Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“How far back will I go?” Hruse asked.

“I do not know for certain,” he answered. They were surrounded by a barrier of his making, unwavering against the wildfire raging outside it. In the garish light, he looked like he had that fateful night when the world began this downward spiral to its end. Hruse flinched as a tendril battered against the magical wall, but he did not. He didn’t even look. “The timing may be...imprecise, but you should be able to find me.”

“You won’t know me, though. And anything I do will change…”

“That is the point!” he snapped, his voice louder than the wind outside. But not louder than the roar approaching. Hruse couldn’t tell who it was, but it didn’t ultimately matter. They were all as abominable as the next. Another miscalculation among many.

They’d thought the Evanuris were gone.

They weren’t.

At least, not as gone as they should have been. What little relief there was from knowing Ghilan’nain and Elgar’nan were truly dead had been utterly wiped out by the rest. Andruil in particular showed a cruelty that matched her ‘brother’s’. To a huntress, everything was prey. The Dalish had been the first to learn it, the lesson driven home until none remained to tell it. What was born of their defeat didn’t bear thinking about. The others’ ‘gift’ for creativity in no way matched Ghilan’nain’s, in form or execution. Returning the monsters made of living flesh to rest was nothing more than a mercy.

Hruse supposed she should be grateful that the Evanuris were all mere fragments of themselves, like Mythal had been. But like Mythal, splintered and disparate, there was no appealing to them with sentiment. They were cold, calculating and undeniably, thoroughly mad from the blight. And like Mythal, there were several pieces of each one to deal with, some stronger than others. When one fell, another rose in their place. Again and again.

It had been too much to fight against, and now they were here, at the literal end of the world. Retreating to the Lighthouse had kept them safe – well, safer – but in order to enact their plan, they had to venture out of it. All they had left was this. Watching the world burn, mourning the countless dead and doing something desperate to escape the sheer horror of it.

“I wish you could come with me,” she said, for the umpteenth time. He bowed his head. She didn’t need to hear him say it. If he could go back and undo all this himself, he would have. But he was all that anchored the current world and the Fade at all. All that kept spirits alive and uncorrupted. He was the last refuge, and wasn’t that just the greatest irony of all? “Solas…”

“Dareth shiral, vhenan. You will see me again.”

“But you won’t be you,” she sobbed as the archdemon screamed again over the rush of fire and wind. It was close, and nearly swallowed the sound of her voice as she repeated her words. “You won’t be you.”

She felt his lips on her brow, cool and firm. She lifted her head to kiss him properly one last time, tasting his tears mingling with hers. And then the bubble around them collapsed, or maybe it was just that she was thrust outside it, sent hurtling through the vortex he’d made. Away from the fires and death and blight. Away from horrors that couldn’t be vanquished because there was simply nobody left to fight them. If she was their only hope, it was a sad state of affairs. She was no one, really. She’d always been no one.

You are Hruse Ingellvar, born of the Necropolis, raised by the Mortalitasi. Mourn Watcher, Rook, bane of Elgar’nan. Heart of the Dread Wolf. You are not no one.

She didn’t know if the words were his or hers. She suspected that in pushing her into the magic he’d finally let himself fall, so it didn’t matter anymore who said what. She didn’t know which way was up or down. She tucked herself tight into a ball within the cyclone of arcane energy, letting it carry her like a leaf. He’d ever been terrible at thinking things through, but he’d never been bad at magic. She trusted him that far. And Dorian had helped until the blight consumed him.

Hruse was supposed to stop him from even beginning this madness. That was the plan. But she had no tools, no weapons. Nothing save the knowledge in her head and a small token around her neck.

Solas was aiming to send her back to the start, before he had a chance to give the orb to Corypheus. He’d told her where it was, that if she couldn’t get through to him – or find him in the first place – that she should steal it herself and hide it. He’d attuned the magic to a specific point, he said. That she would be drawn to that point because of the token she wore. He’d done his best to tell her everything, hiding nothing at long last. He made her memorize it all, because they couldn’t allow anything written down to fall into the wrong hands. He told her that if all else failed, to find the lyrium dagger where it rested at that time. If she needed funds, they would be available to her in the Crossroads. The Vi’Revas would still respond to her, because he’d told her the master password.

They’d done their best to think of every contingency. Now it was up to her to make sure none of them were needed.

Her, a simple woman more used to spirits than people. She missed those days, when her greatest challenge had been stopping a blown out of proportion feud between two undead families. When exile had been the worst thing she’d ever experienced.

She fell from the vortex and crashed to the ground near a campfire that burned in odd colors. The vortex closed, leaving a gust of wind in its wake, making the flames dance. She groaned and rolled over.

A dead man was watching her.

Chapter Text

“Felassan?” she gasped out, pushing herself to her hands and knees before managing to get fully upright. The elf next to the fire remained where he was, slumped against a log, staring at her without any expression at all.

It started to rain, icy and cold.

The fire hissed and went out.

Hruse sighed. First things first, then.

“C’mon, we can’t stay here.” She pushed herself to her feet, dizzy and disoriented and weak as a newborn calf. But it wasn’t just her she needed to worry about and that lent her strength. She tugged on Felassan’s sleeve, getting him to his feet. His eyes were vacant, but she knew he could hear her. He responded to her voice, to her directions, as they stumbled through the trees in search of shelter.

The storm grew wilder, winds whipping through the forest, causing leaves to mingle with the sleet and limbs to crack and crash to the ground. The deluge lashed at them, soaking them both through to the skin. No wonder he hadn’t survived in the other timeline. Exposure alone would have done it in time, but it was just as likely a tree branch had fallen on his head if this was the same weather that happened before. Although she wondered if things were like this because of her arrival.

Don’t be absurd, she chastened herself. It’s just a storm. A wicked one sure, but it’s highly unlikely your sudden magical arrival would affect the blighted weather.

She paused for a moment in her head, recognizing that even now she still used ‘blighted’ as a curse automatically. It was almost funny. Just as being caught in something as simple as rain was funny considering what she’d lived through. Pity it was just as miserable as she remembered it.

Felassan seemed to be gaining back some of his wits from what she knew must have just occurred. Drawn to Solas, her eye. His magic perhaps. And a lot of it. Irrelevant now that she was here. She had to make the best of it from here on out. At any rate, the Elvhen general was pointing between the trees and, through the murk, Hruse saw it. A cave. Well, it would be better than nothing.

They dragged themselves into it and collapsed against the back wall, away from the spitting torrent and wind. She didn’t have a fire making kit, and he no longer had access to the Fade. But they wouldn’t die here tonight. They had each other, if nothing else. They’d make it to dawn. If Felassan had walked here from wherever he’d come from, they could just walk back.

“I’m Hruse,” she said presently. His head turned like that of a cat. He blinked at her. “You are Felassan,” she added when he said nothing. He nodded, just slightly. “You can’t reach your magic. You’ve been made Tranquil. Solas…”

“I should be dead,” he said. The first words he’d uttered since she landed literally at his feet.

“Well, you’re not. And you’re not going to be if I have anything to say about it.” She settled herself a little more comfortably on the ground and squeezed rain water out of her hair. The temperature wasn’t dangerously low, but it was cold.  Made worse since she was wet. Felassan was warm, however. He gave off heat just like Solas did. It had to be an Elvhen thing. “Where did you come from before you were here?”

“Halamshiral,” he answered promptly. Well, his memory was intact, as far as she could tell. He was still watching her in the gloom, his eyes gleaming in the low light. He reached for the cord around her neck. The chaos of the last few minutes must have pulled it free from her shirt. Normally she’d make a fuss about the invasion of her personal space, but a fresh Tranquil would no longer have the nuance available to understand that.

“Fen’Harel,” he murmured, holding the jawbone in his palm. Hruse watched him think, the gears turning behind his gaze. Tranquil, yes. Stupid? Never. “You fell from the sky. You come from somewhere else?”

This was all said in a monotone, with only the slightest inflection of query at the end. She shivered, and not from the rain chill. It was unnerving, hearing him so flat when every memory had been so animated. She took the mandible from his hand, careful not to touch it herself, and tucked it back in her shirt. “From the future.”

“Why?”

“Because Fen’Harel is an idiot.”

“No, he is my…”

“He’s not your anything now, Felassan. He just tried to kill you. He succeeded in making you Tranquil. I think the only thing that prevented your death is the Veil. He’s still in uthenera, isn’t he? What year is it?”

“It is 9:40 Dragon.”

“Right, so yeah. He doesn’t know how bad the Veil smothers magic yet.”

“I deserved what he did. I betrayed him.”

Hruse sucked her teeth and said nothing. There was no use arguing over the point. Felassan no longer had emotion attached to himself, and Solas wasn’t there to get his ears blistered clean off his head. She’d hollered at him before about being short-sighted, no doubt she would do it again when she had the chance. The same mistakes, over and over.

“Get some sleep,” she said after a while. “There’s nothing out there that’s going to get us in this weather. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Ma nuvenin.”

She shivered again, this time because the words hit just slightly too close. Solas would say them when he didn’t want to fight anymore. When he could see her side but didn’t want to admit it, so he simply stopped talking back. Tears pricked her eyes suddenly. Sod it all, was she missing him already? They’d been apart for an hour.

And lifetimes, she thought, unbidden. And the man you know and love is gone. Possibly forever.

“Fenedhis,” she muttered under her breath. She didn’t know much Av’vhen, the language Solas called the pure tongue of his people. The one bastardized by the Dalish. Which she pointed out was natural when one’s entire culture had been brutally oppressed and stolen by Tevinter and all that was left were scraps. He didn’t like that argument either, but she’d won it finally. Before it was moot. So no, she didn’t know much of his language, but she knew how to swear. It seemed fitting to curse him by his own cock. Ironic, even.

Felassan peered at her briefly – she’d momentarily forgotten that elves could hear much better than humans – but then closed his eyes again. He was asleep shortly after that, a dreamless one, she knew. Given everything, she almost envied him. Nightmares likely awaited her.

She sighed and curled up as close to him as she dared to keep warm. It would all look better in the morning, right?

Chapter Text

Felassan had apparently not walked directly here from Halamshiral. Upon further questioning in the morning – which had dawned bright and sunny, almost in defiance of Hruse’s foul mood – she discovered that he’d come from the Vi’Revas.

The upside of that being: there was an Eluvian nearby.

“Take me to it,” she said, all right, demanded. She was too tired, hungry, thirsty and bedraggled to remember her manners. It wasn’t like he took offense anyhow.

Don’t start down that road, she warned herself. Just because he is cut off from his emotions doesn’t mean they’re gone forever. Or that you have any excuse to treat him poorly.

“Please,” she added.

He led the way, uncomplaining and without hesitation. Spirits, it was no wonder the Tranquil were so easily led to the atrocities that befell them. No sense of self-preservation left. Well, it was probably there, he just didn’t feel the same need to call upon it now. It was a chilling reminder and her mood changed from foul because of her circumstances to foul in outrage of his. Even if Solas didn’t know what he was doing. The result was the same.

The mirror was hidden cleverly between two rocks over which a fall of water ran from a spring towards a creek downhill. It opened at her touch and she dragged him along with her through it. It deposited them in the Crossroads, of course, but not in a section she was familiar with. Because of course not, why would she get that lucky?

Calm down, it’s just because you’re in Orlais, a place you never went before it was destroyed.

“Ugh,” she spat aloud. “Time travel is the worst.”

Felassan didn’t comment, nor had she expected him to. He tended to speak only when spoken to. He had no opinions to give. Well, she was sure he did, he just didn’t currently have motivation to do so. Something she hoped to fix as soon as she got the chance.

She took off down the trail leading away from the mirror to see if there were any docks to the other islands. The Lighthouse wouldn’t be the one she knew, but it would still be stocked and she could at least put together some supplies. Or have them be manufactured at need. Whichever. All she needed was a Caretaker.

And as if she’d summoned them…

“You are far from home, dweller.”

She whirled around to see the many faced helm and ragged cloak of the ancient spirit. “I am,” she agreed. “In more ways than one.”

“The Slow Arrow and the Wolf’s Heart,” the Caretaker intoned. “Strange paths have been walked, strange tidings are coming.”

No shit, she thought to herself. Aloud, she said, “Can you get us to the Lighthouse?”

“The currents shift.” The Caretaker dissolved into the air, but then re-emerged on their boat, just as she remembered they used to. Would do? Ugh, time travel.

“Get in the boat, please, Felassan,” she said, stepping into the conveyance herself and offering her hand back to him for balance. He silently sat down across from her and the Caretaker pushed them away from the dock, which faded as they left it. She didn’t know how long it would take to reach the Lighthouse, but it didn’t matter. She finally felt like she was treading on even ground for the first time in ages.

The islands of the Crossroads passed by, sometimes in a blur, sometimes so slowly she could make out the movement of spirits and possibly people on them. All held Eluvians, many of them dark. Some shattered. But none of them blighted. None of them pulsing with the evil she’d grown so accustomed to it was strange to find it missing. By degrees she relaxed. It was 9:40. It was more than a decade before she’d meet Varric Tethras and Lace Harding and agree to go on a wild wolf hunt. At this point in time, Varric was probably being interrogated, in fact. Safe and sound in Kirkwall and not about to die from any number of stupid things.

Or because of Solas, she thought bitterly. Yet another death on his conscience, yet another regret that held him bound too long. She wondered if that was something she would ‘fix’ too.

She wondered if his spell had actually worked as intended, sending her to the point where it had all begun to go wrong. She glanced at Felassan, quiet and composed in the Caretaker’s boat. Surely Solas would assume she’d help any and all who crossed her path; that’s what she did, after all. He’d known she would find Felassan, and immediately try to rescue him. Just how many of his mistakes was she going to come across anyway?

“Oh, that bastard, he’s lucky I love him,” she hissed under her breath. Felassan glanced at her, but she waved him off. She’d explain later, she was sure.

The boat veered off into the clouds and came out into the section of the Crossroads that she knew. In the distance she saw the beacon of the Lighthouse, calling them. She watched it grow closer, gaining definition as the foggy essence of the Fade drew back from it. Her heart lifted. Home.

The Caretaker docked the boat and waited for her to step out, Felassan on her heels. They turned to her, the helm spinning until a set of glowing eyes burrowed into her. “Many currents run here, Wolf’s Heart. Your steps decide what has been and what will be. Take care where you place them.”

“I will,” she said, fairly sure she knew what the spirit was saying.

She took Felassan by the hand and tugged him up the stairs towards the Eluvian that would open into the Lighthouse. Her sense of homecoming was growing stronger by the second and she pushed through the glass almost jubilantly.

Only to be met by a nocked arrow on one side and a naked blade on the other.

And a rapid spate of Elvish she had no hope of deciphering quickly.

Fenedhis lasa, she thought. She’d completely forgotten that in 9:40 Dragon, the Lighthouse was populated by Fen’Harel’s second rebellion. None of which appeared to be all that happy to see a human in their midst.

Chapter Text

Felassan answered the pair of agents’ demanding questions. It seemed they recognized him, at least vaguely enough to hold off on summarily executing them both. The conversation grew gradually less and less tense, and the weapons were lowered, but not withdrawn entirely.

“You,” the one with a sword barked at her after a brief silence. “This way.”

Hruse had little choice but to follow, so she did.

The Lighthouse didn’t bear much resemblance to the home she knew. The murals she’d painstakingly restored were once more rendered invisible and inert. The ramp that led up to the Meditation Room and Emmrich’s library was there, but the doors that opened off of it were not the same. There was no table and cozy sofa and chairs under the spinning astrolabe. She had no doubt that the islands that had loosely attached themselves to create her companions’ rooms were all different. Not that she got a chance to find out. The elf brusquely leading her through the central tower pushed her through a door and closed it stoutly behind her before she could even get a single word out. The lock turning had a definite sound of finality to it.

Oddly enough, she did know this room. It just wasn’t where she’d thought it would be.

“Oh for the love of tiny wisps,” she sighed, exasperated and amused at once. When Lucanis had taken over the pantry as his personal space, the Lighthouse had made another storeroom for dried goods. And she was currently in it, albeit in the wrong building and on the wrong level. Still, she supposed the agents had to eat too. She and the Veilguard had used it mostly for shelf stable things like flour and rice. Lace had hung herbs to dry in here, she remembered. Emmrich had kept the more volatile reagents on a tidy shelf where they would be out of reach and dry.

She sank to the floor in the middle of the room and tried not to cry. Between the shock of coming back here in a time she wasn’t supposed to and the fact that everyone she knew and loved had ended up dead, she didn’t blame herself for the urge. But tears wouldn’t get her anywhere. Only her wits would.

She didn’t know how long she sat there, blankly staring at the walls, but she heard the lock turn again and the door opened on squeaky hinges.

“Come,” said an accented voice. She swiveled around on her butt, expecting another agent. And the person standing there very well might have been, but they were no modern elf.

Tall, lean, with eyes that assessed as quickly as breath, the elf warrior waiting for her seemed to wear a mantle of patience. Hruse knew there were other Elvhen among Solas’s agents. Felassan hadn’t been the only one, he had simply been the most trusted. But by far the easiest way to tell which ones were born in the modern era and which were not was their accent. Those that had spoken Av’vhen all their lives had a cadence not unlike Solas’s. Careful, precise and lilting even in Common.

Hruse got to her feet and held her hands apart in front of her to show they were empty. “Andaran atish’an, hahren.”

The elf blinked at her, but nothing else changed on their face, and they didn’t respond. Hruse let her hands fall to her sides and stepped through the door. She was led – much more gently – back down the ramp to the main hall of the Lighthouse, where Felassan was still standing and speaking with someone.

She and her guard stopped within earshot and waited. Felassan stepped aside and Hruse saw yet another ancient face assessing her. She held out her empty hands again and this time got a flicker of acknowledgment for it.

“Who are you?” this one asked.

“My name is Hruse Ingellvar. I’m from the future. 9:57, in fact. Fen’Harel sent me back to...correct a few things.”

“What ‘things’?”

“All of them, honestly. His ritual went wrong in so many ways we could stand here all day discussing them. The long and short of it is: the Veil fell and the Evanuris escaped. Even the ones we thought were dead. They’ve splintered into fragments. And each one has grown powerful and crazy on the blight since they’re all trapped together with it. In 9:52, I was part of a team that fought Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain. With their life force cut off from the Veil, Solas bound himself to it. And that seemed to work...for a year or so. The Venatori weren’t completely beaten and figured out how to pierce the Veil. And by pierce, I mean they shredded it. The blight got out, all of it. It was...bad doesn’t begin to describe it.”

She had their undivided attention, she saw. She also saw that it was just the four of them in the hall. All the rest of the agents had been sent away. She glanced at Felassan to see if he’d had anything to do with that. As General, his word would still be law, even Tranquil.

“We came up with a plan, Solas, Dorian Pavus and I. Go back in time, keep it from happening.”

“How?” asked her guard.

“My orders are to either find him and convince him not to give his orb to an unknown element like Corypheus, or hide it from him myself.”

“Why,” demanded the one that had been talking to Felassan.

“To give Thedas time. To give him time. Wisdom is patient. Pride is rash.”

“Why you?”

“Because I was the only one left. Solas was holding the world together with his bare hands.”

A ripple of unease went through the pair of Elvhen, but Felassan took it stoically. Well, no wonder. He’d already figured out he should be dead now, so obviously he would have been dead in the future.

No, he touched the jawbone, she recalled with sudden clarity. Huh, interesting. Didn’t think that bit of magic would work on him, being Tranquil.

The jawbone, the one singular piece of evidence she had, although she’d been warned to use it sparingly.

“General Felassan says you fell out of the sky, which seems to corroborate your tale at least to some degree. But you understand, we cannot simply take you at your word. Do you have other proof?”

Yes, but you’re not the one it’s intended for.

“We didn’t risk writing anything down, for fear of it falling into the wrong hands.” Hruse lifted the mandible necklace. “All I have is this. Well, and knowledge of where both the orb and the lyrium dagger are.”

The Elvhen’s gazes sharpened on her and she wished she’d kept her mouth shut. She had to remember that at this time, the plan was to take the Veil down without thought to the consequences. Solas hadn’t walked the world and learned to love it yet. These were members of his original rebellion unless she was completely off, and they remembered a world before. They would want nothing more than to help their leader get that back, no matter the cost to the races living today.

“You are a danger.”

“Yeah, probably. But before you decide what I really am is a liability, I know how to cure the General.”

“You will tell us,” said her guard, taking a hold on her arm that was so tight it pinched.

“You will ask. Nicely,” she retorted. She didn't like holding that as blackmail, but it was the only leverage she had currently.

The second Elvhen jerked their chin and she was dragged back up the ramp to the little store room.

“Oh, come on. At least put me somewhere with a bed.”

The lock turning was the only reply.

“Fuck!”

Chapter Text

She had to get out of here. If Solas and Felassan had had their clandestine – and assumed to be fatal – meeting, then it wouldn’t be long before the Dread Wolf woke from uthenera and began his plan. She had to get ahead of that. She discarded the idea of waiting for him; she had no idea if he’d even come to the Lighthouse before leaving the focus where the Venatori would find it. If she wanted to give herself time to sit down and make a real plan, she had to go straight for it and get it hidden.

But where? she thought, wracking her brain to think of somewhere Solas wouldn’t find it. Nor anyone else, for that matter.

Here, in the Fade, she decided. She knew just the place. With any luck, she could still get in it.

First things first, though, she had to get out of this room.

She had no lockpicks, and the magic she’d once possessed was useless now with the Veil back in place. She turned around in the room, examining every nook and cranny. There was nothing. Malleable as the Lighthouse was, the Elvhen’s desire to keep her here overrode her desire to leave.

“Caretaker, please,” she whispered to the walls. She knew they were always listening. “If you know that my path diverges here, please, help me. There’s so much at stake, you can’t possibly see it all. But you know I can’t stay here.”

For a moment, nothing happened. But then she felt it, the way the Lighthouse morphed itself to need. A wall shifted, melting into a simple door that – if her orientation was correct – would lead her into the room next door. She opened it and peered inside, making sure it was empty. Better than that, it was an armory.

“Thank you,” she murmured fervently. She stepped inside and swapped out her rags for sturdy Elvhen chainmail padded with halla wool. Over that she donned a long leather coat. She could feel the enchantments woven into every inch of it as it cinched to fit her. She debated adding one of the high-collared chestplates, but decided against it. It would restrict her movement too much. She slid a pair of daggers into her belt and found a bow she could draw. A quiver of arrows on her hip was next. Over everything she tossed a cloak with a hood. She could only hope that at least some of the agents here were as short as she was in comparison and she could blend in with their ranks until she could get outside.

90% of successful blending in is confidence, she reminded herself. Act like you belong there, and no one will question it.

She straightened her spine, adopted the kind of ground eating stride Solas’s agents used in their bases, and stepped out of the armory. She needed to find Felassan. He was the key to her escape. Besides, she wanted to cure him before she left. And they’d need to be in the Crossroads for that, where she could entreat a spirit close enough to touch his mind.

The Lighthouse was quiet when she reached the main hall. It seemed to be the night shift, although one could never tell by looking at the quality of the light. She relied on her own internal clock and the familiarity she had with this place. There was no one around, at any rate, and she was able to poke her head into a few rooms undisturbed. She didn’t find him there and knew she’d have to risk going out into the courtyard, where it was likely there would be people.

Nothing for it, she sternly told herself and walked through the big main doors.

Her first thought was that yes, it was all different. But the next was that it was overwhelmingly different. This wasn’t a bolthole, it was a city. Islands spread out in every direction, even above and below the main platform. There were shops, training grounds, meeting halls. There were agents everywhere. She ducked into the shadows and watched the ebb and flow of it for a while, picking out those who were modern elves versus the ones unmistakably ancient. Her best bet would be to speak with a younger one, one who hadn’t seen her face yet.

A Dalish elf, dressed as a hunter, came up the steps and she met them halfway. “Where would I find General Felassan?” she asked, dropping her voice so it didn’t sound quite like herself. “I have a message for him.”

The hunter looked her over, a momentary flash of disdain coming and going on their face, before pointing vaguely towards the central hub. “Try the library.”

“Ma serannas,” she replied, careful to put the emphasis where the Dalish would recognize it. She didn’t need to wonder about their contempt; city elves and Dalish rarely got along, and in her current guise, no one would think that she was human first. For once she was grateful that she’d grown gaunt enough to make her bones stand out more, making her look even less like herself than she used to. If anything, the hunter was probably feeling a little envious that a lowly city elf had risen to the rank of whatever was entitled to wear this get up.

Now she just needed to find the damn library, which in her time was in the central tower. Obviously not now. Thankfully, she was spared having to ask for more directions when she saw it. Or at least saw the bookshelves she remembered peeking out through a door as someone went through them. She paced herself so she didn’t look like she was hurrying, and entered the stacks.

Felassan was easy to find after that, if impossible to reach at the moment. He was surrounded by agents, all of whom were asking him for details on what happened and what they were supposed to do now. Luck was with her as she stayed in the shadows, pretending to look over the books. She lingered there until the meeting broke up and discreetly followed the Slow Arrow out of the library to wherever he was going next. Which turned out to be his own quarters. Hruse sighed in relief.

She slipped in with him before he could close the door and held a finger to her lips when he turned and saw her there. He didn’t raise an alarm.

“Do you trust me?” she asked.

“You saved my life.”

Well, that wasn’t the same thing at all, but she’d take it. “Would you come into the Crossroads with me? There’s something I need to do for you.”

“Ma nuvenin.”

With the General at her side they weren’t stopped once, even if a few of the faces they passed wore quizzical expressions. She let him lead the way to the Eluvian, walking a step or two behind him, hood still covering her enough that no one thought she wasn’t what she looked like, and when they emerged into the in-between space of the Crossroads, she finally pushed it back.

“Wait here for a second, okay?”

He stood exactly where he’d stopped and she felt another shudder go through her at how obedient Tranquil were. It was rather terrifying. She hoped it was also just about over for him. She lifted her hands and spoke the words that would invite whatever spirit was nearest to manifest. She’d never been a mage before the fall of the Veil, but every Mourn Watcher knew the invocation, regardless of ability. Friendly spirits in the Necropolis would come to whoever called.

A glow emerged, growing more distinct with each second. Hruse almost laughed when she figured out what it was. Hope. Well, there were worse things to draw, for sure. Just as she surely needed all the hope she could get.

“Greetings, spirit,” she said politely. “If I may, I have a request.”

“You have need,” Hope said, their voice light and wispy as one unaccustomed to speaking tended to be.

“Can you see my friend at all?” She gestured back to Felassan.

“I can, because you need me to.”

Relief was sudden but she pushed it aside. She worded her request carefully, knowing how literal spirits were. “Will you touch his mind?”

Instead of answering, the spirit flowed over to Felassan, and then through him. He jerked as if stung and looked around himself wildly before his gaze landed on her. She gave him a half smile, and he frowned back. He frowned. Oh, thank the tiny wisps, an emotional reaction. It had worked.

“General…”

He held up his hand to stop her. “I remember the events of the last few days,” he said, and there was the rich cadence she’d missed hearing from him, even if she’d only ever seen memories of him before. “And I can guess what you’re planning.”

“You saw?”

“I did.” He cocked his head at her, and his hair slipped over his ear since he hadn’t tied it back. “Where you come from, it’s…”

“Yes. Then you know why I have to do this.”

“I shouldn’t let you. There are so many risks.”

“Please, Felassan. Don’t let that future come to pass.”

He thought for a moment, the frown still evident between his brows. At last he sighed and tipped his head back as if it was all just too much. It probably was. She’d heard that restored Tranquil could have difficulty in controlling their emotions afterwards. She hoped the brevity of his cut off state might spare him the worst of it. It had only been two days after all.

“You know where you need to go?” he asked at last, like he was giving in.

“More or less. I just need to get there.”

“I will take you.”

For a moment she was overjoyed that he was willing to help. But then her rational brain pointed out a few things and she stopped short. “No, you shouldn’t. When he arrives, I want you to be able to honestly tell him you don’t know what I did after I left.”

“You seek to protect me from further wrath,” he said.

“Yeah. It protects me too. I’ll slip away, and you won’t know where to look for me.”

“That’s very dangerous, and foolish.”

“Maybe, but it’s what’s necessary if I’m going to pull this off. If I can, I’ll come back and face him myself.”

“He might be...angry.”

“Oh, I have no doubt of that. But he’ll also be too weak to do much about it.”

“He can still command others to kill you.”

“It’s a risk I have to take. Felassan, I don’t want the world to end like that.”

“No, no one sane would.” He sighed again and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Then he looked at her again, steely determination in his eyes. “Let me at least get you to the right exit. You’ll have to go the rest of the way on foot, but it won’t be far.”

“Thank you.”

“Let’s go.”

Chapter Text

The Vi’Revas operated in some unfathomable way she’d never understood. She simply didn’t have the arcane training, and every time Solas had tried to explain it to her she got lost in all the calculations and logistics he’d evidently woven into the ‘master’ mirror. Suffice to say, it worked. If one had the password and knew where they wanted to go, the Eluvian would take them there. Just as one needed the password to get into the Lighthouse from outside it; there was no other entry point short of ripping apart the sonallium that held it. And in eight thousand years or more, no one had done that yet. But people were fallible, and betrayals happened, so there were always sentries on duty in the Eluvian hall to prevent interlopers.

Felassan bid those sentries to silence as he led them back through and began to manipulate the settings on the mirror to take her away from the Crossroads. And they obeyed him, because why wouldn’t they? He was their General.

“How much trouble am I making?” she asked softly as he worked.

“Some, but not as much as you fear. He will not hold them responsible for obeying my orders. He will only punish me.”

“I’m not thrilled with that idea either, you know.”

He smirked up at her from where he crouched. “I’ve gathered.”

“How close will I be?”

“It should be within sight. You’ll have to navigate to it on your own though. I have no idea what condition the paths are in.”

“That’s good enough.”

“Hruse…” He stood and concern was etched into his face. “We are even now, you and I. But I hope to see you again. I hope you are successful. The fate of the world should not rest upon such young shoulders, but that’s fate for you.”

She clasped his hand where he’d laid it on her shoulder. “I’ll be back, one way or the other. And we’ll go from there. I’m glad I got to save you, General.”

“Me too,” he quipped with a grin. “Now. Get going.”

She stepped through the Eluvian and into a glittering, freezing landscape dominated by mountain peaks. The mirror closed behind her and went dark. Definitively so. He’d locked it from this location, perhaps to forestall anyone following her. Well, she’d just have to find another one to take her back to the Crossroads.

Where was the nearest one anyway? Treviso? Kirkwall? Val Royeaux?

Halamshiral, she remembered. Briala had one.

Neither here nor there at the moment; she still had to get where she was going. She wrapped the cloak tighter around her and searched for the rooftops she should be able to see from here. And there they were, sitting broken atop a pile of stone that matched the surrounding mountains. She’d have to wade through the snow to reach it, but the coat would keep her protected from the elements. As long as she didn’t fall, either from the heights or as prey to whatever hunted in these passes, she’d make it to the fortress.

She took a deep breath, and set off.

The hike wasn’t as treacherous as she’d feared and for the most part she kept her footing in the snow. Drifts sometimes fooled her and she sank up to her thighs, but she didn’t have to struggle too hard to get out of them. This high, the snow was mostly powder, fluffy and easy to dig out. It was midday, which did give her some pause, since she only had a few hours to reach her destination before night fell. That spurred her on, even when she grew tired enough that her limbs felt like lead and her head swam. How long had it been since she’d slept? Or eaten? She prayed to any deity that might exist that she’d have a few days’ grace to recover her strength before Fen’Harel arrived at his old home to claim the orb.

There was a bridge that spanned the chasm overlooking the river valley below. It was just around this peak, but was considerably lower than her current position. In better weather she expected there were probably stairs leading to it, but she had no way to find them now. She braced herself and slid down the side of the mountain, aiming for a plateau that held a single watchtower at the end of the bridge. Too far and she’d go right off the edge and plummet to the valley. If she bashed herself on a rock, she’d knock herself out and die. Adrenaline spiked and she planted her feet to stop her headlong descent. The landing jarred her right up to her eyeballs, but she’d made it. From here, it was just a simple walk across the bridge.

Once inside the gatehouse, the wind dropped away to nothing and balmy air stung her cheeks. Inside the walls, the weather was nothing like outside. Lingering magic from another era. She took the respite for what it was and stamped feeling back into her feet. It was eerily silent and empty, but that wasn’t a shock. The place had been abandoned for decades, if not centuries at this point.

“Hello, Skyhold,” she murmured. She’d never gotten to see it in the other timeline. By the time she and Solas might have taken the journey together it was gone, torn down stone by stone by the hand of one of Dirthamen’s fragments. He was by far the strongest of them, having had the most time to regain power. Dumat’s death had been over a thousand years ago, after all. The Inquisition had officially died that day. None had survived.

She remembered Solas’s grief; he’d been fond of those he’d walked among in secret so long before. He’d been close to the Inquisitor herself, a dwarven woman who’d been in the Carta before becoming the Herald of Andraste. Aeda Cadash had been a fascinating woman, for all that Hruse had met her only a handful of times. As quick with a joke as she was with her blades. She’d been fierce in her support of Lace’s new powers, angry at Solas for what he’d done to the Titans, and yet pragmatic enough to put that aside in order to save the Veil. And she’d been so in love with the Iron Bull.

Now, Hruse didn’t know if any of those things would happen for her. If she did this right, the Inquisition might never even begin.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, she thought. You still have to find the bedamned orb.

Tomorrow, she argued with herself. She needed sleep and something to eat – thankfully she saw ripe apples on the trees in the courtyard – and she needed some supplies. There was time enough for that.

She picked as many apples as she could carry, and found a room that looked like a kitchen. A stack of crumbling wood was next to the hearth. It would burn, and better than nothing. She found a tinderbox, got the fire going and found a pallet to drag in front of it. Then she ate until her jaw was too tired to chew anymore, lay down on her makeshift bed, and closed her eyes.

Chapter Text

The same ‘at need’ magic that ran through the Lighthouse must run through Skyhold. In the morning, Hruse found a sack of potatoes, miraculously whole and firm with no eyes or rot, spilling out onto the floor of the kitchen. When she went back out to the courtyard, she found chickens pecking happily in the grass. Which meant there were eggs if she could find them. There was fresh water in the well, and a bucket sitting next to it with a rope attached to it. She found a crock of druffalo butter, fresh as the day it was churned. A sharp knife rested on the long counter along with wooden spoons and a stack of plates, flatware and cups. A cauldron, and finally, a pan that fit over the grill of the hearth.

Fried eggs and potatoes left her feeling much more magnanimous towards the world. A bath, albeit one with harsh lye soap more suited to pots and pans than skin, left her feeling human again.

Thus returned to a sense of normalcy that she hadn’t felt in literal years, she began a thorough exploration of the fortress. In the keep the ceiling had fallen in, but the walls were intact, as were most of the windows. Not that she worried too much, the magic in the air kept the worst of the weather out anyhow. She’d yet to find a spot within the battlements where it wasn’t summer. The gardens were a jumbled, overgrown tangle, and most of the rooms lay scattered with broken furniture, but they weren’t her true objective, so she ignored the mess.

She did gaze up at the tiers of the rotunda, however. The walls on the ground level were of course bare, but she had seen a memory of them covered in frescoes once. It must have been glorious in person. She dragged herself away from the space Solas had made his own while with the Inquisition and kept up her exploration. She needed to find the Undercroft, and from there, the entrance to the older foundations upon which this keep was built.

Easier said than done, since Solas was well practiced in hiding things and there had been several other fortresses built atop Tarasyl’an Tel’as.

By the end of that day, she was no closer to finding the entrance, although she’d found the Undercroft itself easily enough. She collected more eggs and after a bit of searching found other vegetables stocked in the larder that she would have sworn weren’t there when she arrived. She would get heartily tired of eating the same thing for every meal, but she wasn’t going to complain. Food was food and she was grateful to have it. She made her pallet a little more homey with a pillow she’d found and even a moth-eaten blanket, and slept again.

The next day followed the pattern. With the notable addition of a sack of flour. She experimented with making flatbread on the hearth and wasn’t too disappointed with her attempt. She thought she’d try it again with potatoes added for a softer texture. She would need to make a store of food to take with her when she left, and flatbread would travel well. The more calories she could pack into it, the better.

It was three days before she decided to check the other underground section. A prison built against the cliff’s edge where a waterfall dropped into the valley. As she moved cautiously through the space, she felt a tingle in her sinuses, almost like she needed to sneeze. Or that the air pressure had suddenly changed with an oncoming storm. She recognized the feeling as being a ward. She tracked it until the urge to wrinkle her nose was undeniable and saw the telltale glint of hidden marks in the stones. She hoped the ward wasn’t trapped. It wasn’t. She pressed lightly on each stone, until one gave way, revealing a latch. A slab of the wall swung open, with stairs heading down deeper. She grabbed a torch and followed them.

At the bottom was a small room with a simple plinth standing in the center. Upon it was the orb.

Even from where she stood she could feel the arcane energy spilling from it. It hummed with a resonance she associated so closely with Solas that she wanted to weep. She basked in it for a while, missing him, wishing things had gone differently. She could understand now, at least a little, how it felt for him to be thrust into a position he didn’t want. To be forced into a duty that could have a catastrophic end.

Hruse knew how Aeda Cadash had gotten the Anchor, by touching this thing with her bare hand while interrupting Corypheus as he tried to unlock it fully. She knew she shouldn’t do that. But she had the burlap sack from the potatoes. She could wrap it up in that, tying it off with twine. If necessary, she could always use her cloak too. In fact, since she was down here and opportunity was not to be wasted, she probably should just use that until she got it back upstairs. She set her torch into a socket by the door and pulled the cloak from her shoulders. She folded it up into something that would put several layers between her and the pulsing focus and laid it down on the floor. She then used the handle of the torch to knock it off the plinth.

And it was a good plan, until the orb rolled on the folds of the cloak. She reached out automatically to stop it and her fingers brushed the cold stone of a Titan’s heart before she could stop herself.

There was something like the opposite of sound and she was thrown off her feet by the blast of energy. She was filled with such a surge of buzzing electricity that her teeth ached. She screamed as every nerve fired and every hair stood on end in the split second before darkness fell over her. She didn’t even feel herself fall to the floor.

She did, however, know that when she opened her eyes she was in the Fade. She desperately hoped it was just her dreaming mind and not her physical body.

Since staring down at her from six, luridly glowing eyes was Fen’Harel himself.

Chapter Text

WHO ARE YOU? The sound of it thundered in her head, but she didn’t think he spoke truly aloud. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

She didn’t answer. A little more than five years ago, subjectively speaking, she would have been terrified by the sight of him. He was massive, with tendrils like smoke bleeding off the edges of him where fur should be, too many eyes and too sharp teeth. This was the Roamer of the Beyond, the Bringer of Nightmares. Even in the Grand Necropolis, tales of the Dread Wolf were not uncommon.

But she was not her younger self, and she had seen him like this just as much as she’d seen him as a man, or even a spirit. She lay sprawled on the stone of the Fade space and she got up, shaking herself out to make sure everything still worked. Given that she felt no pain, she suspected she truly was dreaming and hadn’t been catapulted bodily into the Fade like Aeda had been so long ago. That was the good news.

The bad news, of course, being that she hadn’t expected him to find her so quickly. Or to know that something had happened. She probably should have, though. She knew the timing was right for him to begin waking from uthenera and putting his plan into action at long last. Assuming he hadn’t already started. It occurred to her that when she’d asked Felassan in those first frantic moments after falling from the time spell, he hadn’t answered. He’d only told her the year.

Focus, she thought, looking up at the giant wolf staring her down.

She probably shouldn’t tell Fen’Harel a single thing, if only to preserve herself, however perilously close she was to risking ignominious death right now. He’d left Felassan Tranquil, but the General was an Elvhen and powerful in his own right. Hruse was a simple human, mortal and frail in comparison. If he chose to kill her, she would be dead.

She sighed. “Solas…”

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT NAME?

“I know lots of things. But I’m not having this conversation right now. It’s not time yet.”

And how much experience do you have willing yourself from sleep to wakefulness? The memory of his voice, taunting and flippant, echoed in her mind.

More than I had then, she answered now, willing herself to leave.

The lines of him wavered, but didn’t dissipate. His hold over her was strong. She wondered if the blood magic bond he’d created carried over in some way. It had always been him controlling their meetings back then, at least once she was there. Even after, when he was bound to the Veil and once more a spirit of wisdom, she had never managed to exert much control over his will. That said, this was a Solas who hadn’t yet become used to manipulating others’ dreams, or her in particular. She ducked between his paws, where he couldn’t see her. While he spun around trying to find her, she ran to an outcropping of rock and made herself small in its shadow.

I KNOW YOU ARE HERE.

Yes, she thought but didn’t give voice to. I am, but you can’t see me.

It was admittedly childish, but sillier things had worked on him in the past. Spirits could be fooled in ways that mortals were not. All she needed was for him to loosen the bonds of his control over the Fade space, and she would be gone.

And then you’ll need to find tel’thenera potions for your trouble.

Quiet brain, we’re in a jam here. The man you love doesn’t know you, is pissed off and might do something regrettably stupid. Like always.

The ground shook as he moved, but she didn’t dare peek around the rock to see where he was. She was still pushing her will against his, but gently, feeling around the edges of his magic to find even the merest crack to slip through.

There were none, but this was the Fade. She wouldn’t tire any faster than he would. She could keep this up indefinitely. As long as she stayed out of sight.

Rook, like the chess piece? Neve had asked upon meeting her. She remembered Varric’s response too.

Yeah, she tends to think in straight lines.

Sometimes the simplest answer was the best one. She needed him not to see her. And this was the Fade, as malleable as clay. She was no longer a mage in the waking world, but she had been before the end of the world, when the Veil fell. She knew what she was capable of. Before she could overthink it, she drew a cloak of invisibility around herself. Stealth had always been a favored tool in her arsenal. She had only honed it over her years away from the Necropolis.

He walked right past her hiding place, giving no sign that he was aware of her there.

Oh, she didn’t doubt for a second that he knew she was there still, but he couldn’t find her. She watched him turn, looking right at her without recognition and pace back to the other side of the dream-space.

YOU HAVE HIDDEN, BUT I HAVE YOUR SCENT. I WILL FIND YOU.

There! His will had slipped, just a little. Just enough. Likely to draw her out of her hiding place, which would have worked if she was visible. She squeezed herself through the crack, like a needle through cloth, drawing her self across the boundary of his will like thread. The dream froze before her eyes as she looked at it from the outside, and then she fled.

Granted, she couldn’t go very far. She was tethered to her physical body. But she was outside the range of his sight. She could still feel the rumble of his giant feet, even though she saw no movement through the opaque barrier of the dream. She realized she still hadn’t let go of the Fade cloak yet, and decided she wasn’t going to. If mighty Fen’Harel couldn’t find her like this, nothing else would either.

She heard a roar of frustration, so like a pride demon that she got goosebumps. It wouldn’t do to forget that in this timeline, in this part of his life, he was corrupted. He was not his true self. He was not the man she loved. She didn’t think she’d forget it again.

She felt the pull of her body and didn’t fight it. The Fade grew dark and blank and then she was blinking her eyes, back in her body. Where it was also dark.

The torch had gone out.

How long had she been unconscious?

She groaned and rolled to her side, feeling a variety of aches and pains all over. Her limbs were stiff and her belly felt hollow. And she was still buzzing with arcane energy. Something to worry about later.

Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she saw the orb giving off faint green luminescence, safe and sound on the folds of her cloak. She pushed herself up, inch by inch, limb by limb, until she could get on her feet and stumble back to the bundle on the floor. She carefully pulled up the edges so she didn’t touch the focus again and carried it out of the hidden room.

Chapter Text

Hruse spent a day baking and preparing. She wrapped up the focus in the potato sack, making sure it was secure enough that it wouldn’t come loose in the pack she’d found. Then she made a stack of flatbreads, picked more apples, filled an intact wineskin with water and consulted the aged map she found in one of the more ‘official’ looking rooms of the keep. It was extremely out of date, but it was enough for her to pinpoint where she was in relation to both Ferelden and Orlais. She could go east out of the Frostbacks to Haven, then north to cross the Waking Sea, or she could go west into Orlais and try to reach Halamshiral and the Eluvian there.

Both had risks. Orlais was currently being split by civil war, if she remembered her history right. While Ferelden had become the battleground for the mage rebellion. Soon, Divine Justinia would call the Conclave. If events played out the way they had in the other timeline, the Inquisition would be reinstated to deal with the Breach and Corypheus.

The Conclave would likely still take place. What would happen after that was completely unknown if she succeeded in hiding the orb. Which she was determined to do. Which led her to: what was the best route back to the Crossroads? She could likely gain an audience with Briala, due to her connection with Felassan, tenuous as it was. But that might put her in Solas’s line of sight, since he was watching the elven spymaster too. But there was another option, one that held as many risks, not to the world at large, but to herself personally.

She could go home to the Grand Necropolis.

Vorgoth would probably allow her entry, and keep her hidden from her own younger self as well as a younger Professor Volkarin. The mysterious entity under that cloak could see things no one else could, and could be trusted. The Solas soon to be waking in this world would not even think to look for her in such a place since he had no clue as to her identity. And she knew there was an Eluvian there. It had been held in storage for as long as anyone could remember. The same one that she would open as ‘Rook’, some twelve years in the future.

She hefted the bag of archaic gold she’d found in the room with the map and wondered how hard it would be to exchange it for modern coin. From there, booking passage to Cumberland would be easy, just as finding some manner of conveyance to Nevarra City would be. She sighed. Her best option for exchanging the gold with the minimum of fuss would be the Carta. They’d ask few questions about where she got it, nor tell anyone that they’d seen her if inquiries were made. They’d take a percentage of it, for sure. But she only needed enough to get across the Waking Sea. And the purse was full.

Honestly, she’d have a much harder time sourcing the tel’thenera potions, if that was something she wanted to pursue. Few outside the Circles had access to the ingredients, or knowledge of how to prepare them properly. It wasn’t the sort of thing any hedge mage could whip up in a trice. And currently the Circles were...well, they didn’t exist anymore.

This would be a lot simpler if I hadn’t touched the damned orb, she thought.

No use crying over it. That milk is spilled.

She had the rudiments of a plan. Now she just needed to get out of the Frostbacks in one piece.

She packed up everything she owned into the pack and left as soon as she was ready. The descent from the mountains would take her days, and she wanted to be as far as she could be before nightfall, just in case. She could sleep lightly and not dream. It was a short term solution to the problem of Solas finding her. Eventually she wouldn’t be able to prevent sheer exhaustion from pulling her into the Fade. But needs must. She’d done it before, she could do it again.

The journey was mostly uneventful. She dozed in hollows, or under pine boughs and packed snow, shivering in her cloak. Once she came across a snowcat, but was able to chase it away with her daggers. It decided she wasn’t worthy prey. She ate her flatbread and apples, melted snow for water and kept to a vaguely eastern trajectory. Sooner or later she’d leave the Frostbacks behind and enter the Hinterlands. Maybe even the Lakelands if she was north enough. She just needed to get to level ground and find a road that would take her to a city large enough to have a branch of the Carta.

On the fifth day since leaving Skyhold, she walked out of a forest that had finally not borne any snow and found herself in the region between the northwestern shore of Lake Calenhad and the city of Jader. Good enough. She walked until she found a farming village, begged a place in a barn to sleep and kept one eye open all night, her dagger in her hands. She woke, barely rested but unmolested, and turned north from the village. She was closer to Jader’s port than she was to any other.

She worried that her clothes would draw attention, being obviously of finer quality than a humble traveler on foot should own, but at this point she was so covered in mud, pine needles and assorted other muck that she barely drew a second glance from anyone. She kept her hood up and her eyes down and plodded onwards until she could smell the sea.

On the outskirts of Jader she saw a Carta symbol painted onto a canvas banner. She marched to it and waited for someone to notice her. It didn’t take long. A lone human in a Carta camp stood out, after all. One of the dwarves came her way, shouting over their shoulder to the others in the camp that they’d deal with this. They reached her side and looked up at her and she gasped.

Aeda Cadash.

Chapter Text

“Can I help you?” Aeda asked pointedly after Hruse stared at her long enough for the silence to start feeling awkward.

“Oh, of course. Sorry, yes. I need to exchange some gold.”

The dwarven woman arched an eyebrow, then gestured for them to go into the nearest tent. It was laid out like a banking house and the incongruity of such a thing nearly made Hruse laugh aloud. “What kind of gold?”

“I found a purse of coins, must be Storm Age or older. But I need something I can spend, ya know?”

“You sure they’re real?”

“Oh yes, the place I found them...it would be too hard to make forgeries.”

“Let me see.”

Hruse reached into the purse and pulled one at random. The coin was hexagonal, and stamped with a face she didn’t recognize in the slightest. She couldn’t even tell if it was Orlesian or Fereldan. Aeda looked the coin over, pressed her thumbnail into it, bit it and flipped it in the air to hear its chime. Then she laid it on a scale she produced from under a table, measuring it against a current sovereign.

“Huh. Yeah, it’s real gold. And you’re right, this is old.” She peered up at Hruse, a gleam forming in her eyes. “And you say you found this?”

“Yes. In a ruin. There was a map too, looked like vellum but the weather had gotten to it. It was fragile. All the borders were wrong.”

One lesson Hruse had learned well from the Dread Wolf: make a lie as close to the truth as to be indiscernible. Or more precisely, tell the truth but in a way that leads the listener to come to their own conclusion, regardless of accuracy. Nothing she said was strictly untrue. Skyhold was a ruin. The map had been vellum. The borders on it were wrong. She had found the gold there. She simply omitted its location. Ferelden was full of old fortresses and abandoned castles. Years of conquest had left many marks on the landscape, and the Fifth Blight, however short-lived, had done the rest.

“How much do you have?” Aeda asked. Hruse lifted the purse from her belt and dropped it on the table. The weight of it was enough to let out a metallic thud. Aeda eyed her, rapid calculations going on in her head. “We’ll take a cut, you know.”

“I know.”

“Fifty percent.”

If she expected Hruse to be offended, stomp out without negotiating and then be a vulnerable target further down the road so this band of Carta could take all of it from her corpse, she would be disappointed. “Twenty.”

“Forty five.” Aeda was smiling. Hruse had passed the test.

“Twenty five.”

“Forty.”

Hruse knew how much gold was in that purse. At a legitimate dwarven Merchants Guild exchange, she could easily get 30 sovereigns out of it. And that would be after their standard 15% cut of it. It was more money than the average person saw in two or three years. The Carta maintained itself by preying on the desperate, knowing they had no other recourse and little power to complain. Hruse also knew that she was playing with fire. By pushing a hard bargain, she was painting a target on her back just as much as if she’d walked away in a temper. Still…

“Twenty. Five.” She held firm.

“Thirty,” Aeda came back with. “Final offer.”

“Thirty, and an escort to Jader’s port.” Hruse leveled a stare down at the Carta dwarf. She didn’t need to spell out what the escort was for. So they didn’t stab her in the back, and neither did anyone else. Aeda thought for a moment, then stuck out her hand.

“Done. I’ll write up a contract.”

Hruse shook on it and stood there while Aeda wrote out their deal in two copies. She read it over, they both signed them, Aeda stamped them with a Carta seal and handed one to Hruse. It wouldn’t count for much as insurance, but Hruse appreciated the gesture. She pushed the purse across the table. The dwarf counted out the gold and weighed each piece, then weighed the whole. From a chest, she withdrew a sack and counted out the equivalent in Fereldan coinage, minted with the double faces for Anora and Alistair Theirin. Then, one eye on Hruse, she drew off a third of the coins, scooping them into a pile to go back into the chest.

“Good enough, stranger?”

Hruse nodded. “Thank you.”

“You need to get to the port now, or can I stand you a drink? Least I can do, after all that money.”

“I’ll have a drink, sure.”

“I promise I won’t poison it.”

Hruse met her grin in kind.

They fell into light conversation, and Aeda proved to be just as easy to talk and joke with now as she would be in the future. If not easier, with fewer cares on her shoulders. It was near evening before they left the tent, and Aeda shouted to someone called Lantos that she’d be back, and then they headed into the city proper.

“I didn’t honestly think you’d escort me yourself,” Hruse commented as they wove through the crowded port.

Aeda shrugged. “I like you. You didn’t threaten me, and I didn’t have to threaten you. You don’t seem to be the usual brand of hopeless and you dickered well. An honest deal is worth some extra attention, in my opinion.”

“Fair enough.” She debated with herself as they neared her destination, a merchant ship setting sail with the tide for Cumberland. “Listen, I know it’s not my business or anything, but...if you ever want to leave the Carta, I have a suggestion.”

“Oh?”

“You’ve got a good head, and you’re honest...well, you’ve been honest with me, I think. If this life starts getting a little less ethical than you’d prefer, find the Bull’s Chargers. They’re a merc company out of Orlais. Good people. Good company, fair and pretty honorable. Their leader is…”

“I’ve heard of them. He’s one of them Qunari.”

“Yes.” She looked down at the woman she’d known in another life who would shed heart’s blood for that same Qunari. “I think you’d like him...them. The Chargers, I mean.”

Aeda looked her over for a long moment, then stuck out her hand again. Hruse took it easily. “I might do that, stranger. Good luck to you, wherever you’re going.”

“And you, Aeda Cadash.”

She slipped away from the dwarf’s side before she could ask how Hruse knew her name. She didn’t know what the future held anymore, but if the Inquisition didn’t form because the orb never fell into Corypheus’ hands, then she’d done her best to give that love story another chance. Someone should end up happy, after all.

Chapter Text

The ship’s captain had offered Hruse a meal, but it was salted fish, and like many other Mourn Watchers, she didn’t partake in animal flesh. He wasn’t offended, and invited her instead to at least take a biscuit – stale and slightly too salty, but better than actual hardtack – and an Antivan orange, then wished her a good night. She swung herself into a hammock below deck where the other passengers would be sleeping and let the gentle back and forth lull her into a state of rest.

She tried, she really did, not to fall asleep, as she’d done every night since her disastrous meeting with Fen’Harel in the Fade. But as she’d predicted it would, exhaustion had caught up to her. She knew she was dreaming before it even settled fully in her mind.

WHERE ARE YOU?

She jolted, then must have actually jumped in her sleep, because she woke up falling from her hammock to the floor of the hold, startling the other passengers. Adrenaline raced through her, making her wide awake and trembling. There had been no actual dream, she thought. Just his voice, searching for her. She remembered once that he told her that sea voyages were uninteresting to him, since there was rarely anything the spirits of the Fade could re-enact there besides the odd shipwreck. He had lost sight of her in a place where few spirits mirrored the waking world.

It was enough to calm her down. She apologized to her hold mates and clambered back into her hammock. But sleep eluded her now, the visceral fear of hearing that sonorous voice again keeping her from closing her eyes. It wasn’t that she feared him particularly, she just didn’t want him to find her before she’d completed her task.

A little over a week she’d been in the past, she realized. And on the move each and every minute of it. She’d had no time to think. No time to mourn.

And this is not the time or place to do it, she told herself. These people don’t need to witness you having a breakdown.

Carefully, so she didn’t wake everyone up again, she got out of her hammock and went up on deck to watch the ship cut through the waves of the Waking Sea under a starry sky. The journey would be short, by midday they would dock in Cumberland’s harbor. If not sooner, since the tide was with them. So far, and yet not far enough.

She knew from Solas telling her – and her own memories of it happening when she was younger – that the Inquisition had begun because of an explosion at the Conclave. That Aeda was proclaimed the Herald of Andraste after getting the Anchor. She was the only survivor of the blast. Without the orb, that explosion wouldn’t happen.

But Corypheus might still attack. The Venatori were still advancing out of Tevinter. She could only hope that by the time they became a threat, she would have had a chance to tell Solas what she needed to, maybe even convinced him to give her time to help him break free at long last from the corrupted Mythal’s clutches. Indeed, that was her overall plan.

But she was just one person. And they had no connection now, no familiarity with each other. She didn’t think that just because they’d become lovers in her timeline that it would happen in this one.

You don’t have time to mourn that either, she scolded herself as the first hot tear rolled down her cheek. The wind was brisk on the deck, but not enough to cool the burning in her throat as grief rolled over her.

She was so alone. In every way.

She wished the spell had failed, that she and Solas had accepted death. At least they would have been together.

“My heart,” he whispered, collapsing onto the bed with her. She’d woken when he came in, but stayed silent as he stripped off mangled armor and filthy clothes. She felt the zing of his magic as he cleaned himself up and was waiting with open arms when he joined her under the covers. He’d been gone for days, off fighting one of the fragments in a particularly dangerous area. He hadn’t wanted her to come along. Normally a reunion would involve ferocious lovemaking, a physical reminder that they were both still alive, but not tonight. Tonight he simply laid his head on her heartbeat. He was cold where her arms wrapped around him.

She wanted to ask how it went, but his mood told her enough. He’d lived, he’d returned to her. But the cost had been high. So she held him and didn’t speak. He curled into her body and his breathing evened out. He’d fallen asleep. Only then did she lean up to lay a kiss on the crown of his head. And she wept.

THIS IS...A MEMORY.

Hruse hadn’t even realized she’d fallen asleep, or fallen into a dream of the last quiet night she and Solas shared before things got so much worse. Before they’d begun to plan to send her back in earnest. The memory of holding him slipped away, but the feeling of Fen’Harel searching for her in his anger didn’t grow to fill the space. It was like she’d shown him something he hadn’t expected and now he was re-evaluating. She should wake herself up; he couldn’t be allowed to find her. But she lingered in the darkened Fade, just floating as she knew the ship floated through the waves. The rocking must have put her to sleep on the deck.

Yes, she thought, aiming it back towards the looming shadow of the Dread Wolf. It is a memory. One of many that I carry with me with no substance any longer. Because you are not mine, and I can’t afford to forget that.

He left her alone, whether or not he heard her thoughts. The Fade stayed blissfully empty and when she woke, it was to morning light reflected off the water and the clamor of bells in the Cumberland harbor.

Chapter Text

Aside from being jostled to the point of soreness by the three others sharing a carriage with her from Cumberland to Nevarra City, the rest of her trip was uneventful. Blessedly so. Being thrown around kept her from drowsing any further, and while her mood was sour by the time she stepped out of the carriage, she acknowledged it was for the best that she hadn’t been able to nap. The sleep she’d gotten on the ship would just have to last her until she got to the Necropolis and into the safety of the Crossroads.

There were times she wished she knew how to ride a horse, but honestly, in her current state, that would not have been very safe. She was thoroughly exhausted and her judgment and reactions were betraying that fact. But she’d made it across the Waking Sea and was back home for the first time in subjective years. That had to count for something, right?

Younger you is half your age, the thought intruded as she looked around the once familiar streets and dignified buildings of the nation of her birth. Before she could stop herself, she let the thought follow itself to conclusion. You are old enough to be your own mother.

It was an odd thought to have, considering she didn’t know who her parents were. She’d been found in the Necropolis as an infant, with no sign of anyone breaking in or leaving a note to explain. They assumed she was fully human because she looked it, but there was no way to truly know. She did have a facility with Av’vhen that spoke to some mixed heritage somewhere. Solas had told her the language relied on emotional context and that those with an inherent connection to it could feel the meaning of the words more than hear it. But that could also have been her upbringing in such close contact with a practically non-existent Veil.

For she’d had far from a lonely childhood. The spirits that lingered among the tombs adored her, and she them. It had been a natural progression for her to become part of the Mourn Watch with such a fostering, even though she wasn’t a mage. Guardians of the dead weren’t just those who could work with the Fade.

And then she remembered. In 9:40 Dragon, younger her was still living in the city. Her last hurrah before buckling down to her training.

She drew her hood a little higher on her head – she’d been cautious to keep it up so no one could see her face, hair or distinctive scars – and strode into the morning crowd heading towards the quieter section where the surface entrance of the Grand Necropolis resided. She’d thought about it and decided she would gain entry as a visitor, there to pay her respects. She’d have to leave a donation, but that was partly why she’d driven such a hard bargain with Aeda for the gold. She could buy herself a proper breakfast as she walked and still have plenty left for the Necropolis. The street vendors were already open.

She bought a parcel of stuffed mushrooms and savored every mouthful. She hadn’t had these in years. It was funny the things one took for granted until the world ended. She thought wistfully of Lucanis’ paella that he made just for her and Emmrich, Lace’s yam and jam slams, the elaborate meals Solas would conjure for her on the rare occasions that they had the time. The last five years of her life in the other timeline had been filled with hunger. The only thing that grew plentifully was blight. Oh, there were protected pockets of farmland, tended by those few who had not taken up arms against the fragments of the Evanuris, but it was never a lot. And Hruse was not selfish enough to take more than the minimum so that others might eat too. The one time she’d been starving enough to eat meat, it had made her terribly ill. It wasn’t worth filling her belly if she couldn’t digest it.

She looked down at the last of her breakfast, suddenly unable to stomach another bite as a wave of guilt washed over her. She shouldn’t be enjoying this so effortlessly when she knew what was coming.

Be practical, she told herself. You should fill up on everything available once more and not feel bad about it. You are malnourished and slowly dying from it. And the whole point of you being here is to prevent that apocalypse from happening.

She ate the last mushroom and crumpled the paper it was served in, giving her an excuse to make a fist and vent some of her undirected rage and grief. She tossed the ball of greasy wrapping in the nearest receptacle for that purpose and continued on her way to the Necropolis.

On the surface, the Grand Necropolis looked like a Chantry. If one that was swathed in a rather more dark aesthetic than average. She walked in like every other visitor and left a handful of gold on a tray that then was carried deeper inside by one of the serving undead. A lift unlocked and she stepped into it, feeling something like butterflies in her stomach. It had been so long!

She descended into the depths, the sense of homecoming becoming stronger and stronger the deeper she went. The lift let her out in the broad foyer of the Hollow Belfry and she stood there for a moment, letting the peace and tranquility of her former home simply encompass her. She felt the presence of spirits all around her, heard the murmur of voices, some distant, some closer. And then she felt the emptiness that signaled the arrival of Vorgoth.

“YOU ARE OUT OF PLACE, YOUNG INGELLVAR.”

She looked up into the hood that bore only smoke and felt a tear drip down her cheek unbidden. She wasn’t so young anymore, and this was no longer home. “Yes.”

“COME.”

They led her away to an area that was off limits to visitors, the door closing behind the pair of them with a solid thunk even though neither of them touched it.

“I need the Eluvian, Vorgoth,” she said without preamble.

They said nothing, but she could feel them contemplating her. More tears had joined the first, and she was breathing as shallowly as she could to keep her sobs swallowed. Her throat hurt from the effort. She should have known that returning here would affect her like this.

“WHEN ARE YOU FROM?”

“9:57.”

The entity sighed, a sound not unlike wind passing through bare branches. If anything, it made her tears flow faster and harder and she crumpled, letting one anguished sound escape her. They made no move to comfort her, but that wasn’t surprising. Vorgoth eschewed touch as much as possible. A being made of smoke could have unexpected side effects when it brushed against the corporeal.

“THE WOLF FAILED.”

“No,” she said vehemently. “We all did the best we could. And for a while it was enough. But then it just...wasn’t.”

It didn’t even occur to her that Vorgoth should have no knowledge of the Dread Wolf yet. They had knowledge of so many things they shouldn’t. No one knew what they were, and they did not tell. Hruse had her suspicions after her life in the other timeline. The incursion by Those Across the Sea had been swift and brutally put down when the first fragments rose. Perhaps the singular good thing to come from the end of the world. But she kept that to herself. This wasn’t the time to ask if her old friend and mentor was one of them.

“WHAT WILL YOU DO NOW?”

“My orders are to prevent it from happening. I need to get back into the Crossroads of the Fade. I have something to hide there.”

“YES, YOU DO. BUT DO NOT TRUST THAT IT WILL BE THE END. ANOTHER TOOL EXISTS.”

She nodded. The dagger. Currently held within the body of Knight-Commander Meredith Stannard and on unknowing public display in the courtyard of the Gallows in Kirkwall. She had no idea how she was going to claim it without falling to the madness of its current state.

A wave of dizziness passed over her, more than could be accounted for by her fatigue. She blinked up at Vorgoth to see them returning their gloved hands to the clasp they were usually held in. “REST,” they said. “YOU ARE SAFE HERE. I WILL TAKE YOU TO THE MIRROR WHEN IT IS READY.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, and then everything went dark.

Chapter Text

Hruse would have been more upset with how long Vorgoth made her rest – from what she could tell, she might have lost days, maybe even a week – but she couldn’t deny that it had helped. If nothing else her temper was improved for it, since her current situation would have led to her frustration boiling over. The Caretaker didn’t want to take her where she asked. Hruse had never seen them hesitant before. But she insisted, they yielded, and the boat carried her to the distant island cut off from all the rest.

“This will change the currents, dweller.”

“That’s rather the point, Caretaker.”

“You risk a flood. A flood destroys.”

“Yes, it does. But what’s left behind can be rebuilt. I know what I’m risking.”

Every friendship I ever made. Every life I altered when they became part of the Veilguard. Every life lost at the Conclave, and those that rose to power that might not now, or will come to it a different way.

Every moment, of every day, from this one until the last one.

Hruse knew exactly what kind of flood she was unleashing, no matter the sorrow of it. Another set of Solas’s lessons, although perhaps ones he hadn’t meant to teach. It only takes one person to change the world. Sacrifices must be made for the greater good. And consequences must be lived with.

The Caretaker peered at her from behind the many-faced helmet, and did not speak again.

The island emerged from the mist and the boat bumped gently against the dock. As soon as Hruse stepped onto the cobbled stones, the Caretaker melted into the ether. They would return for her, she knew. But she couldn’t help but feel like she’d just been given their pointed opinion.

I have to do this, she told herself.

Now w ho does that remind you of?

She pushed the thought away and ambled down the snowy hillside to the arena where she could see the fragment of Mythal standing. She didn’t turn to greet Hruse, but crossed her arms and continued to stare out into the mist.

“You are not yet Rook,” the All-Mother said finally, breaking the silence.

“Rook was always me, though.”

The fragment made a noise, almost a snort of laughter. “He has influenced you.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“I survive here, a shade of my former self. Unable to return to the world or the true Fade. But you knew this already.” She turned slightly, just enough to see Hruse in her periphery. The glow of her eyes was less intense seen sideways. “All I can do is watch. What is and what has been. Much of what is to come is hidden from me. I am no longer embodied, but I have not returned to spirit either. I cannot part the veils of time as I once could. But I do not need to in order to know what has befallen the world you come from. Death clings to you like a cloak. I can sense the touch of June’s magic on your skin.”

The pattern of lightning that ran from her right shoulder, down her torso and across her back. She’d recovered, obviously, but it had been a near thing. Solas had poured just as much magic into healing them as was used to inflict them. The scars were a reminder of what even fragments could do.

“The world ended, Mythal. We could have allowed it, or we could choose to fix it.”

“And if you do not?” She turned fully to Hruse then, her expression supercilious. “Do you know where your choices will lead you?”

“No, I don’t. But if I do nothing, then it will have been for nothing.”

“A sad state, is it not? That so much falls upon your shoulders for believing in Fen’Harel.”

Hruse gave the fragment a hard look. “The same could be said for him. He followed you. And now we are here.”

“So this is my fault?”

“Isn’t it? You wanted his counsel and wisdom, then ignored it at every turn. And yet, he continued to be loyal right up until you betrayed him, you lied to him. Who did you think you were fooling, that you would control someone like Elgar’nan? You wanted the power being worshiped as a god gave you just as much as the rest. Be honest about that, now at long last. Even if it’s just with yourself. Who else’s fault can it be?”

“The memories you found of his are nothing more than the cultivation of a twisted tree, reaching for the sun. A narrative he wanted you to trust in order to make himself the victim.”

“No,” Hruse shook her head. She pulled the cord out of her shirt, displaying the jawbone. It glittered in the light of this pocket of the Fade in a way it never did in the waking world. “No, I saw much more than that.”

Mythal actually backed away from her, even though she wasn’t corporeal enough to touch the necklace. But just that movement was damning, and she knew it. Her mask of superiority had slipped, and she’d shown Hruse that she knew what fear was. She couldn’t argue against the untainted truth held within the bit of bone. Hruse tucked it away.

“It’s been centuries since a petitioner stood before me, and you are thus far a sorry one. What is it you wish?”

“To hide the focus here. I know he has not come to this place, nor will he. And it is protected from whatever might happen in the future.”

“And so you would pass the burden onto me.”

Hruse stepped closer to her, nearly in her face. “It is just, don’t you think? Every burden he ever carried came from you. I think it’s time you took back some of the weight.”

Mythal glared at her, eyes narrowed to slits that glowed all the more intensely for it. If she decided to go full rage, Hruse wasn’t sure she would prevail. Even as a fragment, she held power. “I will not let a mortal child lecture me on justice. For what possible reason would I do this?”

“Because you know I’m right. He never wanted a body, he never wanted a war with the Titans, he never wanted any of this. And I did not want to watch the world drown and die from the blight you caused. If you will not hold yourself accountable for past actions, what gives you the right to pass judgment over anyone else?”

“Because I am a…”

“No, you’re not a god. You never were. Face that fact.” Hruse reached into her pack and withdrew the burlap wrapped orb. She held it between them like it might burn them both, and maybe it would. “Someday I will be back to claim it. And at that time, I will ask you to release him from the duty that has haunted his every step for thousands of years. Because that is what it will take to save the world. Not the biggest weapon, or the strongest magic. But release. A simple thing, Mythal. Let him go.”

Mythal curled in on herself, backing away from the orb and the hard truths Hruse laid at her feet. “As you wish, mortal. But do not think to find me so welcoming again.”

Hruse scoffed. “I didn’t find you welcoming this time, All-Mother. Protector. Do you even know what those words mean? If this is the kind of parenting you practiced, you make me glad I never had to suffer it.”

She thought maybe she’d gone too far considering the face Mythal made at her. But then the fragment waved her hand, and a slender pillar of stone lifted itself from the floor of the arena. Its top leveled out, a plinth upon which to lay the focus of Fen’Harel.

“Leave it, if you are going to. And then begone.”

Hruse bowed her head – she didn’t have to like her to be respectful – and hopped down into the arena to do what she came to. She didn’t worry that Mythal would try to take the stored magical energy for herself, the resulting backlash would do irreparable damage to the Fade. This was as safe as any place could be to keep it hidden.

She placed the sack on the plinth, then untied the strings so the burlap fell away, leaving it exposed. Faint green tendrils wafted off the surface and she had to tear her eyes away from its mesmerizing effect. She looked up to see Mythal watching her, no longer defensive or combative. Just...existing. As she had for millennia, alone. If she had just slightly more empathy, Hruse would have felt sorry for her. But she was the architect of all, and remorseless for it. Hruse had been on too much of the receiving end of it to ever be forgiving.

She climbed out of the arena and passed by Mythal without another word. She could already see the Caretaker assembling themself and the boat as she walked back up the hill.

Chapter Text

One might think that with the orb hidden, Hruse was free and clear. That everything would change accordingly and the world would be saved without her having to do anything else. That she could live out this life, alone but safe, until she crossed her own timeline.

Hruse did not think that. Her work was only half done. Perhaps not even half. She still had to find Solas, after all. And convince him not to try and tear the Veil down now. Or any time in the near future. She had to show him what she knew, of what she’d lived through. And then she needed to get him to agree to see the fragment he’d tucked away and left there, too ashamed to face with each passing day. Not to mention, the dagger was still out there. She had to get that hidden away too before it fell into the wrong hands.

And with that thought in mind, she went to Kirkwall.

There were two ways she could go about this. She could try to sneak onto the island of the Gallows and steal the dagger – still in its corrupted idol form – from the body of Meredith Stannard, not a pleasant prospect to say the least. Or she could try to gather some information first. She decided the latter would be smarter. She was somewhat out of step with the latest news of the mage rebellion, and didn’t know how much time she had before events really started moving. It had taken her weeks just to get things in order for her journey into the Marches. Somewhere in the midst of it, the new year turned. It was 9:41, and the Conclave would be soon. She intended to be present for that, to make sure things didn’t go awry.

She eventually found the Hanged Man, the tavern Varric had spoken of so often with such a mix of nostalgic affection and derision. It was a busy night, evidently, and she was barely able to squeeze into the place and find a stool to park herself on and drink watery ale. Raucous voices were all around her, but no one bothered her. She was hardly the only person who was there seeking solitude, or at least giving the impression of it. She listened to gossip, parsed it from what she knew of the past – her past, anyway – and didn’t bother to correct anyone who’d gotten things blatantly wrong. She honestly didn’t know if they had, considering things were already changing in the timeline.

A rich chuckle reached her ears amidst the sudden chanting for a tale and she swiveled on her stool in time to see Varric himself hop up on a tabletop and begin making grandiose gestures to quiet down the crowd.

He was...so young. So alive.

The ale sat heavy in her stomach watching him weave his unique brand of magic over the tavern. A story held forth, every eye on him, the center of attention. He was in his prime, gold winking from both ears, vibrant shirt outrageously open down his chest, a leather duster sweeping around him. His crossbow was not in evidence, but she imagined it wasn’t far away. She couldn’t look at him too long, she felt like she might burst out sobbing. She looked past him instead, to the table upon which he stood. A couple of familiar faces were there, as well as some she’d never gotten to meet but could pinpoint.

Isabela, and Merrill. Sitting side by side with the elf leaning against the pirate in an intimate way. The other elf, Fenris, scowling up at Varric but showing no signs of leaving. Aveline, the guard captain, the one who would go on to hold the city-state together in just a few years. Another man sat with her, his arm around her shoulder. Her husband, Hruse presumed. Hawke was not there, of course. She’d been gone for years by now.

And the fact that Varric is here, enthralling the masses, means that he probably hasn’t been taken in for ‘questioning’ yet, she thought. She’d thought that directly after that whole incident with the Seeker that they’d left to join Divine Justinia.

So many things happened all at once, didn’t they?

The mage rebellion, Solas waking, the orb falling into Corypheus’ hands, Varric’s interrogation and then the Conclave. All within the span of months. All things she’d only ever known second and thirdhand. And now she was watching them unfold before her eyes.

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t stay and watch this man that she’d known so briefly but so well at a point when he was younger and happier than she’d ever known him. She couldn’t stand to hear his voice, more carefree and jovial, without the weight of the Inquisition already on him, without the permanent loss of Hawke to grieve him. She stumbled out of the Hanged Man and gulped air on the street, only to choke on the smog that clung to Lowtown.

Yeah, it’s a shit hole, but it’s home, he’d said to her once.

Eyes streaming and throat closing up on her, she ran from the neighborhood into the darkness, shoving people out of her way without thought. Her feet carried her down to the docks, where the Gallows sat silent and empty across the bay. From here, she couldn’t see the damage from the night Anders had blown up the Chantry and so much chaos ensued, but she knew it was there. Once the mages fled, few ventured onto the island, not even to repair the damage. She’d heard many different accounts of that night. The fighting, the abominations and blood magic. The horror of Meredith turning into a statue of red lyrium because the idol had consumed her. In contrast, this was almost peaceful.

Peaceful enough that no one would see you row a boat over there, she thought.

There were a number of small ones tethered to the docks. For fishing, she assumed. Or maybe there was a brisk tourism trade of going to the empty Gallows for the morbid, who knew? Either way, nobody stopped her. Her arms burned quickly from the exertion, but the bay wasn’t all that big, and it hadn’t taken her long to get halfway there already.

She’d been preparing herself mentally for the screaming, sucking madness of Fen’Harel’s most terrible weapon, but she hadn’t felt it yet. There, in the middle of the water, the stars shining down on her fitfully through the miasma of forge smoke, she stopped rowing, her heart stuttering in her chest.

Fool, she chided herself after a moment. You aren’t a mage anymore, you can’t feel lyrium like you used to.

Right. Of course.

She pulled the oars again, her palms complaining with each stroke, but managed to get the dinghy to bump against the stockade of the pier at the ancient fortress turned Circle turned ruin. She tied it off and clambered up a half rotted ladder, setting foot in a place generally considered cursed now.

She should have been able to feel the pull of the blighted Titan’s blood from here, regardless of her mage or non-mage state. Especially after years of carrying the sodding thing herself.

She didn’t.

The dagger was already gone.

Chapter Text

She crept forward in the dark, looking for where she’d heard the frozen statue of the Knight-Commander should be, but found only a shattered and empty plaza. She could see where other statues had been, the ones that had seemingly come to life during the battle between Meredith and Hawke. And she could see remnants of other structures in the distance, holes and cracks making the whole place look even more forlorn than it was. But no remains, turned to lyrium or otherwise.

“What?” she said out loud before she could stop herself. Panic started to rise in her throat.

No, no, this is too soon. It should still be here! Solas didn’t get his hands on the dagger in my time until after the Inquisition. Well after it.

Then again, she also knew it had changed hands several times before he got it back. With no clear timeline for when that happened.

She heard the clink of metal on stone and saw movement in her periphery just before something slammed into her from all sides. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, could barely see. She fell to her knees, tasting lyrium on the air as she gasped through her mouth frantically. She managed to tilt her head and saw plate mail and a helmet, emblazoned with the symbol of the Chantry. A naked sword pointed towards the ground, almost ritually. The previous panic at finding the dagger missing shifted into more immediate concern for her situation.

Templars!

She lost consciousness.

THERE YOU ARE. Six eyes looked down at her from above, pinning her in place as handily as the Smite that should not have worked on her. The Veil was whole. She wasn’t a mage anymore.

That’s not the important bit right now, she scolded herself.

None of the eyes blinked or wavered in any way. They were far larger than she knew they should be, almost like Ghilan’nain’s face in the clouds over Weisshaupt. She was trapped and more raw fear flooded her body without her permission. It would draw things to her that she didn’t want or need right now. Fen’Harel gazed at her as dispassionately as one might look upon a beetle scrabbling through the grass. Hruse prepared herself for the blow, but it didn’t come. Neither did any angry spirits.

YOU WILL BE COLLECTED.

And then he was gone.

Torchlight stabbed her eyes as she opened them. She knew it was dim, since most of the area was cast in deep shadows, but the flames were a literal blazing point of light that couldn’t be avoided. She rolled over and promptly vomited what little was left in her stomach. Mostly ale and bile. She groaned as she tried to scoot back away from the puddle of sick as it oozed across the stone floor and heard a chuckle from behind her.

Throbbing head and rebelling stomach forgotten, she turned.

“Varric Tethras?” she exclaimed. Or tried to. What came out was barely a whisper.

The dwarf smirked at her and shifted himself around to be more comfortable. She could see that his wrists were in manacles. Just like hers were, come to think of it.

“Nice to find a fan in such a place. So, what did you do?” His tone was soft, as if in deference to her sorry state.

“Trespassed, I guess.”

“You don’t seem like the type.”

Now it was her turn to smirk, albeit only slightly. She managed to get herself propped against the wall of the cell – for that was indeed what it was – and blocked the torchlight with her hands. “You can tell types by looking, can you?”

“Yeah, most of the time. You seem like the determined kind. Ah well, I suppose it tracks. The straightforward ones are always the ones that get caught. Saw you last night, didn’t I? In the ‘Man?”

She hadn’t suspected he’d seen her at the bar. Then again, she’d made a rather abrupt exit, probably highly visible from his position on top of the table. He confirmed it with his next words.

“I know Corff’s ale is awful, but is it that bad that you had to run out of there?”

“I…” Words failed her. Shit shit shit. She was not supposed to be locked up in a cell next to Varric.

Not yet, anyway.

Thanks, brain.

“I heard them talking,” he went on as if he hadn’t noticed her start and stop. “Found you in the Gallows, huh? The Templars don’t like having odd folks appear out of thin air at night, makes them a bit twitchy. What were you doing there?”

“I was just...looking.”

He chuckled again. “Another one coming to poke at Meredith. She’s not there anymore.”

“Evidently.”

His eyes sharpened on her. What had he just heard in her timbre to make him suspicious that quickly?

She was saved from finding out by the door of the jail opening, spilling light from outside into the darkness. Two figures entered, one tall, muscular, and self-assured. The other smaller, covered in a cowl, but no less confident. Cassandra Pentaghast and Sister Leliana.

“Bring him,” the Seeker barked and a few guards came in to haul Varric out of his cell. “Time to talk, dwarf.”

He grumbled something Hruse didn’t catch over the banging of the cell door. She flinched from the sound of it against her too sensitive eardrums.

“And this one?” Leliana asked, gesturing towards her. She’d met the future Divine precisely once. She looked almost entirely the same, despite the intervening years. Soft features belied by the cunning in her eyes. They missed nothing, roving over Hruse in her stolen Elvhen gear from head to toe.

“Does not interest me,” Cassandra snapped impatiently. “She is just a street rat, caught at the Gallows after dark. Drunk, no doubt,” she gestured to the puddle of sick now making its olfactory presence known. “Let her sleep it off and be on her way.”

“The Gallows,” Leliana mused. She smiled briefly – and in no timeline would Hruse describe it as ‘friendly’ – then turned on her heel to follow the Seeker out of the jail. Hruse had a sinking feeling she hadn’t seen the last of the infamous Nightingale.

She groaned again and let herself topple over onto the moldy straw on the floor. It wasn’t like she had anything left to throw up anyhow. She closed her eyes and just breathed.

You will be collected.

Fuck, just what she needed. She had to get out of here. And soon.

Chapter Text

The Templars only kept her for two days. She didn’t have a history in the city-state and, upon rather forceful ‘asking’ for a demonstration, she couldn’t produce any magic. They had no reason to keep her, and thankfully were not so corrupt that they decided to simply execute her. She was still weak and shaky upon her release, but she attributed that more to the horrible conditions in the jail than any remnants of the Smite.

Which really shouldn’t have worked, she thought again.

Don’t worry about it now, she argued with herself. Just get out of here before whoever Solas has sent arrives.

Where was the nearest Eluvian, anyway? She had no idea.

She mingled in Lowtown, sticking mostly to the market, blending in with the crowds. She was able to buy some food, although there wasn’t much that she was willing to eat on offer. She rented a room in a seedy inn at the docks, having to brandish a dagger only once at a pickpocket who thought she might be easy pickings. She was half afraid the bed would have some manner of vermin, but she woke without itching anywhere, and felt more like herself after a decent night’s rest. Fen’Harel had left her alone.

The gossip in the market was that the Seeker was keeping the notorious Varric Tethras in custody, so he could tell his tale to the Divine. And that they would be leaving soon, taking the majority of the remaining Templars with them. Including the Knight-Captain, who’d been in acting command since That Night. Even in the whispers she could hear the emphasis.

Cullen Rutherford, she remembered. Commander of the forces of the Inquisition. She’d never gotten to meet him. But she assumed her survival of the ordeal at the jail was due to his current leadership.

The crowds swelled to watch the Seeker and her entourage head out, and Hruse joined them, hoping the numbers would hide her. It would have worked too, but she’d gotten pushed to the forefront somehow, and was in a direct line of sight of the Nightingale as she rode by. Leliana drew up short and passed a quick order back through the ranks. Armored men approached and Hruse had nowhere to go. The throng was too close. She could have put up a fight and made it all worse, but decided perhaps quiet surrender might be wiser. At least they didn’t put her back in irons. They just made her walk with them. Varric, she saw, was mounted on a pony, wrists still shackled. He gave her a long look, then a wry grin. She returned it.

Well, this wasn’t how she’d planned to start their acquaintance over, but it was what she had.

They marched to the docks and were unceremoniously loaded onto a ship bearing Orlesian sails. The Seeker had already disappeared to speak with the captain, while Leliana ordered people about, getting themselves and their prisoners settled. Once more Hruse found herself sharing space with Varric.

“You caught her eye,” he said by way of greeting.

“So I did.”

“You got a name since we keep crossing paths?”

Hruse froze. What was she supposed to tell him? Her real one? It was uncommon, especially outside of Nevarra, and it wouldn’t be that hard to discover that another woman – of her exact features with black hair and bright gray eyes, if far fewer scars – existed. But she couldn’t bring herself to say the nickname he’d given her in that other timeline.

Varric was watching her as she turned these thoughts over in her head. Outside of the bars of the brig where they’d been placed, a scout set down a covered crate that squawked indignantly. Ravens.

She opened her mouth, completely unsure of what might come out of it, when he scoffed softly.

“I know,” he said, turning his canny eye and smirk on her. “Rook. So far you’ve been quite the harbinger. Seems to fit.”

“A harbinger?” she asked, shock taking the place of reticence. Before, he’d called her that because she ‘tended to think in straight lines’. But she wasn’t that woman anymore. She’d hoped he would call her something else.

He was still smirking, but it wasn’t in any accusatory way, despite his next words. “One minute I was minding my own business, having a normal night at the ‘Man. Then this woman dashes out of the bar, and the next thing I know, I’m clapped in irons by a remarkably stabby Seeker of Truth. And now I’m here. And so are you. So, Rook, what’s next on the foreshadowing agenda?”

She didn’t know what to say to that. Not one single thing came to mind that wouldn’t secure her a position permanently shackled in a dungeon under the watchful eye of Sister Leliana.

“Eh, I’m just teasing,” he went on before she had to come up with something. “Still, I think the name fits.”

“If you say so,” she managed.

“You know where we’re going?” he asked, in a tone that said he knew, but he was wondering how much she did.

She did know. But she couldn’t say so. She shook her head.

“A little town called Haven. In the middle of nowhere in Ferelden. Doesn’t that just tickle the funny bone? I get the feeling that it’s going to be anything but recuperative.”

You’d be right, she wanted to say. Instead, she slumped against the bars of the brig, trying to find somewhere reasonably comfortable for when the ship cast off and the waves carried them back across the Waking Sea.

“Why are we going there?” she asked instead, finally finding her wits enough to bluff her way through this.

“The Divine has called a meeting between the mages and Templars. Seems she’s finally ready to step in with all her Maker-given authority to put an end to it.” He shrugged. “The Seeker thinks I should tell the Most Holy the same story I told her. How Hawke is the last person they want to have leading their Inquisition.”

“She told you that they’re going to bring back the Inquisition?”

“Not in so many words. But I’ve got a good eye. I saw the Writ. She has it with her. Nothing that big should be handwritten, let me tell you. And anything that is, is bad news.”

No shit, she thought. Above them, they heard the anchor clang into place as it was lifted from the water and then the subtle movement of the ship as it slipped out of its moorings. The journey would be short across the Sea, but then it would be a forced march to Haven, which Hruse knew was a good ten day hike with the start of an army at their back.

It was really happening, whether she liked it or not. But at least she’d slipped the leash of Solas’s agent.

Small mercies, Rook. Very small indeed.

Chapter Text

Hruse knew how lucky she’d been on her travels not to come across much violence. The snowcat she’d encountered on the path from Skyhold didn’t count, to her mind, since she’d chased it away before it could swipe at her. But she wasn’t surprised when, a week into their cross country march south from the coast, that violence found them.

They’d confiscated her weapons, of course. Hers and Varric’s. When the knot of desperate mages and withdrawal-maddened Templars spilled out of the trees, fighting each other initially, she took off in the direction of the wagon where they were being carried. It was only seconds before the fighting encompassed their procession. In the pandemonium of that first skirmish, no one was watching the baggage anymore. Hruse ducked under the canvas, rummaging quickly through the jumble. She found Bianca easily given the crossbow’s distinctive size and shape. For herself, it didn’t matter as much; she was used to all sorts of daggers and bows. She took the first ones she found and jumped down in time to need them as a Templar came at her, sword raised. Bianca landed in the mud, but Hruse didn’t lose her head. Literally. She parried the Templar back until she could get inside their guard and end it quickly.

The knight coughed blood on her from the wound she’d put in their throat and she barely turned her head away fast enough to avoid getting it in her eyes. The leather of her coat she could wipe down later. She was sure it was hardly the first time this armor had seen combat.

“Varric!” she shouted, tossing Bianca to him when he turned, having already slipped out of the saddle of his pony. She scowled back at the frown he gave her for finding mud along the arms and gestured to the body at her feet. With an eloquent rolling of his eyes, he joined the fray. She lost sight of him as the fighting turned earnest.

She shot the bow when she could, taking out targets at a distance, usually mages. She ran out of arrows fast, and had to start picking them off the dead and wounded to make up the difference. She closed her ears to the cries and whimpers, closed her eyes to the needless death, and kept shooting at anyone who looked at her the wrong way. She’d always hated battles, but she’d grown used to them, both in her time with the Veilguard and after the Veil fell.

She knew she could have slipped away in the confusion, gotten free and left them to their own devices. But that had never been her way. The same Hruse Ingellvar who’d ended the War of the Banners to her own detriment was still inside her. She would never abandon a righteous cause or a comrade, even those who weren’t exactly friends.

Yet, she thought, dodging another Templar’s attack. The road had been churned into a complete mess and she was starting to lose her footing in the mud. But she was able to dance away out of range.

She’d figured that the knights that had followed their Captain out of Kirkwall were well trained, and they showed it in how they kept formation. She even saw the blond head of Cullen Rutherford out there, wielding a broadsword almost larger than he was. They were all quick and efficient, half the assailants being their former brethren notwithstanding. Victory was honestly a foregone conclusion. In a brief moment when no one was actively attacking her, she saw the Seeker draw upon her abilities. Hruse had never seen anything like it, not even among the various ways Solas and the Evanuris – fragmented or otherwise – could manipulate magic. Cassandra thrust her sword down into the ground and a sort of chime sounded, more in Hruse’s head than in the air. The ring of combatants around her fell, all at once, screaming and writhing as if their blood was on fire.

Hruse didn’t see the archer behind a tree until it was too late, however. All she saw was a small blur, rapidly approaching, and threw up her arm as if she could block the projectile with more than the narrow span of her bones.

The arrow didn’t land.

Well, it didn’t land on her. What it did do was fall to the ground.

She’d somehow encased herself in a barrier.

“What the…?”

She suddenly remembered her fingers brushing the orb as it rolled off her ragged cloak. Electricity buzzing under her skin, rising into an inescapable frenzy until she’d blacked out.

She’d cast Fade Cloak on herself while hiding from Fen’Harel in the Fade.

The Smite had worked on her.

She had just been able to hear the Seeker using her ability, which she knew came from the spirit who’d touched her during her vigil.

And most damning of all, Fen’Harel could find her while she dreamed, no matter where she was. A non-mage would not be so visible in the Fade.

She cut herself off from her swearing, seeing the archer shot down by the Nightingale. Yet another mage was heading Hruse’s way. The barrier was still up and held as the spell bounced harmlessly off of it. She lifted the bow, using the arrow that had been meant for her, and shot them down. The battle was mostly over now. She saw Leliana remain perched on top of the wagon holding the baggage, her form elegant against the backdrop of carnage. Varric was wiping his brow and still scowling about Bianca being dirty. He’d slipped his manacles at some point, she saw. Cassandra…

...was stomping in Hruse’s direction, a long cut in her cheek bleeding openly but in no way distracting her. She aimed her sword at Hruse’s heart, her stance firm and ready for any reaction. Her face twisted into an angry sneer, pulling on the cut and making a fresh line of blood spill onto her gambeson.

“You! Are an apostate!”

Every head turned their way.

Fuck.

Chapter Text

Hruse was frozen to the spot. What could she say to defend herself? Certainly not the truth. No one would believe her and she’d be executed before she could even find Solas. She couldn’t say that she was under orders, they’d assume she was a spy. Same end result. The risk of exposing her true identity was high; the Nightingale’s agents were thorough and would undoubtedly find the younger version of her, happily living in Nevarra City. But it might be her only recourse here.

“I am not an apostate,” she said, trying to keep the waver out of her voice.

“Do you deny the magic you just did?” Cassandra asked, still sneering, still holding her sword aimed at Hruse.

“No. But being an apostate implies that I left a Circle. I didn’t.”

Careful, this is a cat and mouse game with very real consequences, she warned herself.

Leliana had joined them now, slinging her bow casually onto her back. She tilted her head at Hruse, her scrutiny far more calm than the Seeker’s blistering temper. “You do not have the look of a common hedge mage.”

“Because I’m not that either.”

“Tell us who you are!” Cassandra demanded, her patience obviously hanging on by a thread. Hruse drew herself up as straight as she could.

“I am Hruse Ingellvar, of the Grand Necropolis Mourn Watch.”

The swordpoint dropped as Cassandra took a step away from her, almost involuntarily it appeared. The sneer hadn’t left her face, but it changed, becoming more disgusted than angry. “Mortalitasi.”

“No,” Hruse said. “I’m not a necromancer. In fact, my magic has never been that strong. I was trained in the Watch as a guard.”

Not a lie, but not the whole truth. Yes, she’d served the Watch as a guard. But her magic was only not strong in comparison to Solas’s. After the Veil fell in the other timeline, she was powerful indeed under his tutelage. The scant handful of years without the smothering effect of his creation had allowed some latent ability to come to the surface, or perhaps it was the blood magic connection he’d made while trapped in his own prison that had done it. It could even have been her upbringing among spirits and the nature of the Necropolis itself, considering the unknown circumstances of her birth. It was another sign that she might have elven heritage. Not to mention the Veil was paper thin in the Necropolis to begin with, if not completely missing.

Regardless, there was a time that Hruse could call upon magic as easy as breathing and it wasn’t that long ago for her subjectively. Being back in the past had changed that, with the Veil whole. Changed, but evidently not wholly erased.

“In extremis,” Leliana said softly. She turned to the Seeker, although she didn’t let Hruse out of her sight. “She can only do it when the need is dire.”

“And I’d say saving her own life in the middle of a battle counts as dire,” Varric drawled. He still held Bianca in his hands. “Besides, Seeker, what does it matter? The Circles have all fallen. She didn’t join the rebels. She jumped right in to help us save our own skins. Maybe cut her some slack.”

“The control on that barrier was not what I would call unpracticed,” Cassandra said.

“Hey, I never said I didn’t have some magical education, just that it wasn’t in a Circle. Nor was it the focus of my training,” Hruse tossed back. The pair of women glared at each other.

“Why were you in Kirkwall?” Leliana asked. Cassandra still hadn’t relaxed from her defensive stance, but now she had a look of curiosity on her face rather than the fury she’d had moments before.

“I just wanted to see…”

Varric chuckled. “Makes sense now, I guess. Even in Nevarra, they would have heard about the Knight-Commander’s little trick. I’d be interested too if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

It broke the tension. Mostly. The Seeker lowered her guard and pulled the sword away. Leliana looked thoughtful. Cullen, now that he’d joined them, simply frowned. As a Templar, he likely didn’t want to think about anyone using magic unsupervised. Or maybe he didn’t like Varric’s flippant response regarding Meredith.

“Are you saying you were under orders?” Leliana asked. Hruse swore internally. She should have guessed that the questioning would lead them here anyway.

“Not...exactly.”

“Speak plainly,” Cassandra snapped.

“I went to Kirkwall of my own volition,” Hruse replied. “I’m not under orders of the Watch. But…”

“Yes?”

“It’s like he said. The news has traveled far. I wanted some answers.”

Eh, more or less, she thought.

Varric snorted. “And instead you got mixed up in this. Congratulations, Rook. You got more than you bargained for.”

A greater understatement had never been uttered.

Cassandra sheathed the sword, as if that made a decision. “Cullen, keep an eye on her. We need to move out.”

“You need to have that cut seen to,” Leliana countered. “We’ll make camp here. Don’t argue with me,” she added when the Seeker opened her mouth to do just that. “We can’t afford to lose you to something so foolish.”

“Fine,” Cassandra spat, then stalked away to start ordering the nascent Inquisition to make camp. One of the few healers who’d followed them out of Kirkwall dashed off to the baggage train to retrieve their supplies.

Cullen stared hard at her and she concentrated on making herself look confident under his glare. Like she had nothing to be ashamed of. After a moment, his eyes slid away and he too left them to help unpack and set up tents. Varric simply pulled a rag from his pocket and began wiping Bianca down, grumbling under his breath about possible damage. Leliana spared her another long look.

“This isn’t the end of the conversation,” the Nightingale said.

“No, I didn’t think it would be.”

She nodded, nodded again at Varric, then left.

“Right,” Varric said, forcefully cheerful. “That was a mess.”

“Thanks for the defense.”

“Well, you needed it.” He shook his head ruefully. “I really did give you the right nickname, didn’t I? Sometimes I think I need to keep my mouth shut.”

“What do you mean?”

“The world is changing. From what I’ve seen, it’ll get worse before it gets better. And here you are, a little black bird ahead of the storm.”

“Is that what you think I am? A rook flying over a battle, waiting to feast on the dead? I’m Mourn Watch, Master Tethras. The dead are sacred to me.”

He’d gotten Bianca as clean as he could without taking it apart to get into the mechanisms. He shouldered the crossbow and looked up at her, all trace of mirth gone. “I think we’re gonna have plenty of them. And that’s not exactly a comfort.”

“No, it’s not.”

They turned together towards the camp being built. Varric went off on his own, probably somewhere he could stay out of the way – he’d never been the outdoorsy type, and she knew the coming years weren’t going to change that – but she grabbed another tent and started to assemble it. She’d survived this encounter, but she didn’t count that as meaning much of anything. It was all just beginning.

Chapter Text

Haven was about what she expected it to be. A small collection of cottages thatched with sod rising to a peak where the Chantry stood, overshadowing them all. The village was in three tiers, and below there was a pond, frozen over with the winter season, before rising again into the foothills of the Frostbacks. It was obvious the usual residents were simple folk, mostly clerics seeking solitude. They were in charge of the upkeep at the Temple of Sacred Ashes, some miles away up a mountain trail.

Mages, Templars, assorted Grand Clerics and nobles with their entourages poured into the little village day by day, straining it to bursting. Hruse caught sight of Josephine Montilyet on the first afternoon after her own arrival with the Right and Left Hands. The Ambassador had come with a cohort from some Orlesian house or other. The rumor mill had it that Leliana had invited her.

Makeshift barracks went up in the small valley, and that was where most of them were sleeping as the nobles took over the Chantry and the houses. There was a sense of busyness without purpose as she wandered through the town. A whole lot of gossip and very few facts. Tempers ran high between the factions, and she’d heard of a couple fights breaking out. She had been given leave to wander freely, although she had to check in with Cullen morning and night. He was a man of few words, she discovered.

Or it might just be that he’s so busy he can’t think, she told herself. Running an army while suffering lyrium withdrawal had to be utterly exhausting.

But it meant that she would have to brave the Nightingale if she wanted to deliver her observations.

There were Venatori here.

There were plenty of shifty eyes and furtive meetings going on throughout the assemblage. And if she didn’t know that Corypheus was out there, plotting, she might not have been suspicious. But there were too many instances of happening upon a small knot of people in a variety of dress that would not mingle so obviously in Southern Thedas. Mages would not openly speak with nobles. Not here, not while they were in the middle of a rebellion. Not so often without ever being the same person twice. And tucked away in an out of the way spot she’d found a cache of weapons that were distinctly Tevinter in make.

She remembered Crater Lake in Arlathan, and Elgar’nan’s ascension of Lusacan. She and the others had infiltrated the Venatori ranks in disguise to save the Dalish clan from sure death by sacrifice. She remembered what Neve said about blood spilling being their religion. She shivered, because this was the starting point of the Venatori being in league with Corypheus. And under normal circumstances, he would arrive with the orb to try and unlock it so he could break into the Fade. The whole point of hiding it had been to prevent this from happening.

So why were they here?

Because blood spilling is their religion, she thought to herself. And even without the orb, there are enough ‘sacrifices’ here for Corypheus to attempt his plan anyway. He’s coming.

Infiltration amidst chaos. They were here because they were pulling off the same maneuver that she once had.

Hruse climbed the steps to the top tier and found Leliana in a pavilion facing the Chantry. The Divine was with her as they went over last minute plans for how to get this crowd up to the Temple for the actual meeting of the Conclave. Hruse stood at the pulled back sides of the pavilion, not wanting to interrupt them. The Nightingale was quick, though, and caught sight of her within seconds.

“Yes?”

“I’ve found something I think you should see.”

The Divine passed a look with her Left Hand and departed back to the Chantry. Hruse watched her go, hoping that wasn’t the last she’d see of her. Leliana, in turn, rolled up the parchment they’d been studying, which appeared to be a layout of the Temple. Hruse unwrapped one of the daggers she’d found and laid it on the table. She angled herself so anyone walking by wouldn’t see it.

“This is...Tevinter make,” Leliana said.

“It is. Have you seen them, the faces that don’t belong? I’m...concerned that there may be infiltrators intending to disrupt the Conclave.”

“I have seen them,” Leliana said. “I’m surprised that you have.”

“As a guard of the Mourn Watch, it is my job to notice things out of place.”

Leliana gave her an appraising stare, her face closed off and dispassionate. Finally she took a breath and turned her head in the direction of the Temple. “I have made inquiries, you know. The...being my agents spoke to…”

“Vorgoth?”

“Indeed. They confirmed your story. But that is not all I discovered.” She turned back to Hruse and her eyes were hard. “There is another sharing your name. A recruit, just starting her training. In the Mourn Watch. She bears a striking resemblance to you, from what I’m told.”

“I assumed you would find her. She is...related. But she doesn’t know about me.”

“But you know of her.”

“Yes.”

“You did not think to mention her before now. Are you protecting her?”

“Yes, from my presence. As I said, she doesn’t know me. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“This,” she gestured to the dagger, “does not help your case that you aren’t a spy. There are parts of your story that don’t line up. And here you are, with a tale of suspicion on your lips. Who do you work for, Hruse?”

You, she wanted to say. Because in a way it was true. Varric had only been on the trail of Solas because of Divine Victoria’s orders. The Inquisition – or the remnants of it, anyway – had been the ones who knew who Solas was and were trying to stop him.

“Right now? The greater good.”

That didn’t impress the Left Hand much. But she only let it show in the quirk of her eyebrow. “Where did you find this?”

“There is a cache hidden under the foundation of the cottage furthest out.”

“Where Master Taigen is staying? Do you suspect him of Tevinter sympathies?”

“Oh no, not at all. But in a village already remote, his house is remote from the rest. An ideal hiding spot. He likely doesn’t know they’re there.”

“But you found them.”

“Well, I went looking once I noticed how many...odd strangers there are in attendance.”

“There are many strangers here, and many who do not wish to see this conflict resolved for one reason or another. Or will try to sway the meeting to their side. I will take your concerns under advisement. And keep my eyes on them as I do on you, Watcher Ingellvar. I do not trust you.”

“I expected nothing less. But I couldn’t let this go without telling someone.”

“What do you think will happen?”

“At the very least? That they’ll try to assassinate the Divine.”

The Nightingale smiled, just a little. Again, it was not what Hruse would ever deem as friendly. “It is not the first time Most Holy has faced such a threat. Nor will it be the last, I’m sure. Your concerns are noted. You may go.”

There was nothing more she could do or say, so she left the pavilion, leaving the Venatori weapon in Leliana’s possession. She resolved to keep herself out of the way until the last moment. She knew what the cultists were capable of, although at this point in time they were weaker. They’d not yet come to their full power with the backing of creatures like Corypheus or Elgar’nan. But they were a threat. She just hoped Leliana took her seriously.

Her wanderings had taken her back down to the lowest tier of the village, near the forest that bordered it. She wasn’t sure where she was headed; she had no official duties or responsibilities here. It was not a good feeling, to be helpless.

An arm reached out and snagged her, pulling into the cover of the trees. Cold steel lay against her throat and she looked up into a face with a familiar black topknot, branching vallaslin, and violet eyes.

“Felassan!”

Chapter Text

The procession was beginning, Hruse heard it from the direction of the village. Felassan took note as well, and pulled her deeper into the trees. The blade never left her throat and she didn’t fight him.

“Fancy meeting you here, little bird. I’ve been watching you.” He’d also obviously heard someone call her ‘Rook’, since he’d drawn attention to it with such emphasis. “Where is it?”

She swallowed against the knife’s edge, feeling it dig into her skin but not cut. “Hidden.”

He lifted an eyebrow at her and looked unamused. “Tell me something I didn’t know.”

“No. That would defeat the purpose.”

“Do you know how many plans you’ve upset, little bird? How much trouble you’ve caused?”

“Yes. But Felassan, you touched the jawbone. You saw. You know what would have happened if he gave the orb to Corypheus.”

Finally, he pulled away, drawing the knife from her neck at the same time. He slumped against the nearest tree and scowled at the ground. Beyond their meager hiding place, booted feet marched past. An endless parade, which hopefully would all march back down again at the end and not be dead.

“Did he send you? Were you the one meant to ‘collect’ me in Kirkwall?”

“Oh, little bird,” he scoffed, then laughed outright. “No. You’re just lucky I found you first.”

“He came himself,” she intuited.

“He’s somewhere in the village. I followed him.”

She squinted at him. “He doesn’t know you’re here?”

“We aren’t exactly on speaking terms, if you recall.”

“Fair.” Hruse crossed her arms over her chest and peered through the trunks. Occasional buckles and belts glinted from the weak sunlight. But mostly she just saw the movement of all those people following the Divine up to the Temple. “Listen, there’s going to be trouble, I think. Even without the orb here, I think Corypheus is. I’ve found evidence of Venatori infiltrators.”

“Those would be the Tevinter supremacists, yes?”

“Right. In the other timeline, this was their rise to power. When Corypheus created the Breach.”

Understanding dawned on his face, lifting his vallaslin in concert with his brows. “That’s why you hid the orb. So the Veil wouldn’t be torn open.”

“Correct. Hard as it might be to believe, I don’t actually want Solas to not have his full power. I just want him to be smart about it. His plan to take the Veil down now...it’s too soon. He hasn’t made the necessary preparations. Because this world is worth saving, Felassan. You already know this.”

“Yes. Hence his attempt to kill me. He didn’t want to hear it.”

“He needs some time to figure it out himself. How long has he been awake?”

“A while. He should by rights still be familiarizing himself with the world as it stands now. But he has been somewhat angry.” He gave her a pointed look. No guesses needed as to why. Hruse gave him a rueful smile. He returned it. “I could get in his good graces again by handing you over, you know.”

“I know. Will you?”

“Haven’t decided yet.”

“What will you do with me in the meantime?”

“You have somewhere to be, little bird?”

“It’s Hruse,” she snapped. “And yes, I do. Leliana didn’t believe me that the Divine is in danger. So…”

“So...what? You’re going to save the woman yourself? Why bother?”

“Because chaos is what Corypheus wants. I don’t intend to let him have it.”

He smirked at her, looking entirely too much as he had in Solas’s memories of him. The same look had crossed Felassan’s face every time Solas made some grandiose statement. She scrunched her nose at him.

“Yes, I’m aware I’m just one person. But you do realize that I’m the same person who orchestrated the final and permanent deaths of both Ghilan’nain and Elgar’nan, right?”

“So you did, little bird. Hruse,” he corrected. He pushed off the tree and dusted himself off. “Fine, let’s go follow this nonsense to the Temple.”

“You’re coming with me?”

“Why not?” he shrugged. “All the better to keep you in my sight, and out of harm’s way.”

“I’m not defenseless.”

There went the eyebrow again. “And I snatched you into these trees like scooping up a nug. Let’s go, little bird, if you want to catch up to the stragglers.”

She only noticed then that he was dressed like any Dalish hunter, in muted browns and greens. No wonder she hadn’t seen him. She didn’t bother wasting her breath to be exasperated at his cavalier attitude, but instead drew her hood up over her head and slipped along the trees until they could tack themselves on to the end of the procession. He was still smirking, the aggravating man. But he said nothing else, simply following her lead.

The Temple of Sacred Ashes loomed ahead of them as the path came around a bend in the mountains. As architecture went, it wasn't anything special. Primitive, to her eye. But it was large. The crowd was already milling around as they waited. Felassan pulled her aside and they went around the Temple to another door. As much as he might act like he didn’t care what happened to humans, he certainly knew his way around their holy sites. But she couldn’t complain, since it got them inside.

They found a set of stairs and climbed it, hoping for a balcony where they could see everything. And so they did, coming out into a shadowed overhang that looked down on the whole of the interior. Hruse had no idea what sorts of rites were observed here, but it reminded her of the kind of space one might put a choir. It obviously hadn’t been intended to be used today, since it was dusty and unlit. As cover, it would do.

She looked down to see Divine Justinia taking her place at the head of the throng, flanked by Grey Wardens instead of Templars. Hruse supposed it made sense, since Wardens were supposed to be politically neutral. And they stood in positions as if they were guarding her. But she felt her heart drop into her stomach just the same. She knew what Corypheus had done to them in the other timeline.

“Felassan!” she hissed. “Look. Those Wardens...I think that’s how he’ll get in. Solas said he could hop bodies like an Archdemon. And they’re under his thrall.”

He looked over the railing of the balcony to the pair of Wardens armored up to their eyes. “How did he manage that?”

“He bound a dragon with his own life force. Like the Evanuris. And he made a deal with a demon to create a false Calling. He’s manipulating the blight in their blood.”

“Damn. Would he do something here, in front of everyone?” He gestured to the tightly packed bodies down below. The Temple was at capacity.

“He wants to claim godhood. What do you think?”

“Fair point.” He looked again, then at her with an expression that plainly said there wasn’t much they could do. Hruse sighed; he was right. All they could do was watch.

They didn’t have to wait long.

One of the Wardens began to twitch, then writhe. Then they exploded in a shower of gore. Corypheus rose out of the entrails as the onlookers began to scream and jostle each other in a panic to escape. He grabbed Divine Justinia and slit her throat with one long talon. Her blood hung in the air like a crimson mist, bending and weaving itself to his bidding. The screams grew in intensity but then went completely silent. Elsewhere in the crowd, more blood was being spilled. One by one, the hidden Venatori made themselves known, using blood magic to offer the Magister more power and to subdue the crowd in equal measure. One by one, that crowd was about to be sacrificed.

“Felassan…”

“We need to get out of here,” he finished for her, dropping a barrier over them both.

Chapter Text

Hruse and Felassan watched in almost stupefied dread as the Venatori methodically moved through the crowd, now passive and silent, perfectly motionless. Even as their throats were cut, adding their flowing blood to the writhing mist forming around Corypheus. The horror was compounded by how unhurriedly the Venatori worked, never flinching, barely even looking at their victims. They stood without fighting back or making a sound as they were slaughtered, their bodies hitting the ground with little more than an unceremonious smack when they no longer carried enough blood to keep upright. They were all being drained utterly. Under Felassan’s barrier, Hruse could feel the pull of the spell on her too, drawing her closer to the railing of the balcony so she might join the others in unknowing sacrifice.

“Hruse!” he hissed, pulling her back away from the leap she was about to make.

She shook her head to clear it. Her will was strong; she could fight this. Besides, Solas’s connection had never been broken, even though he’d stopped manipulating her through it after his escape from the prison. In fact, she’d agreed to leave it in place, as insurance against anything the Evanuris might try if they caught her. She could never be compelled to act against him by someone else’s will.

She wasn’t the only one fighting, she saw as soon as the fog lifted from her mind. Below, a skirmish had broken out. Blades flashed and arrows flew. The Venatori sent back spirals of magic to little avail. Hruse peeked over the edge and saw Aeda Cadash leading the foray with a dozen other dwarves at her back.

Of course, she thought. Dwarves are resistant to magic, even blood magic.

They’d barricaded themselves behind a pile of bodies, defending their corner of the Temple admirably. But sheer attrition would take its toll, no matter how ruthlessly the Carta could fight. Corypheus wasn’t likely to ignore them forever. Currently he was weaving the blood that had been spilled into an intricate sigil. But when he was done...

“We have to help them. Or stop him.”

“We are just two, little bird.”

She gave Felassan a flat stare. “Do you know what that sigil is for? He’s going to tear open the Veil and make a rift, possibly one large enough to walk through. That’s his plan, to break into the Black City. And when he does, all the varieties of fear drawn to this carnage will escape from it. And possibly some pride, considering he’s an enormous sack of hubris. Are you prepared to deal with both the Venatori and angry spirits?”

He frowned at her, but didn’t argue. From the inside pocket of his brown jacket he withdrew a stick of wood no bigger than his hand. Before her eyes it transformed into a staff, and he began raining fire onto the Venatori. Hruse grinned fiercely and drew her bow.

When she ran out of arrows, she tossed the bow aside and pulled her daggers. The leap would be considerable, but if she timed it right to use the Venatori to break her fall, and then roll with it…

Could work.

“Are you mad, Hruse?” Felassan snapped at her, evidently guessing what she had planned.

“Quite possibly,” she retorted, then jumped off the choir balcony railing. Muscle memory carried her through the motions as Lucanis taught her, her daggers becoming an extension of herself as she stabbed, spun and parried. The dwarves cheered and those armed with something heftier than a mere blade came out from behind their gruesome barricade to join her.

All around them stood the remaining passive forms of nobles, clerics, mages and Templars. Hruse targeted the Venatori who were trying to keep the blood flowing, picking them off as they frantically cut the gathered crowd to ribbons any which way. She had gotten separated from the others fighting back as she worked her way across the Temple, but she didn’t stop long enough for fear to set in. She kept one eye on Corypheus, who was still weaving his sigil together. It was beginning to glow from within, a lurid shade that was all the more sickening knowing it was living blood. She had to stop him from completing it.

She doubted she could kill him. Given his entrance into the Temple, he’d already bound a dragon and would simply take over another body. Which, while she was thinking of it, where had that other Warden gone?

She saw the gray and blue armored figure patiently standing at attention as if nothing was amiss. The level of thrall Corypheus wielded was terrifying.

“Felassan! Get rid of that Warden! Completely!”

He made some kind of response, it sounded vaguely affirmative. She turned her focus back on the towering monster in front of her. Red lyrium erupted from his body, warping his face and stretching his skin until it simply shredded. It was hard to tell where he ended and his robes began; they seemed fused into one. And there was no mistaking the fury and hatred in his gaze as he looked down at her, his hands still moving to shape the sigil.

“I’ve killed worse things than you, old man,” she gritted through her teeth, feeling more than hearing the screeching, discordant music of the lyrium this close. She bounced on her toes, finding her balance for this next move. She needed to get as high as she could and rip the sigil apart. She took a running start and jumped, her daggers poised to slice through the spell as if it was cloth.

Interrupted from the binding, the blood covered her in a sticky, warm gush. The momentum of her leap carried her right through it, the daggers finding purchase in the Magister’s torso. He roared and tried to swat at her as if she was a fly. She batted him back, hanging on by the hilt of one dagger, but she began to slip as she was entirely coated in slick blood. She reached out with her free hand instinctively to brace herself and her fingertips brushed against him.

All at once the music of the red lyrium filled her head, blinding and deafening her to anything else but its unspeakable cacophony. At the same time, she felt something move through her like lightning, centering at the place where her skin met his. The windows of the Temple blew out and she was suddenly airborne. She felt like the epicenter of a tornado, her spine vibrating from the concussive force, her head spinning. There was a crack like thunder in the instant before she was aware that her body had slammed into the floor of the Temple.

“Hruse!” She heard Felassan, but he sounded far away, too far for the distance.

Corypheus was advancing on her, menace in every line of him. Before he reached her, he was engulfed in a wall of fire accompanied by Felassan’s impassioned cry of exertion to keep it going. The last thing she saw was the shock on the Magister’s face as he burned and then she slipped away into the welcoming dark of oblivion.

Chapter Text

Hruse drifted in a timeless, formless place. Snatches of conversation passed in and out of her hearing, never stopping long enough for her to parse what the words were, much less who was saying them.

         “The Divine is dead! How do we know that was not her plan all along?”

          “She had nothing to do with that. She took on that monster by herself, with nothing more than a pair of daggers. She saved our lives! She saved everyone’s life!”

“She is lost in the Fade. Her mind has fragmented.”

          “You were worth that extra attention, weren’t you?”

“Well, shit, Rook. You had to go and be a hero. And I didn't even get to buy you a drink.”

                   “Let me know if anything changes.”

“There you are.” It was soft, gentle. She recognized it but couldn’t tell from where. “Follow the sound of my voice. That’s it.”

She began to have shape and substance again. The tattered ends of her own being had been carefully gathered and sewn back together, the edges uneven and overlapping, but whole. Each passing moment she felt stronger, more complete.

“Come now, let us return to the waking. Leave this place behind.”

She didn’t understand, but she didn’t have anywhere else she felt she needed to be, so she followed the sound. A spark in the darkness, that resolved into a wisp. Then many of them, coalescing into irregularly spaced eyes. Red, then blue. No, gray tinged with purple. A soothing color. A beloved one.

Not yours anymore.

“No, stay with me. Please, Hruse. Stay.” She knew that voice, and had heard it entreat her like that before, hadn’t she? Had she? “Come back.”

Come back to me…

Memories of other battles played in her head, a confused jumble of images and the clangor of weapons that faded away into nothing. She felt abruptly heavy, as if suddenly submerged under deep water. But even that passed.

She opened her eyes.

A scattered pattern of colors spun until she blinked her eyes clear. A ceiling, firelight, furniture seen only in her periphery. She could hear the crackle of the logs. Smell the smoke. She could feel something beneath her, soft and giving under her weight. Slightly lopsided as if something else was pressing down on it more in one spot.

She turned her head, just enough. And saw him sitting on the edge of the mattress.

“Welcome back,” Solas said. He looked...exhausted. He turned away from her to someone outside her line of sight. “If you would, tell Sister Leliana that she has awakened. The Seeker too.”

“Of course.” The voice was pitched low, but she recognized it. Felassan. She drew in a sharp breath, not sure what to expect from them in a room together after their last meeting.

Maybe spare some of that concern for yourself too, she thought, heart pounding. Your last meeting with the Dread Wolf wasn’t much better.

“What…?” She heard a door open and close, and then there was only the crackle of the fire again. Solas was giving her a very small smile.

“I suspect you have questions. I have some as well.”

“Where am I?”

“We are in Haven. Felassan carried you back from the Temple. You have been gravely injured.”

She remembered hitting the stone floor. The crack of thunder that could just as easily have been her spine. Or her skull.

“Aeda...the others…?”

“Mistress Cadash is fine, and is enjoying the perks of her current relative fame. She has been telling the story to any who might care to hear it.”

“Huh?”

He smiled again, and this one was a touch warmer. “How a human launched herself into a losing battle, saving her life and the lives of those with her, as well as those caught in the thrall of a creature that defies description.”

“Corypheus.”

Although his smile hadn’t waned, his gaze turned sharp. There was a wealth of knowing in that look. “Yes.”

“Can I...drink?”

“In a moment. First, can you feel your extremities?”

She wiggled her feet and fingers, the onset of pins and needles making them burn. She had been motionless for quite some time, apparently. She nodded, although it made her head spin again. Solas seemed satisfied and lifted her bodily until she was propped against the pillows at the head of the bed. He then held out a cup with a thin reed of a straw in it. She sipped carefully, tired already from the minimal effort it took. But he was patient, and held the cup without wavering until she was finished.

“Who are you, Hruse Ingellvar?” he asked as he set the empty cup down.

She took a moment to study him while he wasn’t looking at her. A knitted sweater over soft leather lacing. Patchwork breeches with more lacing presumably down his calves to his feet. It matched the memory Lace had said was around the time of the Inquisition. There was a necklace around his neck that she knew every minute ridge and plane of. It wasn’t as worn down as it would be in the future. Her hand landed on the spot hers should be resting, only then noticing she wasn’t in her Elvhen armor. With a jolt, she realized the jawbone was missing. Solas caught her movement and tilted his head in her direction.

“Felassan has it, if you are wondering. He would not let me touch it.” Under the words was a question. Why not?

“Probably smart, for now,” she said, answering the unspoken. “I’m not sure how you’d react without me there to explain.”

“You are out of place, are you not?”

“Just a bit,” she snorted, which then turned into a coughing fit as she choked on her still dry tongue. Her head pounded. “Time too.”

“Fascinating. I suppose that answers many questions on its own.”

“Oh?”

The look he gave her now was equal parts forbidding and sardonic. “I know you took the orb. What I did not understand was why.”

She laughed again, weak and despairing. It was that or burst into tears. “To prevent a catastrophe. Which ended up happening anyway. Well...more or less.”

The door opened again and she saw Felassan enter, followed by the Nightingale and the Seeker. Suddenly the cottage felt cramped and Hruse had trouble catching her breath. Solas remained seated next to her on the bed, and for a moment it felt like he was providing a physical barrier between her and the two Hands of the Divine. But that was foolishness, she thought. He had no loyalty to her, no urge to protect. Quite the opposite, in fact. What game was he playing?

“Thank the Maker,” Cassandra breathed out.

Solas made a noise in the back of his throat. “Begging your pardon, Seeker. I think perhaps I might have had more of a hand in her recovery than your Maker.”

“Of course,” Leliana said smoothly before Cassandra could sputter. “Do not think we aren’t grateful for your assistance.”

Right. He’s just a humble apostate, she thought to herself. Beware the forms of Fen’Harel…

“How are you feeling?” Leliana went on, directing the question to Hruse.

“I’m...alive.”

“And so are a good many other people who might otherwise not be,” the Nightingale continued with a quick look askance at the Seeker, as if proving a point. “I hear we have you to thank for it.”

“I told you I was working for the greater good.”

“So you did.” Leliana inclined her head. “I should have heeded you.”

Cassandra scoffed. “And the Divine?”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save her,” Hruse said. “It happened so quickly.”

“She needs to rest,” Solas interjected. “This conversation can wait.”

“But not too long. Decisions must be made,” said the Seeker.

Leliana looked like she had already made some, but was being diplomatically silent about it for the moment. Hruse might not know what would happen now, but whatever it was, she was likely to be at the center of it.

That’s not how this was supposed to go.

Well, that was rather the point, wasn’t it?

“Be that as it may,” Solas went on. “I must insist we give her more time. She has only just woken. And her injuries are not fully healed. But you wished to know when she woke. And so she has.”

“Come, Cassandra,” Leliana said. “We have seen her, as we wished to, and we have our reports of what happened. Let us leave her to recover.”

“Very well.”

They left, and Hruse looked between Solas and Felassan.

“Do I even want to know?”

Felassan smirked, and Solas looked grave. Hruse sighed.

“This has to do with the Inquisition, doesn’t it?”

Chapter Text

Solas got up from the edge of the mattress, throwing off her balance a little as the padding shifted without his weight holding it down. He crossed the cottage, keeping his back to her, but she could guess his expression. Felassan continued to smirk, at both of them, which told her that Solas was probably scowling. She knew he’d used the Inquisition to his own ends in the other timeline. Or at least, had set out to do that before he got attached to the people within it. She had to remember that he was not the man she knew, but the man he’d been before. Guilt-ridden, sorrowed and angry. But on behalf of the People, not humans.

He’s not going to want to help them, she thought. And as expected, his next words bore that out.

“Human organizations do not concern me,” he said over his shoulder, pinning her with his expression as if by merely staring at her hard enough, she’d confess what she’d done with the orb.

“This one should,” she replied. “Corypheus will try again. He will keep trying until he succeeds or is destroyed. And the madness he sows will spread far and wide. They’re going to need all the help they can get.”

“And once you have told me where you hid my orb, you may do so.”

She rather doubted that and made a face that said so. Felassan snorted.

“She has a point,” he said to Solas. “She knows things we do not, coming from where she does.”

Solas’s spine stiffened, making him stand taller. Rigid. He didn’t like the reminder.

Stubborn, she thought to herself. He had always been so stubborn.

His name is Pride.

No, his name is Wisdom. Pride is a corruption.

“We should probably talk about that,” she said aloud. “Well, you and I should, Solas. Felassan already knows.”

Solas turned just slightly, catching sight of his General from the corner of his eye. Felassan was unrepentantly grinning back at him. Solas completed his turn, so now he could look at Hruse head on. “How?”

“The jawbone,” she said. “It holds…”

“Ahh,” Solas breathed out, comprehension dawning. “It is imbued with memories.”

“Yes.”

“And the reason you did not want me to touch it without you present.” He said it flatly, but she heard the undercurrent of inquiry. No, he wasn’t the same man she knew in the future, but many things about him remained similar. He’d always used a polite mask to cover his true thoughts. And a pedantic tone to hide his frustration.

“Not all the memories in it are yours.” The other version of him had explained the magic behind the blending of their memories. It was part their connection, part Fade manipulation and part simple recitation of events from her perspective. His own were easily imprinted on the bone, after all. But one person’s observations were subjective, leading to fallibility in recall. Fact always lay somewhere between individual interpretations.

His head tilted. It struck her that it hadn’t occurred to him yet why she, a human, would bear his necklace instead of another elf. Or that she might have had a hand in crafting the memories with him. It didn’t appear to have occurred to him that he might ever bond with a mortal in any way. Which was fair, she supposed, given his very existence predated other races aside from dwarves. And what he’d seen of humans thus far was likely unflattering. She couldn’t blame him considering her own opinion of the Chantry and the Circles and everything they implied about the nature of the world was...low. Cumberland might be home to the College of Magi, but it was far from the Necropolis and its influence was not great among the Mortalitasi she’d grown up with.

“The future is mutable,” he said, in a tone that suggested that anything held within the mandible wasn’t something he cared to see. Hruse resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Had he always been so pigheaded?

You are asking for knowledge no mortal in this world is privy to. If I am to share it with you, I need to know what makes you the right person to lead the fight against Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain.

As if there had been another option. As if she wasn’t the only person able to gain the information because he was stuck in her head. She’d even tacitly called him on it, gesturing around the regret prison expansively to point out that there was no one else there. And he’d still demanded she prove her worth to him.

Yes, he’d always been pigheaded.

And you loved him anyway, she reminded herself.

She made a face at him and sucked her teeth. “That’s rather the point of my being here, you know. Because the future is mutable, and what came to pass in my timeline isn’t something anyone wanted, least of all you.”

He looked doubtful.

“Solas, think about it for a second, would you? Why would you send me back in time, at incredible risk to both yourself and me, unless there was no other choice? What do you think might have led us to making this decision?”

“’Us’?” he asked.

“What, you think I just rolled over and let you do whatever you wanted? You and I have quite a history of me holding you accountable for your actions. You just haven’t lived it yet.” And now you won’t. The thought crept into her mind before she could stop it.

Felassan snickered. Solas glared at him. The General met the Dread Wolf’s gaze without faltering, and Hruse felt new admiration grow for him. It took a strong man to face down the person who’d tried to kill him with such snark-laden equanimity. She wondered if Solas was feeling ganged up on yet. And if that was going to make him dig in his heels even more.

She sighed. “Look, I’m aware there’s a danger in seeing the future. But you are the one who created this memory vessel. You’re the one who sent me back with it. My orders were to find you and show you. Convince you to stop and think this through, because it all went to absolute shit. You want to save the world, fix your mistakes. Wouldn’t having more information help you do that better?”

His eyes narrowed at her. She feared she might have gone too far. But he simply stood there, scowling at her, arms crossed over his chest in that way he did when he knew she was right but didn’t want to admit it. She almost smiled, but held it back by sheer force of will. Goading him would only make this harder in the long run.

“Please, Solas. I know you’re angry with me, and I know you’re probably feeling cornered. But this is why I’m here. Because in order to prevent that future, you need to know how it went wrong. And you need it to be in your own words, so to speak, because hearing me tell you isn’t enough. Please.”

“You know she’s right,” Felassan murmured.

Slowly the scowl faded from his expression and his arms loosened from their tight grasp of each other. Hruse held her breath. She wouldn’t feel relief until he’d verbally agreed. He looked at Felassan for a long moment.

“You have seen these memories?”

“I have. They didn’t make much sense to me, but then again, they aren’t mine. And I was…” He cut himself off before he could say that he’d been Tranquil at the time to boot. At least, Hruse assumed that’s what he was going to say. Given Solas’s shift back into tension, she suspected she was right. He hadn’t forgotten what he’d done.

Solas looked back to her, his face blank and smooth as porcelain. “All right. I will see them.”

Hruse held out her hand towards Felassan and he crossed the cottage to lay the cords of the necklace across her palm. He gave her a reassuring smile and stepped away.

“I think I will stand guard, so you are not interrupted,” he said. The closing of the door behind him was soft.

Hruse shuffled herself so she was more upright against the wall behind the bed. They would need to hold the jawbone between them if they were both going to experience this. It wasn’t strictly necessary, as she’d already seen them. But if Solas had any questions, she wanted to be present in the memories to guide him. Which was more than she’d ever gotten when hunting down his own with the Veilguard. She had every expectation that this was going to be difficult for him. No one relished the idea of seeing their own failures play out, especially with a witness. For a man named Pride, it would be worse.

He crossed the cottage and sat once more, holding up his hand so she could press the jawbone against it. She took a shuddering breath and laced her fingers with his, ignoring the ache behind her breastbone at touching him for the hundredth but first time.

And then she was blinded by the flash as the magic took hold.

Chapter Text

In much the way one’s thoughts could be disordered and jumbled, so too were the memories. They overlapped each other, going by so quickly it was hard to pinpoint one from the next. Some were vibrant, stabbing with colors and sensations. Others were mere whispers in comparison, but no less important to the whole. It was an assault on her brain, even though she’d experienced it before.

There were parts she easily recognized. The memories she’d uncovered in the Crossroads, their conversations in the regret prison, that final stand side by side in Minrathous, their time together after he’d bound himself to the Veil and could only meet in the Fade. His promise of atonement and the work he’d done to calm and heal the Titans’ wrathful dreams, however little it had ended up being in the long run. There were flashes of him teaching her how to use the magic that had burst forth from her when the Veil fell, before the unleashed blight consumed Thedas entirely. The arrival of Those Across the Sea and the push to fight them off. The rise of the fragmented Evanuris, each piece siphoning the power of the blight to grow strong, if warped practically beyond recognition. The defeat of the Executors followed swiftly by a retreat from the waking world because the forces of the Evanuris turned their collective gazes on them.

Terrible battles mingled with quieter moments when they’d studied together, or made love. Agonizing decisions, the calculus of war, mixed with tending new crops in a sheltered corner of the Fade. Rejoicing at the birth of a healthy child in a village that hadn’t yet succumbed countered with that same village after June’s constructs had leveled it flat. Destroying Andruil’s bow and the instant of gratification it brought to take another weapon from the hands of their enemies. The cost in lives it had taken, not dissimilar to the battle of Weisshaupt. Sylaise’s fire raging unchecked in the Emerald Graves coinciding with watching the stars from the elevated Archon’s palace with Dorian. Shepherding refugees from Rivain through an Eluvian contrasted by burying Lace and Taash. The Grand Necropolis standing as a last bastion against the tide of darkspawn led by Dirthamen and Falon’Din. Emmrich smiling at them before they never saw him again, Manfred at his heels. Losing Neve to the blight, and Lucanis to his grief. Only Spite remained, wearing the skin of a man too far gone to take it back. Antiva fell, but the Crows had fought unto the last. In the end, even Spite was defeated.

And throughout the onslaught, older memories bled through. The Inquisition, seen from Solas’s eyes. The catastrophic result of giving the orb to Corypheus, and all that came after it. The friendships he’d made despite his determination not to get attached. Aeda laughing over a battlefield, streaked with blood but triumphant, and his heart clenching at the realization that they were real. They were all real. Despair warring with duty. Pride warring with wisdom. Him turning his back and leaving when the orb was shattered at the end. Absorbing the vengeful fragment of Mythal, consolidating power through relics and artifacts, staying one step ahead of Varric all the while. The numbers of elves who followed him growing until he could no longer bear the strain of having it happen all over again. Sending them all away, walking the dinan’shiral. Alone. Stabbing Varric, his manipulation of her when the ritual to move Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain then failed.

Older still, the years of rebellion against the Evanuris in Arlathan mixed in with more current recollections. His birth into corporeality. Centuries of plotting and scheming and desperately trying to make the world be as it had been promised to him. The Veil. All of it, his whole long, long life, rushed past their minds’ eyes in an unceasing tidal wave.

Hruse could tell her nose was bleeding outside the bubble of their connection to the memories. She could feel herself hyperventilating as her mind attempted to integrate and sort through all the information bombarding her, even though much of it was already present in her recollection. Solas’s fingers gripped hers so tightly she could feel their bones grinding together. That single point of contact was all that held her grounded to sanity. And still the collected memories hadn’t ended.

Dorian looking over a written out schematic of the time vortex, adding in his notations to the complex mathematical equations he and Solas had worked on for days. His face haggard, his blood blighted after repelling yet another fragment from Minrathous. As soon as the formulae were finished, he’d walked off the roof of the Archon’s palace to plummet to his death rather than let the blight turn him into a monster that his beloved friends would be forced to kill.

Bellara, tears streaming down her cheeks as they made their final farewells before Arlathan Forest was swallowed whole into a sonallium to protect it. The last viable piece of land where people could have something resembling a life away from the devastation. The wild magic there had been all that had protected it until then; Solas took it a step farther and removed it entirely from the world in the hopes that something, anything, would survive. He’d sealed the entrance to the Fade bubble when they were through, hoping that it would hold.

They felt his own feelings on asking Hruse to go back in time. A mix of anguish and desperation, of knowing this was yet another betrayal, to send her back without him. To make her live it all over again with only the barest glimmer of hope that she could turn him away from beginning this horrific sequence of events.

The look in his eye as he promised she would make it while utterly failing to hide the knowledge from himself that this would be his final act as a living being.

At last the memories narrowed down to the final few as the other Solas put the jawbone around her neck, cautioning her to use it sparingly. The magic was such that only he would bear the full brunt of it, since they were his memories, but anyone who touched it would glean something, some abridged version. It would still be possibly overwhelming.

Her orders to find him and change their fates. To prevent all of it from happening however she could.

A solitary, fleeting impression of his love for her, of his gratitude that she’d allowed him even a moment of respite in her forgiveness and support.

Hruse hadn’t felt herself collapse onto the mattress, but she was cognizant enough to know when Solas’s fingers slipped out of hers. The jawbone had warmed between them and lay in her hand like a live coal. She could hear herself panting, and could hear him too, almost sobbing with the effort to control his own inhalations. She kept her eyes closed, knowing that if she tried to focus on anything, she might vomit.

“How long did it take?” Solas rasped out next to her. “The end.”

“From now? A little over fifteen years,” she managed to whisper. He’d sent her back just five years after the world was saved from Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain. And that was a decade from this moment.

The bed shifted as he lurched to his feet, then she heard the door open and close. She let the tide of exhaustion pull her under.

Chapter Text

When Hruse woke, it was dark in the cottage. Or at least, none of the lamps were lit. The fire burned cheerfully in the hearth, although its light was blocked from her by the breadth of the man sitting at it, his back turned to her. She didn’t need to see him clearly to recognize him.

“Felassan?”

His head shot up and he turned to look over his shoulder at her. Out of armor he was still powerfully built, as only an Elvhen warrior could be. The book in his lap looked rather small as it was dwarfed in his hands. But he was smiling at her, albeit wryly.

“She lives and breathes.”

“So do you.”

“A fine victory for us both, I’d say.”

She snorted softly, feeling it reverberate in her head. It wasn’t precisely painful, not like merely sitting upright had been before, but she could feel the echo of pain lingering. Like an afterimage, or the fog that remained after a bad headache. She rolled to her side and leveraged herself up against the headboard, gingerly pressing the back of her scalp to find a bit of tenderness there.

“I split my skull on the Temple floor, didn’t I?” she asked.

“You landed hard,” he said, which she noted sidestepped confirming it for her. Either he’d learned some of Solas’s misdirection or he’d been actually frightened by her injury and didn’t want to talk about it.

“What are you reading?” It was a blatant change of topic, but he didn’t seem to mind. He lifted the book as if to show it to her, but the shadows were too deep and her eyes still a little crossed.

“Fade and Spirits Mysterious, by Genitivi. It’s entertaining how wrong it is.”

“I bet. You couldn’t find anything better?”

“Well, I’ve already read the latest Hard in Hightown, and I’ve little use for the Chant of Light. That seems to cover the vast majority of the Chantry’s library.”

Hruse chuckled and made a face that conceded the point to him. “Fair enough. Does Varric know you’ve read his work?”

He turned more fully and laid the book down on the side table between the bed and the fireplace. “The more important question is, would he care? I’m just another elf caught up in the chaos.”

“I suppose that’s fair too.” She rested her head against the wall behind her and closed her eyes. Her dreams had been muddled, a mix of the memories she’d once again witnessed and the interpretations by the local spirits. At least they hadn’t been twisted by the Breach, because it hadn’t happened. “Where’s Solas?”

“I’m not sure. He told me to keep an eye on you and staggered off into the woods.”

“I expect he’s having quite the existential meltdown somewhere.”

Felassan smirked, at once familiar and new. “Just so.”

“Shouldn’t you go find him?”

“You know what he’s like. Pride asks for no help.”

She hummed an agreement. Then, “What happens now?”

“I think you know better than I.”

She shook her head. “No, not really. I’ve completely altered the timeline with this. From here on out, nothing will be what I knew.”

It hit her then, just how thoroughly she’d managed to carry out Solas’s final orders. She had hidden the orb and thwarted Corypheus’s catastrophic rise to power. Well, this attempt anyway. She was positive the old darkspawn wasn’t defeated by any means. It was strange now to think of him as an adversary. He was so much less of a challenge than any other had been that she’d faced. But thinking of him was easier than facing the truth that everyone she’d known, everyone she’d come to cherish, was lost to her. People she’d saved the world with would never be met now. The course of history had shifted.

She felt like she couldn’t breathe. It was overwhelming, the sum total of all she’d put into motion. And all the consequences she would have to live with.

Felassan was at her side in an instant, his hands chafing hers. He was warm and solid and real and that was enough to break the spiral before it got too far. She squeezed his fingers so he didn’t draw away.

“I didn’t think it through,” she whispered. “What it would mean, to hide the orb, to stop the madness before it could even begin. What will he do?”

“I don’t know,” Felassan said, just as softly. Carefully, he twined his fingers with hers until they were laced together. “But you are not as alone as you think. You have me.”

“Do I?” she let out on a gasp of air. The tide was threatening to pull her under again. She had to get a hold on it before she was completely drowned.

“There is the spirit, the man and the wolf. We are outnumbered. So we’ll have to stick together.”

Hruse felt tears drip down her cheeks, even as something loosened in her chest. “Thank you, Felassan. It won’t be easy.”

“Loving him never has been.”

More tears joined the first, but she didn’t bother to try and stop them. Because he knew, precisely, what she was feeling. He’d gone to his spiritual death knowing it, and willingly based on his reaction afterwards. The fact that she’d been able to save him didn’t change that.

“We need a plan,” she said, forcing the words out of her throat before it could close up entirely.

“Yes, we do. But first,” and here he brushed her cheeks with a thumb, “you need to grieve. Before it consumes you whole.”

The sound that came out of her wasn’t pretty, and the next one was worse. He held her hands and blessedly didn’t look at her with pity in his eyes. Before long, she couldn’t tell anyway, because she was blinded by her tears and hoarse from her sobbing. And then Felassan was no longer just holding her hands, he was holding her. His embrace was tight, supporting her entirely as if she couldn’t do it herself. When she’d calmed at last, with dawn light creeping through the shutters, he was still there. Patient. Hruse drew in an aching breath, ragged at the edges and feeling like she’d splintered into a million pieces held within her skin. She rested her head against his chest and he let her.

At last she was able to pull back far enough to look into his face. In the shadows he looked otherworldly with his ancient face and violet eyes. They were so close her breath caught. But she didn’t fall for the trap of what her body wanted, which was to get closer still. He was the first person to touch her in kindness in months. Her brain knew he wasn’t the one she actually craved, but her body didn’t care. It was a struggle to release him.

“First things first, I need to get on my feet again.”

Felassan smiled and offered his hand.

Chapter Text

After a few wobbly steps, she found her feet once she was upright. Felassan still held her arm to steady her, but he let go after she nodded at him. Then she realized she was still dressed in a plain shift and didn’t know where her stolen armor had gotten to. Or her weapons.

“Where are my things?”

With an arched eyebrow, Felassan pointed to a chest at the foot of the bed. He knew – and naturally Solas knew, since it was his own armory she’d raided – where she’d gotten the fitted coat and fine mesh chainmail from, even if no one else could even conceive of them, much less expect them on a human. She was halfway to pulling the items from the chest when she stopped. Humble guises. Both Solas and Felassan were currently dressed as simple elves, not Elvhen warriors. Given her unusual involvement, it behooved her to do the same. She was under enough suspicion.

“I should wear something to blend in, shouldn’t I?”

“That might be prudent,” the Slow Arrow drawled. The underlying message of that languid tone was not lost on her. Patience meant more than just waiting. It also meant caution and deliberation.

“I don’t have anything other than this, though.”

Felassan chuckled under his breath and crossed the cottage to grab a bundle of cloth she’d overlooked as an extra blanket. He tossed it to her and she found it was a heavy woolen overdress with a kirtle. She made a face. It had been many years, going back even before her time in the Necropolis, since she’d worn a dress. And she was wary of showing too much skin these days. Answering questions about the unusual scars she bore was always tedious. But the layers would keep her warm, she supposed. Especially with the cloak over it. And her boots would not be as conspicuous under the skirt. Resigned, she pulled the dress over her shift and belted the kirtle over it. At least she hadn’t needed to ask for privacy about it all.

She ran her fingers through her hair, wishing she had a comb, and braided it as best she could into two plaits, as she typically wore it. Her boots were cold, but not uncomfortably so all things considered, and once she donned the cloak, she was as dressed as she was going to get.

“Do I pass muster?” she asked, throwing out her arms for Felassan to inspect her. The ever present smirk deepened into his cheek as he dutifully looked her over. He drew the braids over her shoulders to drape down her chest and nodded.

“You’ll do, little bird.” His tone was affectionate rather than mocking, so she let him get away with the pet name. “Do your scars pain you?”

She gave him a sharper look, with one brow raised. Well, that answered how she’d gotten into the shift she wore. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him seeing them, or her in such a state of undress. Milk, spilled. No point in making a fuss now. “Not anymore.”

“I have seen such marks before. I only saw some of them,” he clarified softly, as if he knew she didn’t want anyone to see them. A gentle undercurrent of understanding laced through his voice. “You are lucky to be alive.”

“I know.”

“You have a cover at the ready?” he asked more briskly.

“I don’t really need one, considering the Hands of the Divine already know who I am.”

“And who is that, really?”

She smiled, suddenly realizing she hadn’t fully introduced herself to him. “Hruse Ingellvar, Grand Necropolis Mourn Watch. At your service.”

“Well met. I think I’ll stick with ‘little bird’.” He laughed outright at the face she made, then shared a grin with her. “I hear there’s a meeting in the Chantry to discuss what to do next. We should be there, seeing as how we survived the attack on the Temple.”

“Probably. All right, let’s go.”

“Are you certain you are ready for this?”

“I have to be,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t have another choice.”

The walk through Haven was noticeably quiet. Those who hadn’t fled after the Temple attack were kneeling in the snow, praying to the Maker. Or tucked away inside cottages and huts, still sleeping. It was quite early, after all. At the fire on the central level, they found Varric staring into the flames. He looked up as they went by, though, and jogged to catch up to them.

“So you’re still with us, Rook. Gotta admit, I’m starting to regret joking about you being a harbinger.” Before she could open her mouth to retort, he beckoned her onward. “C’mon, I’ll escort you in, since I’m supposed to be there too. Might as well get it over with.”

Hruse glanced at Felassan to see how he reacted to hearing the dwarf say the nickname he’d given her – twice – and saw that he was still smirking. Directly at her. She pursed her lips in reproval and followed Varric up the final set of stairs. The Chantry doors were opened wide before them, but the war room door was closed. Even from where they stood, they could hear the shouting. Foremost among the raised voices, Hruse recognized Aeda Cadash’s.

Varric thumped his fist on the door and the shouting stopped. The Seeker opened it and glared at them all equally before letting them in. Gathered around the table was everyone who might have the slightest influence and purpose in what should have been the Inquisition. Leliana, Cullen, Josephine, Cassandra, Solas, Aeda. A few Grand Clerics who’d escaped the slaughter. The odd noble sticking their nose in simply because they felt entitled. The room was crowded.

Solas looked at her sidelong, then looked away, his jaw clenched. She felt Felassan’s hand brush hers and moved with him and Varric to the clearest spot left in the room. Aeda, standing on a chair in order to see over the throng, pointed at them, her expression triumphant.

“There, those two can back me up. That monster intended to kill everyone in the Temple. Without them he would have succeeded. And I don’t think he’s dead. We should be making plans here, not arguing over whose fault it is.”

“Mistress Cadash is right,” Hruse said over the murmurs before they grew back into exclamations. “Those were not the actions or behavior of a being content to be bested. I watched him emerge from the body of a Grey Warden.” She gave Leliana a hard stare. “Sound familiar?”

“I have not been able to contact the Fereldan order,” the Nightingale said softly, commanding the attention of the war room immediately. “This bears investigation.”

At Hruse’s side, Varric swore under his breath. She looked down at him to see him frowning into the middle distance. “What is it?”

He sighed heavily, with the air of someone who had an unpleasant task in front of him. Then he muttered, “Hawke needs to know about this.”

Once, after a rough day on Solas’s trail where Varric actually drank his ale instead of pretending to, he told her a story about having fought Corypheus before the Inquisition. While he still traveled with the Champion. That they’d killed him then, only to have him pop up again a few years later. Hruse knew why, since all these events were history to her, made comprehensive by virtue of hindsight. Corypheus had touched the imprisoned blight in the Fade, and it had made him into a cross between a darkspawn and an Archdemon. He and his fellow Sidereal Magisters were in exalted company among the monstrosities that wreaked havoc on Thedas. Any being touched by the blight was a vessel to them, be it living or dead. The only others with that capability were the Evanuris themselves.

While they others did not know at this point that it was Corypheus they faced, there must have been enough of a description by Aeda that Varric had figured it out.

“Are you saying we should just be taking this woman’s word?” the Seeker was saying. “We know nothing about her, other than where we found her. Which I might remind you, Leliana, was in jail.”

“She has proven trustworthy to me. At least in this.”

The Venatori dagger. The warning she’d given.

Hruse was positive that her time under the Nightingale’s eye had not ended, even as she pronounced that she trusted her.

How much simpler this would all be if she could just say what she knew, but they wouldn’t believe her. Worse, they would accuse her of collusion and probably kill her. It was hard to stay silent, but for now, she must. Again, her gaze slid to Solas. He had been listening intently to everyone, but hadn’t spoken a word. Nothing showed on his face, but she could see the tension in his shoulders from where she stood, and the tick of his jaw as he ground his teeth. It was odd to stand in mute solidarity with him and to understand why he’d been forced to play such a long game.

“So,” Cullen said into the silence. “What do we do now?”

Leliana and Cassandra exchanged a long look. The Seeker straightened her posture into something almost impossibly tall and regal. She slammed the Writ of the Inquisition onto the table.

“We go ahead as Most Holy planned.”

Chapter Text

Hruse had walked into the war room as a witness to an atrocity and among those few who had ended it. Hours later, after listening to arguments over everything from why the Hands had the Writ in the first place and what that meant for the late Divine’s plans for the Conclave to how the organization planned to find the monster who’d done this, Rook walked out an as agent of the Inquisition.

As did Solas, Felassan, Varric and Aeda.

She stood on the steps of the Chantry, vaguely stupefied at the turn of events, and looked out over Haven. Midday had come and gone, and the sun glowed gold and orange across the snow as it began to set behind the mountains. She realized she hadn’t eaten anything since waking. Long practice at ignoring her hunger could be useful, but most likely wasn’t currently, given that she was still recovering from what should have been a fatal injury.

“Does the tavern serve anything without meat?” she asked nobody in particular.

“I’ll see what Flissa can come up with,” Varric said, strolling off towards the Singing Maiden. With nothing better to do, the others followed him.

Solas veered off at his cabin, however, saying nothing but that he was too tired to join them. Hruse watched him go, aware that Felassan’s eyes were on her. She turned away from the closed door of the little cabin and went into the warmth of the tavern.

Most of the tables were full, even at this hour, but Varric managed to find one that would fit them all comfortably. It wasn’t far from the giant hearth and Hruse let the heat of it seep into her gratefully. Aeda sat next to her, putting Felassan across. Varric went up to the bar to order. It seemed he was already well known. This did not surprise Hruse in the slightest.

“How are two dwarves, two elves and you going to stop the mage-Templar war?” Aeda asked her as soon as they were seated.

“Carefully,” Hruse responded wryly. Aeda snorted. “Honestly? One step at a time, I imagine. The fighting is pretty fierce in the Hinterlands, and that’s probably where we should begin. There have to be bases or something where they’re both holed up.”

“Sounds like a good start to me.”

Felassan kept his peace on it, but she thought he might be going over strategies in his head. He had been Solas’s General for millennia for a reason, after all. Granted, it was possible he was also thinking about the logistics of traveling with the selfsame Dread Wolf who’d tried to kill him not long ago. Before she could ask, again, carefully, Varric returned bearing a tray full of tankards, a loaf of bread, a half wheel of cheese and something that appeared to be a roast nug. He tossed her an apologetic glance and pushed the bread and cheese her way. She took a tankard too.

“So,” he said when he got himself situated. “You three figure out how to save the world yet?”

“We’ll start in the Hinterlands,” Hruse said.

Varric made a noise that would make the Seeker proud and sipped his ale.

“The blood mages in league with that creature,” Felassan began. “We need to trace them. No matter what other conflicts are ongoing, they are our actual enemy.”

“I expect that won’t be too hard. We thwarted whatever ritual he was doing. Once our faces are known, they’ll find us.” Aeda seemed fairly sure of it. Hruse couldn’t argue. She reminded herself again that no one knew it was Corypheus besides her, Solas and Felassan. They couldn’t call him by name.

Hruse sliced a hunk of bread and cheese and chewed on them slowly. The others portioned the nug between them and she looked away as they ate it. Once they had devoured everything on the tray, they all sat back with their tankards and simply stared at each other. The hours of shouting in the war room seemed to have stricken them all mute now. Or perhaps the thought of small talk simply felt disingenuous.

Hruse was lost in her own thoughts. There were so many ways this could go wrong, no matter what Cassandra and Leliana said about reinstating the ‘Inquisition of old’ so passionately. She wasn’t entirely sure of the order of events, but there were some that stood out to her, both in the mingled memories and her own recollection of this time as news trickled into the Necropolis. Without a leader, they weren’t going to get very far in terms of amassing the power they would need to command armies and sway political allies. And without a figurehead such as the Herald, choosing that leader wasn’t as obvious. If she managed it right, it wouldn’t be her. Sure, she’d been sent back to change things, but not everything.

Aeda nudged her suddenly and she looked over to see the dwarf squinting up at her. “When we met before, you had a bow and some daggers. You any good with them?”

“Yes.”

That caught the attention of the other two, who both snapped their focus across the table. Felassan relaxed again with a smirk behind his hand, but Varric was looking between them with a gleam in his eyes.

“You’ve met before?” he asked.

“I exchanged some gold for our heroine of the hour. Some weeks back.”

“In Jader,” Hruse finished.

“And you didn’t think to mention this to anyone else?” Varric went on. They both gave him a nonplussed look.

“Would you, given the suspicion among these people? The last thing we need is for that trio to turn a random encounter into some kind of conspiracy.”

“Eh, fair enough.”

Aeda looked back up at her. “You gave me some advice too, that day.”

“I did,” Hruse nodded. And then she realized that the advice wasn’t likely to be necessary, since they would probably still end up hiring the Bull’s Chargers once the Venatori got a little more active. Aeda noticed her face change and she hastily pasted on a smile as she raised her ale to finish it. “I’m done in, I think.”

“You should get some more rest, yes,” Felassan said, somewhere between grave and teasing. “I’ll walk you back.”

The two dwarves didn’t miss the interplay, but neither said a word. Aeda scooted off the bench so Hruse could stand and they made their goodnights. It would take a few days before supplies would be ready for them to go to the Hinterlands. From there, who knew what would happen?

Hruse caught herself glancing at Solas’s cabin once more as they passed it and Felassan chuckled.

“Give him time.”

“I know. And we’ll have plenty of it on the road. Are you...concerned at all? About traveling with him, I mean.”

“We have made our peace.” His tone indicated some finality so she didn’t press. That said, she probably would have enjoyed the shouting match she imagined it was. There was no conspiracy between her and Aeda, but that was not the case with her and the pair of Elvhen. They would have to tread lightly.

“This isn’t what I had in mind, you know.”

He scoffed and held her elbow as they crossed a slick of ice that had pooled and frozen at the bottom of the stairs. Evening had fallen now and with it the air temperature. “Far be it for me to judge, but between the pair of you, I don’t know that you had anything firmly in mind.”

“That’s...fair.” She looked up at the stars, the bitter air making them twinkle so sharply one could bleed on them. “Guess I’ll be making it up as I go along.”

“And you worry about me.”

This time she was the one who chuckled, because when he put it like that, it was undeniable. She’d thought before, during the Veilguard days, that she’d done plenty of messing up. Interfering with rituals, having to kill Evanuris, falling in love with Fen’Harel. She had a sinking feeling this one might end up beating all of them.

Felassan left her at her cabin door and sauntered back into Haven proper. She watched him go, wishing she could be as at ease as he was. Knowing she wouldn’t. She went inside and back to bed.

Chapter Text

The party came out of the woods on a muddy track being worn into the hillside between Haven and the Hinterlands to a tidy camp. Hruse breathed a sigh of relief. Her first trip through the region had been filled with chaos. It was nice to see something a little less...fraught.

That was until the lead scout saw them and approached. Lace Harding.

Pain lanced through Hruse, a pain she could in no way allow to show. In some ways, it was worse seeing her like this than it had been meeting Varric all over again. She was little more than a girl. The freshness of her complexion shining out of her brand new armor was like a blow directly to Hruse’s heart. No matter that she already bore scars on her face and her eyes were too old for the rest of her. Harding gave each of them a small smile, trying to pick out which one she should speak to. Hruse hoped Aeda would step up, but when she didn’t, Hruse knew she’d have to do it herself.

“Good morning,” she said.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” Lace replied. “We’ve all heard the stories of what you did, up at the Temple. It’s an honor to meet you…”

“Call me Rook,” Hruse said, swallowing the ache of it. Leliana had decided to keep the nickname as her agent codename, and she’d agreed readily enough even knowing how hard it would be to hear. But if she was honest with herself, she couldn’t bear to hear someone like Lace call her anything else.

She managed to remember her manners and introduced everyone else. Varric made a quip about ‘Harding in Hightown’ and she snorted in spite of herself. It hadn’t occurred to her that this was where the two of them met. In that year they’d hunted Solas down together before his ritual, they hadn’t spoken much of these early days. The two of them had known each other so long at that point, and she hadn’t thought to ask.

“We should get to business,” Lace said once the bantering was done. “The situation’s pretty...dire. We came to secure horses from Redcliffe’s old horsemaster. I grew up here, and everyone always said that Dennet’s herds were the strongest and fastest this side of the Frostbacks. But with the mage-Templar fighting, we can’t get to him. Maker only knows if he’s still alive. Mother Giselle is at the Crossroads, helping the refugees and wounded. Our latest reports say the war’s spread there too. Corporal Vale and our men are doing what they can to protect the people too, but they won’t be able to hold out very long. You best get going. No time to lose.”

She gave them all a final nod and a list of possible places for more camps in the area, then disappeared between the tents. Hruse fought to keep breathing steadily, while Aeda and Felassan began to discuss which aspect of that rapid fire report they should tackle first. Varric interjected that they should get the Crossroads under control, since that was the center of local commerce, as well as the first meeting point for themselves outside of Haven. Solas looked off into the distance, and said nothing.

“Varric’s right,” Hruse said. “Getting Mother Giselle situated is more important right now than horses. I’m used to trekking on foot, and refugees need somewhere to go more immediately.”

Felassan gave her a sidelong look – probably guessing that ‘trekking on foot’ was a euphemism for using the Vi’Revas – but Aeda tilted her head, thinking something through.

“And those that are able-bodied will be in a good position to get recruited, and bolster the forces for the Inquisition,” she said. Hruse nodded. “Clever.”

“Well, shall we?” Felassan asked, readying his staff.

Hruse was fully aware that neither he nor Solas actually needed them, but as part of their masquerade they both carried one. She herself had gotten the Elvhen bow back from Leliana, along with a quiver full of arrows and a curious look at how a human had come by it. She didn’t ask, however. Aeda had a pair of polished daggers and a shortbow on her back. And of course, Varric had Bianca. It was strange to see it again, unbroken. And also not as powerful as it had been when she met him the first time.

As a group, they left the camp and went the rest of the way down the hill trail into the expanse of the Hinterlands. And into a warzone.

Rebel mages were harrying the merchants and refugees in the Crossroads, flinging ice and fireballs around the hamlet without regard to what they were hitting. Hruse drew on the bow, aiming for the nearest one. The others spread out, and barriers dropped over them. She recognized Solas’s work. He may not have spoken a word to her since gaining the other timeline’s memories, but he wasn’t going to let them all fall ignominiously. Lightning crackled out of his staff, striking down the assailants, while Felassan laid fire traps under their feet. She heard Bianca’s triplets, but had lost track of Aeda for the moment. The Carta woman evidently liked stealth.

The fighting was hardly grueling compared to what she was used to, and Hruse had time to look around and assess the situation. Down the road, she could see a knot of red and white Chantry habits moving through lines of wounded. The other way, she saw gleaming shields advancing towards them. Templars. In between, frightened villagers just trying to stay out of the way. She turned away from the rebel mages and focused her efforts on the Templars before they could get too close. Felassan noticed her shift and joined her.

There weren’t many, no more than half a dozen. Two fell screaming, burning alive inside their heavy armor as Felassan cast. The knights raised their shields to protect them from Hruse’s arrows, but she had good aim, and shot at their now exposed legs and feet to hamper them. They tried to purge the magic in the air, but without lyrium they were too weak to pull it off. Felassan didn’t stop raining fire upon them.

Hruse was reminded that she’d turned her back on the other side of the fight as ice slammed against her spine and shoulders, turning her arms nerveless. It stung more than hurt, since the barrier took the brunt of it, but nevertheless it made her aim poor. In fact, she dropped an arrow she was trying to nock as her fingers simply refused to obey her. She sidled away from Felassan to swing back, since he had the Templars in hand, and had to dodge another incoming spell. Where was Solas? Where was Aeda? Or Varric?

They’d all spread out too wide, unable to defend each other as they fought. Hruse knew she was guilty of it too, having grown accustomed to a team that knew how to work together. Once again she had to remind herself that these people were not the versions of themselves that she knew.

She struck down the mage haphazardly casting in all directions and saw the glint of Aeda’s daggers from the corner of her eye, close by. The dwarf had gone back into stealth to circle around. Her blades landed in a Templar’s back and they screamed, high pitched and cut off quickly as they toppled to the ground. One barrier fell and another dropped over her seamlessly. Solas and Felassan were the only two with practical team experience here. For them a skirmish like this was nothing at all, although both were holding back from what they were truly capable of in keeping with their respective facades.

Hruse looked around the hamlet again, seeing if any stragglers remained. An archer in Templar colors took a knee and loosed. She returned fire. The archer was quick and rolled out of the way, even as she bumped Felassan out of the trajectory of the arrow headed their way. It distracted her, though, and the last heavily armored figure was too close to evade. She took the shield right in her face and chest, falling back to sprawl in the churned up dirt, winded and defenseless.

An arc of lightning coursed through the knight before they could do more than raise their sword and they juddered in place from it before collapsing atop her, dead. She struggled to push their weight off her, still trying to take a deep enough breath, and found that the fighting was over. Her nose was bleeding from the bash, and she ached all over from the impact. The others were in roughly the same shape, but no one was truly injured. She pulled a rag from her pocket to wipe her face, while Aeda looked over towards Mother Giselle.

“You go,” Hruse said. “I’ll catch up.”

Aeda nodded and marched off, Solas and Varric on her heels. Felassan crouched down with her, easing the rag away to see how badly her nose was broken.

“I see you’re actually mortal,” he teased.

“And you’re not, by that measure,” she retorted. “Not a scratch on you.”

“Allow me,” he said, reaching for her nose with glowing fingers. She closed her eyes and felt his magic sink into her skull, setting the fractured cartilage back into place with a faint snap. It made her want to sneeze. “Shall we join them?”

“Not yet. Let her do the talking.”

He gave her an inquiring look.

“The Herald of Andraste might not exist, but I still want her to end up in charge.” She returned his look with one of her own. “I don’t want to change everything. C’mon, help me gather my arrows.”

“Ma nuvenin.” He helped her back to her feet in time to see Aeda walk off with Mother Giselle, deep in conversation. She pretended not to see Solas watching them.

Chapter Text

They’d reached Redcliffe Farm, and spoken with Master Dennet. He, of course, had a number of stipulations before he’d join up with the Inquisition, but all of them were reasonable in Hruse’s opinion. They collapsed into the camp they’d settled on the banks of a wide stream and Hruse knew she’d fallen asleep almost immediately. She also knew she was dreaming, as she haunted the outskirts of repeatedly looping clashes in the burning ruins of the farming village they’d spent the afternoon getting under control.

She’d never been all that talented with controlling her dreams, either before or after the Veil fell. But she could tell she was doing it, at least, which put her ahead of many who couldn’t even tell that. And she tended to remember them when she woke. Some of that, she was sure, was Solas’s influence. Not so much the blood magic connection, just simple exposure to him walking the Fade. She’d been able to train herself to bring back the moments she experienced in her sleep, to tell him of them. She was further able to determine which spirits were present and which were mere wisps mindlessly re-enacting what they saw of the material world. And that talent had nothing to do with the Dread Wolf at all. Her Mourn Watch training was responsible.

Which was to say that when Solas stepped into her dreaming mind, she was aware of it right away.

The scene froze and yet felt firmer. She felt more alert within it, no longer a bystander. She turned away from the carnage and faced him as he loped towards her, one foot directly in front of the other. Here he was not the humble apostate of the Inquisition, but fully himself. Standing tall, dressed in the sort of robes she was more used to seeing him in from the other timeline.

“I wondered how long it would take,” she said. He didn’t pretend to misunderstand her.

“I was unsure of my welcome.”

Hruse scoffed lightly. “As if I could keep you out.”

He didn’t pretend to demure either.

Instead he looked past her, to the war torn landscape. Bodies in the dirt, fires burning unchecked, crops and livestock lost. It was similar to what they’d seen together while battling the Evanuris fragments. But then again, war tended to always look the same. Only the players changed.

“You came here for a reason,” she prompted.

“I have had time to process the memories held within the jawbone. They are…”

“Hey, I get it. No one wants to have proof of their mistakes in such vivid detail.”

“Mistakes,” he repeated softly. He shook his head slightly. “No, the word you are looking for is failure. I failed. In the past and in my future. Time after time. I cannot deny this. I saw the memories of it from my own eyes, with my own breath and blood behind each one.”

Hruse was tempted to point out that for at least some of them he had no breath and blood because he was a spirit, but reverse pedantry wouldn’t help. Instead, she pivoted to stand next to him, so they could have the illusion of not having to look at each other. She’d expected the revelation of just how horribly wrong the future went would be difficult for him. While he was not the man she knew and loved – not yet – he wasn’t fundamentally far removed from him.

“And you,” he went on, his voice so quiet it was nearly nothing but air. “You stayed. You fought beside me and indeed, accepted this as your dubious reward for such loyalty. Knowing that I will only betray you.”

Now she scoffed. “Only an ally can betray. You told me that once. Before you were bound to the Veil, you justified your actions with me by saying it was not betrayal. Because we were not truly allies.”

He’d turned to her, violating their unspoken accord not to look at each other. Or maybe it was only her that couldn’t look at him. She heard him inhale as if he was about to speak while simultaneously remembering the feel of his fingers in her hair, cupping the back of her head as he tilted it towards him. She closed her eyes against the memory, wondering if he remembered it from his own perspective. Wondering if he was thinking of it too, and had caused it to bleed into the shared dream. The sensation melted away as if it had never been there, leaving her heartsore.

“We are not allies now,” she murmured. “Are we?”

He let out his breath, slow and measured as was his wont while in the Fade. That control kept more dangerous spirits at bay. He drew nothing to him that he did not wish to face. Which, she reflected, was fairly indicative of his nature. As Wisdom, he’d had no fear of facing unpleasant truths. But Pride could not be challenged so without growing defensive.

“We are not adversaries,” he said at last. She smiled at the classic misdirection. He hadn’t actually answered the question.

“Where does that leave us?”

The view of the Hinterlands faded away, with no more than a thought from him. Not even a gesture to indicate he was doing it. There was no need for such things between them, and he knew it.

“I do not know,” he said. It sounded mournful, but she’d caught the syntax. He felt little emotion at the words; they were too precise. She nodded as if that answered everything she needed to know.

“I’d like to wake up now. Or at least, I’d like to leave this space.”

“Ma nuvenin. Hruse, before you go, allow me this final word. And if you do not want to hear me speak of it again, I will not. But I wish to be clear.”

“Go on.”

“I carry now a set of memories I have not lived. Ones in which you are my heart. I can feel them, as close as we stand now. And as distant.” The meaning wasn’t lost on her, since outside of the Fade they were on opposite sides of the camp.

“And you do not share those feelings with your alternate self,” she surmised.

“I have not experienced the things my alternate self, as you call him, did. I do not know you as...intimately. On any level. I am not seeking to. I’m sorry if that is painful to you.”

Oddly, it wasn’t. Or at least, not as he expected. She was numb, or maybe it was just that she hurt so much she couldn’t bear to feel anything further. Felassan had told her to grieve, and she had. But grieving did not magically make it better or easier to accept.

“I’ll live,” she said.

“My alternate gave you an impossible task. That in itself is a betrayal of everything you shared with him.”

Somehow she found the strength to turn and look up at his face, shadowed oddly without the sun shining on them. Here, in a blank dreamscape, he was all sharp angles and formality. Reminiscent of the way he looked in the regret prison, where all color had been leached away until only shades of gray remained. It was a heavy handed metaphor if that’s what he’d been going for. She’d never gotten him to tell her. The irony being, of course, that it too had been a facade, while internally he’d been scrambling.

“Then do us both a favor, would you? Don’t repeat his mistakes.”

He searched her face, her open gaze, seeing everything she couldn’t hide from him here where their feelings shaped their surroundings. At last he looked away.

“I can but try.”

The god of lies, trickery and rebellion...depending on the story. Which one of us is he lying to now?

“Then that will have to do. Now let me go.”

He inclined his head and disappeared from her view.

She opened her eyes to the ceiling of the tent, the first light of dawn making it glow. Her cheeks were dry, but her chest was heavy. It didn’t matter, not really. She couldn’t afford to let it. She couldn’t force him to love her, no more than he could force her to stop loving him. And there was work to be done.

Chapter Text

They set up watchtowers. They drove off a wolf pack. They marked supply caches and ore deposits for later harvest. They spread throughout the Hinterlands, fighting bandits as well as rooting out the rebel mages and Templars. Aeda returned a ring to a widow. Hruse found a phylactery on the body of a Templar and returned it to its owner with her condolences. They hunted rams so the Crossroads would have meat and leather and wool. They even found a wayward druffalo. Slowly but surely order was restored.

Varric cracked terrible jokes that Aeda took to a whole new level. Felassan took turns sparring with both Hruse and Aeda. Solas stopped keeping to himself quite so much, although that was relative. By the time they made their way back to Haven, each of them had bled for another and their camaraderie had solidified. But for all that, she and Solas did not speak of their meeting in the Fade. Felassan looked between them, aware of the strained indifference they cultivated.

Mother Giselle had recommended they go to Val Royeaux, to plead the case of the Inquisition in terms of hunting down the monster that killed the Divine. They were getting no support from the Grand Clerics in Haven. They’d cloistered themselves to elect her replacement. That was a consequence Hruse should have anticipated. In the other timeline, none of them had survived, leaving very few choices to elevate. Leliana had ended up serving on the Sunburst Throne. She’d made sweeping reforms to Chantry rule with a zeal that frightened many and created almost as much disruption and chaos as the Breach itself. But it had taken over a year to get her there. Without the same dire circumstances, the Chantry wouldn’t wait that long to elect a new Most Holy.

In the meantime, none of them would outright support Justinia’s decision to reinstate the Inquisition, saying only that they should wait until the new Divine could give her orders. However, Hruse knew if they waited, things would only get worse. Corypheus was not going to sit idly by. His singular goal was the break into the Fade. He wasn’t going to stop trying.

She had only a vague understanding of the early days of the Inquisition. For herself, she’d been deep in training in the Necropolis, and most of what occurred hadn’t been widely spoken about. The memories she shared with Solas didn’t tell her much either, as he was not always privy to what happened behind closed doors. She’d learned some from Varric, but again, it was only what he’d been aware of. She knew that Aeda had allied with the mages to close the Breach. And that they’d fought Red Templars as well as Venatori until Corypheus was defeated.

But there was no guarantee that things would be like that now. Where before the Inquisition was decried as heretical, now it was simply being ignored while other ‘pressing matters’ were discussed. It was frustrating that she couldn’t simply take charge and demand that they hunt down Corypheus. Especially since Aeda was in agreement.

“We could just go, how would they stop us?” she pointed out over a tankard of ale. It was just the two of them at the table, their ‘boys’ having gone their separate ways as soon as they got back to Haven.

“But without any authority to act, what would it serve?” Hruse asked.

“Eh, that’s a fair point. Still, we witnessed the attack on the Temple.”

“It’s our word against theirs, though. And I don’t know how well anyone actually believes that that creature is to blame.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Aeda said, lowering her voice and leaning across the table. “I overheard Leliana talking with some of the nobles and clerics that were up there too. Plenty of people were still able to see what was happening, even as they were frozen in place by whatever those blood mages did.”

“Well, that’s something, at least.”

“I think we have a good case for going. Even if it’s just as a recruitment drive. If this thing gets big enough, those idiots in the cloisters will have to listen.” She looked over the rim of her tankard with a derisive expression. “You know how bureaucrats are. We won’t win them over with popularity or even logic, but get enough backing behind us, and they won’t want anyone else to have control of it but themselves.”

Hruse remembered her expulsion from the Necropolis after the War of the Banners. She’d done what was needed, no one argued that. But she was still punished for it because she hadn’t gone through the proper channels. “Yeah…”

“So, you’ll come along?”

“I will. Who else?”

“Hmm. What we need is some respectability. Really, Leliana and Cassandra should come too, although I doubt both Hands would leave Haven right now.”

“Cullen? He was the Knight-Captain in Kirkwall. He’s seen chaos and knows what happens from it.”

“True.” Aeda finished the ale and thumped the tankard back on the table. “We should have a mage too, to represent both sides of the conflict.”

“You’re awfully open minded about all this,” Hruse noted. Aeda snorted.

“Am I? I suppose it must seem that way. But I’ve moved lyrium on both sides since the rebellion began. I’ve heard tales of what the mages suffered in their Chantry sanctioned cages. And I know what kind of shape the Templars were in too. They were shackled every bit as much, and the leash was the same. Gold is gold, I don’t care where it comes from. And I know I won’t upend the entirety of the lyrium trade by having an opinion. But...it was all going to fall apart sooner or later. I’m sure that smacks of some kind of heresy to you. Aren’t you Andrastian?”

“I’m...well, I’m less devout than I was once. Nevarrans already practice very differently than the rest of Thedas. And I’ve lived through too much to truly believe the Maker has any thought or care for what we do.”

“I’ve been all over the world with the Carta, more places than you could imagine. I’ve seen good Circles, and I’ve seen ones like Kirkwall, since you brought it up. There are places where the dogma is hammered into mages so hard they become self-fulfilling prophecies for failure. If you tell a bunch of people that they should be ashamed of what they are, that they in no way can control, what happens?”

“They become the thing they fear.”

“Exactly. And to top it all off, that red shit is bad news. Most people don’t think about the logistics behind the lyrium trade, but that’s because we Carta were the only go-between out of Orzammar and the surface. Until now. That creature was steeped in it and had to get it from somewhere. No one I know would dare touch it. The sooner we get this mess sorted, the sooner we get back to controlling the flow. And providing a product that doesn’t make people go that insane.”

“I could easily accuse you of being mercenary, but...well, that is the backbone of the economy, isn’t it?”

“Correct.”

“Well, getting back on topic, our only mages are elves, and that won’t go over well in the heart of Orlais. Not to mention, neither of them are from a Circle.”

Aeda’s gaze lingered on her. Hruse raised an eyebrow at her in tacit inquiry. “There’s you.”

“I’m not a mage.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

“Well despite what you’ve heard, and here I’m going to presume you’ve got spies in every corner to have learned such a secret, you Carta thug,” she sweetened this with an affectionate grin, which Aeda returned, “I’m not a good representative either. The Mourn Watch doesn’t keep a Circle, although plenty of Mortalitasi are from one originally. And my magic is...complicated. Sure I’ve had some training, but it was never my focus. I’m a glorified guard.”

And oh, what a complicated bit of obfuscation that statement was.

Aeda sighed. “Then there’s nothing for it. It’ll have to be one of the boys. Got a preference?”

“Felassan knows Val Royeaux better,” Hruse said, ignoring Aeda’s knowing look. She was well aware that there was an assumption that she and the General were a thing, regardless of the truth of it. Admittedly, she could see where the rumors came from. They were friendly, far beyond what a human and an elf should be in this region of the world. And he was always at her back, protecting her, healing her smallest injury. To be perfectly honest, she wasn’t sure she would be able to handle being alone with Solas for days on end without the buffer Felassan provided.

“I think that settles it,” Aeda said decisively. “Let’s tell the ‘advisors’, shall we?”

“On your head be it, Cadash.”

Aeda laughed all the way out of the tavern.

Chapter Text

After much ‘heated discussion’ as Aeda put it – “what, nobody died, nobody even got stabbed" – their final party was Hruse, Aeda, Felassan and Cassandra. It occurred to Hruse before anyone else that it meant the General was outnumbered three to one, but he laughed when he figured it out. Aeda waggled her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything. Hruse prepared herself for endless teasing from her friend.

For Aeda had truly become a friend.

In the other timeline, they hadn’t gotten to know each other particularly well. There simply hadn’t been enough time. But now, being on the ground with her, fighting alongside her, seeing her grow into the woman Hruse had met, she found they had enough things in common that the things they didn't had little ability to impede.

They traveled north out of Haven towards the Imperial Highway, which they would follow all the way to the capital of Orlais. Dennet had come through with sturdy mounts, including a pony just the right size for Aeda. The first day or so, Hruse was saddlesore, but judicious magical healing from Felassan in the privacy of their shared tent took care of it.

Because naturally, they ended up together. She should have seen that coming after Aeda’s teasing eyebrows.

“Is it so terrible to consider me as a lover?” Felassan asked, his eyes flashing with mirth.

“I suppose not.”

He laid a theatrical hand over his heart. “I’m speechless. Truly stricken by your overwhelming enthusiasm.”

She shoved him, laughing. He cackled merrily back at her. Thankfully he’d also set a silencing ward on the canvas, so they were in no danger of waking Aeda and the Seeker.

“Honestly,” she chided, still chortling. “You’re awful, is what you are!”

“On the contrary, I’m very good.”

The heated promise in those words made her pause, and to make matters worse, he saw it. But he took pity on her and turned his back as she shuffled out of her riding clothes and into her bedroll. He waved his hand to douse the light. She turned on her side to see his shadowed form moving around as he settled down himself. Belatedly she thought of a good comeback and spent a moment debating whether or not it would look worse if she said it now.

Oh what will it hurt?

Me.

Pfft. Say it.

“Generally speaking, those who are that good don’t have to say so.”

Across the tent, Felassan tsked. “Careful, that sounded like a challenge.”

“In your dreams.”

She heard him roll over and saw the faintest reflection off his eyes from what little light remained of their campfire through the canvas. “I’ll see you there, little bird.”

“Go to sleep, Felassan.”

“Not before you.”

Inexplicably, or maybe not considering the tone of their entire conversation, she flushed. She was momentarily grateful for the darkness, but then realized it didn’t matter all that much for him. Damn elven eyesight. As if on cue, she heard his chuckle. She rolled onto her other side, knowing full well it made her look childish. And then, of course, sleep wouldn’t come. Because now he’d put the seed in her mind and she was arguing with herself over it. What did it say about her, so soon after Solas’s rejection, that she was actually considering it?

Was it really a rejection, though? He said he was not seeking what you had before. And you don’t have anything now.

Logic won’t win this one, brain. Or have you forgotten how few months it’s been since that last night together?

Yes, the one before he sent you back in time to deal with a version of himself that’s an idiot. Be honest with yourself, you’d be more likely to slap him silly right now than fu…

Enough! We’re sleeping now.

Sadly, as much as she berated herself, she did not sleep. Not for hours. She listened to Felassan breathe, since there was nothing else to hear with the silencing ward in place, and stared at the darkness of the tent. Eventually sheer exhaustion overcame her swirling thoughts, and she managed to get some rest. It wasn’t enough, but it was better than nothing. At the very least, it saved her from falling into the Fade where he was likely lurking.

Cassandra was the only member of the team that woke early, it seemed. It was full daylight when Hruse managed to get herself dressed and out of the tent to find the Seeker at the fire, poking the coals back to life. She squinted at Hruse, cast a glance at both tents where the other half of their squad remained and grunted.

“Rough night?” Hruse asked.

“She snores.”

Hruse bit the inside of her lip. Okay, maybe the Seeker had had just as much trouble sleeping and had decided not to keep trying. “Well, you’re welcome to bunk with him if you’d rather.”

“You’re not…?”

Hruse raised an eyebrow and had the singular pleasure of catching Cassandra Pentaghast in embarrassment. That almost made it worth it. “No, we’re not.”

“Oh.” The Seeker poked the fire a little harder than necessary and looked consternated. “Forgive me for presuming.”

“That’s all right. The offer is still open if you don’t want to suffer another night with Aeda.”

“Perhaps we might trade off, to keep it even.”

“That sounds fair.”

One of Hruse’s braids was suddenly flipped over her shoulder and she whirled around to see Felassan practically on her heels. She hadn’t even heard him leave the tent. His ever present smirk deepened, crinkling the corners of his eyes which were entirely too luminous in the morning light. She felt heat rise into her cheeks without her permission and returned his jovial look with a scowl. He went so far as to tweak her chin and then glided around her to join Cassandra at the fire. Yes, it would definitely be more fair to keep her as far away from him as possible before she did something stupid.

She stalked over to the other tent and stuck her head through the flaps. “Wake up, Cadash. Don’t leave me with these two, I beg you.”

Aeda grumbled, then sat up, looking somewhat murderous at being awakened. But it faded as she grinned at Hruse. “That bad, eh?”

“No comment. Daylight’s wasting and we have a long way to go.”

“Of course, Rook.”

A rude gesture was all she had to say to that.