Chapter Text
Light spills in through the window, and the dust stirs, roused to life by forgotten warmth. It floats in thick, speckled clouds through the sunbeams, aimless and bereft, before settling again to rest at the feet of white sheets that wilt like burial shrouds in the summer heat.
He smells it again—the rich, ripe stench of decay.
A shadow falls across the doorway, and he lets the curtain slip through his fingers, returning the room to darkness. Doubtless the dust rises again, but it’s unseen now, frantic cloudbursts lost to this memory, this dream.
“Don’t come in,” he says over his shoulder, “There’s nothing here.”
All of Tevinter reels from the magnitude of the destruction, and ghoulish chatter about the sheer scale of what has been lost resounds from Minrathous to Perivantium. The Hanging Gardens? The Temple of Hessarian too? No! Yes, and the royal vineyards!
No one talks about the dust. The powdered remains of an ancient, stolen history, it chokes the air, rising in flurries with every step and tumbling in the wake of each shrouded, shuffling ghost searching through the rubble for something, anything left to hold. It buries the city like the first snow of winter, and beneath its weight, Ventus falls silent.
Minrathous had prepared them well, and they step onto the pier wrapped in many-layered cotton veils that leave only their eyes exposed. It’s a practical disguise that turns no heads—not that anyone can see farther than an arm's length in front of themselves—but even so, it feels odd to walk the streets in daylight at Tarquin’s side. Ashur keeps close, eyes fixed on the sharp point of Tarquin’s shoulder, and follows him up through the city.
Even after bearing witness to the ruin of Minrathous, the devastation is difficult to stomach. Ventus had been a living creature before the war with the qunari had taken its turn, every building a work of magical ingenuity joining lush greenery to ancient stonework. Now, behind the ruin of its proud sea walls, not even its bones remain. There is only dust, small mounds and large mounds of unmarked graves.
Military presence remains strong, and legionnaires bristling with dust-dulled arms loom through the haze at regular intervals to check their papers. He wonders why they’re still here. Not even the Antaam could have razed Tevinter’s jewel so thoroughly to the ground. But Ventus is finally back in Imperial hands. Tevinter rejoices in another victory over the qunari. Surely now Seheron will fall.
They turn off the main thoroughfare down a pitted road, and Tarquin slows to a stop, squinting into the yellow haze. Ashur waits, watching him, the road, the dust.
“Fuck,” Tarquin mutters, and turns around.
They backtrack down the main thoroughfare, turn up another crumbling road, and stop at another checkpoint not far beyond that. The faceless legionnaire there shakes the dust off his own records, checks their paperwork, then looks up at them.
“Salma Quarter's two checkpoints back,” he says to Ashur as he hands everything back.
“Fucking fuck,” Tarquin hisses, snatching it all out of his hand and stalking back off the way they’d come.
“Thank you,” Ashur says to the legionnaire as he hurries to follow. Belatedly, with a gesture after Tarquin’s disappearing silhouette, he adds, “I apologize for…”
The legionnaire sets his records back down on the field desk shoved up against the sagging remains of a garden wall.
“Family?” he asks.
Ashur pauses. “Yes,” he replies after a moment, fumbling, “His–our parents. Have you heard anything about the area?”
The legionnaire looks at him through his own veil, dark eyes also red, also tired. The weight of his gaze strikes Ashur somewhere in the throat, and his stomach sinks.
“Is there anything left?” he asks quietly.
“There’s one road to the citadel. We had no way but through.”
His voice is flat and void of emotion. Ashur remembers the sound from Neve, sometime in the aftermath.
“You’re from here,” Ashur realizes.
The legionnaire stares through him at the dust that drifts through the alley beyond.
“Was I?” he replies.
He finds Tarquin waiting by the side of the road. Of all the other drifting shapes in the haze, he’s the only one that’s still, and he looks up when Ashur hurries back to his side.
“There was a school there,” Tarquin tells him, “That’s where we were supposed to turn.”
Ashur holds himself painfully still.
“You can’t expect yourself to remember–”
“–It was a secondary school,” Tarquin continues ruthlessly, “Three stories. Took up almost the whole block.”
“Tarquin,” Ashur insists.
Tarquin looks up at him, and the shape of his face twists beneath his veil.
“I hated the fucking place,” he spits.
The few structures that remain standing in the Salma Quarter have walls that teeter and yawn with wide, gaping mouths that put on display the lives they once had sheltered—a colorful scrap of canvas here, a shattered workbench there. Within and around them, a handful of shapes drift, other smudged souls searching for remains in the silence.
Tarquin scans this grey, sagging graveyard and stops in the middle of what might have been a paved road. It’s split beneath his feet now, soft with dust and sharp with shattered glass.
“Which one was it?” he asks, “Which fucking one?”
His voice is small and muffled by the veil across his mouth, and his eyes have been red for days, but when Ashur touches a hand to the small of his back, he flinches away, hand tightening around the strap of the empty bag hanging listlessly from his shoulder. Ashur tenses, watchful of the other shrouded, shapeless figures drifting through the haze, but none of them so much as turn from their eternal, restless haunt.
Tarquin remains frozen in the road, and Ashur turns him to the first mound of dust to their left.
“Let’s start here,” he says.
It’s been over a month since Ventus’s liberation from the clutches of the Antaam, but much of the public clean-up and restoration efforts have been restricted to the lower circle with its harbor and seaside markets that had long been the lifeblood of Tevinter’s once lush oasis. He hears the screaming that first morning. It pierces the thick haze like a sudden light through the shutters, and startled, he reaches for his knife. Tarquin draws his sword. Shoulder to shoulder, they squint across the street and see a small group of shrouds clustered at the side of a large pile of dust. As they watch, the shrouds lift something small and limp between them, and the screaming begins again.
Tarquin throws his sword down. It lands without a sound.
They dig.
It’s hard, thankless work, made harder and more thankless for the absolute futility of their efforts. Though the missing by far continue to outnumber the official count of the dead, it’s clear that all anyone will find in the dust now are remains—of a body, of a life. Nevertheless, the agony remains somehow in the uncertainty, in the rhetorical question before the full stop.
He’s not exactly sure what they’re looking for. He’s not sure Tarquin knows either. Bodies, he thinks, or at least pieces of them. They find bits of portraits instead, fragments of letters, scraps and threads of once brightly colored fabric. Here is the blade of a butter knife, sharp now and jagged. Here is the spine of a book, bent now around absent words. It crumbles to dust in his hand, and he lets it drift away to find rest on the wind.
Despite the cold of deep winter, their veils smother their faces, wet and clinging from the heat of their breath. Accustomed to such a thing, he fares better than Tarquin, who chokes slowly on the dust and the damp and coughs and coughs until he’s left gasping for breath.
Ashur pushes him to sit behind the remains of a retaining wall that must once have bounded one of Ventus’s many hillside gardens, then crouches before him. Tarquin tries to stand, but out of sight of the main thoroughfare, Ashur takes his hand and pulls him back down.
“Rest,” he says, “We have time.”
Tarquin lifts his veil and pours water from the canteen Ashur hands him over his face. The vivid color of it underneath the dust reassures Ashur, who conjures a faint whisper of cool mist to soothe away the redness in his eyes. Tarquin slumps forward and turns away, hand pressed to his face. Water drips slowly from his beard, where the dust has already begun to cling again, streaking it grey with premature age. Ashur shifts his weight onto a knee and sits back on his heels, waiting.
In the eerie, smothered quiet, the rasp of Tarquin’s breathing is loud, and Ashur can feel every wheezing inhale, every shuddering exhale like a tightness in his own chest. When Tarquin lifts his heavy head, Ashur feels his pain, his wavering resolve in the pit of his own stomach. He stands, and he holds out his hand.