260610108948
Stuff written for the fic that doesn't fit, too far ahead, or I'm not sure what to do with, but still kinda like. or am starting to dislike, or something.
(9:25, 5 yrs ago) The portrait hung in a narrow alcove on the way to the chapel, gilt frame bright against weathered stone. King Maric, forever mid-stride, cloak wind-tossed, smiling bravely. The hallway choked with apprentices pressing close to it, trading rumors. Two Templars stood beneath the frame, helmets tilted, pretending to supervise while obviously eavesdropping.
Areli spotted Emma passing quietly behind the crowd, and nudged through to meet her. Emma acknowledged her with a look, which moved across the students then Templars: unimpressed by the sudden gravity in the air.
Areli loved that about her.
“Let's go,” she murmured. They climbed up the narrow, curling flight of stairs into the higher floors.
The Chantry's guard recognized them and waved them through at the wrong hour. Their work was so dull and specialized no one had bothered memorizing their schedule. The restricted top level level had become used to them.
“You knew,” Emma said. Proud.
“King Maric's dead,” Areli confirmed. “Lost men don't survive at sea for long.”
“Did they find anything? Wreckage?”
“Nobody knows,” said the Templar in the doorway. “But Cailan's the new king. Long may he reign.” His gaze lingered on Areli in a way that had nothing to do with what he was saying.
The room still smelled faintly of incense from a recent Harrowing, the Veil wobbling thin in the air, cut by the silhouette of the telescope. They set to work on the star charts, shoulders brushing more than necessary, until the Templar's footsteps faded down the corridor.
When his patrol stretched long enough, Areli produced a tiny satchel of herbs from her sleeve. They passed it between them, the mild haze softening nervous edges in the chamber.
“Did they think the legendary king Maric was riding back to them, out of a storm?” Areli rolled her eyes, summoning a soft breeze to scatter the scent.
“To the late King Maric,” Emma responded dryly. “And his son.”
“Yes,” Areli agreed, with sardonic gratitude. “Bless their very large problems, far from us.”
Downstairs, the portrait had devolved into theater. Even First Enchanter Irving hovered at the edges, observing the chatter spiral and settle. A cluster of enchanters clucked about the new king. “So young,” one said. “So tragic.” The older apprentices exchanged glances. Someone giggled.
Wynne swept in like a winter gust. “This is not amusing,” she snapped, launching into a lecture about Maric's campaigns against Orlesian occupation, reciting dates and battles.
She scowled at their irreverence and assigned extra reading. The tower had stripped these children of any country outside stone walls. In time, she promised, they would mature and understand the importance of national freedom. The Good King Maric had ended Orlesian tariffs, saved the Circle's budget. That meant something.
When Areli and Emma finally descended for evening assembly, the hallway had emptied. Only Jowan remained, hunched over like a wet sock.
“My parents must be upset. They loved him.” He laughed bitterly. “So—whatever. Fuck them. Fuck the King, this one and the last.”
His words came out small, shaky. He braced for reproach. Behind him, Emma made a crude gesture toward the portrait—a sharp, repetitive flick of her wrist that implied Maric was a monumental wanker.
Areli laughed, bright and unbothered. Jowan flushed pink but smiled, convinced he'd said something clever. Emma looked smug. The tension eased.
Night settled. Assembly passed. And sometime later, a new portrait appeared in a different hall: Cailan, all gold and hope and hero's posture. Almost nobody noticed it at all.
The weeks under Uldred's occupation had left grime and gore smudged across stone. Barely visible on the wall was a pale rectangle. A ghost of a ghost. The place where Maric's portrait had hung.
Now Maric's face rose unbidden in her mind, more vivid than she had any right to remember. The strong lines, the bright eyes. She'd thought the portrait a little idealized back then. Now she wasn't sure.
Alistair looked like him.
It must have been a good likeness, if she could see the resemblance so clearly in hindsight. Why hadn't she seen it before?
Cailan's portrait… she couldn't even place it in the building. She remembered the man more than the image: On the day he died, gleaming in golden plate at Ostagar, that impossible armor, cheerfully greeting her. Later, in the command tent lit by torches, he'd stood beside Duncan, Loghain, and Uldred—yes, Uldred, smiling like a man who hadn't already decided to damn the tower.
Only weeks after Jowan betrayed her. And in turn, mere weeks before Uldred slaughtered nearly everyone here. In the space of a season she'd gone from nameless apprentice to nameless Grey Warden, standing before a king, being told to follow Alistair to Ishal.
He was just some rookie Warden, as far as she'd known. And he still was. But he'd known more about being a Warden than she did, and she'd leaned on that knowledge. He hadn't known much—but he'd been open with her. Or she'd believed he had.
But not about this.
Even while they became criminals, fugitives, hunted by Loghain as traitors to Ferelden.
There had only been time to act. Leliana had spoken to everyone, returned to Emma with sweet, pointed assurances she'd ensure the truth stay quiet. Redcliffe was begging for help. Connor needed freeing. Bandits and monsters tore apart everything along the roads. And so easily she resumed trusting him—to draw fire with clumsy, dependable courage, or outmaneuver enemies in alleys too narrow for his shield.
Emma sank down against the cold stone beneath the vanished portrait and lit the herbs she and Areli had once used to celebrate Maric's death. Now just a dry cope. She inhaled slowly, chest tight.
Areli, the Circle, the King with all the Grey Wardens, were gone.
She and Alistair were younger than even Cailan had been.
And it was so, so tragic.
The old observatory at the top of Kinloch Hold was a forgotten chamber, a dusty and round stone hollow, its windows narrowed to slits. Dust clung thick to the grooves where benches had once been dragged for lessons. At its center loomed a great brass telescope on a cracked dais—a relic and silent witness, perpetually looking up.
Emma sat cross-legged under its lens, her codex with its false hymn-book cover spread open across her knees. A scatter of textbooks and loose papers sprawled around her, some destined to be stitched into the codex later. Her quill scratched steadily as she copied constellations, weaving together her own observations, the actually accurate bits of existing charts, into something her own.
Areli also laid amongst the sprawl of papers, books and scrolls, freckles lit by a narrow strip of light from the mostly-covered windows.
“Tell me something, Em,” she said lazily. “Why is it that we could—” her eyes flicked toward Emma with a wicked grin, “—sneak off for a quick tumble up here, and it’d get us a scolding at worst. But if they caught us asleep or late to morning chant, we’d be scrubbing the dorm floors for a month?”
Emma did not look up from her page. “One’s more predictable than the other,” she murmured, adjusting the careful angle of a tiny star-line.
“Predictable,” Areli scoffed, rolling to her side to watch Emma’s fingers. “One is more sinful, supposedly. Or are we more dangerous asleep than scandalous?”
“Possibly.” Emma raised her brows in mock solemnity.
Areli laughed softly, reached across to doodle in Emma’s margins.
“Still… I’d rather like to nap.”
Emma’s quill paused. She’d been working out the puzzle of how to gift Areli that: a morning with their attendance covered, the smallest rebellion. So innocent, so nearly impossible.
They lapsed into a companionable hush. Eyes half-lidded, Areli slowed her doodling: faceless figures resembling them, entwined beneath a starburst.
“See? Perfect,” she murmured, head sinking onto Emma’s shoulder. The ink on the page wobbled. “Wake me in a century.”
Before Emma could answer, a soft hiss broke from the stairwell. Lily rounded the entrance to the observatory, hurried and flushed.
“They’re on rounds.”
Areli shot upright with a groan. “Lily, you’re a saint and a curse.”
Emma already had the hymn book tucked away, her chart half-finished. She held Areli’s hand to tug her gently toward the exit. Their footsteps echoed down the stairwell, hearts pounding, quietly laughing as they rushed to slip back into the bunk. Above them, their telescope kept its patient gaze toward the sky.
In the Wilds, the first time she fought them, they looked like deformed men. Limbs in the right places. Heads where they ought to be. The details failed on inspection. They were dark and oozing, with skin stretched over crackling bone. Movement too fast for the shape that carried it. Milky eyes that didn’t land on what they saw.
'Like men' was hardly the description, only the closest comparison. They were wrong in ways that accumulated the longer you looked.
It frightened her. Not the danger. The resemblance. That had not lasted. By the time of her Joining, the shape stopped registering.
She worked from elevation when she could. Stone, embankment, anything that let her see the field as a pattern instead of bodies. She disrupted where the line thinned, reinforced where it bowed. The soldiers finished the work.
At Ostagar, she disabled flanks while Alistair pushed through the gap, strengthened the soldiers before the line buckled so they could drive their blades through whatever presented itself.
The highwaymen were not like that.
The stew is suspicious. Alistair sets it in front of Emma with the care of a man offering tribute to something arcane and unreadable. Now he's sitting across from her, not meeting her eyes, and thinking about the stew.
The stew is a good thing to think about.
Rabbit, allegedly. He has doubts. He relayed these doubts aloud because that's what he does — releases whatever forms first, then evaluates the damage in real time. He has been trying, lately, to stop doing that. To think first. He's been trying very hard.
It's going spectacularly.
She's looking at the soup now instead of him. He looks at the table. Then at Leliana, who is doing something conspiratorial at the bar. Then at the window, where the tower sits in the lake.
Emma's going back in there tomorrow. With him, and everyone. Back into the place that made her. He doesn't know what that means to her and he's been afraid to ask because every time he opens his mouth she looks at him with that particular expression — not unkind, just confused.
He looks up. What? like a stuck door.
She meets his eyes.
Right. Right. Yes. He's been aware, in the way you're aware of something you've also forgotten, a stone in your boot that you've decided you'll deal with later and then you've been walking on it numb. Gone stiff. She'd used that word once, talking about something else, and he'd filed it under things that apply to me, specifically, right now.
“I decided to stop embarrassing myself,” he says.
She says, Oh, which does not make it better.
He explains. He's explaining. He tries to sound like someone who has thought about this calmly and rationally and not like someone who, in the business with Leliana, lay awake rearranging the same thoughts in increasingly baroque configurations until sunrise. Maybe it was better if I didn't say the wrong thing. Very sensible. Very measured. He'd been trying. He'd been doing her a favor, actually, by not filling every silence with whatever falls out of his head.
“So you said nothing,” she says.
“Yes.” He winces. “Which appears to be worse.”
She's looking at her drink now, and she says something about how he used to just talk to her. About anything. About nothing. About templars stealing lyrium, about— and here she names the incident.
She remembers, in detail.
The lyrium, the fire, the accident, and he says that was an accident, and she says I know, that's why it was funny, and she says she misses it, when you tell me the first thing that comes to your head, and something about that specific phrasing...
He keeps trying to explain: after Leliana, he panicked.
He doesn't use the word panicked. He says he started thinking this was a sign, that he was out of his depth, that he doesn't have a lot of experience with this. Which is a spectacular understatement, he has exactly no experience with this, he grew up in a hayloft and then a monastery, and then the Wardens and the Blight started, there was not a lot of time for — anyway.
He thought she deserved better than an idiot with a mouth running ahead of his brain.
“I liked the idiot,” she says.
He almost smiles. He tells her he's trying to be worthy of it, because that's what it felt like. Like this mattered enough to become the kind of person who could handle a conversation without constantly putting his foot in things. Like he owed her a better version of himself. Like the version he'd been wasn't enough.
“Please stop,” she says, and there's something in her voice that makes him go very still. “You were enough when you weren't trying. That's the problem.”
He was enough.
He processes this.
He was — all right, the problem with that is: if he was enough, then why — but that's not a productive line of thinking. He's really not going to think about why she was flirting with Leliana if he was already enough. Nope, not in a public inn where the stew is dubious and he's already on thin conversational ice.
He can't treat something like this casually. He's trying to say that.
He looks at the table. Then his hands. Then at Emma.
And Leliana, murmuring at the bar.
Fine. He asks about Leliana. He'd been saving this question, turning it over, still not sure if it was ever any of his business. She'd shut something down with Leliana, and he'd watched it happen from a tactical distance of approximately fifteen feet, and he'd thought: because of me? possibly because of me? And then he'd talked himself out of it, because that was probably arrogant, to assume —
“Yes,” she says.
So she chose this.
“I did,” she says.
He was going to say I wasn't sure, which is true, and then he was going to say I didn't know you felt that way, which is also true, but then something else comes out of her—
“Why would you ask me to choose you and then stop being you?” — it is unfairly accurate and it lands somewhere under his sternum.
He puts his elbows on the table and puts his face in his hands and looks at her. There is nowhere better to look, and she asked a direct and reasonable question that he does not have a direct and reasonable answer to. The answer is: being chosen felt so improbable that when it happened he immediately started trying to earn it retroactively, which is not how that works, which he knows, which has not stopped him...
But he asks, “So, where do we go from here?”
She says they could stop. He looks away, says right, of course, I understand, and means it in the bleakest possible way, because of course that's how this ends, because he did something stupid and overcorrected into a different kind of stupid, the full arc of a genius—
She says no, no, so quickly he has to look back. You don't understand.
“You got scared. I—”
She hesitates.
“I don't want to scare you.”
That he was not prepared for. His shoulders drop about an inch, like something that had been braced too long finally accepts that the hit isn't coming. She was worried. About him. About scaring him.
He'd been so busy trying to be careful with her that it hadn't occurred to him that she might be doing the same thing from the other side. Two people handling the same object so gently it was floating untouched in the middle.
And then she asks: “my magic. Is that it?”
He stares at her for a second. Of all the — he's fought abominations. He says this, almost before he means to, with more heat than he intended: he's fought darkspawn and ogres, they've fought them together, he's not afraid of her. She tells him she doubts it's that simple, and he tries to regroup —
“What did you mean, then? That I see you as a risk? As something to manage?”
She doesn't answer.
He's quieter when he says: “I know what you are. I've always known. It's never once been the part that worried me.”
She crosses her arms and tells him he can barely look at her.
He has to think about that. He has, in fairness, been looking at the table a lot. The drink. His hands. The alleged stew. Things that don't look back with a particular expression that makes him melt internally. But not because he's afraid of her — afraid of magic, afraid of Emma — that's not it, that's never been it.
“What worries me,” he says, reluctantly, “is me ruining this.”
She looks at him like she was expecting something substantially worse.
“That's it?”
“Yes,” he says, and he is, frankly, a little irritated now. Yes, that's all. Merely that—
”—Just the little matter of I don't want to take you for granted. And how I'm trying to, for once in my life, think before I say something stupid. Is that so horrible?”
She asks “why?,” and she looks tired. The chair creaks when she leans back, and she tells him he was never wrong in the first place, “Now... you act like I'm fragile,” she says.
Which makes no sense. She's the least shatterable person he's ever met.
He starts to say “I'm not—” because she absorbed the Joining and the Blight and all of this fighting and tragedy like something uncomfortable and inconvenient.
“You are. You think one wrong word and I'll stop talking to you? Decide you're not worth it?”
He hadn't thought of it that way. Not as if she were the problem, as treating her like something that would shatter if mishandled.
He sits back. That's — yeah. She's right. He's been treating her like that.
“Do you think I don't know what you are?”
She knows who he is.
She's saying it like it's obvious. Like she has to point it out because he's forgotten, and the thing is — he has, a bit.
He's been so busy trying to construct a version of himself that was worth the choosing that he let the person who got chosen in the first place evaporate quietly into the background.
He tells her he was trying to do her a favor.
“I don't need that favor,” Emma says. Irritated, arguing. Because she knows who he is, and wants him. Maker, he'll try to stop. but he's not sure he knows how to stop flailing.
“I didn’t do you any favors. I know that now.”
She says “it's not an audition,” which is — he opens his mouth, and he says he's sorry, he's doing this all stiff and wrong, he'll try — and she says please again, like she's actually begging, “I need you to actually be here.”
She asks about going back to how things were. He can hear what he's not saying: even though you let Leliana down for this, even though you burned something for this, you'd just—
Emma: “It’s a truce. We don’t escalate. We don’t audition. We just… talk.”
“I'll take it,” he says, immediately, and then something human reasserts itself and he hears himself call it extremely un-suave, which it is. She says she's not good at romance, like it's a fact about her, some practical information for navigation—
”—you should learn this.”
“That’s tragic,” he replies.
“For both of us,” she's so dry, so even, always.
He tells her, then, carefully: he doesn't know if he's ready for “—well, you know.“
She says she's not worried about that.
“You chose this,” he said again, like he was testing the shape of it.
“Yes.”
“And you’re not… reconsidering.”
“No.”
He looks down. “I don't know where this goes,” he says, because that's the truest thing he can produce at this particular moment, and it's the one thing he can actually say out loud without it turning into something he hasn't sorted out yet.
“So?” She raises an eyebrow. “The truce.”
“Although—” He starts. Stops. He'd been about to say something. Something in the vicinity of —that maybe the truce is a mistake— and then he looked at her and the sentence died of its own accord.
She looks at him.
“Nothing,” he says. “It's fine. Truce.”
He believes this approximately sixty percent.
The arcane dome pulsed faintly with violet light. Inside it, a Templar knelt on stone. The only one to survive, so far, and they'd nearly reached the top.
His armor was dented and blood-streaked, eyes wide and glassy. He was muttering something—prayers, denials, negotiations with invisible demons. His hands were raw from clawing at the barrier.
Emma stopped. Her stone armor settled with a soft grinding sound.
Cullen.
He was nearly unrecognizable, but for his voice. She had been braced for hysteria, for the Templar’s frothing terror, but not this. Not specificity.
“This trick again? I know what you are. It won't work. I will stay strong.”
Wynne moved forward, hands raised in a gesture meant to be pacifying. “The boy is exhausted. Rest easy—help is here.”
“Enough visions.” Cullen lurched upright, swaying. “If anything in you is human, kill me now and end this game.”
Emma's manna spiked so aggressively that Alistair suppressed a flinch. She'd have obliged him, gladly. Her restraint was immense.
Leliana stepped closer, waterskin already in hand. “He's delirious. Here—”
“Don't touch me!” Cullen recoiled so violently he hit the curve of his containment. “Stay away! Sifting through my thoughts, tempting me with the one thing I always wanted but could never have... Using my shame against me, my ill-advised infatuation with her—a mage, of all things.”
Everyone felt terribly uncomfortable with this. When he stopped talking, one could hear a pin drop. Even the bubble's hum seemed to quiet.
“I am so tired,” Cullen whispered. “All these cruel jokes. These tricks. These—”
“Which mage, Cullen?” Emma asked. It would seem that the demons of the Fade had a lot of practice tempting its captives with the image of this particular mage.
“Enough,” he snapped. “I won’t listen. Begone.” He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, breath stuttering when she was still there. “Maker help me.”
Cullen's eyes focused for the first time. He recognized her. “You,” he breathed. “You're real.”
“I'm real.” Emma took one step closer. “Answer the question. Which mage?”
He stared at her like she'd materialized from his nightmares. Which, in a way, she had. “I... She...”
“Say her name.”
“No—I can't. They made me watch. Over and over. She kept telling me to... to surrender. To trust her. I knew it wasn't real. I knew.” His hands were shaking. “But sometimes I forgot. Sometimes I—”
“Do you even remember her?” Emma said.
That did it. His head snapped up. “I remember exactly.”
Emma nodded once. Her attention was a blade, held steady. “Then say her name.”
He didn’t.
“Areli—may that Maker-of-yours damn you!— she was Areli Surana. What happened during her Harrowing?”
“I was... I was doing my duty. Following orders. She was—the demon was—”
“She passed every test before that night,” Emma said quietly. “Every single one. Everyone said so. She was the best student in Wynne's cohort.”
“Then why did she fail?” Cullen's question was a demand. “Why did the demon—”
“You tell me.” Emma's voice was ice. “You were there.”
Alistair stepped up to flank her. A warning, or a comfort. Emma couldn't tell which.
Cullen's face twisted. “I had no choice. The demon was already—she was already—I couldn't—” His breath came in hitches. “There was nothing I could do.”
“So you killed her.”
“I saved everyone else! I protected her from herself!” The load-bearing lie, spoken like a prayer.
“If I hadn't acted, if I'd hesitated even a second longer, it would have torn through the entire tower. You don't understand what I saw. What it made her—”
“I understand,” Emma said, “that you want me to believe you had no choice. But it didn't get there by itself, did it?”
Wynne touched her arm. “Emma. He's been through—”
“Poor Cullen.” Emma didn't look away from the prisoner. “Kneeling now. But he was upright when Uldred took this Tower. He was armed when Areli was trapped.”
She paused. “The demons and blood mages kept him alive. On purpose. Why?”
Cullen made a sound like he'd been punched.
“Stop—”
“Did she beg you to stop? Does some part of you believe you loved her?”
“Stop!!” He pounded on the barrier. Alistair shifted closer to Emma, by inches. She had provoked Cullen to frenzy. For a moment, they all thought he might try to attack her through it.
“Did you even wait to see if she could fight it off?” Emma continued.
“You weren't there! You don't know what it's like to watch someone you—to see them become—” He was gasping now, hands pressed to his temples. “I see her every time I close my eyes. I see what she became.”
“What they made her become. What it, and you made her...”
She trusted you; I trusted you. Emma couldn't say it.
Cullen collapsed back to his knees. “Why did you come back?” His voice was hollow now, all the fight gone. “How did you survive?”
“This is my home,” Emma said. The words felt dry. “Or it was.”
“As it was mine. Look what they've done to it. They deserve to die. Uldred most of all.”
“Where are Irving and the other mages?” Wynne interjected.
“The Harrowing chamber. But you can't save them. You don't know what they've become.”
“And you do?” Emma asked.
“They've been surrounded by blood mages—” Cullen's eyes were feverish now. “Their wicked fingers snake into your mind, corrupt your thoughts. You can't tell who's been turned. Who's still human.” He looked directly at Emma. “You have to end it. Now. Before it's too late.”
“End what, exactly?”
“All of it.” He said it simply. “To ensure this horror ends, to guarantee that no abominations or blood mages survive—you must kill everyone up there.”
Emma felt something cold slide down her spine. Behind her, Leliana inhaled sharply.
“Everyone,” Emma repeated. “Even the ones who fought Uldred. Even the ones who resisted.”
“You can't tell maleficarum by sight.” Cullen's voice gained strength, gained certainty. “Just one could influence the mind of a king, a grand cleric. The risk is too great. If you care about Ferelden—if you care about anyone outside these walls—you'll do what's necessary.”
Alistair stood next to her, close enough that his mail almost brushed her shoulder. It had picked up the cold in the air. She could feel it.
Emma felt a painful irony, poison in her second pulse. A bastard prince stood at her side, listening. A future king, maybe, hopefully not. Influenced, right now, not by blood magic but by herself, her choices.
“If he wants us to kill survivors,” that bastard said, quietly. Not to Cullen. To Emma. “We're not doing that.”
Cullen's head snapped toward him. “You don't understand. You weren't here. You didn't see—You're one of them—”
“I know exactly what you saw.” He paused. “The memory of your friends' deaths is still fresh in your mind. You're not thinking straight.”
Cullen stared at him, something like betrayal dawning in his eyes. “You... you would trust her?” He gestured at Emma. “She let Jowan walk.”
“We know. And she's about to save whatever mages are still alive up there.”
Cullen opened his mouth, slack, shocked. “You're making a mistake.”
“It's worth a shot,” Alistair said.
“We've come out better for our mistakes, so far,” Leliana added.
Emma wasn't paying attention to them. She was still looking at Cullen. Her hand drifted toward her staff. Everyone in the room saw it.
She turned to Wynne. “Can you drop the barrier?”
Wynne didn't answer. But she was ready to intervene. Ready to heal. Emma's fingers closed around the staff, tight with potential violence. The bubble hummed.
Cullen didn't move. He just watched her, eyes wide and almost hopeful. Like he wanted her to do it.
Like it would prove him right.
“We need him alive,” Wynne said carefully. “If we kill his last man, Greagoir won't hear us.”
“I know.” Emma's voice was steady. Too steady. “When this is over, your boss will want to know why the malificar kept you. You'll tell him we saved lives, and the Chantry men who wanted to slaughter everyone were wrong.”
“And if I don't?”
Then I'll come back. And we'll finish this conversation.
“You will. Because you'll need them to believe you had no choice—again.”
Emma abruptly walked past the bubble without looking back. Alistair followed immediately.
“May the Maker watch over you.” Leliana cast one more troubled glance at Cullen before trailing after them.
Behind them, muffled by stone and distance, they could hear Cullen start to pray.
Wynne lingered, following last.
“It's just cruel,” she sighed.
As they climbed the stairs toward the Harrowing chamber, Alistair opened the visor of his helm, trying to get a better read on his fellow Warden. Failing that, looking for something to resolve the unease he felt.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” Emma said. She didn't slow down. Didn't look at him. Just kept climbing.
Alistair nodded. Asked nothing else. Stayed close.
Morrigan materialized from raven-form on the landing above them, golden eyes sharp. “The chamber above reeks of blood magic and desperation,” she said. Then, studying Emma's face: “And I heard you have encountered someone from your past. How interesting.”
“You have no idea,” Alistair muttered.
“Oh, I have some idea.” Morrigan's smile was knowing, indeed. “So much guilt and rage and misdirected devotion.”
Emma said nothing. Alistair's polished armor caught the light from above—the sickly green glow of illegal, horrible magic filtering down the stairs.
“Well,” Morrigan continued, “are we now pretending that restraining yourself from ending him is a noble act? We have spared the jailer of Circle mages we also meant to aid. 'Tis a tangled contradiction you are weaving.”
“She didn't kill him because it wouldn't have helped,” Alistair said.
“How pragmatic. And here I thought it was mercy.”
“Mercy is conditional,” Emma said quietly. “I haven't decided if he's used his up.”
Somewhere behind them the city kept its noise—shouting, commerce, the hostility of individuals who knew something was wrong but hadn't decided what to do. Here, at the edge of it, a fire, a dog, and two Wardens.
Emma heard him sit next to her. Quiet, for him, now unarmored.
“I've been thinking,” Alistair said.
She'd known since the street outside Goldanna's house. The way he'd gone silent and then stayed silent.
“You've been circling the fire for awhile.”
“Those aren't mutually exclusive.”
“No,” she agreed. “They're not.”
He was quiet long enough that she glanced up. He was watching the fire, forearms on his knees, hands loose.
“Em, Look... back there,” he said. “With Goldanna. I kept thinking about what you said after. About standing up for myself.” He turned a pebble over with his boot.
He looked up then. “I've been through that whole house in my head, thinking—she blamed me for existing, and I just—And then she called you a—” He stopped.
“And... Maker, I never even thought about it. Funny. She can say whatever she wants to me. I've heard it my whole life, from different voices. But you—” He shook his head. “That I couldn't let sit.”
“Like when that blood mage had you frozen behind the barricades,” Alistair said, quieter, “I stopped thinking. I just went.” He looked at his hands. “I cut through the whole line. I do that for you. I go, every time. but if I don't protect myself, then you have to.”
Emma slipped her arms around him. Something she'd been longing for outside Goldanna's house, when he was plated save for the helm he'd removed to meet someone who did not care for it. Without the armor there was just him, the give of a linen shirt, warmth that shouldn't have surprised her. but did.
“I don't want to be someone who only exists to absorb things,” he said, his voice going rough as he hugged her. He held on. “I mean, I'm pretty good at it. I won't stop. There's a difference between stepping in front of a sword and just...I don't know. I'll try. To pick my battles. I think. I'm working on that.”
“And I don't want you thinking you don't matter when I say something like—” He winced. “—Duncan was the only one who cared. You were standing right there.”
“You are a true friend,” he said. “The first real one I've had. Meeting you has been the one bright spot in all of this. And...”
He didn't look away. Didn't qualify it or immediately find something self-deprecating to say.
”...I love you.”
“Good,” Emma said.
He blinked.
“Is that—Is that all you're going to say?”
“What else? That covers it.”
“I don't know. Something. Anything. You could—you could tell me I'm an idiot. That would feel familiar.”
“You're not an idiot.” She squeezed him for emphasis. He let out a long breath. “And I love you.”
“Right,” he said. “Okay.” Something in his chest unknotted. “Good.”
He squeezed her back, and rested his chin gently on her head. They settled there. The fire crackled. Muffin snorted in his sleep. Somewhere past the edge of camp, Denerim continued its argument with itself.
“For the record,” Alistair said, after a while, “I thought there'd be more fanfare.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“And I had a whole speech.”
“I could hear you rehearsing.”
“Maker's breath.” He shuddered. “How much did you hear?”
“Enough.”
“Was it—”
“It was good, Alistair.”
“Okay,” he said again, softer.
She could feel him thinking—the slight shift of his jaw, more words, before they became words. Then he stopped trying to think and just stayed. She could feel his heartbeat against her temple, steady where it hadn't been.
The tower trembles above the water. Or below it. Alistair can't tell. Its reflection is clearer than the thing itself. He stares at the tower, then up, then back down. His armor is gone. Someone was very thorough about it.
“It's strange,” he says. His voice sounds like it's coming from far away. “I had something to tell you. Felt important. Urgent, even. And then—”
He looks at Emma. She's soaking wet. The thought slips right out through his fingers.
“Gone,” he says.
Emma shrugs. The motion ripples the water around her ankles. She offers him a pipe. Smoke curls around her fingers, with the particular dead-ichor smell of Ostagar the morning after. He decides he doesn't want any part of that.
“Don't we have a world to save?” he asks, glancing around at the blur of it. “Why are we here?”
“Because you sank,” Emma says.
“Right.” He considers this. “That does sound like me. Very on-brand, quietly drowning during a Blight. Not a heroic last stand. Just fell in a swamp. Nobody puts that on a memorial.”
The tower shudders again. This time it looks like it might fall upward. His stomach takes a turn, head swimming with vertigo. The sensation recalls their nauseating spin out of Ishal, the ice she'd built under them in the dark, the impossible fall. He remembers the cold of it. Her grip.
“How about this for an epitaph,” Emma lowers the pipe. Her rock armor is settling over her arm. “What we meant to protect you weighed you down.”
“A bit trite, isn't it?”
“Makes it no less true.”
The water climbs his waist. He frowns down and staggers, as something underneath pulls him off-balance.
“Ah,” he says, watching her reflection. “Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“You're hurting me,” he observes, without particular judgment. The water is so cold. He hadn't noticed that before.
“Yes,” Emma says.
He considers being offended by this, but decides he doesn't have the energy. The pulling continues, unpleasantly creaking beneath the Fade's eerie light.
“I did warn you,” Emma says. She doesn't sound particularly sorry about any of it, which is reassuring.
“I know. I know you did.”
He lets his knees buckle to the force yanking at him, harder and all at once. Something painful cracks through his chest. It sounds like ice over the lake, the exact moment before it decides to hold or give. The world goes all white for an instant.
“I should tell you,” he manages, short of breath.
The tower leans sideways. He reconsiders. It's actually them who are sideways. He's limp against the current. The light through the water is doing something wrong, spreading, pale.
“What?” she asks, her dark eyes going soft. Alistair hesitates, ends up just looking at her with rapt attention. He tries to hold the thought.
Gone again. The water takes it.
His vision clouds, throat swells and closes. He reaches anyway, his numb hand finding her wrist or her sleeve or something, the small solid fact of her fighting the swamp over who gets to hold him.
Incredibly stubborn, he thinks. It's a compliment, really.
The white came back. It subsumes everything.
“I will take first watch,” Emma said. “Since I cannot get up.”
She did not elaborate on the reason, though it was apparent, sitting heavily in her lap. Alistair had gone limp somewhere between cross-referencing the third or fourth map. He dipped his head, which settled in the hollow between her thighs with the soft inevitability of water finding lower ground.
Sleeplessness had been the pattern, both of them surfacing from nightmares to find the other already awake, already watching, already pretending not to. That he had found sleep here, with his cheek against the inside of her knee and his breath slowing to something like peace, struck her as both deeply moving and deeply unfair.
Morrigan emerged for her watch and stood over them, arms crossed, brows folded to exasperation, a look she wore so often it had nearly become her neutral face. Emma looked up at her.
“You may have second watch instead,” Emma offered, “if this vexes you.”
“Tis not a bother,” Morrigan said, which meant it was, slightly. She did not retreat, which meant there was something else. “Do you realize you have been smiling for hours?”
Emma considered denying it. She did not. “It is the smiling that bothers you?”
“Not at all.” Morrigan's gaze dropped to the man sleeping in Emma's lap, and her lower lip acquired the particular curl for things she found definitely repugnant and perhaps fascinating. “But you are acting the fool. I fear 'tis contagious, since that fool began drooling into your groin, in fact.”
She felt a twitch begin in his hand and bolt down his arm, into shoulders that had stopped carrying anything. Emma smiled again, despite of its concession to the description.
“He must be pleasant enough in bed,” Morrigan continued. “I cannot otherwise imagine anyone enduring his conversation.”
The barb landed. Emma had fought not to lose the conversational candor she had with Alistair. That had quite nearly been lost to his own self-consciousness once the prospect of this intimacy appeared on the horizon.
That was behind them now, what felt like long ago. Almost dissipated to the comfort he so obviously felt, here and now. Something she couldn't take for granted.
Emma sighed; Apparently the rawness of that nerve had not entirely dissipated. She knew the witch had been expecting something like this, a tightening, a small private bristle. It wasn't worth explaining. Morrigan wouldn't understand.
“I love him,” Emma said, simply.
Her friend's sigh was long and theatrical. “Twas once a time when I suspected you were above such infantile sentiments.” She paused, studying Emma. A layer of curiosity passed behind the gold of her eyes. “Do you truly enjoy cradling a grown man like a child?”
Emma looked down at him. Her hand moved of its own accord to brush slowly along the back of his head, a gesture she could not quite justify. The firelight felt warm on his hair.
“Maybe I do,” she said.
They sat in the eerie but familiar silence that constituted peace between them.
“When we spoke of friendship,” Emma still felt the nerve to explain, and settled for a poor approximation. “I agreed with you. That it is arbitrary.” Her fingers moved through his hair again, she felt a slight ripple in him, an unconscious response. “Arbitrary, but not without meaning.”
“Then what meaning do you find, I wonder.”
Emma's eyes found the necklace at Morrigan's throat. This one she had selected specifically for the elegance of her neck and shoulders, for the way that particular metal glittered against her fair skin. It had seemed, at the time, like a purely aesthetic decision. She was no longer certain.
“I think my feelings for him are not unlike what I feel for beautiful things,” she said. “Which is also arbitrary. And still means something, anyway.”
“A beautiful woman can become powerful through that beauty,” Morrigan returned, with the tone of someone quoting from first principles. “What power does this bring you?”
“That is an irrelevant question.” Emma did not look away from the necklace.
“One protests too quickly,” Morrigan observed.
The camp was quiet; she could hear, at the edges, the low sounds of others sleeping, the occasional shift of wood in the fire.
Morrigan let the silence settle before she said, with the neutrality of someone observing weather: “It has drawn my notice that your Alistair bears a striking resemblance to the late King Cailan.”
The muscles along Emma's back went rigid. She slowly spread her fingers across the nape of his neck. Morrigan nodded.
“Do not think for a moment that I relish it,” Emma hissed.
Morrigan looked at her in a way that made her feel briefly prey-shaped. Not threatened, but tracked. She kept herself still against the impulse to shift, deliberately, so she would not disturb the man in her lap.
“Is that truly so?” Morrigan's voice was almost gentle. “With the way he defers to you so completely... he could do great things, had he the inclination. Have you truly no desire—”
“Absolutely not.” Emma's voice was final. “He wants nothing to do with it. He is a Grey Warden.”
“Very well,” said Morrigan, with a sigh of reluctant concession. “Tis with regret that I am convinced this foolishness is in earnest.”
“I'm touched by your concern.” Emma paused. “And it goes without saying—”
“I shall tell no one.” Morrigan examined her nails. “Although, I do hope you'll reconsider.”
Emma looked down at him, hand still resting at the back of his head, and felt that familiar ache. The longing that had settled deeply and persisted through all things, even the closest moments, never really resolved. She had come to believe this was simply its nature. That the feeling was not a lack to be filled but a condition to be inhabited, like weather.
“Tis sickening to watch you two,” Morrigan said, though her lip had relaxed somewhat. “But if it takes your mind from our situation.” She turned. “Have it your way.”
She disappeared toward the fire's edge. Emma listened to her footsteps fade.
Emma stayed where she was. Alistair's breathing was deep and even and warm against her leg. She draped her other arm over him and felt him adjust, clutched her hand to his side, and instantly fell back again into a deep sleep.
Emma drifted between stalls, half-listening to Oghren haggle loudly over a greataxe while Alistair stood nearby, arms crossed, looking very tall and uncomfortable.
Among the broad-bladed axes and sturdy dwarven shortswords, one piece stood out—a slender dagger, the steel dark as red wine, its pommel wrought into a blooming rose. Fine work, too fine for its company. She could not help but be reminded of the blooming rose from Lothering. Even now, the last living one she'd seen.
“For the elf?” asked the dwarven merchant.
Emma glanced back at Zevran, who was examining a set of throwing knives with professional interest. She picked up the dagger, examining its weight. Light, balanced. The sort of weapon meant for quick, precise work. Zevran would appreciate it. She caught his eye and gestured him over.
“What do you think?”
Zevran took the blade, turning it in the torchlight. His fingers moved with practiced ease, checking the edge, the balance point, the way it sat in his grip.
“Very nice.” A slight smile; He seemed pleased. “Though I confess, Warden, this would serve better in the hands of a fighter who knows a shield.”
“You mean Alistair?”
“He carries daggers, does he not?” Zevran spun the blade once, then offered it back to her. “This is made for someone who fights with their off-hand occupied. See here—” he indicated the grip, “—drawn quickly while holding something else. Shield, torch, struggling victim...” He shrugged. “Your templar-trained man would make better use of it.”
The merchant nodded. “Elf’s not wrong. That’s an off-hand blade. Called the Rose’s Thorn.”
Emma considered this. Alistair did keep daggers—he'd used them effectively enough in the Deep Roads when they'd been pressed too close for his sword. It wasn't his preferred weapon, but, if Zevran thought it suited him...
“Tell me about it.”
The smith snorted. “Pretty name, ugly story. Old forge-line made it generations back. Fine work—but it killed a king in a duel that wasn’t supposed to be deadly. Ended the noble line, and stained the house’s honor. The whole forge was blacklisted, erased from the Memories.”
“A curse by another name,” Zevran said.
The dwarf gave him a flat look. “If losing your clients counts as a curse, sure. We call it bad business. Steel’s good as ever. A name’s all that’s tarnished.”
Emma looked at the blade again, at the rose and thorn, at the dark steel that had ended a king's life.
“Perfect,” Emma said, reaching for her coin purse. “How much?”
“Oh, my Warden, so poetic. Sometimes curses can be weapons, no?” Zevran chuckled. Quietly. Emma nodded an agreement.
The merchant named his price—steep, but not unreasonable for a weapon of this quality. The Rose's Thorn sold for around one hundred and fifty sovereigns. The dwarf grumbled something in dwarven that likely translated to “reckless surfacers”, and accepted the coins.
“Just don’t tell anyone where you got it.”
“So,” Zevran said softly as they moved away from the stall, “you buy a cursed blade that hungers for noble blood, and intend to give it to your royal bastard.”
“Alleged curse. Alleged bastard.”
Emma glanced back to make sure Alistair was still occupied with Oghren. Zevran studied her, but she was unreadable. They rejoined the others as Oghren sealed his deal, the dwarf looking pleased with himself and his new greataxe. Alistair glanced at Emma.
“Successful shopping?” he asked.
“Very,” she said. “I'll show you later.”
Something in her tone made him pause, but before he could press, Oghren clapped him on the shoulder with enough force to make him stumble.
“Right then, Wardens! Let's get back to camp before I spend all my coin on ale instead of decent steel.”
That evening, after they'd settled into camp and the others had dispersed to their various evening routines, Emma approached Alistair with the wrapped bundle in her hands.
“I have something for you.”
He looked up from where he'd been maintaining his sword, grease cloth in hand. “Oh? Should I be worried?”
She held out the bundle.
Alistair took the cloth-wrapped package, his expression shifting to curiosity. The fabric was rough under his fingers, probably cut from someone's old cloak. He unwrapped it carefully, revealing the dagger within. The torchlight caught the rose pommel, making it gleam. He stared, then let out a low whistle.
“It's beautiful,” he said, genuine surprise in his voice. Then he looked closer at the blade, at the thorn etched along its length. “Wait, this is—Emma, this is high-quality work. This must have cost—”
She sat beside him. “It's called the Rose's Thorn.”
“Fitting, I suppose.” He turned it over in his hands, testing the balance. Like it had been waiting for his hand specifically. “Where did you—?”
Emma paused, and he recognized that look. either very good news or very complicated news. Sometimes both.
“Near the Diamond Quarter. It has a history. It killed a dwarven king, ruined a forge, that sort of story.”
Alistair smiled, then grew serious again, studying the blade, feeling the edge. Sharp enough to cut through anything. He looked back up at her, brow arched.
“So... you bought me a king-slaying dagger.”
“Apparently,” she said, unbothered.
“That’s—Maker, Emma, that’s dark even for you.”
“Depends on what you’re cutting. This blade ended a dynasty.”
He went quiet. The fire popped between them.
“Oh—I see. Well—Emma, Not that I want the throne, everyone knows that. But...”
“I know,” she said, gently. “But in Orzammar, there's always an alternative, isn't there?”
He chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Em—that's either the most brilliant or insane gift anyone's ever given me. I can't decide which.”
“Both,” she shrugged.
“With you? Usually is.” He picked up the dagger again, more carefully this time, balancing on one fingertip. “I have to admit, there's a beautiful logic to it.”
“Zevran called it poetic.”
“He would.” The metal felt warm now, like it had absorbed heat from his skin, or maybe from the fire. Or maybe from whatever mad magic Emma had woven into this moment.
“He said it would suit you best.”
“Zevran suggested—really?” Zevran, who'd tried to kill them. That Zevran?
“I'm also surprised.”
“The world really is ending if Zevran's thinking about someone other than himself.”
“Admittedly... I thought of you, when I saw it,” she smiled at him, “But, you'd use it well.”
“Thank you,” he said finally. “For this very pointed irony.”
He sheathed the dagger carefully at his belt, where it settled like it had always belonged there, like a fitting armor. Another curse worth keeping.
From across camp, Zevran caught Emma's eye and raised his wineskin in salute.
And yet where the dwarves should have been, a hollow, a vast ache, a bottomless well of gravity in the center, swallowing all sound and beauty, like a socket where an eye had been torn out… forever open.
Beneath it, something older and harder locked into clutch. Shoulders braced, spines pushing stone just as worms push the dirt, rock yielding with a slow groan. This beat poured into her bones, thick and molten at first, but solidifying. She tried to resist, will herself to dissolve into the stone and be done with flesh. but she was not strong enough. The rhythm offered a deep solace, but tragically, it wasn’t hers. She felt wretched and cursed to walk the surface as meat.
Only once, in a dream or through Caridin himself, the stone did sing to her, and she remembered:
“Our Stone will never forget you, nor will we, so long as we may shape it.”
She remembered Kinloch, how its tower moaned and flexed under winter winds. She remembered Ostagar’s stones humming faintly beneath the soldiers’ chants. This was older, deeper, like Caridin’s forge: hammer, anvil, earth, the rhythm of labor itself written into the world.
The Proving ring gathered it all. It was no pit but a bowl, stone carved so perfect it seemed to drink sound and return it magnified. Standing at the center was like standing in a singer’s chest. Every step, every clash of metal, every shout from above rippled across the walls and poured back, layering until the air itself trembled.
It was less an arena than a great instrument, a singing bowl struck by anything that had ever moved. The crowd throbbed above, the forges pounded beneath, and the overtones shook her teeth while the undertones rattled her ribs. Spellweaver hummed in her palm, hers only a moment in time. It was a much older, greater being, already mourning for her.
Emma fought in time. Spells broke like percussion, lightning cracking on the downbeat. She barely thought—the dance of combat bore her up, pulled everything into sequence; But none like the Silent Sisters, with no need to speak. In their wisdom, the Sisters knew to explain would profane this, command and communion both. She realized why the dwarves called it Proof: not of strength or honor alone, but proof they still resonate with themselves.
From a distance, a knight was a moving structure, an assembled thing. Nested plates, hinges answering hinges. Weight distributed with the kind of care only given to weapons or sovereigns. If you had lived a life without violence or wealth, if iron usually meant nails or ploughshares, the first sight of one promised force that would stop you cold. Contained. Directed. Loyal to whoever had paid for its making.
Up close, it was more. The hot smell of oil. Leather darkened by sweat. Metal scored and polished again and again, loved into submission. Enchantments hummed faintly, not loud enough to hear, but if you knew you could feel it. It was machinery in a world that pretended it had none. Pistons in spirit, if not in name. An iron body built around a human core, turning flesh into a system.
People talked about knights as if they were men first. She knew otherwise. They were logistics. Group decisions. Someone, somewhere, had decided this one would be given the good steel, the rare runes, the fittings that didn’t fail.
Someone else had gone without.
War was always a question of need and greed dressed up as honor. The best-equipped were sent first. Investment demanded return. Victories paid for the next layer down.
She understood this too well. The man inside, the object that made him terrible. And the way the machine loved its operator back, if he learned it properly. You could touch a breastplate with more reverence than a body, because the plate had kept him alive when bodies were cheap.
Blacksmiths spoke about their work the way priests did, hands scarred, eyes bright. They needed furnaces hot enough to liquefy stone, tools precise enough to coax obedience from metal. Even here, in a place that claimed to be simple, there were engines. Rare. Arcane. Half-forgotten. The knight who stepped out of that process was not so different from the ancient golems, moving soldiers of stone.
She had written pages about armor already and left most of them buried. This was the part she hadn’t said aloud yet. That what she loved was not the romance of chivalry, but the intimacy between a person and the machine that kept them alive. The way history, craft, violence, and care all converged around a single body and said: you will be more than human today, or you will die.
“Two souls,” she’d say, tracing a slow spiral in the dirt with her stick, “always drifting toward one another. Even when they shouldn’t. Even when the world tries to keep them apart. They find each other, lifetime after lifetime.”
Morrigan would roll her eyes. Alistair would pretend to be annoyed. And Emma would sit there, contemplating, looking blank.
Leliana insisted it was harmless fancy—“fictions for comforting the mortal heart.” She said it with the serene confidence of someone who had personally broken half the Chantry’s restrictions and still managed to sleep soundly.
The tales made Emma feel strange nostalgia, a shape of a truth, twisted.
She and Alistair would talk sometimes, hypothetically, about the life they might’ve had without the Grey Wardens. He’d imagine some goofy, domestic future: a garden, a mabari that always rolls in the mud first thing after a bath, a kitchen he keeps burning things in. The most normal fantasy in the world; Nothing wrong with it, really.
Emma couldn’t describe the same. Maybe after this war, she could join him in that life; She could imagine herself satisfied with just surviving, able to take for granted a roof and a warm bed.
But without Duncan, and the Grey Wardens? She couldn't imagine anything so pastoral: She'd think of the Tower of Magi reformed into something that wouldn't murder and maim its inhabitants. A place that didn't render Emma someone so lost that Duncan's conscription into a brutal war was salvation.
But the more she listened to Alistair—the stubborn way he held onto hope, the way he believed deeply in small goodness—the more she understood:
In any other world—any other version of Thedas, any other “lifetime” as Leliana would put it—Emma would never have met him. Never have looked at him twice. Never have loved him. He’d have been in a monastery. She’d be in the Circle.
Their lives only collided because the war made these places sloppy with their rules. Because everything went wrong at the same time.
Without the Blight, without Duncan’s eye for strays, without catastrophe… what are they? Two parallel lines. No point of intersection.
so Leliana liked to imagine lovers chasing each other across centuries. Emma understood it differently: only the blight could have brought them together. When Leliana finished her tale and everyone drifted off to their bedrolls, Emma stayed awake a little longer.
Reincarnation, destiny, cosmic choreography— or else, a single, unrepeatable accident. The later cannot be taken for granted.
Emma goes still in the chains, pupils dilated, breath leveling in a way Alistair knows down to the bone. A familiarity that comes from counting someone's heartbeats in the dark through the manna in her veins.
The guard doesn't notice. He's leaning against the far wall, tossing a bruised apple in boredom. But Alistair feels the Fade flex like a pulled thread— that awful prickling sensation.
Please tell me that wasn't magic.
For a second he's convinced he imagined it. He doesn't know how long they've been in here (at least a day), his stomach feels like stepped-on clay, and there's a persistent ringing in his ears. Emma's gone so quiet he thinks she's passed out.
Then the shackles clink softly against stone. Not wrenched open. Not forced. Just… empty. His heart slams against his ribs.
The space she’d been displaces the air softly. The templar by the door glances over, frowning at something he can't quite place. If Emma had cast anything, even slight, this man should be on her like a hawk on a mouse. But the guard just shifts his weight.
Alistair's nerves are lighting up anyway. He's ninety percent sure Emma just did something impossible. Ten percent doubtful, maybe he's hallucinating. One hundred percent sure he should not be the one playing mage-detector right now. He wants to call for her, but he's too concerned she actually pulled something off to risk alerting the guard.
The templar starts pacing. He finally looks over properly and freezes mid-step.
“Where—Maker's breath—WHERE IS SHE?“
There it is. Panic. Steel scraping from the scabbard, boots skidding on damp stone.
Alistair shoves himself upright against the wall, chains rattling. “Maybe she, uh… evaporated? Very tragic. You should write a report.”
The templar growls, steps forward—
—and a rat scampers out from behind the waste bucket.
Right past his boot.
The templar jumps, jerking back with the kind of full-body flinch normally reserved for stepping on caltrops. For one beautiful moment, he's entirely distracted by the rodent.
That's when Emma hits him.
She's halfway back into her body, still disoriented, still naked, still shaking from bones that just finished being the wrong shape. But since she met the arcane warrior in the ruins, and found that sword, her magic made her strong— albeit, a strength of little finesse. Her fist lands with the force of someone who's accidentally discovered she can punch like a sledgehammer.
Surprised, he folds like a kicked stool, armor clattering as she shoves him toward Alistair, who finishes him with the chain.
He stares, as their enemy is struggling, asphyxiating, and going limp. “Right. So that's new.”
Emma's breathing hard through the recoil of this impact on her, arms wrapped around herself. “Don't… don't ask me to do that again.”
“Absolutely not. Once was plenty.”
She fumbles with his chains, fingers still trembling. The manacles are heavy, old, built specifically for restraining magic, but there's that strange strength still simmering in her hands, and she manages to snap the pin just enough for him to wrench the rest open.
It feels like a miracle. Please don’t let us die naked.
They fight the next pair of soldiers: dirty and desperate. By the time they're winded enough to lean on each other, they are very aware they cannot keep doing this.
“Maker's saggy left— oh.“
Two Chantry sisters sweep through the corridor. Suddenly he was embarrassed to be talking about the Maker's tits, even after all this time.
But they're Leliana and Morrigan wearing veils.
Leliana radiates serenity, hands folded. “We found your things. Well… some of your things.”
Morrigan looks like she's contemplating war crimes. “This costume itches. It chafes. And I despise it with the fire of a thousand suns.”
They hand over a small bundle: some clothing, a belt with pouches, knives, Rose's Thorn still in its sheath.
Alistair blinks at Morrigan's disguise, then laughs heartily. Emma's looking devious, trying to suppress her smirk.
“Do not speak to me.” She rips the Chantry robe clean off and hurls it at the wall.
Leliana sighs at the discarded habit with the same disappointment normally reserved for burnt pastries.
Emma's half-dressed, buzzing from unfamiliar, desperate and illegal magic. Morrigan studies her with the air of a teacher dispensing faint praise.
“So,” she says, “you finally managed a transformation. Congratulations are in order, albeit modest ones.”
Emma, still flushed: “I turned into a rat.”
“A beginning.” Morrigan's smirking, “You are, as ever, painfully slow to adopt instruction.”
You could practically feed Emma that backhanded praise as dessert. She's beaming despite everything.
Alistair, fastening his belt: “Wait, so that was?— I thought— I felt something! I also thought maybe I just had a concussion...”
Emma: “You definitely had a concussion.”
Morrigan flicks him a look. “It takes very little to fool a Templar, particularly when it comes to magic which is both ancient and esoteric.”
Emma ties her hair back with still-shaking hands, jaw set. They're not free yet. They're bruised, under-equipped, drastically outnumbered. But the party's together again. And the next goon who tries to stop them is in for a very disappointing day.
Once upon a time and place, specifically a stone tower in the midst of Lake Calenhad in the second decade of the Dragon Age, a red-haired elven mage looked at the stars through a telescope she was not supposed to be using (not at that hour) and said something to Emma about the wheel of the sky.
She meant the stars. She meant envies in the spirits of the Fade. She meant exactly what she said,
“Everything moves in circles, everything returns. Eternally.”
She was not wrong. But she was not talking about a needle skating over Claudia Black's seventeen thousand lines recorded in a studio in 2008, rotating in the chrome of a Seagate Barracuda since the winter it was installed.
This wheel was the size of a beating heart. Instead of beating, it spun at 7,200 revolutions per minute. When the Calenhad docks loaded, it's arm reached in rhythm with the read head, seeking. When the Fade opened, something physical ticked across the disk to find it.
The player opens a monolithic black and aluminum case. There are fingerprints from a RAM upgrade, a replacement fan, a graphics card that nearly didn't fit. The machine has been many machines. It has always been this machine. But save files have not moved, until now.
There is latency in the turn of the wheel.
An OCZ Vertex 2 sits on the desk in an antistatic bag. It has 120 gigabytes and no moving parts, no platters, no seek time. No arm traveling a magnetic surface seeking truth.
The player thinks: the load times are going to be so much better. The Seagate comes out. The OCZ goes in with four screws, a SATA cable, and a molex power connector. The player boots the machine and the Vertex accesses data simultaneously and all at once, through golden threads strung at every point.
Here is what the executable would know, if knowing were a thing it did: It was written for a universe with phosphor tubes and magnetic storage. It allocates memory in 32-bit space, which means it can only see two gigabytes of RAM at once, the way a person standing in a valley can only see as far as the ridge. This was fine in 2009, when the ridge was the horizon.
The executable couldn't know it is patched. Not by BioWare or EA, who moved on to other universes on new deadlines. This gift comes from a benevolent stranger working with love. They adjust the header and open the executable's eye. It sees four gigabytes instead of two.
The BIOS finds the new drive in approximately no time at all. There is no arm to seek, no wheel to come around. The wheel has stilled. The universe stopped spinning. The player opens the game and it loads in the time it takes to exhale.
The player opens the second-to-last save, preparing to play the expansion. The un-chosen save ended tragically at Fort Drakon. It exists in the same directory as this one, megabytes in a folder, stamped with the time of the player's last touch.
Different choices are made in a menu. Now the Archdemon is about to die and both Wardens will walk away from it. The maps load quickly, ready to begin again. The killing blow lands. Spellweaver punches through black scales and rotten flesh and sinks deep. Bone's resistance breaks down under ringing song...
The old Old God's voice vibrated from Urthemiel's skull and jolted into Emma's arm through the blade. The Archdemon cascaded out and through her in rings of expulsion. She felt herself blown back and watched the sky blur over her. The cobblestones of Fort Drakon's roof rose to meet her with the indifferent commitment of gravity.
She didn't feel it when she landed.
Magic floods through everything. The Fade opens in its yellow organic dank, crumbling at the edges against a lattice of glowing green on dark glass. The world outside moved under the surface, almost but not quite still. Emma tried to sit up.
Nothing happens.
“Am I dead?”
“Not for long.”
The spirit of Valor flickered before her with his armored silhouette, his armored silhouette shifting from templar plate to leathers. It's forge-light haloed him, just as it had in the Harrowing's arena, present visually without occupying space.
“How long?”
“Less than you imagine. I have taken the opportunity to speak to you.” Valor paused to read her. “Last I saw you, you were with another.”
“Alistair is probably losing his mind.” Emma closed her eyes. There was a dark pulse behind them. “Let's make this quick.”
“A fair request,” Valor tilted its head.
“The Archdemon—”
“Is destroyed.” It said it with satisfaction. “Gone. And there is something else I should explain to you.” Valor began.
“The ritual,” Emma was eager to know.
“The ritual.” It paused. “Is the culmination of something difficult to explain to a mortal, who experiences time as a single thread.”
Emma waited. It had not needed prompting previously. Now it was searching for a form that would fit.
“You have died.” it said finally. “The thread was cut and tied until I intervened.”
“How?”
“The word does not survive translation. Roughly: the ritual that saves your life needs the correct arrangement of events. Like a blow to an enemy, I ensured those events struck.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Someone willed you to try again.”
“That someone isn't you?”
“It is. There is also another whose face I cannot see.”
“They willed,” Emma repeated flatly. “Or do they want to see what happens next?”
“I do not know. The distinction matters more to you than to me.”
Emma thought about that for a moment. She thought about Areli, who apparently never got a second version. Duncan, and Jory, and Daveth. About how many times she had been the arrangement of events that saved someone else.
“You have met spirits and learned what they knew. Secrets of life and death. The way of the warrior inside magic. You did not always know you were doing so.”
“I suspected,” she said.
“I want to teach you to be harder to kill.”
“There it is. The lesson.” Emma folded her arms and frowned. “Learning technique from a random spirit is one thing. This is strange. I've known you too long.”
“You should consider it nonetheless.” The spirit's leather pauldrons hardened back to resemble to steel. Emma sighed.
“I'll consider it,” she said. He inclined his head, satisfied. The forge-light brightened briefly around him.
“That is enough. Return.”
She materialized at his left, which was where Emma would have been, had they not been blasted apart. The shape resolved and he realized: Not a threat. It was Morrigan.
He almost didn't process the wings. She was actually descending from the sky, on a span of raven's wings longer than the height of a man. They folded against her shoulders like they belonged there, then furled into shadow as the witch's boots touched the ground.
She held Emma's body.
“The ritual completed,” Morrigan said, without urgency. “She has, quite incidentally, died of her injuries. There remains time to remedy that.”
“Give her to me,” Alistair demanded. She did, with a deliberate gentleness distinct from one who was naturally so. It felt completely at odds with every version of her he'd ever known.
“How much time?” He asked as he took the weight of Emma from her.
“More than you imagine,” Morrigan said, impatiently. “Her body is intact.”
He was walking fast, not quite running. Running would mean he thought Morrigan was wrong, and he needed her to be right. He couldn't look at Emma's face. He was sidestepping the dead and injured, watching the way forward.
“It almost seems like you care,” he said. He didn't mean it as an accusation, but as the closest thing he had to thank you. He looked back for a response. Morrigan became a scatter of black feathers, and then nothing, already gone.
“There will more glorious battles ahead.”
The air hit her first, smoke and copper smell of a city under siege. Pain followed. A lot of pain.
“Please,” she heard Alistair's voice, close and stripped raw. And footsteps, a few people, fast, non-military, arriving in time to witness their patient stop being dead. Their knees dropping. Someone shouting. No. Not just someone. Many, in celebration. Thousands cheering and screaming.
Emma groaned. Her eyes snapped open and the sky above Denerim swam into focus. Cobblestones burned and adhered with slimy ichor to her back. Her fingers found Spellweaver still in her hand, surprisingly.
“Hi,” said other Warden, near-breathlessly. Blood dripped from underneath his helmet. “Your timing is terrible.”
“What's happening?”
“What's—” He stopped. “The darkspawn are—” He looked up briefly, looked back at her. “They're retreating. All of them. Everywhere. People are noticing.”
Emma could hear the grit of their awful claws on the stone, boots chasing, arrows piercing their backs on the retreat.
“It worked,” Alistair chuckled carefully, like he wasn't entirely sure of it yet. “Morrigan found you. But she's—she's gone. It was—”
The medic asked something technical and Emma answered it. Vibrations tilted toward them. Alistair repositioned to face the edge of the movement, covering them from view, for just a minute. He settled back onto his heels, hands resting on his knees, staring at her.
Emma lay on the cobblestones below Fort Drakon with the body of the Archdemon on the tower above her and the city of Denerim in the process of realizing it had survived, and she thought about what Valor had said. Someone willed her to try again.
She looked back. He was still watching her, steadily wrecked, his armor proving that he had done exactly what he'd always done: Stood in front of everything that tried to reach her.
“Alistair,” she said.
“Still here,” he said, removing his helmet. He was bruised and bleeding above his eyebrow, looking at her with intensity. The crowd was getting louder.
“We did it.”
Someone had recognized the armor, or the staff, or the dead god nearby. People pointed, looking their way. Recognizing them. Emma put her hand on the cobblestones and pushed herself upright. The medic made a concerned noise.
“Are you alright?” Alistair said.
“No,” Emma said. “But we're doing this anyway.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We are.”
He pulled her up.