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Dorian ducks under a flailing sword-swing from the shambling corpse pursuing him, thumps his back into the stone pillar, and hisses as the singed flesh of his arm scrapes on the rough surface. The corpse's sodden face cracks into a scream, the demon riding it sensing victory.
He sweeps his staff like an improvised scythe, no grace but a wicked aim. The pronged blade at the butt rips through the corpse's calf, and it flounders onto its knee. Behind him Bull's maul lands on the hillside. The raking death cry of a terror demon seems to peel a chill from the air.
Spurred by that, Dorian ignites a flame upon his staff, pushing his snagging will into it until it glows white-hot, and smashes the burning brand into the corpse. Despite the damp, it goes up like a pile of reed paper.
"Bull!" His call peters into a gasp. The veilfire he lit upon the pillar bathes the hillock in cold green; the glow bulks the shadows with seeming substance even as it throws them back. "I swear by my copious eminent forefathers, If you need me to come drag you up, you will never live it down."
"Would that you should, 'Vint." Bull's boots make a series of slick muddy sounds as he slogs up the slope. The veilfire paints him garishly; still, the only blood Dorian can see is a sluggish gash in his right side, above his thick leather belt. "Still think it was a smart plan to light the fucking beacon?"
The flat-snouted dogs carved on the pillar have a dim sheen of moisture, but on some benevolent whim of the Maker, the sky stopped pouring a few hours ago. Perhaps He thought the litany of Dorian's present torments was hefty enough: one, he is separated from the Inquisitor, two, in the company of the Iron Bull, three, in the blasted Fallow Mire of all places in His creation.
"Yes," Dorian says peevishly. "The veilfire flushes out the demons hiding nearby, then stabilises the area. Rather like lancing a boil. Brief peril followed by greater security, which is what we require, no?"
"Pretty much," Bull says, his tone oddly dull. "Would've felt better taking a lookout tower, but the one we passed looked pretty rickety." He circles away from Dorian towards a haphazard cairn of stones at the far end of the hilltop.
"Where are you going?"
"Thought I saw--" A stone rolls down, steered by Bull's hand. "Yeah, did. Trapper's cache. There's some dry firewood in here."
Their packs are stashed by the beacon pillar; they at least had the advantage of planning their stand against the demons. Dorian gets up, teeters, and has to catch himself on the pillar. "Vishante kaffas."
"Too much?"
"I might," Dorian says, fumbling at the padded pouch where his potions are, "have gone easier on the glyphs. Fire or purification might've sufficed."
"It was a good call, though." Bull kicks over moss and dirt to make a pit for the fire. "Seeding the slope with 'em."
Dorian lifts the vial of lyrium, frowning at it so he doesn't have to pick apart the approval in Bull's words.
"That your last one?" Now Bull is squinting at the vial, a tiny chilly jewel in Dorian's palm. "You can't... do the mana-drinking trick?" His gesture at the scattered corpses is laden with unease. But he makes it.
"There is nothing here that I can use." The undead they just put down are twice slain by now. "They're hardly recently departed. The... the embers of their lives are cold. I can't fan them anymore."
Bull nods. Dorian watches his throat move before he turns away.
The burn on Dorian's arm twinges. He downs the lyrium in a resolute gulp, bracing for its potent snap in his throat. His exhaustion spikes into crystal clarity: a false peak, crumbling as soon as the potion spreads into his body.
Schooling his surging thoughts, he instead uses the mana to layer his right palm with frost. A wraith's fey flame licked his left arm; the skin is intact, but an angry, mottled red. He half awaits a comment from Bull about leaving his weaker side unarmoured.
He only gets the patient scratch of flint and steel until Bull's stolen firewood lights. Melting ice runs down Dorian's arm as he keeps creating more, a handful at a time, to cool his injury.
Ridiculous. Amateurish enough to lose sight of Varric and the Inquisitor on the foggy log road; even more inept to trip on said log road, stir the plague-soaked, spirit-ridden cadavers in the shallows and need Bull to haul him back to solid ground; and mortifying to conclude that they were lost, by their twosome, in the heart of the bog.
Making a fire is a risk, too. Night is coming on fast, and Dorian's boots remain wet. The fire may mean they're alive by morning to be found.
"You break the skin there?" Bull jolts Dorian out of his reverie. "There's clean linen in my pack. Wrap it up. You'll be glad you did, in this damp."
"Are you charged with my moods now?"
Bull is seated on the plinth of the pillar, his much-suffered pack open by his leg. He's spread out the medicine kit Dorian's seen him bring out after a scrap: bandages, small herb bags made from oiled cloth, and more particular instruments, pincers, a scalpel, and a few curved suturing needles.
"I'm charged with your life. That includes not seeing you lose an arm to a festering burn."
Dorian ruffles the dregs of his dignity, standing up to deliver a counterblow, when he catches proper sight of what Bull is doing. Bent to the right, he's pointing a threaded needle at his side, in the mingling light of real flame and the veilfire.
"Oh, Andraste on the pyre."
"You spit this much at everyone that tries to look out for you?" Bull doesn't even glance up. His brows are pressed low together. "Bet that wins you friends."
"I didn't mean--" Dorian loosens his gloves, dropping them on top of his own pack. "How did you even get the thread through the eye in this dismal lighting?" Not waiting for permission, he plucks the needle from Bull's fingers. They shave clammy against the back of Dorian's hand.
"Had to learn how. Not that much harder with one eye, once you figure it out."
"Is this clean?"
"I held it to the fire, if that's what you mean." Something sullen and subdued to Bull's voice. He tries for that infuriating mixture of swagger and kindness, but keeps missing it.
"Ah." Pinching the needle between his fingers, Dorian sends a tiny seed of pure heat to flow across it, from end to tip. The silk thread spins into a wisp of smoke. "Allow me?"
A genuine question.
"You let me bandage that burn, I'll let you sew my side." Bull already shifts to give Dorian access to the wound below his ribs. It's a superficial cut through soft tissues, but probably painful, as movement will chafe at it.
"A fair trade." Dorian slips another length of thread through the needle's eye. Blood clots along the edges of the gash; Dorian smells a whiff of alcohol. Battlefield medicine, but it'll help ward off infection.
Bull grits his teeth as Dorian makes the first quick dip and pull. He gives out no sound of agony, though. "Shit. Where'd you learn needlework, anyway?"
A second suture, a third. At the same time, Dorian mulls the question. Bull likes poking at him to see what makes him yelp, but this isn't the same bored or amused curiosity.
"Nevarra City, as it happens." He lets Bull draw three breaths before he sticks the needle in again. "Tevinter may be the summit of all things magical in the world, but necromancy is the exception. It is... something of a dismissed discipline in the Imperium. A redheaded stepchild, if you will."
"Heard the expression, though redheads are always good in my book. Hnn."
"Well, I felt that it trapped my parents between an undesirable choice of speciality and the desire to give me the best education."
"If you were gonna raise the dead, you were gonna do it like nobody else?" That must mark the first time Bull's found humour in Dorian's necromantic pursuits.
"Naturally," he says. "Breathe evenly." He pauses to wipe off renewed runnels of blood. "My teachers soon put a damper on my pleasure at frustrating my parents. The Mortalitasi begin from the basics. Anatomy. Thedasian burial rites. The proper preparation of the bodies. There is a certain protection in that. It cleanses the dead, but it also cleanses the mourners."
The dead aren't the only ones at risk. He realises he's been repeating the words of his old Nevarran mentor, even mimicking her cadences. The suturing needle moves in the rhythm of his memory.
"Never looked at it like that," Bull says, pensive and still. "The Qunari burn corpses, too, but it's not... meaningful. You just don't want them around. They're waste."
"I see." It seems best not to go prodding there while he's prodding Bull with a keen bone needle.
Bull falls quiet under Dorian's tending. Eerily quiet, one might say. His breaths are only barely roughened by pain. If Dorian is miserable, he has to wonder how Bull is. Even their short, prickly acquaintance has advised him that Bull, who relishes every kind of danger, considers demons no laughing matter. They whet his focus and drive his blows like no other enemy.
In the Mire, spirits inhabit every nook and corner, every stuttering dead. Dorian's plan to buy them some refuge involved dragging demons out right on top of themselves.
He sews the wound shut the rest of the way with small, exacting stitches, like he could seam Bull in body and in spirit. Make him whole and safe.
"There you are," he says, a touch unsteady. "All done."
"Not a bad job, 'Vint." Bull grins, and Dorian has to look away, blinking hard. The strain of the day is getting to him.
Bull has a pot of water going, and once Dorian has put an embrium poultice on Bull's side and tied it in place, and had his arm dressed by Bull in turn, they huddle by the fire, sitting on opposite ends of Bull's bedroll. Bull tips out enough hot water for mugs of tea and pours buckwheat and beans into the pot to stew. Dorian is beyond protesting; sustenance will be sustenance.
The moons rise through the mist. The veilfire dances at their backs, and the slow stench of peat and smoke rolls around them. At least the chill makes the corpses under the slope stink somewhat less.
"We ought to sleep," Dorian says over his emptied mug. "If I dare say so, since we have lit the beacon, someone of our own might also spot it."
"Don't jinx it." Bull stirs his pottage to mix in the dried and crushed cloves of garlic he conjured from his pack. Dorian is perhaps reassessing the horror of being strayed out here with him, specifically. "If you want a bit of shut-eye, I'll keep watch."
"I want sleep. You need the same. We've been on our feet since dawn, and fought three instances of the unquiet dead today."
"Qunari can go for three days with catnaps. Done it before."
"In groups greater than two, I assume, so your collective awareness may help you not to blunder into harm's way." Dorian goes to inspect his cloak, which he draped on a nearby tree to dry. It's gone from sopping to moderately damp. "I'll put down some warding glyphs."
His only answer is a sigh from Bull. More water goes into the pot, then a generous pinch from Bull's box of salt. That's more care for supper than Dorian's ever seen him show.
Can he recall seeing Bull cook? It's a thing the Inquisitor takes unexpected pleasure in, so she often handles it when they're out with only a small party.
"They don't bug you, do they?" Bull casts his one eye, bruised with creeping fatigue, towards Dorian. How tired he looks.
"The corpses?"
"The things inside them." As he speaks, Bull tosses a skin studded with tarnished silver at Dorian. "Here. Should keep us warm until the pottage's done."
The whiskey has the same aroma of peat as the air, but Dorian takes a swallow gladly. Passing the skin back to Bull, he sits down. "You are aware that I use spirits in my spells all the time."
"Not in so many words." Bull drinks, studiously, and grimaces. "Crap. Last time I buy anything from that shifty elf in Redcliffe."
"A wise decision, I'm sure."
The reluctant night breeze draws the smoke upwards at last, freeing it from milling about the hill. Gratified, Dorian inhales a draught of cleaner air. "I didn't really answer your question, did I?"
"Well," says Bull. "Guess you can get used to anything. Even corpses that might climb back up in the dead of night and cut our bellies while we sleep."
Dorian chuckles. "You must understand that I am very good at this. Quite masterful, in truth."
"Not like at your one weakness, humility." Bull ignores Dorian's scowl. "Sure you are. You wouldn't have lasted this long otherwise."
Reaching for their firewood pile, Dorian adds a sparing log to the fire. It must be enough for the night. "They bother me all the time. Especially here, with the Veil so worn by the plague deaths." He shrugs, tries to make it a cavalier gesture. "If they can't make me rise an abomination, they can make me rise an arcane horror. You do remember those, in the--"
"I remember." Bull's eye is incisive. Dorian's heart is a restive tattoo.
"Then you see that a certain caution is a mage's watchword."
"I won't let that happen." Bull sets the words like a master builder sets the final stone of a wall, to fit it all together. "At least if you return the favour. Get me from a distance. Fire brings 'em down, right?"
Dorian narrows his eyes. "Are we making promises of mutual destruction now? I didn't know our relationship ran that deep."
"We're laying safeguards," Bull says. "You put down your glyphs hoping that you won't need 'em. You'd rather do that than wake up ass-deep in shrieking corpses."
"Your arse, or mine?"
When Bull makes a three-fingered version of a rude gesture at him, Dorian counts it a boon. "Either works for me."
There is an image Dorian did not invite. He's thankful for the shifting light that might mask the twitch in his expression.
"Fire brings them down," he says after a beat, collecting himself. "Spellfire even better than natural flame."
It is as close to an agreement as he can come.
They eat the rather decent pottage, saved by Bull's spices, and feed the fire another measure of wood. His maul close to hand, Bull rests his back on the beacon pillar, wrapped in his blanket and the huge full cloak he never even wears outside camp.
Dorian leaves his cloak to continue drying, unbundling his blankets with a sigh. They're something, but spring is still new on the branch and rime is forming in lacy patterns on the ponds below.
"Hey." Bull raises the side of his cloak. He looks at Dorian firmly, as if to say, I mean only this.
From where he stands, Dorian shapes three warding glyphs. One on either side of Bull, and a third to guard the steep path that leads up to the camp. They sink into the earth with nary a glimmer of energy.
He draws his blankets around himself, sits down next to Bull, and with a deep breath reclines into his blind but whole side. "We will not discuss this in the morning."
"Which part? The personal confessions, or the cuddling?"
"Neither," Dorian says, and is both dry and warm for the first time that day. His head falls into the juncture of Bull's arm and chest with deplorable ease.
Bull tugs the cloak around them both. In hitching unison, they sleep.