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It starts with a headache.
All trade in and out of Kirkwall is in abeyance while the dust settles from the explosion at the Grand Chantry and Meredith's coup attempt, which is the polite term for the Templar commander losing their mind and doing their level best to kill everyone they've ever met.
The dust is not a metaphor, either. Cullen develops a cough on the second day. He doesn't want to think about what he's breathing in – and if he's having difficulty, a man who's in reasonably good health, what of the rest of his templars? What of the rest of the city, and the people in Darktown who cannot afford so much as a cloth to cover their faces with?
He fields requests from the medics and the healer mages, panicked representatives from the nearest cities asking what the fuck happened, runners delivering messages from everyone from the Carta to the Grey Wardens asking if they're in danger, who did it, how, why, can they help?
As the second-in-command of the Templar Order in Kirkwall, one of the few remaining people of any rank whatsoever, Cullen takes it all in the teeth.
All the while, his headache grows and grows, even though he's taking his lyrium on schedule. There's just too much to do. The paperwork on his desk breeds overnight, along with the dust in the corners and the missing persons reports of yet another person who wasn't supposed to be in or around the Chantry that day, but –
Cullen sighs, pressing on the bones of his forehead as though he could massage the ache from his brain that way. He wishes Aveline wouldn't send on every missing persons report to him, as well, because he can't do anything about them. He hasn't the manpower. He makes a note to go have a talk with her when he has more than thirty seconds to spare.
He is much more concerned about the flow of food and fresh water – a few of the Circle mages have come to him with concerns that the city's aquifer might have been contaminated by the explosion, and while he's set them to figuring out whether that's the case or not, they haven't come back to him yet.
Their supply of lyrium is quite possibly at the bottom of his list of things to worry about. It escapes his notice entirely until one of the younger recruits knocks on his door mid-morning with a half-empty jug of lyrium base and asks whether some of their supply has been mislaid.
Cullen knows it wasn't.
His mind races through what will happen to him if the supply is wanting and then immediately discards it; his own problems aren't his concern. Cullen has nearly a hundred Templars under his command, from new recruits all the way up to old men who are nearly ready to retire into the mindless twilight that is the only future left to them. All of them require lyrium to function. Fear grips him whole, but he manages to crush it down and stand to check their stocks for himself.
The storeroom shelves are never full, but Cullen's never seen them this empty, either. His first impulse is that someone's been stealing, but he does some rough mental math and realizes that their last shipment was over six days ago, when they're meant to come every three days like clockwork. He checks around the room on his own and finds a dusty bottle nearly three-quarters full that someone shoved behind one of the shelves, which will keep them going for another day or two, but that's it.
That's it.
He gives the recruit a tight smile and goes off to check the mages' stock, but Cullen already knows that Meredith didn't let them keep much on hand, and he's not surprised to find their small shelf already empty. He raps on it with a closed fist, making a gentle clashing sound as his armor scrapes against itself, while he thinks; he can send messengers to the Templar complement stationed in the cities nearby, begging them to part with what stores they have, but he knows that the Chantry sends exactly as much as is required for the number of templars stationed at a garrison and no more. To lend Kirkwall any lyrium, those commanders will be shorting their own men, which is a dangerous proposition.
It's not well known outside of the Order, but there have been riots when the lyrium supply looked to be in danger. Every templar knows what's waiting for them. The older one becomes, the more it looms like a menacing shadow over the rest of one's life. Any shortage is cause for panic.
This is a disaster unless Cullen can solve it – and now.
There's more than a few active smuggling rings in Kirkwall, Cullen knows. Of them all, the Carta is famously dwarves only. He reaches out to Varric Tethras in the hopes that he knows how to contact them, but Varric sends an apologetic note back that says no one's seen hide nor hair of the Carta since the explosion. He says that they've gone to ground in the way only a dwarf can, and it's anyone's guess when they'll be back. Cullen smothers a very unprofessional oath and shoves the note away from him to join the rest of the paperwork on his desk.
Cullen follows the rules – they're there for a reason. He has no idea how to find anyone else who might have smuggled lyrium in the city, and those are the sorts of people least likely to volunteer themselves to a general appeal, even for a reward. The punishment for smuggling lyrium is three days in the stocks, or a whipping, depending on the Templar Commander's mood. And Meredith was always a good hand with a whip.
Faugh. Kirkwall.
Grimly, Cullen takes up his sword and goes out hunting for the other smugglers he knows, by name or face or reputation; some he finds exactly where they always set up shop, some are drinking or at home or hiding, but every one he finds swears the same thing: they don't deal in lyrium. They've never dealt in lyrium and don't have any hanging about.
Worse, Cullen believes them.
It's full night by the time he turns away from Lady Elegant, his mouth pinched in anger and growing dismay. His shoulders are aching and he doesn't want to think about the state of his stomach. There has to be a solution, he thinks to himself, ignoring the dismay growing in his chest. There has to be something he can do. Maker knows that one can find anything in Kirkwall. Cullen just has to think.
Where, where, where?
Before he can take more than ten steps away from her, someone catches Cullen's elbow. He jerks away, his flesh crawling, his teeth aching from how hard they're clenched together.
(There aren't many vestiges left of his time in Kinloch Hold, but a horror of someone creeping up behind him is one.)
Cullen turns to see Lady Elegant tilting her head to look at him. "Begging your pardon, Knight-Captain, but if it's lyrium you're after, have you tried Samson?"
When he hears the name, a complicated tangle of feelings surfaces inside of him like he's fished up a clump of slimy, disgusting seaweed from the lake of his childhood. Of course he knows who Samson is, and what he does, and why. Samson is a desperate man, looking for any way forward that might save him. Any of them might share Samson's fate, in the end, whether excommunicated for good reason or bad – does it truly matter?
Perhaps part of Cullen's disgust is the reality that very little separates him from Samson. Knight-Commander Greagoir had every reason to excommunicate Cullen, at one point in his life. He didn't deal well with the mages after... After that happened. He couldn't look at them without his mind supplying illusions in which they twisted and morphed into unnatural abominations, and it wasn't enough to grit his teeth and pretend they were still people. Out of kindness, Greagoir sent him away, but he would have had every right to cashier Cullen out of the Order instead. He was already on the lyrium then – barely, but the first draught is all it takes.
Looking at Samson is like looking in a mirror that's water-spotted and warped with age and seeing a nightmarish version of himself looking back.
It's very easy to say that he would never stoop to the depths of which Samson has proved himself capable when he's never been faced with that choice.
"Thank you," Cullen says out loud, forcing a smile. "I'll do that."
And so, with sword and hat in hand, Cullen descends into the depths of Lowtown to find Samson...
And that choice changes nearly everything.