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He woke choking on the smell of burning flesh. For one terrible instant Damon did not know where he was. Green light. The Anchor crawling up his arm in bright cracks of agony while Varric shouted something he could no longer remember and Bull held him down hard enough to bruise bone.
"Hold him!" Dorian's voice.
Another voice after that. His own, perhaps screaming.
The heat had been impossible to describe afterward. Not heat exactly. Consumption. The mark had ceased to feel like magic in those final moments beneath the eluvian. It had felt alive. Hungry. He remembered seeing the skin split open along his forearm with green light shining beneath it like molten metal through cracked stone.
Then Bull's axe.
The dream always ended there. Damon jerked awake before it fell. For several long moments he could not breathe properly. The darkness of Caer Visus pressed around him while phantom fire raced along the missing arm and through the scars that twisted down the left side of his body. His shoulder throbbed, his ribs ached. The old burns pulled tight across his skin beneath the linen shirt he slept in. The arm that no longer existed burned worst of all.
He shut his eyes again and forced himself to breathe through the pain. Slow breaths. Deliberate ones. Cassandra had taught him that in the months after the amputation, when pain and humiliation had made him short-tempered enough to snap at anyone who tried helping him stand. Breathe first, move second.
Outside, wind groaned against the walls of the hold. Beside him, the bed remained warm where Cassandra had slept earlier. She had already risen.
Damon sat up carefully and reached for the ceramic jar near the washbasin. Avexis prepared the salve herself. The tranquil elf never spoke much while working, but every few weeks new jars appeared in his chambers with tiny neat labels written in careful Orlesian script. Elfroot. Embrium resin. Crushed dawn lotus. The salve dulled the tightness enough for him to sleep through most nights now.
Most.
He worked the medicine slowly into the scar tissue across what was left of his arm, his shoulder and ribs, jaw tightening as the damaged skin flared unpleasantly beneath his fingers. The worst scars clustered nearest the missing arm where the Anchor had spread unchecked during the final hours before Bull severed it.
Some mornings the burns still felt fresh. As though green fire lingered beneath the skin waiting to wake again. The pain came with it sometimes. Fingers curling around nothing. A forearm that no longer existed aching deep in invisible bone. The healers called it phantom pain. Damon privately considered that an idiotic name for something capable of waking a man half screaming from sleep. He finished applying the salve and rested there for a moment in the dimness of pre-dawn.
Sixteen months ago he had woken in Halamshiral feverish and shaking, one arm gone and his mind swimming in pain, and asked Cassandra to marry him before good sense could stop him.
She had said yes at once. No pause to think on it. No look of surprise. Sometimes he suspected she had made that choice long before he ever found the courage to ask. The thought eased something in him still.
He rose and crossed quietly toward Anthony's cradle. Anthony slept curled beneath a thick wool blanket, one small fist tucked beneath his cheek. Damon paused beside the cradle longer than he intended. The boy had Cassandra’s dark hair already. Thick. Unruly. A Pentaghast look about the brow and eyes as well, though Maker help him, Anthony had inherited a mixed version of Damon’s and Cassandra's nose.
Eight months old and already loud enough to wake half the hold when hungry. Damon rested his remaining hand lightly against the cradle’s edge and watched the slow rise and fall of his son’s breathing. There were mornings still when the sight of the boy startled him. A son, Damon Trevelyan had survived Corypheus, the Anchor, half the damned world falling apart, and somehow this was the thing that felt least believable of all.
Anthony stirred softly in his sleep as Damon leaned down to press a kiss against his forehead. The child smelled faintly of milk, wool and lavender soap. For a brief moment the phantom pain eased.
A quiet knock sounded at the chamber door soon after. One of the younger servant girls entered carrying fresh linens bundled in her arms. Gwendolyn. Fifteen, perhaps sixteen. Fereldan by her accent. She bowed quickly at the sight of him.
"My lord."
Damon glanced toward the narrow window. Dawn had begun creeping pale and cold through the mountain fog.
"Cassandra is already working, isn't she?"
A small smile crossed the servant girl's face. "Since before first light."
Of course she was.
Damon looked back toward the cradle and carefully lifted Anthony into his arm. The boy shifted sleepily against his chest but did not wake. Warm. Heavy. Real. For one strange moment Damon remembered the days before the Anchor, before Skyhold, before the Breach, when he had imagined fatherhood as something distant and abstract. Some noble obligation to be dealt with eventually.
Instead it had arrived after war and mutilation and near death, wrapped in dark hair and Cassandra's eyes. Anthony made a soft sound of protest when Damon handed him gently to Gwendolyn.
"Take him to the kitchens once he wakes. Tell Marta not to drown his porridge in honey again."
Gwendolyn laughed quietly. "Yes, my lord."
Damon watched until she disappeared down the corridor carrying the child carefully against her shoulder. Only then did he turn back toward the chair beside the bed where the prosthetic rested. The thing looked ugly in the grey dawn light. Functional. Heavy. Made from dark leather, polished steel and carved oak fitted carefully over the remains of his arm below the elbow. Dagna had overseen most of its construction herself after weeks of measurements and adjustments.
A craftsman's solution to an impossible loss.
It could rotate slightly at the wrist. The thumb and first two fingers pinched together through a small internal mechanism controlled near the elbow. Enough to hold papers. Reins. A cup on steadier days. Nothing more.
Damon sat heavily and began fastening the straps one by one. Leather tightened against scar tissue. Buckles pulled firm. The familiar pressure settled along the ruined limb as he secured the final clasp near his elbow. Even now, almost two years later, part of him still recoiled from the sight of it.
Not merely vanity. Something deeper. He had once been a swordsman before he became Inquisitor. In Ostwick he had won purses and tourneys against men larger than himself because he was faster, because he could read movement before it happened. There had been pride in that once. Pride came easier then.
Now servants avoided staring when they helped buckle his armor. Recruits looked too long before remembering themselves. Nobles still called him brave with pity sitting plain behind their eyes.
Worst was when he caught himself believing them. Some mornings he still felt half-made. Less than the man Cassandra had first dragged from Haven's dungeon in chains and fury.
His mouth tightened.
Yet Cassandra had never looked at him that way. Not during the long ugly months afterward, when pain made him sharp-tongued and ashamed of needing help with the simplest things. She had simply adjusted to it. As though this was merely another wound to tend. Another burden to carry between them.
Maker, sometimes he thought she deserved someone easier to love. The realization unsettled him even now. Damon flexed the prosthetic slightly, listening to the faint creak of leather and metal.
Outside, steel rang faintly through the cold morning air from the training yard below.
---
Cassandra had already been awake for hours.
By dawn she had reviewed reports from the southern watchtowers, settled a dispute between two recruits over stable duties, corrected three pages of copied Seeker histories, and argued briefly with Emery regarding provisions before finally escaping her office beneath the excuse of morning drills.
The truth was simpler, her mind had grown too restless for ledgers. The mountain air struck cold against her face as she crossed the inner yard toward the training grounds below. The training yard lay half-veiled beneath the pale mountain mist.
Cold clung to the stone walls of Caer Visus and settled silver upon the scattered racks of practice weapons. The first recruits had not yet arrived from the lower barracks. Only the sound of steel striking wood carried through the morning air in slow measured rhythm.
Cassandra paused beneath the archway overlooking the yard. Damon stood alone near the center ring. A training dummy swayed under the force of another strike from the blunted sword in his hand. Not graceful. Not elegant either. Deliberate. Controlled through effort rather than instinct. Different from before.
The loss of his left arm had changed the balance of his entire body. She noticed it in every sparring session no matter how fiercely he tried to conceal it. His footing compensated constantly now. His shoulders turned differently during swings. The strength in his back and right arm had grown considerably during the past one year, but some movements still carried the faint hesitation of a man relearning himself.
He hated that hesitation. Cassandra knew because she hated witnessing it. Damon stepped back and rolled tension from his shoulder before striking again. The prosthetic rested secured beneath dark leather straps against his forearm. Functional enough for daily tasks but useless in combat. A reminder more than a replacement. His shirt clung lightly to his back from exertion.
Another strike. Wood cracked loudly.
Maker, he was overworking the shoulder again.
Cassandra started descending into the yard without announcing herself at first. For a few moments she stopped and simply watched him move through the drills.
The scars only worsened the impression. Burned flesh twisted down the left side of his body beneath the linen shirt and leather straps. Even standing still, Damon carried himself differently now, compensating unconsciously for balance that no longer came naturally. Cassandra watched him drive another strike into the training dummy with the patience of someone who had learned long ago to observe before acting.
His footwork was wrong.
Not dangerously wrong. Not the catastrophic wrongness of those first terrible weeks at Caer Visus when he had still been learning how to move through doorways without clipping his shoulder against the frame. This was subtler now. A lean where there should have been a pivot. Weight distributed a fraction too far from center, as though some stubborn part of him still expected balance from the arm no longer there.
He had always been precise.
That precision had made him dangerous long before the Conclave. Long before Haven. Long before the world placed a glowing mark in his hand and demanded he save it. Leliana’s reports had mentioned it often during the early days of the Inquisition. Damon Trevelyan. Duelist. Rogue. Nobleman with tournament victories across the Free Marches and an irritating habit of adapting faster than opponents expected.
Quick. Unorthodox. Infuriatingly difficult to predict.
Those qualities survived everything else. Cassandra was grateful for that.
They were the reason she stood in the yard before sunrise instead of in her office reviewing supply ledgers beside Emery and pretending tower reports mattered more than this.
She descended the last steps into the yard. “Your weight is too far left.”
He stopped. Then he turned. His eyes found her across the yard.
Green this morning in the pale mountain light. Tired beneath that. The dream again, she suspected. She knew the look of the dream mornings by now and had learned not to ask. Damon answered concern with wit whenever possible and she had no patience for wit before dawn.
“I know,” he said.
“Then correct it.”
“I’ve been correcting it for weeks.”
“You’ve been telling yourself you’re correcting it for weeks.” Cassandra crossed toward the weapon rack and selected a wooden practice sword. “There is a difference.”
He said nothing. She turned and found him watching her with the expression he thought she could not read. The one balanced carefully between pride and resignation.
He looked older now than the man she had dragged from chains outside Haven. Not old. Never that. But worn by responsibility. His once dirty blond hair had darkened over the years, nearer light brown now except where silver had begun threading through the temples. Grey lingered through the rough stubble along his jaw as well. Stress. Pain. Sleepless nights. Too many years carrying burdens meant for nations instead of men. And still entirely too handsome for his own good.
She stepped into stance. “Again,” she said.
Damon moved opposite her. Wrong. Still wrong. But less wrong than two weeks ago, and two weeks ago had been less wrong than the week before that. Cassandra held onto those small improvements stubbornly.
He had only recently begun training properly again nearly a year after Anthony’s birth. For months he had scarcely left the upper chambers unless duty demanded it, hovering near the child with quiet relentless protectiveness that bordered on absurdity.
As though the boy might vanish if Damon looked away too long. As though he himself still feared disappearing.
“Attack,” she ordered.
He was still fast. That surprised people. They saw the scars first. The missing arm. The prosthetic strapped uselessly at his side. They expected hesitation afterward. Weakness. Slowness. They expected diminishment.
Damon disappointed them.
His speed had never belonged to his hands. It lived in his feet. In his eyes. In the sharp instinctive awareness that made opponents feel half a step behind him before the fight had truly begun.
The first strike came low and fast toward her ribs.
She parried.
Second strike. A short blade this time from the right side, quick enough to test reaction rather than strength. Better. Third strike. She stepped inside his guard and slammed the flat of the practice sword against his shoulder hard enough to stagger him backward. He caught himself before falling. Also better.
“Again,” she said.
He came again.
The yard slowly filled around them. Cassandra noticed it only distantly. Recruits arriving from the lower barracks. Veteran Seekers lining the northern wall. A few servants carrying buckets who slowed suspiciously near the gate.
Let them watch, there was nothing shameful here. She had decided that the first morning she found Damon alone in this yard, sweating through pain and fury while trying to relearn movements his body no longer understood. This was not weakness. This was work.
Cassandra had always understood work. Fourth exchange. Fifth. She pressed him steadily, forcing angles, forcing adaptation.
“Your feet,” she said.
“I know where my feet are.”
“Apparently not.”
She struck him again. This time he absorbed it cleanly without losing stance. His jaw tightened. His eyes flattened into pure concentration. There. That.
Cassandra recognized the difference immediately. She had learned Damon across years of battlefields, strategy meetings and endless nights beside war tables. She knew the difference between Damon performing control and Damon truly working. Performance was the wit. The charm. The carefully measured confidence.
This was different. This was the man who forgot to protect himself when focused on something that mattered.
He came in hard against her left side.
She blocked.
He pivoted.
Actually pivoted this time.
Weight balanced properly through the right hip rather than compensating toward the absent left.
And suddenly Cassandra felt it. The old Damon.
Fast. Aggressive. Precise. Beautiful. He caught her blade in a bind and held it. The yard went quiet. Even the veterans.
Cassandra felt the pressure immediately through her wrist. For the first time since the amputation, truly correct. Damon held the bind with fierce green eyes fixed on her, breath fogging pale between them in the cold air.
And there he was again. Not the wounded man waking from nightmares. Not the exhausted former Inquisitor dragging phantom pain through sleepless nights. The man from Haven. The man who had fought through demons, Corypheus and the end of the world itself with impossible stubbornness and two blades in hand.
His mouth curved slowly. Smug bastard.
“Oh,” he said softly. “I’ve got you.”
Cassandra slammed the pommel of the practice sword into his sternum, then swept his ankle from beneath him with a sharp twist of her boot.
The bind broke instantly.
Damon hit the snow flat on his back with enough force to drive all the air from his chest.
Somewhere near the weapon rack a recruit made a choking sound that might have been laughter.
Cassandra stood over him. “You smiled,” she informed him.
“I was winning,” Damon wheezed from the ground.
“You were becoming arrogant.”
“I have always been arrogant.”
“Yes,” Cassandra agreed calmly. “But previously you had two arms to support the personality.”
A veteran near the gate failed spectacularly to hide his laugh.
Damon stared up at the grey Hunterhorn sky for several long seconds. “Maker,” he muttered.
Cassandra extended her hand. He looked at it. The braid had loosened from her hair during the sparring, dark strands falling across one shoulder while cold flushed color into her cheeks. She was breathing harder now than when they began.
Good, Damon had always made her work for victory.
He took her hand. Cassandra hauled him upright.
He rose off-balance, momentum carrying him closer than intended, and neither of them moved away immediately. Close now. Cold mountain air between them. His breath visible against her lips. She could see the pale scar tissue climbing above the collar of his tunic, warped remnants left behind by the Anchor’s final destruction. One recruit glanced toward it. Cassandra did not. She had decided long ago how she would look at the man she loved. She had never revised that decision.
“You fight dirty,” Damon said quietly.
“I fight to win.”
“You enjoy knocking me down.”
Cassandra considered it. “Sometimes.”
Then she grabbed the front of his tunic and kissed him. Not gently. She kissed him with complete certainty and no concern whatsoever for the audience surrounding them. Damon answered immediately. No hesitation. No performance. Just warmth. Real and familiar and entirely Damon. The training yard fell into near sacred silence.
When Cassandra finally pulled back she rested her forehead briefly against his. The cold. His breathing.
“You are improving,” she said quietly.
She did not mean the footwork. She meant the rest of it. The ugly adjustments. The stubbornness. The endless refusal to surrender pieces of himself simply because pain demanded them.
She meant him.
Her fingers tightened once around his hand. Then she stepped back.
“Again,” she ordered.
Damon stared at her for a moment. Then laughter escaped him suddenly. Brief and unguarded. He bent, retrieved the practice blades from the snow and rolled his shoulder carefully before returning to stance.
“You are,” he informed her, “the most demanding woman I have ever met.”
“Yes, but you are the one that proposed in the first place” Cassandra replied.
“I mean that as a compliment.”
“Oh...Thank you”
He looked at her across the yard with that expression not quite a smile but close enough to matter.
They trained for another hour.
By the end both of them were sweating despite the mountain cold, their boots carving the snow and slush to mud across the yard stones while recruits wisely kept their distance. Damon lost count of how many times Cassandra knocked him flat onto his back. Cassandra lost count of how many times he nearly caught her with that infuriatingly fast right hand of his.
Eventually Emery called an end to the morning drills before the initiates killed themselves attempting to imitate Lord Trevelyan's footwork.
Cassandra lowered her blade first.
She exhaled hard, chest heaving slightly from exertion, and glanced toward the upper levels of the hold where Anthony still slept somewhere beyond stone walls and warm blankets and an exhausted servant trying to keep the boy from crying himself awake.
It had only been a few hours. Already she missed him fiercely.
Damon followed her gaze.
“Lunch?” he asked.
Cassandra sheathed the practice blades. “Maker, yes.”
Together they left the yard behind.