The corridor opened into cold stone and lamplight. The floor’s large slabs were misaligned, gaps between them exposing darker earth. The place was slowly sinking back into what it had been before anyone consecrated it. The walls curved closer, covered in spiraling carvings that repeated.
The party, by contrast, felt intrusive. Too alive. Too temporary.
“What is this place?” Alistair said. “It’s different from the rest of the ruins.”
It was. The teal-green light that had persisted through the outer halls muddied here against warmer torchlight pooling in corners, catching on sealed clay urns lined along the back wall. Spears and blades leaned upright nearby.
“We must be close,” Leliana said, softer. “This is holy ground. I can feel it.”
The Guardian stood ahead, fully armored, polished without ornament. The lamplight didn’t pass correctly over him.
“I bid you welcome, pilgrims.”
Emma: “Who are you?”
“The Guardian. Those who carried Andraste from Tevinter to this place made a vow to protect Her remains. I am all that remains of them.”
She could feel the Veil pressing into this chamber — attentive, quivering.
“The ones who took over the rest of the temple—”
“The Maker’s silence grew long. Andraste gave no sign. An ancestor of the one called Kolgrim decided he would give them one instead.” The Guardian’s voice carried no particular feeling. “Some disagreed. They did not disagree for long.”
“Do you want me to get rid of them?”
“The Maker will judge them, when the time comes.”
“I need a pinch of the Ashes. Arl Eamon of Redcliffe is dying.”
“Then you will prove yourself worthy. It is not my place to decide. The Gauntlet does.”
“What is the Gauntlet?”
“You will understand when you face it.”
“I’ll enter.”
“Before you go.” The Guardian looked at her.
She stopped.
“You came from the Circle of Magi. There was someone who mattered to you there.”
Emma said nothing.
“She drew danger. You knew this. So you tried to contain it.” He paused, the way a very old man waits for things to settle. “You made choices about what she should risk. What she should want.”
“Stop.”
“You believed she was grateful.”
“No.” Emma had a dozen responses. All of them true. All of them beside the point.
She was aware of her heartbeat, with a strange, numb clarity. Like the awareness of a wound before the pain arrived.
“Do you believe you failed her?”
“My answer is my own,” she said.
The Guardian held her gaze. He did not press. “Then you know your own heart.”
He turned away.
“Alistair.” The Guardian turned to him. “Knight, and Warden. You wonder if Duncan should have lived instead of you. If the better man survived.”
“I—” Alistair stopped. His eyes flicked to Emma before he answered. She looked back. “Yes. If Duncan had been saved, and not me — if I’d just had the chance, maybe…”
Emma carefully exhaled. What felt like a knot in him tightened at the sound.
“The choice was made for you. And you resent it.” The Guardian paused. Alistair’s jaw was set. “Even though the man who made it is gone.”
Silence.
“Leliana.” The Guardian turned. “Why do you say the Maker speaks to you, when doctrine holds that He speaks only to Andraste? Do you believe yourself Her equal?”
“I never said that—”
“In Lothering, your brothers and sisters criticized you for what you professed. You were hurt. But they also noticed you. You had become ordinary there, one more devout woman among many. The dream changed that.”
“I know what I believe.”
“I did not say the dream was false.” A pause. “Only that you appreciated what it cost you.”
Leliana didn’t respond.
“And you—”
“No,” Morrigan said. “I won’t play this game.”
The Guardian inclined his head. “As you wish.”
He did not pursue it further. Whatever the Gauntlet measured, it didn’t require confession.
“The way is open,” the Guardian said. “Good luck. May you find what you seek.”
They passed back through the Guardian’s doorway into the corridor.
“Now you’ve got me curious,” Alistair said, “about how you really feel.”
Emma: “About what.”
“The Guardian. What he said to you.”
“He was a spirit,” Emma said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Alistair looked at her sideways. The cathedral opened ahead, vast and stripped. High arches disappeared into teal gloom. Columns marched inward toward a raised platform and a sealed door. Translucent figures stood spaced along the sides, bluish and wrong around the edges.
The first spirit in the cathedral was a woman, barely solid. Leliana made a small sound of reverence. Morrigan examined her skirts with disinterest.
“I am Brona,” said the first spirit. “Echoes from a shadow realm, whispers of things yet to come. Of what do I speak?”
Emma answered without breaking stride, “a dream.”
“Yes. A dream came upon me, as my daughter slumbered beneath my heart. It told of her life, and of her betrayal and death. I am sorrow and regret. I am a mother weeping bitter tears for a daughter she could not save.”
Emma stared blankly, then moved on. Alistair’s brow furrowed as he watched her rattle off the answers to their riddles.
The spirit of Ealisay stood before a pillar, head inclined. A tune. Shartan, whose elven form flickered at the eyes: home. Vasilia, who asked with something that sounded almost like amusement: vengeance. Maferath, whose question carried the particular flatness of long shame: jealousy. Cathaire: hunger, Emma told him and felt his gaze follow her through.
Havard asked his and seemed to listen to the answer with more attention than the others. The mountains, he stepped aside.
And Hessarian with the last question before the sealed door: “She wields the broken sword, and separates true kings from tyrants. Of what do I speak?”
“Mercy,” Emma said. The door unsealed.
The chamber on the other side was smaller. The ceiling dropped. The walls narrowed. After the cathedral’s deliberate emptiness, the proportions felt almost intimate.
Emma stopped abruptly. Alistair heard his gauntlet creak around his sword as he followed her line of sight. Whatever he expected, it wasn’t that.
Floating, not standing in the way people stand. Present in the way memories are, located in space without quite occupying it. The red hair, her bright brown eyes, the freckles. The tilt of the head.
There, in the low light, was Areli. Who he had never seen and somehow recognized anyway.
Emma had spent now over a year with this image in the back of her mind. Here it was rendered in teal and faint light, just slightly wrong around the edges.
“You’re not her,” Emma said. She sounded small. Her voice pulled Alistair half a boot forward, slightly in front of her.
“No. But something of her touched this place. Love can do that.”
Love.
Emma said nothing. The textures of the Veil brushed softly against her. Like fabric rather than threshold, and in this chamber she could feel the weave of it pulling and thinning around the figure in front of her.
“I didn’t think I would fool you,” the Areli-spirit said. “But am I a spirit? Or something else? I am part of the Gauntlet. I am part of you. I am what this place requires to speak to you. All of these are true.”
“And for what?”
“To speak. Because I didn’t ask you to protect me.”
“I know.”
The spirit’s light shifted, steadied. “You used to look away from what you were doing while you were doing it.”
It extended something, a faint luminescence, an object that solidified into an amulet in Emma’s palm.
“But no longer. We must acknowledge our past before we can face our future.”
The spirit looked past her, glanced over the party, lingering on Alistair. His lips thinned to a line. Then it was gone.
Emma rubbed her forehead, hiding her face as she maintained composure. He leaned toward her, low so the others wouldn’t hear: “Em.”
She didn’t answer. They moved toward the next corridor before he tried again: “That one was different.”
“They’re all different,” Emma said.
“That’s not what I meant.” He looked at her sidelong. “Was that— who was that?”
“It wasn’t anyone.” She kept walking. “It was the Gauntlet.”
“Spirits don’t choose forms at random,” Leliana said, quietly. “Something lingers when love was real.”
“It chose a form that moves her,” Morrigan said. “Tis all.” She glanced at Emma without particular emotion.
Emma was still looking at the object in her hand. She thought she caught a fleeting image of Areli’s smiling eyes in the silvered backing, and couldn’t stop herself from looking for it to reappear.
Alistair watched her. Something he hadn’t been looking for clicked into place.
Selfishly, he felt relief first. He thought about Duncan. The hand on his shoulder, the decision already made. The sort of quiet deciding that got made for him his whole life.
It was why he hadn’t told Emma, not about everything. Not about the parts that could turn him into someone else in her eyes. Not until they’d reached Redcliffe, and he absolutely had to.
Now—he was here, on holy ground, with her.
“Was he right? The Guardian.”
“Yes,” Emma said.
Alistair hesitated. “About… you? Or—”
She nodded. “—and you,” she added, cutting him off. He looked away from the edge.
Leliana weighed in: “Care can become pride, if we aren’t careful.”
Morrigan said: “You decided you knew better than she did. Circle mages love to do so. It changes nothing about the outcome, but at least you can stop pretending otherwise.”
He looked at Emma again. He watched her close her fingers around the ancient amulet. She didn’t look back.