them. "Where is Irving?" I asked, urgently, looking up toward the observatory door.

His expression shifted. "Don't go in there."

"Why not?"

"Just-.."

A scream, horrible and anguished, burst out of the observatory, and Cullen's face crumpled into a sob.

Instinctively, I looked up again. My name bled urgency when he called after me.

I ran, throwing my weight into the door. It burst open. Slammed shut behind me. There was blood. Blood everywhere. Bits of human flesh, twisted and corrupt, and in places they had no business being. And... a rift? A rift. Up in the rafters, pulsing down with that same strange energy from Redcliffe.

A screaming, struggling mage was being held aloft between two abominations gone horribly wrong, a demon of desire caressing him with hands that brought—apparently—pain, not pleasure. "You should accept the gift I offer," it crooned. Then its eyes flicked to me, and, abruptly, the trio abandoned the man. Advanced on me. Pinned me against the door. "You," it purred, "should not be here. But you are... delectable."

It touched me, and I screamed.

~

And then I was in Kinloch.

I was standing at the foot of a well worn staircase, and my steps echoed naturally as I took them one by one. There was blood magic in the air.

Cullen leapt to his feet, my name on his lips, a little confused. "Are... you alright? What's wrong with your eyes?" He was trapped in a crushing cage that was taking its time with the crushing.

My brows furrowed. I brought fire and claw-blades to my hands, and I slashed.

"It's no use," he said, voice so young, and so, so tired. "We tried everything. We were helpless. That mage tried a fireball. It reflected and burned him alive." He gestured vaguely behind me, but my eyes went to the door beyond him instead. The observatory.

"Don't go in there," I heard him plead.

Yes, don't, Scaíth agreed.

"Why not?"

"Just-.."

A scream, horrible and anguished, burst through the door, and Cullen let out a strangled sob.

I ran, and he called after me with a voice ripe with terror. I threw my weight against the door, and it burst open. Slammed shut behind me. There was blood and bits of human flesh everywhere. A rift up in the rafters, pulsing down, same as the one in Redcliffe.

A screaming, struggling mage being held aloft between monstrosities, a demon of desire caressing him with hands that brought pain instead of pleasure. "You should accept the gift I offer," it crooned. Then its eyes flicked to me, and they dropped the man in a crumpled heap on the floor. Advanced. Pinned me against the door. "You," it purred, reaching up, claws tearing away my shroud, "should not exist. But you are... incredible."

It touched me, and I screamed.

~

And then I was in Kinloch.

I was standing at the foot of a well worn staircase, and my steps echoed urgently as I took them in twos.

Cullen questioned my name, unfurling slowly to his feet. "Are you... Maker! Your eyes..." He was trapped in a crushing cage.

I growled, brought fire and claws to my fingertips, and slashed.

"It's... no use?" He said, voice confused "We tried... We were... Someone tried fire..." He gestured vaguely, but I was already at the observatory door.

"Don't-.."

Not again, groaned Scaíth.

I opened it. A scream, horrible and anguished, burst out of the mage as the desire demon stroked him, hands drifting down his chest and lower... lower...

I shut the door shut behind me. The rift was up in the rafters, pulsing like the one in Redcliffe. Bound and gagged against the opposing wall, Irving. Slowly, I crept along the edge of the wall, toward him.

"You should accept the gift I offer," crooned the desire demon, eliciting another scream with its motions. "This would all be so much more... pleasurable." Lust flowed from it like waves down a slow waterfall, mingling with the mage's crumbling resolve.

"Do you accept this gift I offer?"

I tore my eyes away, looked up at the rift. Reached out with Scaíth and brushed up against it...

The thump of a body unceremoniously dumped, and then the demon was upon me, claws digging into my shoulder, my back pinned against the floor. Its hands were pure agony. "You are an intruder!" it snarled. "And you will be mine!"

It kissed me, and I screamed.

~

And then I was in Kinloch.

You can see where this is going, and I don't want to keep repeating the same events, over and over and over again. I don't want you to know what it was like, watching Cullen unravel. I don't want to tell you all the ways I tried and failed to close the rift. All the ways I died.

So I'm just going to jump ahead a few hundred cycles, alright?

I... what? Oh. Yes. I am on fire. Let me fix that. Alright, sorry. Shall we continue?

~

I was in Kinloch.

Again.

But this time, I didn’t count steps, nor did I marvel at the familiarity of old stone underfoot. This time, I walked—well, limped—like a blade drawn from its sheath; quiet, honed, and sharpened with purpose. Blood magic was in the air. I didn’t flinch. I breathed it in.

“This trick, again?!” Cullen’s voice. Always Cullen. I didn’t look at him this time, but I let myself hear the scrape of his boots, the tremor in his voice as he knelt. "I will stay strong," he ground out, even though the cage was killing him slowly. "How deep they must have delved into my thoughts! But your eyes...”

He loved you, Scaíth said, sadly.

As a friend, Scaíth. But it was true.

“My eyes are fine,” I said, calmly, even though I didn’t know what they looked like. Even though I’d never seen them. “You’ll be fine too. Eventually.”

I didn’t slash at the cage. Not this time. Not again. My feet took me straight to the observatory door. I paused with my hand on the wood.

“No! Don't make me hear it again!” His voice faltered, dissolving into a sob, entirely broken. "Don't make her scream anymore!" By now, I knew how many ways his pleading could end, and I was finished letting it hurt me.

We are going to kill them, Scaíth raged.

The scream came, like it always did: wet and broken. The air shivered with a demon’s delight, and I went in.

The smell hit first—blood, rot, alchemical heat. The rift hovered in the rafters like a hungry spider, Fade-green light pulsing with a rhythm not unlike my own heartbeat. I didn’t need to count the bodies. I’d done it before, and I stepped over them like stones in a creek. My emaciated robes fluttered as I moved, the edges of them brushing against the blood-glyphs painted on the walls.

The desire demon lifted its head as I entered. Still beautiful, still wrong. Flesh too smooth, eyes too deep. It was posed like a sculpture—but alive, animate, dripping with the magic that slid between lust and despair.

“You again,” it purred. Its claws curled and uncurled, voice curling with them around the hem of my thoughts. “I do so love a persistent girl.”

I didn’t answer. I reached up.

Go get it, Scaíth.

We joined with the rift. It was like throwing open a window in a house too long shut. The Fade roared through me, not in a single scream but in layers, like wind passing through a forest of voices. The rift didn’t push back this time. It pulled.

The demon shrieked, her glamour cracking like ice. “What are you doing?”

The abominations lunged. I let them. The first tore through my shoulder; I didn't scream. The second pinned me down; I didn't resist.

My body was irrelevant now. My soul was busy.

The rift responded, and showed me its chasm of need. Not the desire of bodies or power, but something deeper. The ache of an echo that had forgotten what it was supposed to return to. It wanted—longed—to be filled. It fed on unmet yearning, unspoken grief. And it was feeding so well here.

But I saw this for what it was now. One moment, so saturated with agony, so unresolved, that it had curdled into forever. And the rift… it had been drinking from it. Living on it. Holding it open.

Not anymore, I whispered, and poured myself in.

The grief. The rage. The love I had carried like bone-deep splinters. I gave it everything. I gave it Kinloch’s last dawn. The sound of Irving’s laughter. My breathless awe as I first turned the page of a tome too big for my hands. Wynne’s musings on the wonders of Creation, that I’d never fully been able to grasp, but always longed to hear.

I gave it the last time Cullen spoke my name, and all the times I never let him finish.

The rift screamed. The demon howled, its body shredding into curls of steam. The abominations blinked like stunned animals—no longer fueled, no longer whole.

And the rift broke. It didn’t seal. It shattered. The light collapsed inward like a dying star, and the whole observatory groaned as time’s crooked spine straightened. One last breath of Fade-light swept outward, brushing my skin with the warmth of everything I had lost—and then it was gone.

~~~

And then I was in Redcliffe, and the rift was closed.

"So that thing on your hand does work," the woman said, turning around. She let out a low whistle. "Wow, what happened? You look like you've seen better days."

I was missing my shroud. Quickly, I bowed my face to the ground and fished a spare out of my pocket. Yes, I kept spares. I'm a prudent person. Sometimes.

In any case, her observation was quite true. Between entering the sacristy and exiting the time-loop, my robes had been eviscerated by demon-claws, scorched through by rage, and soaked through with far more blood than any mortal should be able to lose. Myself included. I stung all over from what felt like a million paper cuts.

"Is all that yours?" She meant the blood.

"Most of it," I growled. "Some of it is Venatori." I’d already been covered in blood when we’d reached the Chantry. Now there was just a whole lot more.

She lapsed into an awkward silence.

The woman's voice was familiar, but I was still recovering from not being in a time-loop, not being trapped in a moment that folded ever inward on itself into infinity. With shaking fingers I bound my eyes, then popped the cork on a healing pot and downed the entire thing like it was a shitty brandy that I didn't want to savour.

"Where are we?" Varric's voice rustled in the corner. "And... why am I holding Solas? Here, Chuckles," a sound of sleepy complaint. "No... No! Here, you just hold onto your staff there... With both hands."

When I finally looked up, Varric had shuffled over, and I realized that this very bad, very weird day had just gotten weirder. Luckily, I was fresh out of feelings. "... Thessa?"

"Thessalia Varn," the woman said, reaching out her hand to shake Varric's, vigorously. He flopped a bit with the force of it. "At your service... Well, not really." She offered the hand to Solas too, but he simply blinked at her, keeping both hands firmly on his staff.

"You aren't dead," I said, flatly, feeling very close to dead myself, "and you're dressed like a Venatori."

"Ah, yes. That's a long story," she said, cracking a cocky grin at me. "But the important thing is that you're here, and I'm helping you escape."

"You... are?"

"Yup!" She said brightly, and turned on her heel. "Come on." She beckoned with two fingers over her shoulder.

"Please explain," I deadpanned, limping after her. In the sacristy, there was an altar. And beneath the altar, it turned out, there was a tunnel. She snapped her fingers for the key, and I gave it to her.

"The Magister lured you here on purpose," she said as we walked. "You felt that rift? How it does funny things to time?" She wiggled her fingers at me, bringing back echoes of a happier time. "Uh-huh. If it feels like he used magic to get here before you did, that's 'cause he did. He's obsessed with you."

She pulled a coin out of her pocket and began flicking it up into the air and catching it, an old habit that she hadn't lost and had gotten ridiculously good at. She could probably flip a coin and catch it while fighting a Templar. In fact, I was pretty sure I’d seen her do that once.

"Tried to drug you, stopped that," she lifted one finger, then a second. "Wants to steal you, stopping that." She raised a third. "Likely to chase you... Not much I can do about that." She waved her hand, dismissively.

I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to ask ‘How are you alive?’ Because I thought I knew the answer. Or part of it, at least.

The crypts beneath Redcliffe’s Chantry were narrow and stifling, thick with a dust that clung like grief and coated the breath. Time had settled heavily on the old stone. Roots knuckled through the mortar, and every step sent echoes spiraling down tunnels better forgotten. I remember Thessalia walking ahead, torch in hand, its light glinting off her burn-scarred arm and the knife-blade at her hip. Her pace was urgent but precise, as if she'd memorized the path long ago and could walk it blindfolded if needed.

I followed her, checking back periodically to make certain my companions were keeping pace. By the time the tunnel began sloping upward, air thinning and tinged with pine and ash, they were mostly lucid again. When we reached the final passage, Thessalia muttered something low and sharp under her breath, a glyph on a stone dissolved, and and old slab door ground open. It scraped against soil and stone, revealing not another corridor, but the open wilds.

She beckoned with two fingers again, encouraging us to pass her through the door, and we emerged into the silver-boned chill of a dusk that was falling in pale gloaming patches across red earth and thorny brush. The Frostbacks loomed distant and sharp, the walls of Redcliffe barely visible beyond a fall of shadow and trees. The wind still smelled of pine, but a touch of cold iron was settling in. No roads. No watchers. Only trees swaying in the wind, and Scaíth's heartbeat somewhere close to mine.

"You're welcome," Thessalia said brightly, still inside the passage, stone slab already beginning to slide shut.

"Wait!"

The stone paused.

"Thessa. I thought you were dead. Will I see you again?"

"I..." She shook her head. "Perhaps. Perhaps not. I expect you will. What happened to your eyes, anyway?"

My brows knit together. "Come with us, Thess."

Sometimes the words we use to describe things don't quite fit reality, but when I describe the look on Thessa's face as longing, that is precisely what I mean.

But she shook her head. "I'm sorry, E-.."

I shook my head sharply, willing her not to speak my name, and she blinked.

"I'm sorry, Herald," she repeated smoothly. "I can't. The Elder One is going to win." The stone slab began its upward slide again, inexorably this time, and I lost sight of her.

"Who's the Elder One?" I called, over the wall.

She didn't answer. Instead... "Catch!" A copper coin pinged in an arc, from her side of the barrier to mine.

I caught it, and stared at it as the stone slid home, shimmered with illusion, and became a simple outcropping of stone.

"Goodbye, Thess," I whispered.

~~~

I was worse for wear, but we didn't want the Venatori to catch us, so we didn't dare camp the night. Instead, with pursed lips, Solas sat me down and gently caressed my wounds with healing magic, until I snapped at him to 'stop wasting time'. Then Varric forced me to drink another healing draught, and I nearly bit his head off.

It was a long, painful walk back to non-Redcliffe civilization. We had to walk all night, and a little bit of the next day. And yes, they did ask me what happened with the rift, and how in a single moment I'd had the ever-living shit beaten out of me, and who was Thessalia, and how well did I know her, and...

Let's just say that I didn't answer, and eventually they learned to shut up.

We reached the Crossroads shortly after dawn to find a flurry of Inquisition activity. Soldiers breaking camp. Medics packing healer's kits. When we strolled into camp, by which I mean something more like 'Varric ambled in like he owned the place, while Solas half-dragged me in his wake like a waterlogged cat', everything froze for a moment.

The freezing was so entire that I could feel it even with my eyes closed. A hundred humming threads suddenly coming to a standstill with that singular focus that I'd long-since learned meant that 'everyone is staring'. Then Solas lowered me onto a pallet and a new flurry began, every medic in the Inquisition homing in on me like iron does to magnetic rock. Scaíth fled into my hand, where people expected it to be, and stayed there.

I let them fuss over me as the corporal hurried over. I watched him push through the crowd, a recruit following in his wake. I ignored the hisses and the clucking and the scent of warming poultices, the snip-snip of a doctor getting tools ready to stitch.

The corporal averted his gaze on his approach, but I demanded his attention. My body is irrelevant now. "Corporal Vale?"

"Yes, Herald?" His eyes snapped up, and to attention.

"Report!"

"Preparing t'march on Redcliffe, Ma'am! To recover the Herald!"

"That's me," I observed, and he reddened.

"Yes mum. Now that yer here, mum, I'm not quite sure what t'do."

"Paper," I demanded. "Ink." And the corporal’s attaché scurried off. "How did you know I was in need of recovering?" I asked.

"Bird from Haven, Lady Herald," he seemed to be waffling on what to call me. "Said ye may've been drugged, an' definitely disappeared, my Lady."

I blinked.

"Dunno how they knew, Lady Herald."

The boy returned with ink and paper, and I wrote a missive to Haven.

        N—

        Mages with tv, rc under foreign occ. Offer aid to rcarl, honour sovereignty.

        Sev proceeding to tr. Reply if tees already aligned.

        -C

‘C’ for Conduit. We’d figured that ‘H’ for Herald might be a little too on the nose.

"Hold still, Lady Herald!" some poor woman stiching my arm may or may not have interjected. I ignored her.

"Send this to Haven at once," I said, returning the parchment to the young recruit, finally turning my attention to what was being done to my body as the poor woman tied off and clipped a gnarly row of stitches.

"Thank you," I apologized. I hadn't made her job easy. "Are we done here?"

She acquiesced, and I nodded my thanks again as I stood. "Corporal Vale."

"Yes, Herald?"

"We'll need horses."

"I thought you didn't ride," Varric complained. I simply shook my head. I didn't. But I would.

Where are we going? Scaíth asked.

You're not gonna like it, I replied.

Chapter Text

The cart creaks like an old woman’s bones as it groans along the frozen trail, pulled by a sway-backed mule with sorrow in its eyes. Dawn bleeds over the mountains, a smear of white-gold fire against a sky that’s just a smidge too blue to be real. The snowdrifts glitter without warmth.

She sits hunched against the wind, her eyes turned toward the horizon as though she can still see the road in normal ways, with normal sight... And she can.

Beside her, Thessa wraps her cloak tighter, gloved fingers fiddling with the hilt of her staff. The wheels hit a rut, jostling them together. Neither speaks for a while.

        Is this shape useful? Will it let me know you? A voice like Thessalia's echoes from the mountains, but her friend's lips aren't moving.

When she breaks the silence, her voice is fragile but lit from within, like a candle filtering through gauzy curtain. She wonders aloud about the peace talks—about endings, and beginnings. Thessa huffs, bitter as frost. She doesn't meet her gaze. “I’ve seen too many negotiations end in fire,” she murmurs. "Something powerful is watching this one." The words echo off the mountains like prophecy.

        Everything tells me something about you. So will this: watch.

The cart jolts. Snow scatters. Something dark circles high above them, blotting out the light. She tilts her head. “Did you see that?”

But Thessalia is already gone. A hush replaces the wind. The world has tilted sideways. The bench beneath her has vanished. The creak of wheels becomes the soft chime of broken glass beneath her feet.

Kinloch. It always comes back to this.

She stands in the corridor outside the infirmary, where blood has dried like rust along the ash-scorched, disaster-pitted walls. The stained glass windows spill fractured light across linens and too many filled beds. It smells of vinegar and pain. She moves forward, but her footsteps make no sound, as though the floor forgets she’s there.

Behind a door left ajar, voices thunder like a burning home. Cullen’s voice—sharp, desperate, unravelling. “They’ve lost control. You saw the bodies. I’m telling you,” his voice cracks, “they’re gone—corrupted. You have to end this!” Pleading. “If you don't, it will spread.”

Another voice, too calm, deep and dwarven. The Hero of Ferelden, perhaps. His title flits from her memory like a moth brushing past her cheek. “You’re asking for an Annulment, yes? The Knight-Commander told me what that means.”

“They’re already dead,” Cullen grits. “They just haven’t stopped moving yet.”

She pushes the door open. It groans on its hinges like a child in pain. He's lying in an infirmary bed, very close to the door. She remembers a nurse telling her that he can’t stand to be too far from an exit.

He turns his head. Sees her. And something in him curdles. “You!” His voice is no longer desperate; it is final. “You’re one of them. An abomination walking like a woman.” His hand slaps the bed beside him, searching for a sword—for anything—with shaking fingers. “I should have ended you when I had the chance.”

"... Cullen?" her voice shivers with heart-break and shock.

        Cullen? a trembling mimicry.

The walls ripple, blacken, crumple. The floor peels away beneath her like layers flaking from a scab. The windows stretch thin and tight, glassy membranes ready to burst.

And then she is falling. Not through space, but through memory. Through Cullen’s voice. Through firelight. Through time. Abomination. She falls through snow, but it is not cold. Abomination! The fall becomes flight.

A feather-drift through golden pollen and green clover, her bare feet finally coming to rest, kissing moss-damp earth that smells of cedar and violets. She is small again.

Ashalle hums under her breath, long fingers weaving buttercups and wintergreen into a child’s braids. She sits cross-legged, skin flushed with summer warmth, eyes closed. "And so Elgar’nan cast his fire across the sky," Ashalle whispers, "and made the stars to remind us of sorrow." The story drifts like motes of dust, and the air tastes like sunshine.

Somewhere, a fire crackles. Somewhere, someone is singing. Arms wrap around her shoulders, warm and safe. The sound of halla bells becomes clinking pots, and sputtering oil.

The Tabris kitchen is too small for laughter, but it makes room. Cyrion hums as he tosses turnips in a cracked pan. His smile is all corners and creases. She darts in with a fork to steal a taste, and it is wild and hot. She winces, then laughs. He swats her with a rag, and the warmth lingers.

"Abbaaaaa," she whines, not truly displeased, grinning.

“Burned your tongue again, eh, little one?”

The smell of charred spice becomes crisp parchment.

She’s back in the halls of Kinloch Hold. The real one, not the ruin, yet. Winter sun spills through frostbitten windows. A shriek... and then a snowball crashes against her back. She whirls, grinning. Jowan runs. She gives chase. Her robes are too long for this, her boots too soaked, but she doesn’t care. She’s breathless with joy. Happy, for once.

        So you're mischievious then. I will make use of that, when I am you.

        Who are you? I ask.

In the corner of her eye: wings, pale and flickering. She turns. The courtyard is empty. Snow falls upward. Her breath clouds dark and heavy.

Then mud, briar, and peat. The Wilds breathe around her, slow and deep.

She walks through fern and fog, searching for herbs along the edge of the fens. Her boots sink in the blackwater muck, and moths spiral around her in silent loops. One lands on her wrist. Its wings are paper-thin, dusted like old scripture. Something waits.

        Get out! She is mine!

        Who needs to go? I ask, Who is yours?

A woman stands at the base of a tower cracked open like a long and slender nutshell, cloaked in robes of grey gossamer that shift like cobwebs. Moth wings flutter faintly from her sleeves, stitched like fading prayers. Her face is as wrinkled as the ends of time.

"You have forgotten," the woman says. Her ancient voice carries no malice. Only truth. "You have forgotten what you are. What you were meant to become."

Her throat burns. She wants to kneel. She wants to run.

"You must not fear the shape of your fire, child."

The moth on her wrist trembles. Then stills.

"You were always meant to burn."

A scream follows; not hers. Not yet.

        Get OUT! The wind howls

        A flicker of understanding. I am NOT yours, I say.

... and she is shackled. Knees on stone. Blood crusts her mouth. Haven’s prison shrinks around her, too cold, and too clean. They hover over her, circle around her, demanding answers. "Tell me why I shouldn't kill you now!" Again. "The Divine is dead!" Again. Torches sputter like dying stars. She does not answer, cannot answer. They twist the shackle until her spine arcs like a sliver of wood being shaved by a chisel. Blood drips from her nose. It spreads on the prison floor, unfurling like the wings of a butterfly.

        You're stubborn, it says.

        I will burn you, I say.

Falling again. The outer wall of Kinloch rough beneath her hands, fingernails tearing loose, something new bursting free of them to dig into the stone in blazing streaks. Screams rising like anguished, startled birds as the lake below waits, black and glassy, and the tower tears itself apart in a howl of wind and fire. A stone pillar breaks loose and spins past her.

        Death has followed you everywhere you go, hasn't it? Everyone you've loved... Everyone you've cared for...

She screams as she slides into the water, expecting to drown, but it's a shallows, blooming into a hip-height sea of blood around her, endless, stretching off into eternity in all directions. Blood stains her hands, her teeth, her skin. Is it hers? She lifts a hand to wipe her mouth, but it is soaked through, red through every layer, all the way to the bone. She finds a door in the middle of the lake, blood dripping up the frame. It won’t open. She cannot get out.

        There is so much blood on your hands. A delighted laugh. When I am you, the people will NEVER forget what you do to them!

        I've seen through your game, I yell back. What else do you think you can gain?

        I scream and scorch dry a clearing. We're in a burned-out husk of a forest now. The demon looms above, golden masks stitched into thorned and envious flesh. You are under the mistaken impression that I require your consent, it says.

        I lunge. No staff. No spell. Just bloodied fists and broken nails. I strike, feral, and the demon laughs—until my claws slash fire from its cheek. The heat bursts up my arms, electric. My rage screams.

It rips free of her throat as her magic surges from her skin, unshaped and raw. A bolt of searing flame erupts from her hands—no, her chest, her core—and strikes both men as they crowd in on her, faces shifting, shadowy aspects of possession and lust and greed. Nobody cares about a knife-eared little girl, one of them had sneered, his heavy slap reverberating from the walls.

They don't burn for long. Ash and blackened bone collapse in the spaces where they'd stood. Her pulse echoes into cavernous silence, her breath coming sharp and fast. Torchlight plays against her sweat-damp skin like adoration. And in that moment—terrifying, molten, rapturous... She smiles.

        And you crave it. You crave the violence.

        I didn’t choose this. I didn’t choose any of it!

The cart creaks again. Wood groaning, wheels turning.

She sits once more, same crooked plank, same mountains ahead. The rising sun weaves itself into the frostbitten fields like a golden thread. It’s still the same. She is not.

Her hands lie in her lap, knuckles charred. Her shroud flutters. There is no breeze.

Thessa no longer sits beside her. Instead, a little Dalish boy, white-haired and cloudy-eyed, peering up from beneath a broad-brimmed hat, its eaves like moth-wings framing his face. His face bears vallas’lin, and she wishes she could read it.

Has he been there the whole time? Through fire and ruin; through falling towers and seas of blood and rage?

        You look... familiar, I say. I’ve seen you before. Have I?

        I've been watching. I'm Cole.

She opens her mouth. Something dark flutters out. A moth. A wisp of smoke? It disappears into the sky. Before she recalls who she meant to answer, the horizon shakes.

        We’re inside you. Or I am. You’re always inside you. It’s easy to hear, harder to be a part of what you’re hearing. But I’m here, hearing, helping. I hope.

        I shake my head. None of this makes any sense.

        Envy hurt you, is hurting you. I heard it and reached out, and then in, and then I was here. It’s-.. it’s usually not like this.

        Get OUT! The other demon. Envy?

A pulse of light. White-hot. Star-born. Then sound, a moment late, and a crack that breaks the world.

The cart rocks. Ash spills into the sky, and demons spill out of it. Fireflowers bloom. Moths shimmer in waves, wings fluttering in an ethereal dance, then vanish.

She blinks. Sees a tower falling. Blinks. Sees an ocean of blood. Blinks.

Sees nothing at all. Instead, she feels, rather than sees, a thread reaching out—questioning, uncertain, evasive. It brushes up against her hand, lays itself across her open palm. Asking for permission.

        I dig deep within myself and spin a thread of my own, a thread of whispering fire. I send it trickling up my body, down my arm, out of my wrist.

The threads meet, laying side by side, and her fingers curl around them, holding them together.

        I clench my fist, and fuse.

Someone's fingers brush her sleeve. Smoke unspoken curls between them.

"We're thread-bound now," she hears Cole say. She doesn't know what it means.

And then...

Everything is ashes.

Wings.

Fire.

And the sound of a million Fade-charged threads, snapping.

~~~

The dreams started our way to meet the Templars. Not our first day on the road, but the second, and thereafter. Different each night, but somehow always the same; something studying me, toying with me, hurting me.

I said nothing. I don't like to announce it when a demon is toying with my mind. I've heard it tends to lead to premature execution.

But my companions were always watching me now, concerned and vigilant. I don't think they'd stopped being alarmed by my behaviour since Redcliffe. And honestly? That was fair. But at the time, I didn't care. I was in pain, sleep-deprived, and surly. Entirely unpleasant to deal with.

I'm sorry for it now, but I wasn't then. I drove them away, or tried to, anyway. Stubborn bastards refused to leave.

And Cole was often with me. Watching, hearing, helping—he hoped. A witness to an anguished struggle that I needed a witness to. I was unravelling, but he was keeping me sane. Mostly. A spirit talks like that and I'm not so sure that what results can be considered 'sanity' in a conventional sense.

In any case, the time-loop had been easier, in a way. Repetition breeds desensitization. Over time, I lost my feelings. I became able to maintain my focus. I studied the rift a little more each time, learning its feelings, seeing it for what it was, and finally learning how to close it.

With Envy, the story kept changing, the emotions kept shifting. I didn't lose my feelings, couldn't maintain my focus, was being studied by a hunter. But it still miscalculated me.

By the time we reached Therinfall Redoubt, I suspect my companions secretly wanted to hand me over to the Templars for an exorcism. Which under normal circumstances, probably would have helped, if the Templars of those days could have been trusted not to kill me for good measure. Which they couldn't.

But under these circumstances, it would not have helped. For, you see, it turned out that Envy was Therinfall’s shadow-queen.

~~~

"Thank the Maker you are here," Cassandra said, rushing across the bridge as our tired horses clip-clopped over it. I was furious and tired, about ready to fall out of the saddle and spontaneously combust. "Nightingale sent word you were coming."

"Report!" I snapped down at her.

Her eyebrows drew together at the irregularity of my demeanour, but she straightened. "We are ready to petition the Lord Seeker to sanction a Templar march on the Breach. The Lord Seeker... refuses to negotiate with anyone but the Herald herself."

A glimmer of my old humour, darkened with anger. "Well, doesn't that sound familiar."

"I did try," Cassandra said. Varric levied a compassionate look in her direction. Solas frowned.

"I'm sure," I replied, scathing.

Then I felt a pulse of grounding comfort roll down Cole's Fade-thread. It washed over me, and I softened, dismounted, landing on the cobblestone with a groan. "I know, Seeker,” I apologized. “Let's go do this."

We walked across the bridge, diplomatic attachés—Josephine's various connections—peeling away from their conversations to join us.

"Do you know what you did to capture the Lord Seeker's attention so completely, Herald?" One of them asked. His voice was mildly curious, and definitely dry. "Ten Orlesian houses, a royal-born Seeker, one Grey Warden, and a loyal and well-connected mage was enough for the Lord Seeker when we first arrived.”

Cassandra nodded. “And then, suddenly, at the snap of someone’s fingers, the only person who mattered was... you." She gestured, helplessly.

Unease stirred in the pit of my stomach. "Nope!" I replied brightly. "Not a clue. Doesn't sound good!"

It wasn't. Negotiations went south pretty much immediately, and not only for us. It seemed my presence was the spark that lit a combustible situation teetering on the brink. It was total chaos. Templars fighting Templars... and Venatori?

"I thought we left those behind in Redcliffe!" Varric yelled over the familiar crank-twang! of his crossbow. I'd filled them in.

"We did," Solas confirmed.

"There's red lyrium growing out of them,” Cassandra sounded horrified.

“And their Templar friends," Blackwall sounded sick.

"It’s Kirkwall all over again," Varric groaned, bitterly.

“What an unfortunate situation,” Vivienne commented, unruffled.

I growled. There was hum of something echoing in the air, its flavour uncomfortably familiar and exceedingly distressing.

We battled our way to the Lord Seeker's perch, a room precariously balanced in the keep's central tower. Templars who wanted answers about ‘the red stuff’ joined us as we went. The Seeker hadn’t been spotted in days, apparently. We found him waiting for us at the base of his crow's nest, back to us, front facing the tower door as if nothing in the world were more fascinating.

"Lord Seeker?" I knew something was wrong as I walked up to him, alone, the Herald whose presence he’d requested. I could feel the wrongness in my gut, the intent rolling off of him in waves incredibly not right. Slowly, he turned around, and I came face-to-face with...

... Not the Lord Seeker. "Who are you?" I asked, grimacing.

He opened his arms, expansively, as if encompassing us all within them. "My friends! It is so good to see you again."

"That... is a Tevinter," Varric commented.

"Your powers of observation are overwhelming." Cassandra deadpanned.

I agreed. The accent was rather strong. The man did not belong in the armour of a Seeker of Truth.

"Where is the Lord Seeker?" a Templar demanded. "What have you done with him?" another was horrified.

"I don't know you," I replied. “I’ve never met you before.”

The Tevinter's head cocked to the side and he smirked, as if I had said something technically correct, but still very funny. "Of course you don't," he said, dismissively, eyes drifting past me to regard the crowd standing behind me, down the stair. Templars, Inquisition agents, and international negotiators, all stirred together in a single melting pot.

"Templars! Inquisition," he nodded his beneficence. "You see before you the 'Herald of Andraste'... or do you?" his mouth widened into a toothy grin.

"Herald?" he called.

And from around the corner of his tower, I walked out.

... or did I? I recognized the taste of the air around it, and the shiver in the threads that bound it to the Fade.

"... Envy," I corrected.

Finally, I could voice my enemy’s name aloud, and I felt my anger begin to rise. When I looked at the thing—not straight at it, mind you, but sort of off a little to the side—I could spot the thread that bound it to the man from Tevinter. My lip curled. Envy had been summoned. Had been bound.

"Maker!" "What manner of witchcraft is that?" "Which one's the Herald?" "Damn mages..." "What do we do?"

At last, Scaíth gloated, as my rage grew and grew.

"You've plagued my dreams, of late," I murmured, voice dark and glittering with shadow. I cocked my head to the side, studying its mockery of my face.

"And now I know you," my own voice replied. "Now I am you."

"No one will believe you are me, demon!" I hissed.

"Do your friends know you so well?" It laughed with my laughter, the perfect shade of impish darkness. "Not as well as I know you."

It walked right up to me, studied me back. Grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around to face the crowd, shielding its body with my own, fixing its eyes on Cassandra Pentaghast. "Take her," it commanded. "She's been deceiving you," it growled.

For a moment, it seemed that everyone held their breath.

Cassandra nodded. Unsheathed her blade. Began walking up the steps. Paused at the top of them.

What? Scaíth raged.

Envy's uncovered eyes shone down at the Seeker, at the Templars, at the Orlesian delegates, sapphire-blue. They were the same eyes I'd always had. The eyes I assumed I didn't have anymore.

Cassandra moved. She charged right at me… then with a sudden spin swept my legs from under me, knocking me out of Envy's grasp. As I crumpled, she continued over me, crashed into the demon.

"No," she cried, "you are the imposter!" "With the Seeker!" yelled a Templar. Mayhem ensued. Get up, Scaíth seethed, I want in on this. Envy shrieked and threw Cassandra against a wall.

It's angry, I commented.

That's okay, Cole's thought along his thread. You are too.

I leapt to my feet and unleashed my rage. And together, all of us, we defeated a demon-queen.

Oh, and also a Magister. His name was Alexius, he’d come from Tevinter via Redcliffe, and he liked to play with time-rifts. Needless to say, I was really unhappy with him.

~~~

"Thank Andraste you knew the difference," I later commented to Cassandra, speaking over the top of a very large—and sadly also very empty—mug of ale. “Also, how’d the Inquisition know we’d hit trouble in Redcliffe?” I figured Nightingale had filled her in.

She shrugged and peered up into the rafters of the Singing Maiden. "Sera’s ‘little people’,” she replied. “And it was not so difficult. You would never ask me to take down another on your behalf. You would do it yourself. Probably screaming like a banshee." She sounded very certain, and looked very relaxed.

"That..." was too insightful. "Is not what I expected you to say."

She smirked, and looked at me, eyes dancing. "Fine then, have it your way, Mistress Mystery. Those were not your eyes."

"That's more like it! Flissa!" I held up my empty mug. "Another round of drinks!"

Tomorrow, we would seal the Breach.

~~~

Varric had once quipped that we looked like we were headed off on a holy mission. That first time we went to the Hinterlands had happened not so long and yet was an entire lifetime away.

Well, the next day took his holy mission and raised him an entire fucking village on holy pilgrimage.

We didn't want more deaths on our hands if something went horribly wrong. We'd tried to spread the word that folks should stay in Haven. We tried giving the Inquisition troops the job of staking out a perimeter to contain anything untoward we might unleash. We tried leaving before dawn, before Haven ought to have been awake.

But when the Templars arranged themselves in triple lines, with myself and Cassandra and Cullen at the head, it was all over. There was no holding the people back.

I got it. I truly did. But I also wished I had less of an audience. I'm a solitary soul, at heart. And speaking of hearts, the faithful had hung theirs out on the line, along with their lives, and the very fabric of their Andrastian faith, all for this moment.

They would not be kept away. First it was one, as we marched down from the Chantry's muster. Then a couple more, as we went through the gates, and then a couple more. Until there were streams of people, civilians and soldiers and even some nobility, feet whispering reverently through the town, the camps, the trees, to join this sacred moment, and I suddenly realized that perhaps this is what the Exalted Marches had looked like. But whereas those had sought to conquer and convert others by the sword, ours sought to save a world, and close the Breach.

This seemed like a much better use of time.

There were so, so many threads around us, betraying and belying intent and thoughts and words. Every person has a hundred threads that makes up who they are. Take a hundred people with a hundred threads... And perhaps you begin to grasp the magnitude.

But what was so beautiful about their threads that day was the way they were all woven together. Nobody but myself could see it—or maybe Cole could, too?—but we were all interconnected in our intents, our hopes, our fears, our mission. Our threads wove a breathtaking lace of possibility and probability that at one point stretched the entire length of the path from Haven's Chantry, through the Temple of Sacred Ashes’ foyer, to the courtyard where once upon a time I had channeled the mother-rift.

And above, the Breach filled the sky like a wound torn into heaven, a disk of green fire pulsing with slow, malignant rhythm, slowly spinning. I had seen it countless times. In dreams, in waking, in every terrified glance cast skyward. But today… today felt different, because we had come to end it.

The Templars broke formation as they reached the ruin, fanning out like ceremonial acolytes, each stepping into their appointed place. Cullen and Cassandra split to the sides, each taking up a post against a wall, each with hands on sword-hilt, doing their best to be prepared for whatever might come. To be ready to drag me out of there if things went wild, if they even could. And I, too, had an appointed place, in the centre of the courtyard, at its very heart.

I felt the Templars' power swell; not from blood, nor from magic, but from discipline and belief. From the absolute, grim clarity of duty, and their faith in the Maker and Andraste to see them through it. One by one, they raised their blades, and the lyrium in their armour flared a radiant blue, their bodies burning like stars. A hymn rose among them, low and bone-deep, in no language I knew but every language I understood. This was not the madness of zeal. This was reverent invocation. A pouring-out of love for Andraste and praise for the Maker above.

The power built, its pressure mounting like the sky was about to cave in. In a single, fluid motion, the Templars trust their blades into the air, offering their swords to their God, and with a sound like thunder inhaling, the Breach slowed.

It was my turn.

I stared straight up into the eye of the Breach and bent my arms at the elbows, palms up, steeling myself. My body remembered fear. My mind remembered pain. But my soul—the soul that had survived when Kinloch burned, that had walked a single moment in a million different ways, and had torn Envy from my mind—my soul knew what had to be done.

I reached deep inside and, slowly, heart pounding, I pulled a palm-sized pillar of Fade-fire out of my core and through my hand, stretching it up and up and up and up... until, finally, it made the gentlest of connections with the Breach.

Betrayal, deep and abandoned and lost, pulsed slowly through the column, heartbeat slowed by Templar intervention. It was as though the Breach had been created with a purpose, an intent that had never been realized, a need that had not been met.

When I was fourteen, I was engaged to a young man from Highever. Yes, I know that fourteen sounds young to you. But my moon's blood had come, and in the cities we elves die young. So it wasn't an unusual age, for us.

I wasn't against it, either. This was the rite of passage of my people, and I was looking forward to it. To the wedding, and the ceremony, and the rare experience of receiving a Chantry Mother's blessing... To the after-party with the drinking and the dancing... Even to the after-after-party, when a young woman like myself and a young man like my husband might find ourselves alone, unclothed, and with the Maker's seal of approval on having a bit of fun. And then... Life. Life was about to begin, with a partner, perhaps with children...

Frankly? I had met my bridegroom, and was over the moon with pleasant expectations. But I guess Andraste wanted her Herald to be a virgin.

In any case, the wedding dress and veil is a very important part of an alienage wedding, because you can tell by looking at it how well the young woman is loved. Her mother makes the bulk of it, but every woman who gives a shit makes sure her handiwork touches it too, in some way or another.

The newly-wed's dwelling is a similar affair. The bridegroom's father builds the bones of it, but every man who cares makes sure to add a little something. Which, with such little homes as we had in Denerim, made for some very interesting interiors when the groom's family was large.

But I digress; back to the dress.

There was only one woman around on my side of the family, which had everyone in the alienage clucking over me with concern. Fortunately for me, however, that woman was Ashalle, and she made a beautiful dress, and an exquisite veil. The dress: stone-gray, beautiful with my sapphire eyes and copper hair, embroidered lovingly with halla and fireflowers. The veil: delicate lace, blue like my eyes, beautiful and intricate and sheer.

I never got married in it, but that doesn't nullify the love that she poured into it. She brought it into being from the spinning through the weaving yea unto the final touches of embroidery.

I remembered watching her work, in little moments throughout the day, sometimes late into the night, sometimes early before dawn. I remembered telling her that she didn't have to work at it so hard, and her stubbon little soul, beginning to stoop beneath the weight of age, would just shake her head at me and keep working, showing her love for me in the weaving of cloth and the spinning of cool cotton thread.

And now, in this moment beneath the Breach, I saw threads too. They flickered not merely in green, but in all the colours. They shone not only for people, but for the Veil itself. Its warp and weft stretched overhead in perfect chaos, impossibly tangled, impossibly elegant. The Breach was not the gory wound it seemed to be... It was an unraveling. I needed to re-weave it.

I summoned staples of Fade-fire to me, tugging them gently into something like yarn, wrapping them around me in a coil. I imagined my body a spindle and my core a whorl… and I dropped.

Staples of the Beyond twisting and uncoiling into thin, fine threads. I let them filter through my body, stretch out from my fingertips, loop lazily and gracefully upward... And I began to stitch.

The thread became my will, each pulse from Scaíth becoming a tug of fire-thread to and through the Veil. I re-made the warp. I re-wove the weft. I imagined every loop as a knot of lace—delicate, and intricate, and lovely. I wove abandonment and hope. I wove faith and fear. And yes—I wove betrayal, and dreams, and daring where nobody else would. I wove a younger Cullen calling me by name, and all the times that I'd been called some other thing entirely. I wove burning so bright that I could not be held, and sinking so low that no-one could ever save me.

I wove all the pieces of me that I could gather into patterns that made no sense to the eye, but which sang to the Veil like lullabies. The Breach stretched and yawned, resisting like a child who was not ready to sleep. And then...

My final thread slid home, and the sky sealed with a sigh. Not an explosion. Not a flash. Just a stillness so vast it rang loud in the depths of total silence. I let out the breath I hadn’t known I'd been holding.

And then, someone, I've no idea who, started it. Her voice was beautiful and clear as she sang out her conviction and praise.

        The Light shall lead her safely
        Through the paths of this world, and into the next...

Oh no, I remember thinking. But someone joined her.

        For she who trusts in the Maker, fire is her water ...

Ah crap, I remember swearing.

        She should see fire and go towards Light
        As the moth sees light and goes toward flame...

Several voices now, swelling, bearing up the mountainous air, filling the silence with Transfigurations.

        The Veil holds no uncertainty for her,
        And she will know no fear of death, for the Maker
        Shall be her beacon and her shield, her foundation and her sword…

Pretty, Scaíth whispered, sleepily settling into my hand for a well-deserved rest.

And the Chant of Light followed us, all the way back to Haven.

Chapter Text

We threw a party. A ginormous party. A jubilant cacaphony of joy and song and raucous laughter. People pulled out skates I didn't know they had and rushed out onto the lake. People ate and drank and made merry, and it was a very, very good time.

But I couldn't get into it.

Even with all that noise—all that dancing and clinking of cups and clattering of platters—Haven was so, so quiet. Because the Breach was gone, and with it, its echoes in my mind, that persistent pull Scaíth and I had both felt to our very cores since we'd been joined, the million threads that frantically darted to and fro as thousands of poor souls in Thedas took little moments to fear the ending of the world.

All of that was gone. It was great! But it took some getting used to.

I went to the lake and walked down the entire length of a rickety old jetty held fast by feet of frozen ice. I remember thinking to myself that the next time Haven thawed, it would be a lost cause.

I sank to a crouch at the edge of the dock, gloved hands dangling loosely between my knees, and stared at the dark skin of the lake. Beneath it, I wondered what waited. Bones, maybe. Frozen fish. The reflection of someone I used to be. Who knew?

There was a reason for the darkness of my thoughts.

“Magister Alexius,” I murmured, to no-one in particular, tasting the bitterness of the name.

“Master of the Southern Free Mages.” I barked out a short, sharp, bitter laugh.

"Free," I scoffed.

We shouldn't have run, came Scaíth’s low, gravely murmur, from somewhere behind my kidneys. He slinked like a yawn up my spine and into my shoulder, down my arm. We should have fought.

You always say that.

I was right this time.

I wasn't sure he was wrong. “I knew the Grand Enchantress was desperate,” I muttered. “But that desperate?”

Scaíth flared faintly against my palm, stretching like a cat. The woman wanted power. I can understand that.

"Well, she got a leash,” I snapped, “and sold out all her fellow mages in the process," I ground my teeth.

But it hadn’t been the Grand Enchantress' fault alone. Many of those she’d sold had wanted to join the Magisterium. Fools. And now their master was in our hands, having answered just enough of Sister Nightingale's questions to fuel my nightmares, yet not enough to allay any of my fears. It was probably intentional, the bastard.

He sat mage-shackled in our prison, that same prison I'd sat in not so very long ago, and who knew what the fate of his army of indentured mage-servants was? Shipped off to the highest bidder in Tevinter? Dead in Redcliffe’s alleys? Did they even know what they’d been selling themselves into?

They knew enough, Scaíth grumbled. They're not blameless. I looked down, and flexed my hand around him.

“I know,” I said, softly. “But neither am I.”

I remembered the weight of that long walk back to civilization, after Thessa had plucked us out of the Magister's trap, plopped us into the middle of nowhere, and disappeared. Each step had bled into the next, numb and burning at once. My wounds had crusted over with dried blood and stubborn will, and at some point I’d stopped feeling them. All my pain had gone dull, distant—as if it belonged to someone else’s body entirely.

Maybe it did. Maybe I’d left mine in the Kinloch Hold of the past, curled around itself in that endless looping moment that had broken Cullen's mind. I knew now, why he'd turned on me. I knew now, why he'd called on the Right of Annulment.

I knew now, that it was me who had done it. Me who had broken his mind. Me.

Well, you were trying to make it stop, Scaíth pointed out.

Varric had cracked jokes to fill the silence, his voice an anchor trying to drag me back to the road, to the trees, to my own skin. Solas had simply walked like a ghost beside me, face carved of ancient stone, mostly lost in thoughts he didn’t want to share, but occasionally making noise to ask probing questions I didn't want to answer. I had let them talk, or not. I had heard them, or didn’t. Sometimes I heard them too well and snapped at them to shut up. Everything around me had felt like it came through water, blurred and slow, distant as a dream I hadn’t chosen.

I had walked straight into Alexius’ trap, into an obsession that I now knew through hearsay, and had seen him target the struggling rebels in their desperation. Had seen him target my sisters and brothers in magic, just to get to me. And now I had a choice. Patch myself up, send word to Haven, and return to face the man post-haste and burn him out...

... or do the pragmatic thing and go to the Templars. I had already sent Cassandra, with authorization to act. I already knew that between super-charging myself into yet another potentially-cataclismic Fade-bomb versus suppressing the raging tide that was the Breach into something Scaíth and I could stomach, I would always choose the later. And saving the mages...

... would take time. If they even wanted to be saved. Some of them very clearly did not. And time wasn’t something we had a lot of. The longer we waited, the larger the Breach grew, the less likely either Templars or Mages were to possibly be enough against it.

So I had chosen the Templars, offered Ferelden our foreign support that I didn't doubt they wouldn’t take, and left the Southern Mages to their fate. Even then, I’d wondered if I was making a mistake. And even now, standing on the icy jetty with wind clawing at my coat and Scaíth settling into my lap, I still didn't know.

It was out of my hands now, if it had ever been in them. Even if Redcliffe's Arl successfully retook his castle town, it wouldn't be an overstep if he handed the mages over to the nearest Templars he could find... or killed them all himself. They had collaborated with a foreign occupying power to drive him out, after all.

There was only so much I could do to save idiots from themselves.

And yet. Perhaps I should have brought an army to Redcliffe in the first place, choosing commitment over cautious half-measures... or perhaps I should not have gone at all? Had Cullen been right about the cloudiness of my judgement? Had my decision to seek the mages damned them?

He had come to my room as I was packing that day, after I had decided: Cassandra to the Templars, me to the Mages.

I had heard the knock, sharp and soldier-clean, and also so familiar from a time in our lives that he didn't seem to remember. And I opened the door knowing it was him, knowing by the rhythm of it, and by the tension in the air it left behind. Cullen had stepped inside without waiting for further invitation, jaw tight, eyes harder than usual.

“This is a mistake,” he had said. No pleasantries. No softening.

I had turned back to the satchel on my bed, shoving in a salve kit, wrapped. “You already made that clear.”

“They’re mages,” he bit out. “What happened at the Conclave was magical. The Breach is magical. There's already so much magic in the air here, Ellana, that none of us can breathe.”

I nodded, understanding where he was coming from, but something in my stance must have rankled, because he escalated.

“And now you're going to, what, go have a nice little chat with the mages so they can add all their own special peculiarities into the mix?” His hands were up by his face, fingers writhing to accentuate their ‘peculiarities’.

"I'm going to the mages," I replied, summoning all my calm, "because they have invited me, and the Templars have not. Maker willing, Cassandra will win the Templars over."

"And if she doesn't?"

"Then, Maker willing, I'll convince the mages to come as backup."

"Backup," he scoffed. "No they're not. You just don't want to admit aloud that you've chosen your fellow mages over everyone else and against reason."

"That's not true," my anger flickered.

"You know very well that you weaken the Seeker's case by not being there yourself, Herald."

"I'm her puppet to them, remember? The Lord Seeker made that clear in Val Royeaux!"

His eyes flashed, sharp as drawn steel. "Then let her take her puppet with her! The only thing that matters is the Breach! Do a song and dance if you have to!"

I froze, my hands clenched around the leather strap. I was more than a song and a dance.

“If the mages are so bad," I began, shoving my rage back down my gullet where it belonged, "then tell me: What are Templars, Cullen? Where are the Templars? Have they forgotten their sacred duties?”

“I-..”

“Did they not literally become red lyrium in Kirkwall? Have they not filled the Circles with mismanagement and abuse, just waiting for the Seekers to close their eyes of Truth?”

I watched him deflate. "Templars have been party to regretful acts," he ground out, dully. "I have done many regrettable things. But Templars still brought order. We protected people from demons, from themselves...”

“You locked us in cages,” I said, voice low and shaking. “You carved fear into children and called it protection.”

“Because without self-control-..”

“Self-control,” I repeated, flaring and bitter, “is a funny word when you mean obedience!”

There was silence. Only the sound of the wind outside Haven’s walls, and my heartbeat in my ears. Then he stepped forward, closing the space between us.

"You’re walking into a nest of vipers and pretending they’re old friends," he finally said, quiet. "The risk is too great, Ellana."

Ah yes. The risk of losing that Andraste-'blessed' mark upon my hand, was too great for the man who’d once pleaded with his Knight-Commander for my death. Because I was a weapon and an instrument. Had always been a weapon and an instrument.

And perhaps I understood that. Perhaps I even accepted that. Maybe. But all I said was, “So be it.”

He had left without another word.

The wind off the lake cut sharper than any blade, but I stayed there on the wooden jetty, leaning into it like it could flay me of my sins. The nice thing about sitting by a lake in winter was that every inch of it was still right where I'd left it, frozen and unchanging beneath the moonlight.

But maybe the Commander had been right.

~~~

And, as before, I heard him before I saw him; this time in the slow, deliberate groan of old wood beneath steel-shod boots. I didn’t turn. Not right away. I just listened to his approach, every step thudding through the bones of the jetty.

He stopped a pace behind me, silent for a long moment, his threads reaching out to me, uncertain and unintentional.

Lovely. The Commander of the Inquisition was come to check in on the Herald, who was shunning the party and crouching on a frozen dock, talking to herself. No, I wasn't having a mental breakdown, why do you ask, Commander?

"Maker, it's cold out here," he finally said.

It was true, and certainly colder for him than for myself. My rage runs me hot.

But I scowled, feeling ill-equipped in this moment for a Cullen interaction. "You don't have to stay," I snapped.

He stepped closer, up beside me, and I looked up at him.

He looked a little lost.

Relenting, I patted the cold dock beside me and he sat down, slowly, swinging his armoured legs over the edge with as much grace as possible—which wasn't much. Have you ever tried sitting down in plate-metal?

We watched a elven man and a human woman glide on silver skates across the surface of the lake, looping in lazy circles hand-in-hand.

“I was wrong,” he said at last, voice low and raw with honesty.

And I blinked. 'Cullen is wrong' is not what I had just been thinking. The lake stretched out before me, vast and cold, and offering me absolutely no clarity.

"I was wrong," he repeated, "about your motives. I thought you blinded by... identity politics," he huffed out a laugh, like he couldn't believe he'd just said that aloud. "I thought you were going to lock away your better sense and throw away the key, because you were a mage and mages stand together. Or something like that." He sighed.

That could have been his point, but it seemed he still had more to say. "Go on..?"

He fidgeted with a kneeplate. "Cassandra told me that you chose 'the Templars, in alliance, to close the Breach' before you ever went to Redcliffe."

My exact words. Charming. I sighed. "Why did you come out here, Commander?" I was tired.

"Is it true?"

"Does it matter?"

"Why didn't you just... tell me? I said such awful things to you, implied even worse..."

He didn't remember the half of it. But that was another lifetime, and irrelevant.

"Because you were right, Commander," I said.

His intake of breath was short and sharp. Visible in the cold air as something reshaped behind his eyes, pieces of a puzzle he didn’t want to solve arranging themselves.

"You were right, Commander," I repeated, intentionally, deliberately, "that I wanted them to be old friends, because the alternative means that old friends are all dead friends in my book." I was hearing anguish on the winds, realized that it was mine. "They were old friends, Cullen. I saw one of them."

And she might be a new enemy, I didn't say.

He was sitting very, very still. His voice cracked. “You’ve been in a Circle.” It was more statement than question, but I nodded. I wouldn’t lie to him.

"I didn't even want them to help me close the Breach," I confessed, and if he could have seen through my shroud there would have been pleading in my eyes, "but I did want to offer our protection." I didn't know what I was begging for, and something within me shrivelled up and froze brittle. This was too much. Too much trust. Especially with him.

I turned away. "Turns out they 'accepted' it from someone else, with the most stupid terms I can imagine. It was a moment of weakness. It will not happen again."

"No, Ellana," he let out the breath he'd been holding. "That is not the lesson to learn here."

"Then what is?"

"The lesson is this: That I am sorry," he said it softly, tenderly, voice cradling yet full of conviction. "I am sorry for what I said before Redcliffe and Therinfall, and all the other times I’ve accused you of malice and blindness. I’ve accused you of bias, and of choosing mages just because you were a mage." His voice darkened. "But it was me. I was the one who couldn't see beyond the label our world has placed upon you. I saw you as a mage before I saw you as a person, with a history, with memories, with... old friends."

You know, the ice on the lake was so incredibly interesting. I couldn’t possibly tear my gaze away from it, oh no. I was going to study the same spot over and over until I learned it in the finest of detail.

"You asked me why I came out here," he continued. "As a person with a history, with memories, and with 'old friends', I am here to thank you for saving them, and protecting them, and preserving their purpose when so many others didn't think they deserved one anymore. I owe you for that."

I swallowed hard, tasting misplaced gratitude upon the wind, and anguish in the falling snow. Words unspoken echoing in the night, feeling crushed by the irony of this existential talk of history and memories, coming from a man who had forgotten my face and my name somewhere along the corridors of time.

“I didn’t do it for you,” I tried to brush it off.

“I know. That’s how I know I was wrong.”

I didn’t know what to make of that, but as party-sounds continued to drift through the air, I felt the wind change direction. It brushed over us both, cool and cleansing, like the Maker’s breath granting absolution to the damned.

~~~

Harsh alarm bells rang. Cullen and I looked at one another, stunned.

"What in the-.." His armour made it hard for him to stand, so I hauled him to his feet. Time was folding in on itself. I'd found him sitting against a bookshelf, once, dazed by some demon. I’d dragged him up to standing.

"We must get to the gates!" I cried. "Go!"

Someone struggled to remove their skates. "Who would attack us? The Herald just saved us all!" Someone else swept them up and carried them. "What's going on? We're under attack? From who?" We ran along the lake edge, dodging between tents. "We have to put up barricades or something." We reached Haven's walls, began dragging people through the gates, faster. "What's happening?" "The Herald will save us. That's why Andraste blessed her!" "This will be bad. Real bad." "Let me help!" "Maker willing..." We pulled the gates shut and barred the door. We'd done that together before.

"Report!" I demanded, of nobody in particular.

Cassandra was there. "One watchguard reporting. It’s a massive force, the bulk over the mountain."

"Under what banner?" Josephine was breathless; must have run from the Chantry.

"None," Cassandra replied.

"None??" That didn't fit with Josephine's diplomatic world-model. "That... Why-.."

"What threat could the ground hold?" Vivienne articulated for her, working her way from the mage’s quarter of the village. "You’ve already conquered the sky!"

An explosion rocked the gates inwards on their hinges.

"Hello? Hellooooooo!"

"Tevinter again,” I ground out, my hands balling into fists. “Or does the accent grow on trees?” I didn’t think so.

“Why is he knocking?” An Inquisition soldier; Laurie, hurrying to Cullen’s side.

“That wasn’t knocking,” Cullen replied. “That was fire.”

“Alexius is not that important,” Nightingale said, silky voice closing in from the dark. She hovered at torchlight’s edge, distorting it by her form.

“Tevinter would not launch an invasion over the Magister,” Josephine agreed.

The voice called again. "If someone could open up, I'd appreciate it!" The cultured voice of one accustomed to being tended to, yet braced by the determination of conviction and an urgency borne of mission. Malintent did not ooze from the threads that whorled around him.

Cole flashed into being by the gates, and opened it for us. "Help, he is here to help," he agreed, and vanished.

"What the-.." Cassandra jumped a foot in the air.

"That was Cole," I said quickly. "He's a friend, and he does that. You just haven't noticed him yet."

Vivenne’s eyes narrowed.

"Mite exhausted!" The Tevinter's voice called in through now-open gates. "Don't mind meeee!" I rolled my eyes. Someone was requesting attention. "I came to warn yoooouuuu, fashionably late, of course."

I rushed out, and Cullen followed me, sword drawn. We had done this before, too, in a place with a lot more flagstone and a lot less snow. Cullen glanced at me, brows furrowed, like he was untangling more than one web at once.

The Tevinter was a mage, seated in the snow, at least five dead Venatori sprawled around him. He was clearly a man who could burn a furious fire with his ass firmly planted in deep, freezing snow.

Impressive, Scaíth was intrigued.

Don’t get too excited, I replied.

The man’s eyes latched onto Scaíth, flickering in my hand. "Ah, there you are. My name is Dorian Pavus, and I came to tell you what happened to the mages at Redcliffe."

My stomach fell into a pit.

"You're not going to like it," he promised. And, well, I could already tell that.

I hauled him to his feet and made to drag him through the gates, but he shook me off, pulled out a spyglass, and pointed it out toward the advancing force.

"Your southern mages are under the command of the Venatori now, in service to some thing called the Elder One."

My stomach fell into a well. Thessalia's Elder One?

He handed me the spyglass and pointed. "And that woman,” he said…

And my stomach fell into a gaping chasm. Thessalia’s Elder One.

"… she commands the Venatori." He proclaimed it with self-important relish, pleased in his role as the artist of revelation.

The Elder One was monstrous. Twice the height of any human I’d ever seen, and twice as thick, red lyrium sprouting symbiotically from his body in all sorts of places, scarring his thickset face with jagged outcrops. And Thessalia stood by its side and marched on my people, like nothing was wrong.

I handed off the spyglass, and they passed it around.

Are we going to fight that? Scaíth asked, drawing my attention to the Elder One again. His threads reeked of red-lyrium-song and sounded like despair.

Andraste's voluptuous ass, I hope not, I replied.

We dragged Dorian back through the gates and barred them shut, again. Another thing Cullen and I had done together, with a different mage, at a different time, in a different place. That one had been surrounded by hungry shades of horror, and I’d wiped them from the face of Thedas with a shockwave of flame.

Everything felt surreal, and shock coloured the silence.

"Cullen, give me a plan. Anything!" I locked eyes with him, not that he could tell. Shroud and all that.

"Haven is no fortress. If we are to withstand this monster, we must control the battle," Cullen mused, and I knew exactly what he was going to say next.

Well, that seems bloody impossible.

But very fun, Scaíth was eager.

"We'll get out there and hit them with everything we've got," I said, and his eyebrows snapped together as I snatched his words out of his mouth… or from the echoes of memory. “You have the village, Commander.”

He nodded, and immediately started shouting orders, demanding barricades and steady lines. And, yup. You guessed it. We'd done this before. Only, in a Circle cafeteria, not an entire town.

And since shit at the Tower hadn't gone well... well, let's just say that the parallel frightened the crap out of me.

Vivienne and Cassandra took off with me as the gates opened yet again to let us out, and we went as fast and furious as we could. Cole flashed in and out of existence as the need arose, slitting throats and ending pain in the most humane ways he possibly could. Vivienne, for her part, brought an icy control and well-tempered purpose that dragged a stillness in her wake that only she could, and Cassandra’s roaring challenge echoed across planes.

I fought in a frenzy of claw-blades and staff, flinging fire in what felt like every direction, exploding with rage whenever too many got too close. And even with their aid, I remember thinking that this battle was balanced for an Inquisition army, not a little party of four.

Scaíth revelled in it. But we did not control the battle.

When the Venatori breached the gates, we furiously fought our way back to retake them, then back into the village. Fire and screams and Venatori everywhere.

Cole flashed into being. "A village of the dead who don’t know it! Unless you help."

Even in the middle of a battle—especially in the middle of a battle?—it was a relief to have someone else who could feel the ways the world's threads sang.

We ran and we fought and we lifted burning beams off people and fought some more and dragged the wounded and unpinned ankles and fought some more and broke down locked doors and...

We were in the Chantry. The last ones in. They closed the doors behind us. A man collapsed.

Dorian caught him.

"Chancellor Roderick!" He looked so awful that I went immediately to his side, even though we shared no small amount of grudgingly respectful distaste. He was the one who had wanted me executed… remember?

"A brave man," Dorian said, sadly, as we lowered him to the ground. "He stood between the Chantry and a Venatori."

"Briefly," the Chancellor scoffed. "I am no Templar."

He wasn’t. He was a Divine’s undersecretary, thrust to the top of his Chantry by her death and those of so many others; whose heart was in the right place and yet whose conclusions always left something to be desired. His threads whispered of righteous sacrifice and faith… and yet of doubt.

“Herald!” Cullen interjected, approaching at a jog. "Our position is not good."

"There have been no communications, no demands," Josephine caught up, breathing too fast, too shallow.

Nightingale peeled out from the shadows. "Only advance after advance."

"There was no bargaining with the mages, either,” Dorian groaned. “This Elder One takes what it wants."

"The Elder One doesn’t care about the village," Cole flickered into existence again, and stayed that way. "He only wants the Herald."

"What?" Cassandra was outraged. "Why?"

"I don’t know. He’s too loud. It hurts to hear him," I whispered. Cole’s impressions, my voice.

"He wants to kill you," Cole repeated. "No one else matters, but he’ll crush them, kill them anyway.” His head cocked, inhuman. “I don’t like him.”

Cullen threw a hand up to the bridge of his nose, pinching. "You don't like-.." Cullen gave up the futile task of trying to understand Cole, and looked at Dorian instead. "How do we stop him?" he ground out.

"Trust me, that is not information I would keep to myself," the mage snapped.

Cole shook his head, eyes peering off into distance. "It won’t be easy. He has a dragon."

We all fell in a deep, ominous silence.

Scaíth, what happens to you if I die?

Don't die.

Yes, but-..

If a suitable host is near, I may survive. I probably will not.

"What about the trebuchets?" Cullen asked.

"What about them?" Cassandra.

"We could bring the mountain down..."

"Burying all of us?" That was a hard 'nope' from Dorian.

"We’re dying, but we can decide how.” Frustration. “Many don’t get that choice."

Silence again, dark, and gloomy. And this time it was Chancellor Roderick who broke it, to tell us about a path that he’d once found by chance, that went through the crypts.

I was starting to think that maybe all Chantries had secret creepy-crypt paths. It seemed suspicious.

"Herald," the Chancellor groaned, barely capable of speech, voice fluttering around pain. Bruises stained every inch of him, and I realized with a strange sadness that the man was bleeding from the inside out, certainly dying. "If this simple memory can save us, if Andraste showed me so I could tell you…” He closed his eyes, searching his soul, and I tasted echoes of a reality shrieking as it bent and twisted and reshaped itself.

“This could all be more than mere accident,” he whispered. “You could be more."

Another silence. This one teetering on a knife’s edge. Nothing screams ‘you may be touched by God’ louder than a skeptic finally giving in.

Something slammed into the doors to the Chantry. Then several somethings. Shields, bashing. Or maybe fireballs. We listened.

I gathered myself.

"Well!" I finally said, brightly. "Time for me to play the bait again! But... Cullen. Dragons have wings." It would be difficult for the Inquisition to outrun a dragon.

"It won’t stray from the Elder One. He’s here for you." Cole was being helpful. I think.

"Then... not a problem!" I started backing toward the door. My arms gesticulated flippantly, like I was putting on a one-woman play. "I'll draw them off, hurl rocks at the mountain, and the Inquisition escapes by the Chancellor's path. Easy peasy!"

"And... when the mountain falls?" Cullen came after me, steps halting. He looked stricken, like he was starting to see something that was fracturing his reality. "What about you?"

I stared for a moment. Took a deep breath. Let it out. There was no ‘me’ anymore.

"These people are here because they wanted to close the hole in the sky," I said, softly, "but also because of what ‘I’ represent. Because even Chancellor Roderick over there is starting to believe that I am something more."

I shook my head, sadly. "I'm probably not. But now this Elder One is here for me, and these people who came because of my existence are at a risk of dying for it, too."

He shook his head once, sharply, and swept a hand over his face, like a man trying to dislodge a covering from his eyes. "Wait until we are above the treeline before you strike," he said, as if there was any chance in Andraste's bloody hell that I could make it to the trebuchets alive. "Perhaps you will surprise it, find a way…"

My hand was on the door. At the last moment, I turned back to look at him. We had done this before, in a different time, in a different place. With my rage, I had been the better distraction, always the one who sallied forth. With his faith, he had been the better bulwark, always the one who held himself back, showing restraint, to shepherd the lost. And somehow, he had forgotten me.

"Cullen," I said, willing him to feel the intensity of my gaze through the shroud that hid my eyes. "If I die, remember me..."

I turned, and placed both my hands on the bar across the doors, bracing it. It was trembling under the pressure of a dozen insistent blades.

"Not by sword… or shattered tree?" He spoke to my back, bewildered, the words dredged out of him like echoes of a time that would not, could not stop repeating itself. "Maker's breath." His threads rejected the very revelation they chased.

"Commander," Cassandra said something, but I'd stopped listening to words.

I listened to echoes now, and the glowing interconnects of the world. I tasted shock and regret as Cullen walked away. Fear and faith from Cassandra by his side. A hundred fears, a hundred hopes, a hundred lives curling upward, incense smoke into the rafters, holy sacrifices.

I felt, rather than saw, the Inquisition retreat behind me, following the faltering thread that was our Chancellor's final intent. Smelled, rather than heard, the door before me beginning to let go of purpose, longing for a release that hovered, shattering, in the air.

~~~

My shroud was wet. I was crying. The Inquisition had cleared this opening foyer to the Chantry, and someone—probably Solas by the strength of it—had erected a barrier that blocked the arch to the atrium. Wynne had done that too, once upon a time.

It had trapped me inside. This time it trapped me out. But its purpose was the same; when the next door broke, I, and then it, would bar the way...

And this door had just about had it.

I don't want to die.

We won't, Scaíth, I lied, and I dove deep within myself. I plunged into that pool that was always there, my liquid rage; calmed by the release it had already tasted this night—less erratic, less demanding—but not gone. Nowhere close to gone.

It's time to get angry, Scaíth thrummed with anticipation. He knew me so well.

This Elder One took my friends, I replied. My shoulders flexed, preparing themselves.

He had taken the broken body of a mage rebellion and placed a collar around its neck before it had a chance to breathe and right itself. He had chased me from Redcliffe to Therinfall Redoubt, not merely to hunt me in the flesh, the demon they unleashed not content with claiming my dreams. It had sifted through my thoughts and dissected my innermost workings. It had sought to usurp my face.

And we destroyed it, Scaíth growled.

I rose from the fiery pool within, anger spreading like a bloodstain from my core to the very edges of my being. I shifted my hands, placed one beneath the bar, ready to lift; the other held ready to open the Chantry doors.

His agents had meddled with the fabric of time, twisting it in on itself like dirty laundry, instead of treating it like something sacred. I had been stuck in a bloody time loop, to face the sobs of a friend I loved over and over and over again, to torment him with my own agony on repeat until he broke and forgot my name.

Anger flared to red-hot rage, smoldering like coals that would never go out again, bubbling up against my skin, daring me to let it out. Claw-blades beginning to press through my fingertips, ready for blood.

And now he's here, for you, destroying yet another of your lives.

I burst into fury, white-hot and pure, devastating and unstoppable. We might not reach the trebuchets, but we would give the Inquisition every moment we could. They had as much time as I had rage unfurling in my belly.

With a snap I threw up the door-brace. With a growl I unleashed just the tiniest taste of the pressure I held within…

And the doors flew open.

~~~

The voice that ripped out of my fiery throat was half-mine, half-Scaíth's. "You are going to regret the day you marched on Haven, Venatori, for I do not simply intend to kill you. I want to kill you. I revel in your pain. And I will not stop until every one of you is dead and crumbling into ash upon this holy ground!"

Holy ground? Really?

That's what everyone seems to think, Scaíth was smug.

“I am Fury, I am RAGE!” I cleared my throat with a growl, and a little bit of a cough. "By which I mean to say that... all of you are dead!"

My grinding alto, Scaíth's words. Mostly. Okay, fine, I admit it, some of them were mine. And, of course, I screamed out all of this—and more—while murdering everything I could see. And I had sight that was more than sight, so I could see a lot.

The world narrowed to a pulsebeat. I would hold against the tide, and I was not alone. Scaíth was with me, howling for blood, and I could feel Cole along his thread. Sometimes busy, his mind on something else; sometimes whispering words I couldn’t hear but that comforted nevertheless. Sometimes, simply, watching.

Steel rang. Blood hissed as it hit the snow, hot and sticky. My claw-blades sang their own rhythm—cleave, burn, rip, rend—and when I moved, fire licked the ground behind me, catching the hems of robes, eating corpses where they fell. Venatori screamed, and Scaíth screamed louder, a raw, giddy joy rising up my spine like a second soul in ecstasy. I was burning from the inside out, and I liked it. He liked it.

More! he snarled, all bright hunger and iron heat. Split their bones and drink the marrow! Let the Fade see what we’ve become!

We were fusing. The breath in my lungs wasn’t breath anymore—it was fury made flesh, rage made radiance. I flung fire with my left hand, raked a man’s chest open with my right, drove my knee into a mage’s jaw so hard it cracked apart like dry wood. I felt them coming before I heard their footsteps, flanking up the rise to the Chantry’s square, trying to hem me in. They were being clever.

I dropped to the snow as the first spell flared overhead and Scaíth twisted in my chest, dragging my hand up with a violent jerk. A rift bloomed open and shut with a resounding crack, a pulse of green agony ripping the world apart, just for a moment. And the Venatori staggered, screaming, as their barriers shattered like glass. One didn’t fall, so I finished the job. Fire through the mouth. Silence.

I was laughing. Or Scaíth was laughing. Or maybe it was both of us.

A blade came down, and I barely dodged. It caught my upper arm, shallow, and I screamed. Not from pain, but from offense. I twisted under his guard and drove my claws into his belly, lifting him off the ground on tiny daggers. He gurgled something, and I didn’t care what. Scaíth let me burn him from the inside.

The heat built—rising, surging, mounting—like a tidal wave at sea. The snow was gone, sublimated by my heat, replaced with flagstone black with crumbling viscera. Ash clung to my lips. My feet slid in blood. But I kept going. I kept killing. Every motion was a thread of defiance. Every spell I cast stitched another second for the Inquisition to run, run, run.

But there were too many. They were still coming, again and again. I heard the echo of marching feet, spells charging, orders shouted, distant, and barely human. I was slowing, but I couldn’t afford to slow. I was the wall of fire, holding against a roiling tide of flesh and blood. I was the last thing between the Venatori and a people I had decided to save.

And then... A scream. Not a man’s. Not a demon’s.

A scream like a hurricane cracking open the firmament.
A scream that slammed into my skull and stopped my heart.
A scream that bore down from the sky.

The blast hit me like some god’s open palm—wind and fire and sound and terror—and the world tilted, lifting me off my feet, throwing me through the air like I weighed nothing. The sky reeled. Snow erupted around me in an arc. I slammed into the ground and skidded, bones rattling, ribs fracturing on stone.

Scaíth howled inside me, not in joy this time, but fury and shock and pain. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. I clawed at the earth like it might hold me down, might keep me rooted.

The scream echoed again, high and bright and close. And overhead... Something descended.

~~~

I tried to rise. Found myself stumbling face-first towards a dragon. It roared.

The gust of raw force struck me down again. And an ancient voice followed it, bones cracking and venom dripping, as something slid from the dragon's back. The Elder One.

“Enough,” he snarled. The air itself recoiled from him. The heavens curled back. And shadows flooded into the empty spaces they left, blooming like inky harbingers of death.

The dragon settled back on its haunches, watching me, waiting to be loosed upon me like a feral wolf. My body screamed, my mark flared, and Scaíth thrashed under my skin like something feral and cornered.

“Pretender,” the Elder One hissed. “You toy with forces beyond your ken... No more.”

But I needed more. It was too soon. I had not bought the Inquisition enough time.

Despair reached its inky fingers out for me, and I was drifting...

We’re almost there, Cole whispered in my mind, shocking my rage awake again.

“I’m not afraid of you!” I spat, dragging myself upright.

The Elder One laughed—a hollow, bottomless sound. “Words mortals often hurl at the darkness,” he dismissed. Tilted his head down to look at me, face a flicker of memory.

“Once, they were mine,” he said, lips curling. “But they are always lies.”

And I knew, in that moment, that he had once stood where I now stood. Shivering and lost, caught between the light and the abyss. I knew he had hated it. I knew that hate had never left him.

He straightened. “Know me,” he intoned, looking down his nose at me, he shadows coiling around me like tentacles, rising from the fiery pits of hell itself. “Know who you have pretended to be.”

His shadows were gripping me, squeezing me tight, tighter than breath and dripping with malice.

Almost, Spindle! Cole said.

The Elder One lifted his arms, like the Divine granting a holy blessing. “Exalt the Elder One!” he commanded. “Exalt the will that is Corypheus!”

I didn’t move. Didn’t say a word.

The shadows pressed me down. “You will kneel!” Sharp gravel pressing into my knees.

We’re dying, but we can decide how. Many don’t get that choice, Cole reminded me. The Commander’s voice dripped with resignation, but he was right. I did have a choice.

My choice was to die as distractingly and prolongedly as possible, for a people that didn’t know me yet I had come to love.

Sounds lovely, Scaíth groaned.

“I kneel to nothing whose magnificence I don’t know,” I snarled. “Tell me why. Make me understand!”

Corypheus sneered down at me. “Your understanding is not required, mortal. If you gain it in your final moments, consider yourself blessed.” He raised his orb, crimson light cascading down its shadow-black surface like blood.

No! Scaíth flared with recognition, panicked and hot. I like it here! Something yanked it into my fingertips, and I gasped, clutching at my wrist.

“I am here for the Anchor,” Corypheus declared, “and the process of removing it begins now.”

A sound tore from my throat. Not a scream… Something worse. Scaíth was howling, and the Elder One’s shadows reached inside me and pulled. My knees buckled. My body faltered. My rage drained away like a fire snuffed out.

No! I don’t want to go! You're hurting me!

“It is your fault, ‘Herald,’” Corypheus hissed. “You interrupted a ritual years in the making—and instead of dying, you stole its purpose. What marks you as ‘touched’—what you flail at rifts—I crafted to assault the heavens themselves. And you used it to undo my work. The gall.”

Scaíth fought him, screamed through me, clawed for purchase in my blood, but Corypheus was unraveling it—rending it from its roots. I could feel its slick heat receding down my spine. A hole opening in my soul. And yet...

I fell to my knees. Rage-less. Empty. Barren. But, somehow, Scaíth was still there, and Cole’s feathery touch flitted across my soul.

My jaw trembled. “Then why did the Divine die? For this chaos?”

“’This chaos’ will empower me. It will ensure we no longer beg at the feet of the invisible.”

He advanced, reached, and seized me by the arm. Lifted me effortlessly into the air like some child’s doll to peer into my face. I struggled, but he didn’t even blink. “I once breached the Fade in the name of another, to serve the Old Gods of the empire in person," he whispered, and he wasn't speaking to me.

I'm not listening, Scaíth moaned. Corypheus' grip tightened.

"I found only chaos and corruption. Dead whispers! For a thousand years I was confused... No more.”

Go away! Scaíth howled.

“But I have gathered the will to return under no name but my own, to champion a withered Tevinter, and to correct this blighted world.” His eyes burned into mine with a rage that countered my own. “Beg that I succeed—for I have seen the throne of the gods, and it was empty.”

I'm STAYING! Scaíth shrieked.

Corypheus hurled me.

I slammed into the Chantry wall. Bones splintered, and a skull cracked. Scaíth whimpered and withdrew, curling itself into the hollow at the top of my spine.

“The Anchor is permanent,” Corypheus snarled. “And you have spoiled it with your stumbling.”

I clawed my way upright. A sword—someone’s, anyone’s—lay near me. As if by unspoken signal, the dragon raised its head again. Began to advance. Trembling, hefting with both hands, I held the blade between us. Prepared myself to die.

And then, a whisper along our thread-bond, soft and urgent. Cole.

Throw the rocks now. Throw the rocks!

I wasn’t near the rocks or the trebuchets. I closed my eyes in despair. I couldn’t throw any rocks. And yet...

The Breach was gone, but its shadow remained. I could still hear the humming threads of the Veil, still see them with whatever lay behind my eyes. My fingers tightened around my mark—around Scaíth. It made a reluctant, uncertain sound; half-warning, half-resignation.

I remembered sealing the mother-rift, that feeling of burning it shut with my hands. Of locking its aggression inside that brutal cage, untempered iron hammered shut with too much heat and too little water. She was a locket of pain I’d left outside my chest. And she was still out there, crying, in the Fade.

I sent a Fade-thread, thinner than a whisper, invisible to the eye. I sent it questing for the mother-rift, going where I could not go, couldn't see, could only feel. I found her, hovering, despairing in the Beyond, bereft and abandoned, horribly alone. Still trapped in the cage. Still shaking behind bars. Softly, I opened the door.

The Mother-rift rose, trembling and uncertain.

I remembered Ashalle's love for me, the way she poured it out in that desperate forest search, and gave it gently through those beautiful embroideries, and sang it loud and clear every single moment in between. I remembered her soothing me to sleep, and kissing my hair, and holding my dreams. I remembered the way she looked at me.

Corypheus threw his arms up in frustration. “So be it. I will begin again.”

The Mother-rift reached, took my hand, let Scaíth guide her down the thread that linked her soul with mine.

I remembered spicy turnips, the pride that beamed from Cyrion’s face the day I was to marry. The way Irving soothed me the first time I woke in Kinloch, awkwardly uncertain despite old age and somehow deciding I was his to guide for the rest of his days. I remembered Wynne's cooling touch, pacifying angers I could not. I remembered wrestling with Jowan, sparking gossip and rumour that meant nothing to either of us, because we were siblings. Swapping poems with Cullen in the library; marking a page in a book for him to find; discovering something scrawled on parchment strip in return.

Corypheus turned toward his dragon. "I will find another way to give this world the nation—and the god—it requires," he ground out.

I can't, the Mother-rift whispered; somewhere inside me, cracking like ice, shattering like glass.

I remembered wandering the wilds, never quite coming to terms with the beauty of God’s Creation, but trying. I remembered meeting Thessa, her intrusion on my camp an outrage, her infectious grin proclaiming that this was where she was supposed to be. Her light chased the darkest of memories away. She drew me out, out of my loneliness and into their camps, turning her friends into my friends, her companions into my companions, in the shadow of a war we had inherited from centuries of tradition.

You can, I replied, and the Mother-rift shivered.

Corypheus scathed, voice hissing with infinite disappointment and malice. “As for you,” he shook his head, almost regretful. Almost. “I will not suffer even a bumbling and unknowing rival… You must die.”

The Mother-rift stretched and flexed around my core, encircling that place where a wellspring should have been, but wasn't. She touched it, and I didn’t flinch.

I remembered mage-shackles shattering as I charged the Breach. I remembered losing everyone, yet finding treasured glimpses of a new Cullen all over again. I remembered Varric showing love in the way he learned my favourite drinks. The way Solas watched me like I was something fragile and precious. I remembered Cassandra’s faith in my righteousness when all I saw of myself was someone who burned too bright to be held.

And I remembered everyone. I remembered the shimmering web of Inquisition threads, bound together with acceptance in the name of a purpose truly shared. I remembered people setting their differences aside; Templars fighting side-by-side with mages; humans serving side-by-side with elves; an entire people coming to trust that maybe—just maybe—Andraste's Herald was an elven mage who sometimes burst into flame.

I remembered our pilgrimage to the Breach, staring up into the Fade, knowing that Templars were behind me, and feeling totally unafraid.

“You expect us to kneel,” I whispered to the Elder One. “But we will not." Gods, I hoped this worked. I didn't want my last words to be...

"Take this, motherfucker!”

I opened the door to my pain, threw away the key, and the mother-rift flooded into me, straight through me, burning away the horrors, flooding my wellspring with Fade-fire, filling it with her very soul...

... and it was my own.

Welcome back, Scaíth said.

I dove into the space between moments. Watched flames pause in the midst of burning, the dragon hovering in mid-air, jaws wide, talons lethal. I dove deep within myself, to my pool of rage, now overflowing with what should always have been mine, my body trembling yet somehow not shattering, still whole. The mother-rift a part of me completely, filling in the cracks where something had been missing, healing wounds I myself had not fully known.

I reached deep within my core and drew out of the well a torrent. Sent it arcing over Corypheus, rushing past his dragon. I eyed the snowy mountainside…

There. Where the snow was thick and a face of rock overlooked the trees.

I drew a long shuddering breath, and stepped into the next moment.

Fade-fire swept up the valley like a viridian tsunami reclaiming its territory, crashing into the mountain with echoes that swept through space and time with a sound that transcended the mortal plane. Snow and stone tore loose. Trees snapped. The mountain wept. A landslide—pure and glorious and divine—descended upon Haven like the judgment of every dead god we’d ever called silent.

We’re Andraste’s holy garden hose! Scaíth was jubilant.

The dragon shrieked and vaulted toward Corypheus, shielding him in its vast wings. But I didn't wait to see what happened next.

Rubble fell like brimstone from the sky. The Chantry cracked open. The earth bellowed and twisted. I ran, and it was Kinloch Hold all over again—the roar, the chaos, the way the light bent and fled. My steps found no purchase. The snow gave way.

And just like Kinloch... I was falling.

Chapter Text

In my dream, I lay on a forest floor, the bark at my back damp with dew and sweet-smelling moss. Overhead, the trees whispered secrets, their branches like gnarled fingers tangled in the sky. I could smell loam, and something older. Dust from well before the Maker had a name.

        Get up, Cole’s voice, pressed through the gap in my ribs, insistent.

She came walking, silent as windfall. It was her. It had always been her. Her feet barely brushed the leaves, and still they rustled, not by her touch, but by their remembrance of who she was. She was ancient in the way mountains are—slow and inevitable and watching. Her robes dragged behind her, gossamer and graying, the sleeves spilling like moth wings too delicate to last. She touched my brow with fingers soft like ash. Do you remember, now?

        Get up! Scaíth said, snapping like a whip of flame.

It flared, and my body jolted as if struck by lightning, agony arching through every joint. I woke at the bottom of the world, buried in a shaft of stone and dark and silence.

Everything hurt.

I didn’t stay with you, Scaíth spat, voice tense with worried indignation, just to die in this… wherever we are.

“We’re in a mine,” I croaked. “For... mining... rocks.”

My laughter scraped the walls as I pushed myself upright, muscles shivering under the strain. I moved slowly at first, each step a negotiation. But movement became momentum, and momentum became need. I stumbled through tunnels carved for greed, joints locked, breath ragged. Something loomed ahead, a grey smear in the dark.

The cavern widened. The air was sharper.

“I left the door open,” I mumbled, my thoughts not forming right. “Did I leave the door open? Did they all get out?… Who’s there?”

No one answered, except demons.

They coalesced like rot rising from a wound: two despair demons, their forms bloated with sorrow, trailed by wraiths that clicked and wailed like broken bones trying to knit. I fought because I had to. Because if I didn’t, they’d chew through what was left. I struck with my fingernails, my teeth, and the spite in my bones… But I was bleeding out, and had no fire left in me. A demon caught me, cold and enormous, arms like a vise, and I couldn’t break free.

My mark flared and Scaíth ripped the world apart. The rift tore open, flared green, screamed like a goddess giving birth, then slammed shut again, folding the demons in on themselves.

I landed on my back, groaning. “Hey,” I wheezed. “That’s nifty. You did that earlier. Could you always do that?”

No. Scaíth revealed nothing.

“Mm.” I closed my eyes. “Noted.”

Outside, the world had become cruelty made weather, a snowstorm roaring like a beast. The wind flayed me raw, but I stepped into it anyway.

“If we die out here, do we still get to call it a win?” I muttered.

You promised not to die, Scaíth reminded me.

“If a god falls and no one hears it,” I whispered, “does it still echo?”

You’re delirious.

“I don’t know where to go.”

Follow the thread, Cole murmured from the between-places.

I cackled. Everything was funny, and horrifying, and so very cold. “I think I’ll just stay. Let the snow bury me? Let it all drift...”

Follow! Cole barked.

Fine. I reached beneath the skin of the world, groping blindly through threads of thought and time. It took everything I had to find him, his thread... his guidance. Even that spark felt cold. It was like the bandages around my eyes were finally blocking my sight.

I walked. I followed the thread. Wolves howled. I followed the thread. Found a dead campfire. I followed the thread.

Keep going, Cole urged. You are not so far anymore.

But I was too slow. The snow was too deep. My bones forgot their shape, and my mind unraveled. I collapsed, and fell into the thread. I was falling, and I didn’t land. Not on stone. Not on snow... I landed somewhere sideways of reality, inside a boy with too-large eyes and too-sharp bones, made of echoes and mercy and things left unsaid.

Cole.

His thoughts weren’t thoughts, not like mine. They were impressions. Fragments. He flickered across the campsite like a burning match—there, then not—flickering through tents and bodies like fog made flesh. "I knew mountains were cold," he murmured, his thoughts mine, “but this—this is bones forgetting they are bones.” He spun, caught glimpses of thoughts, pain, guilt. I was inside his skull—or beside it. I didn’t know. I only knew that the wind was quieter here.

“Help. Must get help—The snow is like a blanket, Scaíth!—Get up.” He paused. He was me. Then he wasn’t. Then he was everyone. “Did I do the right thing?—The Herald will not die.—I didn’t save them. Didn’t save her.” Cassandra questioned herself and Nightingale clung to her faith. Cullen’s guilt, blooming and freezing like blood dripping into icy snow.

Cole appeared to him—really appeared, all sharp sympathy and childlike urgency. “She’s not dead. Not yet...”

Cullen startled violently. The weight of command fled his shoulders for an instant, replaced by something raw and reflexive. Fear. “What in-.. Cole. Don’t do that.” His voice cracked in spite of himself. Maker’s breath. He hadn’t even heard the boy approach. Of course he hadn’t.

He hated how easily Cole could undo him.

I floated. I shimmered in Cole’s mind like a distant star, pulsing along a thread still being spun. Still there. Still flickering. Barely.

“She’s only dead if you don’t help quick enough,” Cole insisted, his voice bright with that strange Fade-certainty that made it hard to dismiss him, no matter how much Cullen wanted to.

The guilt bloomed in Cullen’s throat before he could stop it. He’d sent her out into a hopeless battle to die, as if she were some chess piece in a game. There hadn’t been time to weigh it—there never was. The weight only ever settled in afterward, heavy and irreversible.

“What are you on about?” he asked, too harshly. He could feel it in his chest; anger rising not at Cole, but at himself. He had become a Templar to protect… and turned on his charges. Had become Commander to defend… and Haven was lost.

Cole tilted his head, birdlike. How could he make him understand? “She is fire, Spindle spinning rage. Plunging through the dark, soft and sharp at once… Burning star caught in a cage—no more. Sometimes she is quiet—like the hush between heartbeats—and sometimes she is the scream before the dawn.”

Cullen’s breath caught. Something in the way Cole spoke—like reciting a litany, or quoting a prayer long-forgotten—punched straight through the armour he wore around his grief. “The Herald?” The words came out hollow, like they might crumble if he touched them.

Cole didn’t answer directly. He never did. He only slipped closer, into Cullen’s orbit, his presence folding around memory and pain like smoke curling through a crack. And then he was Cullen. Or near enough. Borrowing the edges of Cullen’s voice, his guilt, his remorse. “I swore myself to her; she broke and bled like anybody else, but walked through fire and Fade.”

“Stop that!” Cullen snapped, the words more plea than command. He didn’t need to hear his private agonies echoed back to him.

Cole flinched, but didn’t retreat. “Now she’s dead,” he whispered, not cruel, only truthful in the way nightmares are truthful. He reached up and tugged at Cullen’s sleeve. Once. Twice. Like a child might, desperate for someone taller to see what they could not.

“She’s not dead!” He was me again, his voice trembling with cold and memory. “I remember being warm… Ashalle? You have to breathe, even when it hurts. I don’t want to, Ashalle.” Cole sobbed, then steadied. “Spindle is hurt. You have to help!” He vanished. Appeared again on the edge of camp. Back and forth, back and forth.

Cullen caught on. His eyes widened, and I felt the rush of hope that bloomed within him, fragile at first, then roaring like high tide. He had failed her in not preparing Haven… but perhaps not all was lost?

“You didn’t fail me,” Cole whispered, “I failed you.”

“Cassandra!” Cullen barked, his voice stronger now, steady. He beckoned his aide with a jerk of his arm, urgency propelling him. “Come on... Come now.”

Cassandra’s steps crunching over snow, urgency in every stride. Laurie following, wide-eyed, quiet.

“What’s going on?” Cassandra asked, trying not to show the cracks in her voice.

“Cole knows where she is.”

Cole was frantic now, spun of Fade-mist and urgency, his thread creaking like a wire drawn too tight. “I don’t hurt anymore. Do I still have to breathe?” he whispered—not to anyone, not exactly. “You must follow!” And then he flickered back and forth again, petitioner and guide, sometimes leading them into the storm, sometimes doubling back and tugging on sleeves. Something not quite alive desperate to save the living. He sung now, deliriously off-tune in words not his, repeating the first line over and over and over. “If I die, remember me…”

Something was pulling at Cullen’s reality again, dragging him through dusty corridors in his mind, memories he’d run away from and refused to look at for so long. The tune clung to the wind like frostbite, and it shouldn't have meant anything to him.

But it did. And it had, in that moment when the Herald paused at the Chantry door, looking back at him with bandaged eyes and tempered iron in her spine. This had been the song she had chosen to die to, and somehow, he had known how it continued. “Not by sword or shattered tree…”

The words roved around inside him, gathering up the splinters of a memory he hadn’t known was lost. Because he had heard it before. Long ago, in a Tower that no longer stood, in a room lit up by warm hearth and a woman’s reckless laugh. She had sung it once, absent-mindedly, plucking at a lyre that she couldn’t quite play, and the song had drawn him to her like a moth to flame, finally breaking their silence. “It’s old,” she had answered when he’d asked, her eyes blue and glittering like sapphires. “Older than the Chantry. I’ve always liked it.”

        If I die, remember me…
        Not by sword or shattered tree,
        But by the way I watched the sky,
        And hoped the stars would never lie...

She’d sung it, and that’s when he’d asked her for her name.

Cullen stopped walking. Just stopped. Cassandra almost ran into him.

Her hair had been lighter then, coppery and glowing like the flame she mastered daily. Something must have forced it darker since, deepening and darkening until it attained the colour of fresh-spilled blood.

“Cullen?” Cassandra’s voice was sharp, fear creeping in . “What is it?”

He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Driving snow stung his skin, but all he could feel was the sickening tilt of his world reshaping around a truth his wounded mind had refused to let him see. To him, she’d been the Herald. A woman who hid her eyes and simmered with rage, and somehow held the key to their salvation; terrifying—sometimes—to behold. And yet she was also something gentler than that, wilder than that, making jokes when she should scream, never afraid to show it when she bled. A lot had changed in a decade, but not everything.

Cole turned back, closer now, and whispered urgently, “You see her.”

Cullen’s lips parted, but no sound came. Only a breath released against the storm and shimmering into frost. His hands trembled, and not from cold.

“She hoped the stars would never lie,” Cole sighed, softly. “But they do sometimes, even to themselves…”

He flitted away from Cullen. Flickered into being beside me, and I looked down through his eyes at my own body, half-buried in snow, limbs curled inward as if to protect what little fire still trembled inside.

Cullen surged forward, the ground pulling him toward them, toward her, all his uncertainty flaking away like ice from shocked steel. The snow broke beneath his boots as a billowy gust thinned the storm for the barest of moments, and he saw her.

Not the Herald, not the symbol carved by fire and fate… But her. The friend he had lost, the woman he had let die, the mage he had killed with his words. And suddenly, he wasn’t leading. He was running. He was slipping. He was there.

“Oh, thank the Maker,” Cassandra breathed, stumbling to her knees.

“Not real. Just a hope. Fever dreams flickering warm in my chest,” Cole murmered. His thread brushed through me like a caress. It’s real, Spindle, he whispered. Real enough to follow.

In my mind, I reached for Cullen’s warmth. “Don’t forget me,” Cole said.

“I won’t,” Cullen murmured, voice thick with something older than pain. “I promise.”

“Unless you do.”

“I won’t forget you, Esharana.” His arms closed around me like a vow, gathering my broken form up from the snow as if I weighed no more than memory, and I moaned—a fragile, broken sound. The ice was inside me now, cold and crackling like creaking crystals.

He held me closer.

“Not again,” he whispered. “Not ever.”

“Spindle can sleep now,” Cole said, flickering to peer down into my face. He was crying. “She is safe.”

Languor rolled off him in waves, and I slept.

Chapter Text

The Shape of What Survives
The Shackles and The Sky,
The Needle and The Cage.
Too Many Mirrors, And Too Many Names.

The Stitching and The Shattering.
The Splinters and The Seams.
Too Many Masks, And Too Many Blades.

Time Rifts and Reckoning,
Weaving Warp and Weft.
In Her Name I Breached The Fade,
I Found My Self, And Wept.

Canticle of Light, Transfigurations 10:2
The Light shall lead her safely
Through the paths of this world, and into the next.
For she who trusts in the Maker, fire is her water.
As the moth sees light and goes toward flame,
She should see fire and go towards Light.
The Veil holds no uncertainty for her,
And she will know no fear of death, for the Maker
Shall be her beacon and her shield, her foundation and her sword.

If I Die, Remember Me [link to listen]
If I die, remember me.
Not by sword or shattered tree,
But by the way I watched the sky,
And hoped the stars would never lie.

Chapter Text

Beta: Emlineth

Elvhen Conlang: FenxShiral [Project Elvhen dictionary]

Dragon Age: Inquisition Transcripts: [website]

Varric's Nicknames: @ageofdragon [tumblr]

Dragon Age Wiki: [website]

Artwork: Gemini and ChatGPT

Fandoms: Dragon Age (BioWare), Book of the Ancestor (Mark Lawrence)

Influences: Circle of Magic (Tamora Pierce), The Knight and The Moth (Rachel Gillig)

Readers: You. Thanks for sticking with it!

Want more? Check out the sequel: The Threads that Never Fade!