Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“…because I thought we were on the same page about this!”

Dorian’s voice over the sending crystal was tinny and wrong. Too small for the depth of emotion in his words. Too high for the frustration in every curt syllable.

“That was before.”

“Before what? Before you actually believed it was possible?”

Skyhold was colder than he remembered. Bleaker. Thick clouds covered the sky, harsh winds cut through the mountain, singing their eerie tunes as they sliced at his skin. It wasn’t even winter yet. It usually took a visit from Dorian for Trevelyan to feel so bitter about the cold. Just like it usually took a visit from Trevelyan for Dorian to complain of the humidity up north.

It had been a couple of years since they’d had the opportunity for anything more than a quick conjugal visit. The dissolution of the Lucerni had made leisure time a funny little memory.

“Dorian, you have done so much. No one could ask more from you, no one could—you don’t need to do more, not if it means—”

"Don’t give me that. Not when there’s so much I’ve failed to achieve.”

Trevelyan grit his teeth. “I understand you haven’t been making the progress you hoped, but this was never part of the plan!”

“That’s because we didn’t expect the Venatori to be stupid enough to lay all the ammunition against them right out in the open where anyone could find it! Not to mention assassinating Archon Radonis--" There was a pause, another cut, a crackly breath. And then, sardonic, “I thought you’d be proud of me, Amatus. It’s exactly the sort of road you’d take, isn’t it? I seem to recall you suggesting a few murders yourself to make this quicker.”

“It’s not the methods I object to.”

He hated having arguments like this. Clipped and cut off from each other. Unable to see the impact of his words, shape himself around the way Dorian’s eyes changed at each syllable. There was a way to do it, once, but he couldn’t remember. There were a lot of things he’d forgotten, as late.

There used to be a lot more animals around the mountainside. Trevelyan remembered hunting for them, back in the old days. Some of his fondest memories were of stalking the occasional ram, finding a deer to dress when the pressures of politics got to be too much. The eyes that made him bristle, the force of hungry refugees staring at him.

Had they been so hungry?

Or had they just been hopeful, then?

Back when everyone called them pilgrims instead. 

“I don’t think you’ve thought about where this leads. The burden that will be on you. Let someone else handle it.”

“Oh that’s rich, coming from you. And who is going to ‘handle it’, as you say? Who else is in the position I’m in? Who else is willing to do what’s necessary? Who isn’t scared of Venatori assassins.”

Trevelyan had never bothered to learn the names of any of the Lucerni, save one. On some level, he’d known they wouldn’t be worth knowing in the long run. “--Maevaris Tilani.”

“Don’t be cute. She’s full of that trite noblesse oblige, talk of ‘inspiration’ and ‘fixing the system’, but you and I both know it is broken, Alexiel. I butt against walls no matter where I turn in the Magisterium. This is the only way I’ll ever be able to fix Tevinter, it’s my duty, it’s—it’s my birthright.”

“Your birthright? Are you listening to yourself?”

“More than you are listening to me, certainly!” The ground shifted. Trevelyan almost lost his footing as he very nearly toppled down an incline. “Vishante kaffas, I will never get another chance like this! I will never get another opportunity like this! Don’t you get that? What part of this is too complicated for you? I’ll put it in simple terms you can understand. I--”

The sky turned red as a moon covered up the sun.

Trevelyan was hit with a sudden wave of noise in his ears. His vision swam. Dorian was still talking but it was drowned out by the ringing, the—the music. He tried to reply, but all that came out was a low growl.

The pressure abated just enough for him to hear Dorian sputter, the tone of his voice completely changing, “What was that?…What’s going on?”

He tried to make a wry observation that Dorian must have been indoors in a room with no windows, but he choked on spittle instead. His lips were clumsy around his teeth. They didn’t fit in his mouth.

"Alexiel? What’s wrong?”

When he managed to get words out, his voice sounded unusually deep. “Have to…go.”

“No, don’t you dare, don’t you dare hang up on—"

Dorian’s voice cut out, panicked and enraged.

Evelyn. He needed to find Evelyn.

She was back in quarantine. With Iron Bull. Yes. It wasn’t far. Skyhold was a ten-minute walk from here, the quarantine down in its dungeon basement. He could just go find her and she’d see him and know she had to—

He doubled over, a shot of pain wracking its way up his body. Spine pushing up against the skin on his back.

Oh. It was happening now.

He let out a scream, a shout that howled through the mountain air as he desperately pawed at his armor and clothing, the leather and furs tying him in. Quickly shucking his gloves, he tried to undo the buckles on his prosthetic, remains of his arm twisting and pulsing painfully, but his fingers were breaking open and eventually he had to settle for biting through the straps holding it together. His boots, the very nice boots that Max had gotten him as a Satinalia gift three years ago, split as his legs broke themselves, as he fell to the ground and writhed against the snow, burgeoning mass stuck in tight. Trevelyan screamed again, pain and rage and excitement, ripping fabric, leather, flesh.

And all around him, the air was changing.

The sensation of magic coursing around him—that was something he hadn’t felt properly in a very, very long time. Not since he’d healed the sky, and had his hand ripped away. The taste of the Fade on his tongue, a thick scent like he was chewing on it, across his skin, like rushing water.

And then the feeling grew distant and far away, as his skin bubbled up and filled with fur underneath, and he had to peel it off.

It wasn’t the first time. Or the second, or third, or fourth. The body would come back to him, every now and then, in battle, when he or his sister weren’t quick enough to head it off. He had learned things about it, found ways to push his thoughts above the rushing tide of its mind.

But this time was different.

It was there on the wind. Magic. Deep, and old, and rotted.

He did not howl. The beast doesn’t howl. It’s not really a wolf.

North.

The gods walk among them. It can smell them, the impression they make upon the fabric of reality.

Where Dorian is.

It cackles and breaks into a run.

And he runs for quite some time. Forced to take the land road. The scenery passes by him in a blur, not interesting to him compared to the scent that he follows. The stench of a dead god soon fills his nostrils alongside another smell, the decay he has come to know so well in countless hopeless battles. But there is fresher meat elsewhere, and he runs to pursue it.

He does stop to eat every now and then—he has to, this body gets so hungry—but there’s slim pickings until he passes the border into Nevarra. Then he is in nice, civilized areas again, where danger is on the horizon and not at the doorstep, and people are quite unprepared for a monster barreling through and swallowing them whole.

He has a way, now, of directing himself. He did even the first time, he just never cared enough to do it. To choose who he killed and maimed. He goes for animals, when he can. Larger beasts taste better than humans and elves and dwarves, that is the thought he pushes into the predator mind. But the frenzy of his journey doesn’t leave much room for discretion. The best solution is to direct the bloody hunger at enemies he can recognize, but those aren’t always available.

Antaam. Venatori. They make themselves easy to pick out. They wrap themselves in bright colors, like foreign candies. He has fun tearing off the wrapping as he rips them to pieces, magic washing over him like soap, axes springing back from his hide.

He does try harder to keep from killing civilians on the street when he finally finds himself in Minrathous. But there’s also hardly any of those. Most of what writhes through the city are darkspawn and Blight growths, and even in this addled state the beast isn’t stupid enough to bite them.

It’s an hour of fighting that feels like several minutes when the smell hits again from within the rot of decay all around. He snaps to attention, barreling through the streets and knocking aside ghouls like toys.

And there it is. He knows it. The spell knows this, this scent, the bane of the world, the monster he was made into a monster to stop, the herald of the end, the Dread Wolf--

Solas takes one look and blasts the beast right off him.

Trevelyan tumbled as he fell, naked and covered in blood.

He lay there on the wet pavement, feeling the gore cooling on his body, sloughed off flesh and fur that vanished into the ether once it lost all warmth.

Back in Tevinter. Land of nightmares.

There were footsteps near him, gentle, the sound of skin on stone. He rolled slightly, just enough to have an eye facing the sky. A familiar elven face came into view.

“Hi Solas,” he said.

“…Trevelyan.”

That might have been amusement on his face, but he’d always been so deucedly hard to read.

Solas looked about the same as he did that day in those elven ruins. But then, he was thousands of years old and he had probably looked like this for most of them. He was wearing a better coat than the last time they’d met, the violet in his eyes flickered and popped in the grim, red lighting of the Blight in the city, but he was still—

He still looked like the person Trevelyan had trusted, once. The person he had poked and needled at, and then gradually come to rely on more and more for advice. For interesting stories about the Fade. For unwelcome chastisements about his personal life. For insight without the emotional compromise that so many others seemed to suffer from.

Even that look he was giving him now, that was so familiar it hurt.

“One moment.”

Solas padded away from him. Trevelyan stayed where he was and coughed up bits of bone and blood.

And then, heavy fabric was suddenly being draped across his body. He rolled some more, got his legs under him. It was one of the banners from a nearby shop—torn and tattered on the ground. Intact enough to preserve his modesty, as all of his clothing had gotten torn off.

…Again.

He took the end of the banner and wiped his mouth. “I heard you were in a Fade prison.”

“I fashioned a key and walked out of it.”

There was a brief silence after that. Trevelyan waiting for clarification, Solas refusing to give any. This was a game of chicken that Trevelyan always lost. He hated silence. “…You don’t look terribly surprised to see me like this.”

“My agents informed me of your…’condition’. And the relapses. You have my sympathies.” It did not sound terribly sincere. Especially not when he started to muse, that tone when he was dissecting a spell like some mathematical equation, “A curse created through a tether into the primordial magics of the Fade. A tether cast in blood magic during the infecting ‘bite’, as it were. Despite your limited knowledge of such things, you do understand that its periodic resurgence is because you insist on venturing where the Veil is thin, correct?”

“My sister’s demon thought so.” Trevelyan stood, shifting to crack his back but careful to keep the banner around himself. “And you cut the tether, I assume?”

“It was child’s play. I did not risk having my people interfere in the madman’s crude work because I knew it would not stop me, even were he to succeed.” Solas tilted his head slightly. “That was…careless of me. I apologize.”

“…That’s not what you owe me an apology for.”

“You could be referring to many things.” He paused. When he spoke again his voice was gentler. Less cold. “But I suspect I know what, in particular, you mean. Tell me, what would you have done? In my position?”

And Trevelyan had no answer to that, save one.

“Fail,” he said softly. “Lose to the storyteller who sees a hero in me. Who made a place for me in his home.”

Solas moved closer, hands coming out from where they’d rested behind his back. “For all your brutality, you have a child’s heart.” And, after a pause, “…It is not such a bad thing.”

“Not anymore I don’t.” Trevelyan fidgeted. Felt none of the burning anger he had expected to. The months of self-doubt that had consumed him that first year. Maybe he was in shock. Maybe he was just relieved to see someone who knew him, really knew him, and was still breathing. “…Did you hear how—how things have been on my end?”

And on cue there was that old aloofness, rushing back up. “I was informed. At least, for some of it.” So curt. So brief.

It felt easier, like he could say it this time. “Everyone’s…it’s been, uh…”

The thing that stalled the words in his throat was the subtle way Solas’ brows arched for him. Sympathy.

He couldn’t.

Finally, Trevelyan landed on, “I haven’t heard from Cole since all of this started.” Since that particular friendship, at least, was more mutual than others. “Do you…?”

“I have heard only whispers of his activities, before I was lost to the Fade prison; but then it is not like him to make waves, even in his…more mortal state that you encouraged in him. I am surprised to hear he was not at Skyhold; I’m afraid I could not tell you where he is now. Hopefully far from this place.”

Trevelyan took a moment to process that. In darker moments he had long suspected that Cole would have joined with Solas if given the option. Heal the oldest hurts the world had to offer, side with the friend to spirits who had never needed to be trained out of miserable bloodlust.

His thoughts were interrupted when Solas spoke up once more. “It might interest you to hear that Thom Rainier was among the fallen at Weisshaupt.”

The banner suddenly felt scratchy and damp against his skin. He pulled it tighter around his shoulders. “Oh. …I didn’t know that.”

“I’m afraid I must report that Scout Harding did not survive her mission, either.”

Trevelyan made a noise.

Not unkindly, Solas added, “I would tell you that she died bravely and nobly, but I think for you it would be more comfort to say that she fought viciously. Thinking nothing of taking down an enemy far above her weight class, and winning the fight for it.”

Bloody, scrappy, sweet Harding. He didn’t even have any tears left for her. Was there even a point to having saved her mother? Getting her one of the few nice rooms left in Skyhold? Now someone was going to have to tell her that her little girl was dead.

But did that even matter?

“The things you love,” he said. Quietly, almost to himself. Eyes on the pavement, the geometric dragon design that they used in Tevinter. “Bringing down the Veil won’t bring them back.”

Solas said nothing.

“You won’t be the person you were when you lost them.” His own voice sounded oddly detached. Like he too was just discussing an equation. Some essay on a piece of fiction. “It won’t fix you. You won’t love that world any more than this one.”

“Trevelyan.”

He took a minute before he let their eyes meet. Solas only made the contact for a few moments.

“…Though I suspect you are right,” he conceded, “There are other reasons for what I do. People other than myself for whom I do it. …It is not for mere sentimentality that I have put you through so much. Please remember that.” As Trevelyan rolled that over in his head, he added, “You have always viewed love and duty as the same. …I think you are understanding now how they must diverge.”

That tasted bitter.

Solas once more became brisk, business-like. “Come. The Shadow Dragons have a hideout this way. You will find safety in their numbers. And some clothes.”

The Shadow Dragons.

“And Dorian?” Speaking of love. He almost didn’t dare ask. Trevelyan had seen it during his mad dash; the remains of the Magisterium. “Is he…?”

Solas stopped. Turned to look back at him. “He is with them.”

Trevelyan put a hand on his chest. His heart might have been caving in. “He’s alright.”

“Last I was aware, yes.”

“Yes, then…Then take me to him.”

The walk was not far, and they spent most of it in silence. Trevelyan found that he dimly recognized this street, with his human eyes. Dorian had taken him to eat here, once. Back when it was a bustling market, full of people, lined with stands selling food prepared in a hundred different ways. He’d made Trevelyan sample something that almost burned his mouth out, then as apology gave him a generous helping of some sweet and savory grilled chicken on a stick.

Not together, of course. Dorian couldn’t be seen walking with Trevelyan openly after the last time it got them attacked. They had ambled through opposite ends of the marketplace, Trevelyan in his usual disguise, Dorian dressed down from his normal politician regalia. He’d still had a few people recognize him from the debate earlier that day.

It was grotesque, now. Masses of growth coated the walls on the street, snaking ropes of red ending in engorged pustules. From experience he knew the very big ones had captured people inside them; thankfully these were all small enough that it was just filled with…whatever you called the goo inside. It still wasn’t pleasant to see in a place he primarily associated with food.

Eventually they found two Shadow Dragons carefully navigating the road, keeping to the darkness with masks pulled over their faces. For one of them, this was not a new part of his ensemble, and so he was still recognizable even with his jaw covered.

The Viper. (Trevelyan had resolved that he would never call him Ashur). And the other must be Tarquin, the two were practically joined at the hip. More friends of Maevaris than Dorian, but he did know them. They looked upon him with surprise instead of bafflement.

Solas deemed this good enough to leave him and rejoin the fight once more. Trevelyan watched him shove a Blight tentacle out of the way with magic as he went and thought bitterly of seeing him turn a member of the Ben-Hassrath to stone, wondering where all of that had been when they were facing down a dragon that spat lightning from its craw.

Tarquin took it upon himself to approach, clearing his throat and tugging down his mask. “Inquisitor.” Trevelyan twitched at the designation. “Morrigan told us…That is, we had thought…”

“Yes, I know. ‘You took your time getting here’. I couldn’t find a boat.”

Tarquin almost smirked. “You said it, not me.” And then, never one to linger on pleasantries, “Looks like you could use some outfitting. We were just on our way to the pawn shop to clear out the last of our supplies there, battle’s finally turned for the first time in ages. Should be able to find something for you with what’s left.”

The pawn shop wasn’t far. There were a few darkspawn between it and them, but with a mage and a military man as his escorts, Trevelyan wasn’t in any danger and they made it in safely.

The first items he went to after pulling on some loose clothing were the weapons.

Expectedly as a Tevinter organization, much of what they had was magical in nature. Even blades intended to be used by those with more mundane talents; swords with enchantment runes infused into the hilt, maces comprised of knotted snakes that writhed if you swung them a certain way. Eventually he was able to pick out a good dueling blade with a nice, intricate crossguard, and from there it was just miscellaneous supplies, the grenades and potions.

Of course, before he could put on the only armor that fit him, they had to address the rather pressing issue that he was still missing most of his left arm. The prosthetic that Trevelyan had been wearing before—his favorite--was back in the snowdrifts at Skyhold.

Not that he couldn’t fight with just one arm (he had been very insistent on making himself capable without it, just for situations like this) but the Viper insisted they would be able to supply him with something.

There were many like the one he’d lost, interwoven with only minor enchantments because otherwise the lyrium would give him a headache—for the past five years Trevelyan had been using a few exclusively commissioned by the dwarven embassy in Minrathous for him, after Dagna’s last creation blew up in his face—but they were all across the city in Dorian’s townhouse and inaccessible. It was slim pickings at the back of the pawnshop, by comparison. Most of them were clearly scavenged and incomplete, or else designed for mages who could supply their own power for the delicate control required for anything complicated. Eventually he settled on something mechanical, and begrudgingly accepted help from Tarquin in getting it strapped on. It was crude, made of metal and some other material the dwarves had apparently been very hush-hush about. Heavy enough to give him the proper balance, hard enough to use for blocking. Able to grasp, though not with much dexterity.

It was fine. He pulled on a short mantle to cover it as it sat against his side, bent at the joint where he’d once had an elbow.

Trevelyan contemplated the leather gloves of the spare armor as he finished getting dressed. It had been a few years since he’d finally quit wearing gloves everywhere. Dorian had teased him about it relentlessly, but no one ever commented on his knuckles. It had been very freeing. He’d sort of felt like more of a person.

Wearing gloves was a matter of necessity now, of course. You couldn’t risk any blood contact with the Blight. Better if you had your whole body covered.

Then it was over, and he was all ready. Viper nodded in his direction as he returned to the front of the shop.

“This way. Maevaris and Dorian are cutting a path through the side streets for us. Lusacan—sorry, Elgar’nan—has gotten the Venatori riled up over something, and it’s lightened up the pressure enough for us to make a push through the Blight for his base of operations. Your timing is…rather fortunate.”

“That’s very odd,” Trevelyan remarked as he followed behind the pair. “Because I have the absolute worst timing out of anyone in Thedas.”

“Hm. Fortunate for us, anyway.”

When they arrived, of course, they found a pustule in a broken fountain and darkspawn of varying kinds crawling out of it. And then it wasn’t Trevelyan following; then he was pushing between Tarquin and the Viper, letting out a soft snarl.

Good. A chance to test out his new toys.

Using a bow was less effective than he would like with the ghouls. The hurlocks that pulled spikes from their back, they usually gave him some breathing room to fire, but the charge of the smaller darkspawn required too much dodging to get a proper draw, even if he did manage to hit a weakpoint like the neck or their ankle. The blade was much faster, and he found himself relying on it more and more as the fight progressed. It felt a little delicate for his tastes—Trevelyan always liked at least a little bit of flexibility to just hack at someone like a maniac when it was five minutes in and he was running out of steam, without running the risk of snapping his sword in half—but there was something unique about the edge, an unnatural tint to its sharpness. It cut through flesh beautifully, but there was a part of him that resented how easily it slid through. Like he wasn’t getting to enjoy it.

He was killing them so quickly that they didn’t get to suffer.

Not that darkspawn could really suffer, that was just pretend.

Just something that they did to feel better about it…

“Alexiel Trevelyan,” something whispered into his ear.

Trevelyan jerked. His sword caught in a ghoul’s eye socket, and he found himself desperately flailing to yank it free while also keeping its friend from clawing his skin off.

“Yes, I have heard of you. The hero of the south who cut down my minions’ pretender god. Bra-vo!”

The last time something talked inside his mind like this—smooth, sensual, caressing—it was a demon.

“Such a shame that you find yourself still a pawn of the Dread Wolf all these years later, little Lex. You must have been devastated when you learned he was the true power behind your adorable little Inquisition.”

Trevelyan grit his teeth, stumbling in his footing as his sword slid loose with a wet schlick. The edges of his vision felt red, and blurred. There was noise around him, people talking—he could hear them clearly, this wasn’t a matter of their sound being drowned out, it wasn’t physical. But it was like he couldn’t understand anything but this crooning voice in his head. They were speaking a completely different language.

“It’s not too late to join the correct side, you know. I am a benevolent god. Those who repent shall find succor and glory in the light of my mercy.”

They were in the thick of the horde, now. Progress had been slow going, but now they could see a few combatants on their side. Mages wearing the Shadow Dragon colors, even a few that weren’t. There was one of them, Trevelyan was pretty sure he’d seen him lighting street lamps once or twice, he had a very noticeable tattoo under his eye. The rest had weapons, much like the ones back in the pawn shop.

There were also quite a few bodies on the floor, and it became rather important to avoid tripping on them.

Trevelyan glanced over. Beside him the Viper shook his head, a hand to his temple. “...He does that every hour or so.”

“Forget that.” He pointed farther ahead. “Is that Mae?”

“—Venhedis.”

Dorian had introduced Trevelyan to Mae before she’d been kicked out of the Magisterium. She’d seemed…brighter, then. As glamorous as he’d come to expect from a cousin of Dorian Pavus, able to light up a room with just her smile alone and a sharp wit that left her opponents gasping for breath.

If she’d still been that Maevaris, there would be no question of who could eventually become Archon.

Losing her seat after everything she’d sacrificed and lost seemed to have done something to her. Wilted her. She hid in the shadows and fantasized about coming back into the light, and Dorian—poor Dorian—had to take up the burden of fighting for their causes in her stead.

She was facing down a Hurlock at the moment, one of the larger and more bestial sort that the Evanuris had crafted. Their hides were tough to crack by normal means, and seemed almost resistant to magical blasts. It was clear that she’d been fighting for quite some time, and her steps looked clumsy. Near misses from that creature’s mottled axe by a razor thin margin.

If he just stood there and watched, it would probably kill Mae before they got to her.

He could blame the arm. Couldn’t get to his bow in time, he’d say. They’d believe him.

Trevelyan lined up the shot, got the hurlock in the neck and downed it long enough for Tarquin to saw its head off.

The fight went on.

It wasn’t just darkspawn around them. Elgar’nan’s forces consisted of more than just his mindless shock troops. Once Trevelyan and the rest had cut through the outer edge of the fight, they saw Blighted men and women in Venatori outfits, warped Qunari wearing the Antaam colors.

And there in the middle of it was Dorian.

Sweeping broad arcs of lightning through the warriors who wore heavy armor. Blasts of fire at the ones that didn’t. Shunting wisps through the bodies to rise any that were still intact enough to do his bidding, his mouth moving but too far away to hear the words, the chanting. He was garbed in his Magisterium robes, though the outfit was significantly torn (deliberately it looked like, in some areas), and the staff he carried was topped by a diamond-shaped foci with a stone held there in the center. It glimmered as he worked magic through it, rings on his fingers flashing when he used a hand instead.

Dorian was a dream.

He always looked particularly vicious when they fought the Venatori.

Like he still had something to lose.

Eventually the last of their enemies sizzled and seizured at another round of the lightning, before at last crashing to the ground. Dorian made an audible, contemptuous sniff. Then he turned and saw Trevelyan, and both of their hearts stopped for a second.

“Alexiel?” Shocked, quiet, and then a dash over to him. “Fasta vass, why are you here? How?”

Trevelyan coughed. “I, uh, ran.”

He knew he didn’t look good. There were new scars on his face, he probably still looked like he’d puked up his last lunch, and he was in borrowed clothes. But Dorian didn’t look significantly better. He was covered in grime and sweat, unshaved, and had a cut on his temple that had bled pretty heavily before clotting.

So it seemed a bit dramatic for him to look so horrified. “What’s happened to you? Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, Dorian.” Something like a smile twitched weakly at the corners of Trevelyan’s mouth. “Don’t fuss.”

“’Don’t fuss’, he tells me. Like a bleeding fool. Come here.” Though it was a command, Dorian didn’t give him time to obey, stepping forward and running a hand over his hair, feeling at the junction of neck and jaw and his fingers coming away with crusted blood.

Anyone else who’d survived the fight chose that moment to press the advance. Their enemies might have been felled, but the growths of Blight and rot were a fair bit more animate than usual down the road. Trevelyan left them to it. He no longer had any reason to follow them.

“I kept trying to contact you. When I couldn’t, I thought…” Dorian let out a shaky breath. “Well, never mind what I thought, you’re here now. Where did you go?”

“I—” It was insane, but Trevelyan couldn’t remember if he’d told Dorian about the returning transformations or not. He was sure he hadn’t mentioned it when it first happened again, because he’d assumed it would only be the one time and there was no need to bring up something that had been so upsetting for the both of them over a minor hiccup that Evelyn had handled very easily. And then at the next resurgence there wasn’t really a way to discuss it without bringing up the first time that he had omitted, and—surely he must have brought it up eventually but now he was surrounded by blood and singing and magic and he couldn’t, he couldn’t remember-- “We’ll talk about it later, we don’t have time.”

“We have a little time.” Trevelyan didn’t resist any further, feeling like he was on the precipice of saying the wrong thing. Dorian swallowed, but thankfully seemed to have more pressing matters on his mind. “About the fight we had—before—”

“It’s okay.” It wasn’t. “I was just being stubborn.”

“Don’t say it like that, like it’s easy. I know that I…” He sighed. “I know it’s not what we talked about. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have been so—”

Trevelyan laughed, the sudden and loud sound that had been leaving him more readily lately. “Only Dorian Pavus would try to have a talk about my feelings when there’s killing to do.” He pulled away, not too far, because he couldn’t bear that, but he needed to start walking or else they would continue to be facing each other and he knew his eyes would probably give him away. He began to head for where Tarquin and the Viper had ran off with Mae. “There has to be a Tevinter left before I start worrying about what you’re going to do in it.”

“Later, then. When your head’s wrapped around it.” Almost a relief. Drop the topic. Maybe Dorian would forget about it. And then, “What about Antiva? We’ve only just heard, the Blight that took Treviso has spread through the country. —Your brother and Josephine, were you able to--?”

“They’re fine.” They weren’t. “I moved them all to Ostwick when the Antaam first invaded.”

“After the eclipse—when Elgar’nan—” Dorian was having to jog to keep up with him, he was walking so briskly now. “It’s been so difficult to get any news about what’s happening elsewhere—”

“It’s fine, Dorian. It’s all fine.”

If he had been there, he would know. There with him, by his side, and not here in the safety of underground hideouts, chatting in bars, picking fights on the Magisterium floor—

If he had been there, he’d probably be dead too.

“What about you.” His hand grabbed Trevelyan’s shoulder, squeezed hard enough that it didn’t feel particularly comforting. “Are you alright?”

Trevelyan stopped physically, but his heartbeat continued its steady drum. He could feel it in his ears. “I told you. Just dandy.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Would it make a difference if I wasn’t?” When Dorian didn’t respond, he shrugged him away. “We have work to do, don’t we?”

“Work? When you look like you’ve just been—”

A blur of movement caught his eye. From the misty, darkened red sky, a small shadow arrived from behind a building. A bird.

He knew who to expect when the woman appeared from within it, and so didn’t miss a beat when he said, “She’s here, isn’t she?”

"Your timing is impeccable, Inquisitor.” His lip curled. Morrigan seemed to notice, and a light of something—amusement? Reproach?—gleamed in her eyes. “Rook and her forces have just breached the city.”

“Clara? Here?” Dorian blinked at her in amazement. “But she’s been missing for—how long has it even been, a week? Two? I suppose that does explain what’s distracted the Venatori…”

“Missing?” Trevelyan had simply assumed she’d been fighting here since it started.

 “Around the time Solas arrived.” After a moment Dorian sighed, talking through his teeth. “Yes, I believe it was quite convenient, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

Morrigan ignored him. “She intends to converge on the Divine’s manor. I suggest you make time to join her. It seems now is the time for the fate of the world to be decided.” And then, with a smirk, “’T’would be a pity were it decided without you.”

There was another electric crackle of magic, and then she was gone, the dark crow flying away again.

Trevelyan looked back at Dorian. “You heard her.”

“After—after this is over. We’ll talk then.”

“Noted.”

They rejoined with the rest of the Shadow Dragons. The Divine’s Manor, it seemed, was the goal all along. The anchor point for the Archon’s palace where Elgar’nan had taken up residence. Though even outside of that, it was, if nothing else, outside the range of the palace’s magic cannons in its position directly under it, so it was safer than most areas of the city. The problem was that all of the secret passages that led inside were filled to bursting with Blight. Still; Rook was going there. Viper bid them to follow, and their forces turned.

There was still a fight to get there, but it passed by in a blur with Dorian by his side. It was startling to think about, but Trevelyan hadn’t actually gotten to fight with Dorian outside of tiny skirmishes with ill-equipped assassins since…Since the Exalted Council, he was pretty sure. They had always had a wonderful rhythm together. It didn’t feel rusty at all.

The actual building, once they got in visual range, was impressive. The sort of thing Trevelyan had come to expect from Tevinter architecture, married to the ostentatious grandeur that came from being among the country’s wealthiest (as tended to be the case for “charity” organizations like the Chantry). He did note with some interest, however, that it was not as large as the Archon’s palace, nor, in fact, was it floating. Which did say something about the scale of power here, he supposed. No Divine in the South would ever have tolerated a Grand Cathedral that was lower and smaller than the Winter Palace.

The passages that had previously been untraversable were remarkably clear when they arrived. Waiting for them inside were Rook’s people—or rather, the people who had chosen to support her cause, they couldn’t really be called hers. Not all of them, but whoever had been holding up the tail end of the invasion force, fighting against the city’s defenses. Mostly Grey Wardens, it seemed like—dinged and covered in dirt, exhausted and quiet.

Maybe they would have had an easier time if they tried turning into giant monsters and jumping clear over the walls like he did.

They were stuck in the tunnels waiting to be joined by the Shadow Dragons because apparently the entrance at the end was jammed.

Dorian smacked his staff against it. “Kaffas!”

The Viper knelt to inspect the lock with a soft reproach of, “Language, Pavus.”

Trevelyan nudged Dorian’s hand. “Fuck.”

While they grinned at each other, a dwarf warden with her greathammer lost her patience and smashed the door open. They ran into the room prepared to find more Venatori, but instead found an eclectic band of the sort he hadn’t seen since—

There she was, in front of him.

Rook.

His smile fell away.

Clara Mercar. That was her name. Dorian had told him once, more than a year ago. Bemoaning an operation that had gone wrong, brought undue attention on the Shadow Dragons from the Templar authorities. Trevelyan hadn’t remembered her, at the time. But her name, her face, it was burned into his memory now.

And what a sad face it was. She was this little twig of a thing, an elf (though it was hard to find her ears behind that curly mane of dark brown hair) and a mage with a staff taller than she was. Upward slanting brows, bruised and slightly sunken eyes with cataracts so thick it was a wonder she could see through them, a little mouth with dark lipstick painted to always look slightly pursed, slightly dour. She looked like the tragic sacrifice in a bad Antivan opera, the silent role that didn’t last past intermission.

For their scant few prior interactions, she had been clad in scuffed old leathers and a ratty cloak, but this time she was dressed differently. He recognized the style; Nevarran, he could guess. It looked vaguely ceremonial, though there was more protective functionality to it than that—made out of Gurn hide, if he was any judge. It also looked in a similar state of filth to the rest of everyone there, though not as bad.

He was so distracted by her, he almost missed the Blight-ridden Dalish elf next to her (“Bellara”, as he recalled) until suddenly everyone was fussing, talking about getting her to a healer. And then Trevelyan was being bundled along with the rest of them by a hand to his back and a voice in his ear. “Come on. We have that moment of quiet now.”

With the world still screeching and rumbling outside, he would not have called it “quiet”, exactly. But he allowed himself to be manhandled away.

Dorian deposited him in a chair by a fireplace, muttering an incantation to bring it quickly to life. Trevelyan hadn’t realized he was shaking until he no longer had the weight of his own body keeping him grounded and solid.

“Wait here. I think I saw something to drink just in the other room...”

Don’t leave me.

It was too loud in here, as the place slowly filled up from its other hidden entrances. All wearing the various colors of the allies Rook had been courting; Veil Jumpers, Mourn Watch, Antivan Crows, those treasure hunters, what were their names…?

Too many people, all talking. Some crying, some laughing. Mostly murmuring, that hushed and fearful thing. Too many individual voices. He wished he could silence them all. If any of them tried to talk to him, he just might.

When Dorian returned with a warm mug, it was a relief. Trevelyan accepted the offering and drank without asking what it was. He didn’t recognize the flavor of it at all. Slightly acidic, a little thick, smelling of wine but no burn of alcohol on his tongue. It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t very good either. But some energy began to return to his limbs, and—as long as his mouth was occupied, Dorian just stood there and stroked his hair and didn’t ask him any difficult questions.

“…Are you still going to tell me you’re just ‘alright’?” murmured Dorian when he had at last finished.

Trevelyan looked into his cup. “I’m not any worse than the last time we talked,” he answered finally.

“The last time we talked was not a good conversation.” After a pause he pinched Trevelyan’s ear hard enough that he flinched. “I thought that was our last one.”

“You should sit down too, Dorian.”

“I’ve done enough sitting down. Ever since that jumped-up fashion-disaster of a ‘god’ took over the city I’ve been huddling in Shadow Dragon bolt holes waiting for the chance to fight back. We all have. Getting to take some action at last?” He exhaled, a grumble in the back of his throat. “I’m feeling rather wonderful right now, actually.”

Trevelyan took Dorian’s hand in his, pressed his fingers to his lips.

“When we survive this…” A moment of hesitation. Dorian sighed again, but this time sounding old and weary. “…It won’t be so terrible. I’ll…I’ll make it work. I promise.”

Rook’s friends were trickling into the room as they spoke. Trevelyan had seen them before, but only in brief glimpses. Never as one, never gathered together like this. And of course, the only one of them that he had known as a friend was no longer there. What could he think of them as a whole? They were a cast of, as Dorian might have put it long ago, “unique snowflakes”, each defined by how unlike the others they were. Yet these differences didn’t seem to keep them from smiling at the sight of each other, keep their edges from lining up. The wrong sort of whatever.

Dorian saw him watching. Nudged him.

“Remind you of anything?” he asked.

Trevelyan felt bile rise in his throat.

He swallowed it.

They talked freely with each other, these companions. The elf with the Blight in her eyes, she spoke in rapidly branching topics, an endless well of information and irrelevant detail on what she’d experienced while held under Elgar’nan’s sway (apparently the fate of anyone who’d attended the Magisterium session the day the Evanuris took over, at least those who weren’t killed outright). The others would interrupt every now and then to get her back on course, or else request clarifying details. There was a very natural push and pull to it. Familiar. Yes.

But then Rook approached from the back hall, and they all seemed to stiffen. Not in discomfort, nothing like that. But the easy comradery wasn’t the same with her in the room. She had a dry, understated way about her that didn’t seem to lend itself well to her friends’ ebullience.

Though the necromancer—Volkarin, as Dorian had told him--he stepped up to kiss her forehead before she opened their talks, and—yes, that was rather sickening.

Trevelyan let out a dry chuckle into his own palm, staring into the fire. “Everyone keeps acting like we still have a chance. Like we’ll kill the Evanuris and all the flowers will just grow back.”

Dorian smoothed a hand over his shoulder. “That tends to be what happens when Blights end. We’ll get through this.”

Trevelyan grumbled.

He was quiet, during most of the war table meeting. Observing. It was a complicated problem. Normally murder was a great way to get rid of the people in your way. But in this case, they needed both of the apocalyptic elven gods alive to keep the Veil intact. Or at least, one of them.

When he had spoken to Rook before, in the Cobbled Swan (what felt like a lifetime ago), she had sounded quite positive towards Solas. Almost stupidly so, in fact. The Dread Wolf was doing the thing he’d done back during the time of the Inquisition; helping in the little ways, inconsequential in the grand scheme of his plan, good deeds to satisfy his own moral ego. And to Rook this was apparently an impressive thing. Or maybe she just liked the support. She looked like she craved it constantly, approval. Trevelyan had even felt it between the two of them, the way she’d hung on his words, his opinions over dinner.

Whatever goodwill Solas had managed to gain from her that way, it was gone now.

Liar. Traitor. The only words she had for him were harsh condemnations, and plots to lock him inside the Veil he sought to break.

Which was fair, but also not. Solas didn’t lie. At least, he’d never lied to Trevelyan.

Not directly, anyway.

It was a poor distinction intellectually, but it had put him above Thom Rainier, or the Iron Bull, the natural liars in his group. It had...hurt. But not in the same way.

Trevelyan found himself lapsing into his thoughts. Why should he pay attention to the plan? They didn’t want or need his input. And after what was maybe an hour, where wartable talk had broken to everyone saying their last farewells to each other, Dorian wandering off to touch base with Maevaris, he felt someone pushing a small bottle at his hand.

Trevelyan looked up. Rook.

His ears felt like they were full of white noise again.

“It’s elfroot,” she explained, unasked. “Harding…said you liked elfroot…?”

He stared at her, brow set, eyes open hard. Then he took the bottle with a grunt. “Another betrayal...”

“Sorry?”

“You have places to be.” He downed the whole thing in one gulp, winced at the medicinal burn as it traveled down his throat. “Go. We’ll hold the line.”

Rook left two of her companions, the grey warden and the detective, to help them maintain their defenses against the darkspawn and what remained of Elgar’nan’s army.

Trevelyan only briefly thought about incorporating them into his combat strategy, and then vehemently decided not to.

The new darkspawn, at least, were sort of fun to fight. He’d had a conversation or two about it with Warden Commander Mahariel before she’d vanished to recruit her “alternative allies” (she was supposed to be back by Redcliffe. Redcliffe came and went without her). She had complained that their lack of strategy made them too chaotic for her, difficult to plan around. But for Trevelyan, who had less head for strategy and more interest in running, jumping, slicing, it was more suited to him. The bow was still a problem, the arm was simply too slow and clumsy for the precise aim he needed, but the dueling was fun and learning it had made him feel better those first few years after losing his arm, so he didn’t mind prioritizing it.

He supposed he was fortunate, to still be in top shape even as he was getting older. Maybe he had that spell to thank for that, the—“curse”, as Solas put it. Or maybe he was better at taking care of himself than most. Though, throwing himself into danger again and again didn’t really seem like taking care of himself. That was the kind of thing Dorian used to chide him over all the time.

Dorian.

Dorian wouldn’t be able to leave him if he broke his legs.

Trevelyan shook his head, trying to dislodge the thought.

One of the Antaam soldiers, the artillery, they sent a blast of some gaatlok explosive right for him. Trevelyan swiped his blade up, managed to redirect the projectile away from himself, threw a knife trying to get a clean shot through the face plate. He didn’t have time to see if it landed or not because another one came at him with a heavy shield.

Archon of the Tevinter Imperium.

Not a job that you could just quietly retire from.

A Venatori almost managed to get a slash in his shoulder with one of those wicked, curving blades. Trevelyan swung with her, looped his arm around her neck, slammed her into the ground and then stomped until her nose turned concave.

They’d go after Dorian. Dorian would try to kill them before they could but even if he got all of his current enemies in one go, there were always new ones. New ones who would have a big, shiny target to aim at now. Archon Pavus, the reformist. The boat rocker.

He’d do well. He would. He was stronger than that. Stronger than any of them.

But you didn’t just stop being Archon when your work was over. You didn’t just put it down when you were done with it. Even an Inquisitor couldn’t do that, apparently.

--No. Think about something else. Think about anything else. There were so many things to kill out here, and so many people killing it with him.

The elf. Him. Rook’s friend. Focus on him.

By this point, Trevelyan had known and worked with a decent number of Dalish, but Anderfels Grey Wardens were another matter. In theory they shouldn’t be so different; they followed the same creed, after all, fought the same monsters, undertook the same secretive rituals. But, as he understood it, the Fereldan wardens had been on bad terms with Anderfels leadership since the chapter’s restructuring after the Fifth Blight, and the Orlesians had been all but disavowed after what Clarel had pulled in Adamant. Trevelyan had never had an “in”, as it were.

Davrin held himself in a military manner quite unlike the spry and supple style that Trevelyan had seen in other Dalish hunters. It could have been simply more rigorous warden training, but that didn’t seem right. The Wardens liked to take in their warriors mostly finished already.

Maybe it had something to do with being from one of the few Dalish clans to live this far North, so close to Tevinter.

And then there was the griffon.

It was funny. He’d read the same stories as everyone else. Marveled at the picturesque image of wardens riding griffons the same as everyone else. It was a childish wonder, a fairy tale, and now here was one brought to life before him. Ripping darkspawn apart with its claws, plunging its beak into qunari necks.

Yet Trevelyan felt no wonder.

But then he wasn’t really feeling much of anything.

The other one of Rook’s, the mage detective, had shown up once or twice in the paper. Trevelyan had read some; he’d always been more keen on fictional serials than anything true to life, and so had only given her articles a passing glance over pumpkin bread and fried fish at Dorian’s breakfast table, but he still remembered the name the one time they’d mentioned it. Neve Gallus.

Her ice magic made him think abruptly of Vivienne.

No.

The splintering emotion almost made it through, but it didn’t. A Venatori spellbinder tried to turn one of his legs to stone and so Trevelyan was subsumed once more with the pleasant numbness of combat.

That is until he heard a particularly gruesome screech and glanced to the sky to see an archdemon flying up to its master.

“Fenedhis.” Only a few feet away from him, Davrin yanked his sword out of the neck of an Antaam cannon operator. “That thing is still alive.”

Trevelyan looked up at it blandly until it was out of view. So it was.

Predictably, the warden was significantly more upset about it. “Should have known better than to trust Fen’harel to do a Grey Warden’s work. –Assan! To me!”

“What? –Davrin!” There was a clack-clack-clack as Neve made her way across, too late to stop him. She came to a halt by Trevelyan’s side. “As if a single extra person is going to make a difference!”

Something popped in his ears.

“I’ll go with him.”

Neve turned to look at him, shoulders tight. “What?”

He didn’t pause to address her, securing his bow and blade to have his hands free. “I know Solas. Better than any of you, I’d wager. It should be me up there. Distract him, if talking him down isn’t an option.”

She moved to block him off. “I can’t let you do that. You don’t even know what the situation is like up there. If something happens to you—The South needs you alive, Trevelyan.”

Trevelyan’s eyes flashed. “Get out of my way. I’m not asking your permission. If you try to grab me, I’ll cut your hands off.”

Neve pulled back, blinking. And then she shook her head. “Magister Pavus warned us about you.”

“Clearly not adequately.”

Then he started to scramble after the elf.

A thought occurred to Trevelyan, as they ascended that tendril of twisting, singing Blight.

Not really a thought, nothing so coherent or deliberate. More like an image. A wish.

He imagined that he was on a beach somewhere, with Dorian. Watching the sun set, hearing the gentle crashing of waves, and drinking cold cider.

The inside of his lungs felt damp.

The sun was still covered by a moon

Something screamed further up; a guttural, wailing shriek.

There were monsters waiting for them when they reached the lower edge of the Archon’s palace. The griffon was waiting for them, perched on a piece of scaffolding, and Davrin called to him, began the fight.

Dorian’s new home was looking a little shabby.

They’d have to clean it up before his appointment.

Finally, the three of them arrived at what was left of the throne room, right in time to see Rook slitting Elgar’nan’s throat with the lyrium dagger.

The air around them crackled.

That sensation again. Of magic rushing through, along his skin. The Veil shuddering. That familiar feeling that set an ache in a palm he no longer had. Like if he just brought up his hand and flexed his fingers, he could fix all of this. Make the sky whole again.

And there was Solas.

He was weak. Barely able to stand. The fight with Elgar’nan’s archdemon had nearly killed him, that was clear just at a glance. Even as he limped along. Even as he clearly was going to end the world again.

Though he could have jumped in to intervene, Trevelyan stood there. Watched as Rook futilely tried to strike, only to be held in place by Solas’ magic, as anyone could have predicted. Watched the dagger wrenched from her hand with a curious fascination. What would the new world look like? Would all the demons matter, with so much Blight still everywhere?

Rook wasn’t alone, though. Already her friends were rallying, the mage and the qunari. They stopped Solas in his tracks, broke her free—sent the glowing dagger flying.

In the corner of his eye he saw Davrin, lifting his sword and preparing to enter the fray.

Trevelyan shoved him off the edge of the building.

The griffon—scrawny, gangly, adolescent whelp--shrieked and dove after him. The sound drew the attention of everyone currently on the battle field, stopped them in their tracks. He didn’t stop for them. He continued moving, darting over the slick flooring. It must have looked wonderful when it wasn’t covered in black, bile blood.

And then he had the fallen dagger in his hand, felt it thrum with energy, and yet, subdued. It was like no piece of raw lyrium he had ever been near—and he’d been near a distressingly high amount for something so lethal. And yet, he knew it was not something he wanted to play with. Kill with. He tucked it on his belt, felt a little better when it was farther from his hand.

In that time, it seemed the shock had worn off. Rook was staring at him, aghast, her mouth dropping open. “Inquisitor—”

“Shut up!” It was like a lance bolt cutting through him. He was going mad. He was losing his Maker-damned mind. “I’m not the Inquisitor anymore, stop calling me that! I disbanded the Inquisition TEN YEARS AGO.”

He’d been kidding himself.

All those years. What a silly little joke it was. It was laughable that he’d fallen for it, that it took so long and so much before he realized.

Being the Inquisitor. Having friends. Being a hero, like all those stories he’d spent his childhood hiding in. Pretending he could learn to be better, learn to care about the world. Pretending he could have ever kept or even saved anyone or anything that mattered to him. It had never been true. It had been a trick of the light, one that an elven trickster god had played on him.

But that was old news. He’d had his tantrum over it and let it burn out. Solas had never put him through anything that the “Dread Wolf” hadn’t suffered himself, tenfold. Solas knew. He understood.

This place wasn’t real.

Neither were the people in it.

The only people that were real were the ones he loved as friends.

Trevelyan crossed over to him. Saw the old elf take the sight of him in.

The shock that registered on his face.

Then the understanding.

And then—

Sadness.

“You do not need to do this,” he said.

Trevelyan snarled as he clasped his hand in his and pulled him up. “I don’t know how anyone can live as long as you apparently have and do the things that you have apparently done and still be fucking soft.”

He wasn’t, though. He wasn’t supposed to be. Not the Solas that he knew. He wasn’t supposed to bleed this much, wasn’t supposed to look at him in that mournful way, wasn’t supposed to look so--

Vulnerable.

He remembered that day, years ago. Falling to his knees, vision swimming, oceans of magic pulling through his hand and sapping his life away. Remembered Solas gently gripping his wrist, and in one smooth motion taking that magic from him. Leaving him there as his glove filled with dust and fell, flattening, to the ground. There had been his usual stoic demeanor, the cold that he put on, but something else too. Something unbearable. The soft kind of pity a parent reserves for a child. The sanctimonious kindness that came with wisdom. Trevelyan had always, always wanted to pay him back for that. Hurt him for that.

Solas didn’t look composed enough for that, now. He was looking rather mortal, in fact. Clutching his side and blinking away the blood from his brow.

“My friend,” he said. It was funny. He straightened his posture, held his arm as though it was simply bent in rather than managing a wound. “I wish I could be glad to have you by my side. That you shared my goals, instead of just seeking some foolhardy revenge.”

“Because your motivations for destroying the world are rainbows and butterflies, I’m sure.”

“You destroy yourself.” Solas took a breath in, and the world around them rippled with magic. Some of his wounds—they didn’t close, exactly. But a thin, green sheen began to coat his body. “…Very well. If you think you have nothing to lose. Join me, then.”

Trevelyan laughed. Funny, his teeth still felt too sharp. “You could always kill yourself. That would stop them from sealing the Veil back up.”

Solas glanced back, the barest hint of a smirk. Breaking. “Funny.”

“I’m not joking.”

“I know.”

Trevelyan went for Rook. Obviously he went for Rook.

She didn’t make the first move. She seemed quite bewildered to be facing him at all. “I don’t understand! You fought to save the world. Why turn against it now?”

Dull. Stupid. Idiot girl.

“My world is already dead,” he said. Calm, at first. Like it was just plain fact. Like that was all it was. He circled her, saw the confusion. Felt a fresh wave of fury rip through him and he shouted, “Solas didn’t do that! You did!”

She was prepared enough for his first strike that he found his sword bouncing off of the barrier she hastily brought up around herself. She could have countered in that moment, he was more accustomed to mages who thought offensive spells were the sum total of what they had to learn, or barriers that simply absorbed impacts instead of repelling them. Instead she darted away, leaving him to shout some more.

“You are the reason the Evanuris escaped, them and all their Blighted monsters. And now you think you deserve to walk down there and stand among their victims and be celebrated as a hero? When all of this was your doing? You think you’ve done anything to make up for that?”

“I had no choice!” Her voice was cracking, strained. He wondered if she believed the things she was saying; it was more impassioned than he had ever heard from her, but the emotion behind it didn’t feel like sincerity. “If I didn’t do anything then Solas would have succeeded and the world would have been drowned in demons! Thousand would have died!”

“Thousands?” He couldn’t help it. He laughed. “Oh, sure. Let’s pretend it would have just been thousands. Let me ask you, Rook. How many people do you think have died since you interfered in Solas’ ritual?” He swept his arm broadly toward the vista before them. “Do you think you’ve hit that number yet?”

They could see all of Minrathous from here. The pillars of Blight infestation reaching into the sky. Curling tendrils of disease snaking across the ground. A frothing mass of Darkspawn below, like swarming ants. And it was nothing. It was nothing compared to what he had seen. In Fereldan. In Orlais. The Free Marches. When the Antaam and the Venatori had fallen back, the Blight had risen back up like the tide. Its waves claimed everything in its wake.

“You let Varric die! You let Harding die! My friends!” The anger outpaced his desire for that dramatic pause, and he kept trying to get a hit in—if he turned his blade at just the right angle he found it could slice right through her barrier, and he’d managed to clip her jaw, left a red line, but not much else. She was too fast. Or rather, she was using some type of Fade-step to evade him. He would swing his blade where she was, only for her to just…not be there. “You let loose this Blight and it swallowed up the land I loved!”

Magic crackled around them, across the platform. The other mage, Volkarin, he was blasting at Solas with some spirit magic beam. It didn’t look to be doing any real damage—the shimmery barrier around him was holding strong—but it was holding him up, keeping him from effectively countering the qunari, who—actually, he couldn’t see anymore.

“And I did love it.” Trevelyan threw a grenade in their direction, then turned back around to see the scrawny little elf darting away from him again. Why was she looking at him like that? Like he was the pathetic one? “I tried so hard to save it. I did everything I was supposed to, I did so much. And I fucking did it one handed.”

There was movement to his left. A flash of grey. Trevelyan just barely got his left arm up in time to block two axe strikes that would have buried in his back.

The blades bounced off the metal of his prosthetic. The qunari—what was the name? Taash? Yes, that’s what Rook called in horror when he leveled a kick into their stomach and knocked them back, skidding near the end of the platform. They didn’t fall off, but it was a narrow enough space that Solas could throw up an ice wall to cut them off from the fight.

Pulling his punches. Asshole.

Trevelyan lunged at Rook again. “And it wasn’t enough. None of it meant anything. None of it mattered.”

She scrambled back, another narrow miss but this time without the benefit of her Fade step. “Now that the gods are gone, the Blight will go away! The land will heal, don’t you see that?” She fired bolts of magic at him to ward him off, but she didn’t seem to be trying very hard. By now Trevelyan had seen her call down fireballs, suck the life out of her enemies like it was nothing. It was starting to aggravate him that she wouldn’t do him the same courtesy. “The people can rebuild, the South isn’t gone forever!”

“The part of it I loved is.” This time she blocked his sword with her staff, metal clanging in his ears. “That part is never coming back!”

Rook swiped, and the sharp edges of her foci--it looked a little like wings—smacked him upside the head. Trevelyan stumbled, had to rapidly adjust his footing. Falling to the ground in a battle meant dying, he swiveled to strike his left arm against the stone to push himself up and away. It clanged terribly, jarring his shoulder.

He needn’t have bothered. There was no follow-up strike. “I get that you’re angry and hurting, but what Solas is doing will destroy the world!”

Even after all this, she was trying to reason with him.

He really, really hated when people did that.

“I don’t care,” he snarled, blood dripping from his mouth. “Let it burn.”

 And then he tossed a handful of the explosive grenades left on his belt to give a more visual demonstration of what he wanted.

Rook threw up another one of her little soap-bubble barriers, but it shattered like glass at the onslaught. Her magic sputtered, staff slipping from her hand, and in that split second he shot forward and seized her throat in the metallic grasp of his prosthetic.

“Your friend got in a lucky shot at Ghilan’nain and you think that makes you a god killer? I bashed Corypheus’ brains in with his own orb! I downed Hakkon Wintersbreath with a few friends and an old bow!” Another laugh was rising in his throat, watching her struggle and shove at his hand like some fish on a hook, jaw working but no sound escaping. He swallowed it down in a snarl. “Without your precious magic what are you? Just a little girl hiding behind fighters stronger than her! Better than her!”

Those washed out, milky eyes stared into his, and he didn’t flinch from them. Didn’t blink. It was more than he had ever given her, taken to staring out windows or over her shoulder the few times they had spoken before. He didn’t think he could even see anything in there. Those eyes felt almost as dead as Cole’s.

And then, her voice a rasping wheeze, her lips parted.

“He was afraid of you.”

Trevelyan’s grip loosened.

Then a cold hand was prying him away. His head whipped around to see Volkarin yanking him back. “That’s quite enough.”

If he moved his eyes a little further, he saw Solas staggering under a steady onslaught of blows. The double axes of that qunari, one after another, chipping away at his own barrier, the shimmer over his skin. Where were his powers now? On the one hand, Trevelyan knew he must have been running on fumes, but on the other it did always seem so very typical that the moment someone joined his side, they retained only a shadow of their former power.

Volkarin shook his hand again, snapping his attention back. There was something odd about his face now that they were up close, a sort of sheen that didn’t seem to match the light around them, though he didn’t have much time to think about it. His wrist hurt with the intensity of the grip. “You have looked into the maw of despair and been consumed by it. But I will not tolerate this, even for the sake of those you once saved.”

The words were all just noise. With his free hand, Trevelyan jammed a dagger right into the man’s chest, where his heart was.

Where his heart should have been.

Where it wasn’t.

He looked up at Volkarin with confusion. And then, as he watched, the flesh melted away, and he was staring into the glowing sockets of a skeleton.

“Maker’s breath,” he uttered.

“Stand down,” it said. Voice echoing, but not the echo of sound—it was more the humming reverberation of magic. Power in the ether. “We have been fighting gods and you are just a mortal man.”

Trevelyan opened his mouth to speak. Paused. Thought better of it. Then started again. “Frankly I don’t know how to respond to you.” And then, “Tell me, if your body is actually just held together by magic and not sinew or flesh, what happens if someone blots out all the magic in the room?”

Funny, up until this moment in his life, Trevelyan would have been quite certain that it was impossible for a skeleton to look confused.

The last grenade on his belt was an interesting one. Tarquin had explained it to him in brief when he asked, because Trevelyan had never seen anything like it during all of his time in the South. And why would he? Southern Templars were so very different from the ones in Tevinter. It was very important to the Southern Chantry to maintain that monopoly on being able to cancel out magic.

Why would they allow anyone to develop a grenade that did it too?

There was a flash as the little orb hit the ground. He heard Rook cry out “Emmrich!” as the skeleton collapsed to pieces, and oh my wasn’t that entertaining. She thought the spirit—because that had to be what he was looking at--was actually Professor Volkarin.

What had it been before they put it in his corpse, he wondered. Curiosity?

No. More important things.

Despite its usefulness, the effects of the bomb wouldn’t stay for long. A Templar would have done a more lasting job, but he’d refused to become one. Already he could see the green fires flickering back to life, the pieces of bone starting to rearrange themselves back into place, writhing under heavy fabric.

“Just a man,” he repeated, sword ready. “Yes, that’s all I am. Just a man who likes to kill things. And they called me a hero because I killed the right people, in the right way. Only now it seems we disagree on who deserves to die.”

In the corner of his periphery he could see, Solas had fallen again, though whether he’d finally run out of mana or been a victim to Trevelyan’s grenade would never become clear. The qunari stood over him, breathing heavily, blades stained. But he was still alive. Blood still dripped from his wounds.

And there was Rook. Standing there, looking at him with those weepy, miserable eyes, that glowing dagger in her hand.

–What? When had she taken it off of him?

He was afraid of you.

Trevelyan made a final dash for her, his sword sweeping in a broad arc towards her stomach.

And then he was suddenly moving at a tenth his normal speed.

Rook took only a second to register the change before she scurried away, still coughing, her staff held knuckle-white in her hands again. Trevelyan’s blade hit the ground harmlessly, not even enough force to strike a spark. He gritted his teeth, snarled and tried to reorient himself, but it was like moving through water.

He knew this magic. He had felt this spell before, but it wasn’t quite the same. It had never felt like this, because—he had always been on the opposite side of it.

That was when he saw him there, at the far end of the platform.

Staff in hand. Face set.

Oh.

Dorian dropped a Crushing Prison spell on him, and Trevelyan was thrown down to the ground with a whumpf.

The last string inside him snapped.

The battle was over. The Veilguard won; Solas had no more fight to put up when Rook finally sealed him into the Veil. The sky cleared. The Blight began to wither away. It was a familiar story; Trevelyan was struck by how much this ending looked like one he had seen before, complete with the tears in the sky stitching…shut. Mended. Little scars left to remind them of where a hole had torn.

A joke. Ha ha. It was very very funny.

Dorian’s magic was still holding him down as he approached. Rook’s friends looked to be on their last legs—they had thrown all they had into this battle, and almost hadn’t made it. They were saying something to Dorian, only…only, Trevelyan couldn’t hear it. Their voices were drowned out.

After a moment, he realized that he was the one drowning them out.

It was like Redcliffe, he realized. This sensation in his chest. The convulsions spasming his lungs. It was just like how he’d been in Redcliffe.

Gasping. Choking. Maniacal. Tears slipping down his face.

Redcliffe had been the end, he was pretty sure now. The place where he’d finally lost it. And it was strange to think so, because Redcliffe hadn’t even been the worst of it. Most of the refugees from other fallen cities had been funneled towards Skyhold by then. Just because it was the last holdout in Fereldan didn’t mean anything. Just because the king died there didn’t mean the country wasn’t already lost. Why should it be the thing that broke him?

Why should that matter, when he’d already seen Cassandra warped and twisted by Blight pustules that liquefied and reshaped her into a gruesome Hurlock general menacing Val Royeaux? Why should he care, when he’d already watched Vivienne make a last stand against the tide in Montsimmard to give her surviving Circle mages a chance to flee for safety, only for one of them to carry the taint back with them? When he’d already received word that Ostwick had been flooded with Blight from the inside, the very walls it erected for protection a trap that kept all the civilians from escaping?

There were casualties everywhere they went. For all the ground they gained in one area, they lost more elsewhere, and that was how the entire “war” had gone. The South had never learned to put aside their differences. When Fereldan faced a Fifth Blight, it started a pointless civil war and killed off its Wardens. When its mages started a rebellion, the Chantry dithered and wrung its hands until the Templars cut themselves loose to ravage the countryside. When Corypheus tore a hole in the sky, it took Trevelyan beating the other countries into submission to get anyone to stop him. But he didn’t have the resources to make them get along any more. By the time they realized what was upon them, it was too late to turn back.

Sera had told him to count out the arrows he would need to make the Blight pay.

She had sat with him by dying firelight, fletching and making a list of all the names. One darkspawn for each name, that was her system. Treat them like something understandable, a baddie you could shout insults to across the battlefield. Trevelyan had never bothered to learn most of the names of the little people in their ranks, the few who followed his banner instead of their scattered leadership, but she knew every one of them and she called them out when letting her arrows fly, so he’d followed her example. And it didn’t make anything better, it didn’t fix it, but—at least Sera had been with him. At least he could function. At least there was her.

At least until Redcliffe.

They’d reconvened with Evelyn, and the Iron Bull. The remaining Grey Wardens of Fereldan had shored up the city’s defenses, hoping to break their enemy’s wave to create another escape route for the civilians they’d gathered there. Warden Commander Mahariel had left, had promised they could turn the battle in their favor. With her plan it had seemed like it was achievable, that it could be one of a few rare successful evacuations and maybe even a breaking point in the war, and then the next morning there was a surge of darkspawn on their defenses and…she never showed up.

No one came to help them.

He hadn’t reacted at first because Sera was there, and he knew it would be just like before. It would crush them to suffer another defeat, but at least they knew the important people were in safety, waiting for them; Dorian, Dagna. He might have lost the others by then but at least he still had Sera.

And then he didn’t.

And Trevelyan found quite suddenly that he was just one man, all alone, with no home to speak of. And his enemy was not some villain he could mock, nor some simple monster he could slay. It was just death. It was just the world. It was just life.

And he’d started laughing just like this. Just like he was now.

Dorian was talking with Rook and the others still, pleading something.

Trevelyan couldn’t hear them. He was too loud.

Oh, he had never learned to care about anything else.

Duty. Faith. Honor. It didn’t mean anything. It had once, but only through their eyes. Their eyes, and no one else’s. And now that they were gone, it would never mean anything to him ever again.

So what was left?

There was no revenge that would make it alright. But that was okay, because nothing needed to be alright now. It was all gone. It wasn’t tied to anything anymore. Everything would get better, or it could get worse, and it would not make a difference to him either way.

When Dorian stood directly before him again, he knew they were alone. It took a few minutes longer before Trevelyan was able to get his breathing under control, but Dorian waited for him. He was sweet that way.

“…I’m going to release you.” There was a pause. The magic around them shifted, and Trevelyan found himself able to move again, no longer a weight crushing him down. “Now, if you could just—”

Dorian’s voice cut off in an oof! as he slammed his head into his stomach.

They tumbled across the floor, weapons clattering to the ground beside them. Trevelyan was disoriented enough from his own strike that he wasn’t able to stay on top, Dorian kicking him in the ribs as he flailed. He braced his arm around his side as a shield, rolled away when Dorian crunched a toe on another hit.

“What are you attacking me for!?” he bellowed as they both scrambled up to their feet. “What have I done!?”

"You stopped me.”

“Of course I bloody stopped you, you lunatic!” Dorian shouldered him back, Trevelyan hit a wall and had the air knocked out of him. The shock of the impact drove Dorian back again, and he squirmed away. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this but nothing gets better if you destroy the world!”

“I don’t want it to get better.” He picked up some masonry and threw it, though of course it went wide. “Healing. Hope. Redemption. These things are an injustice, Dorian. The thought of anyone going to that scorched, rotten place I called home and being happy there again, thriving there again, it boils my blood.”

He bent to grab more debris, but with an incantation Dorian flung the loose stones and wood out of the open throne room in the same direction that Rook had sent Solas, where they fell back down to the city below.

“That’s no reason to try and kill everyone!”

“That’s easy for you to say. Your home is just fine. You haven’t lost anything.” He felt the grin split, lips still bloody. “Sure, it’s a bit of a mess right now, but you’ll clean it up. Slap on a new coat of paint. And when you’re done it’ll be greater than it ever was.”

“You’ve gone insane.” Dorian looked stunned, voice thinning. “You have actually lost your mind.”

Trevelyan paced around him, arms thrown wide. “We’ve finally ended the Venatori, for good this time. The Magisterium has been utterly destroyed, leaving a political power vacuum ripe for a man with the right network and blackmail material to seize control. The Qunari no longer have a standing army to threaten Tevinter with, and the South is now a leaderless, rudderless mess ready for a strong country to step in and take the reins.” He laughed, joyless. “Everything has turned out exactly the way you wanted it!”

Dorian’s face darkened, and his tone turned from thunderstruck to thunderous. “None of this is what I wanted.”

“Oh, that seems to be a trend for Pavus men!”

“You little shit--!”

It was an ungainly, ungraceful dance. Full of elbowing and snapping, two middle-aged men tousling like a pair of boys. Dorian could have killed him with a single shock of lightning to the chest, and the fact that he was instead trying to get Trevelyan into a headlock was absolutely enraging.

Trevelyan bit Dorian’s arm.

“Ow! Festis bei umo canavarum, are you a child?!”

His fist thumped against Trevelyan’s back until he let go, and then they flung apart again.

“Alexiel—Alexiel, just—just talk to me!” How dare he look at him, with those sad eyes of his? No more the unflappable and witty politician. He was too disheveled for that. “Tell me. Tell me what happened down there. Don’t leave things out, don’t say it’s fine, just tell me what’s going on in your head, please.”

Trevelyan barked back, “Why don’t you ask your new best friend Roo—”

Dorian smacked him upside the head.

“I don’t give a bronto’s left testicle about Rook!”

Then while Trevelyan was still staggering from the hit, he grabbed his face.

“I should have known you’d do this,” he seethed, one hand digging into his cheekbone, the other yanking at his hair. “I should have known you’d be like this when I left for Tevinter for one fucking month and you couldn’t even tell me your hand was killing you! Maker forbid you give me any kind of notice that you’re turning into an omnicidal maniac!”

“What was I supposed to tell you?” Trevelyan struggled, metal arm still curled into his side, the base of his palm shoving into Dorian’s chest--and then suddenly grasping the fabric there and pulling in. “How could I have ever put it into words? Over a sending crystal, what possible combination of sounds would have conveyed what I was feeling that wasn’t AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!”

Startled, Dorian propelled himself back.

The scream echoed across the platform. Bouncing against hardening growths around them into a chorus of fading wails.

Trevelyan stood there, breathing heavily.

They had tried to grieve together. In between battles. In between sessions at the Magisterium. Over distance, through voice alone. But Trevelyan wasn’t suited to it. The enormity of what he’d lost had caught in his throat, too big to speak aloud. Too much to release.

Denerim burning. Lake Calenhad in ruins. Their aid from the Free Marches scuttled by sea monsters. Family gone. Friends poisoned against him in the worst possible way. Monuments to the fallen that were trampled by a marching horde. And then the return to Skyhold, the site of his fondest memories, the great triumph that was all based on a lie. A reminder of the pointless, fool task of learning to love something that could be destroyed in an instant. Where everything he had worked so hard for achieved nothing, and he could only watch huddled refugees face the slow advance of starvation and despair, and the demons that fed on it. And turning into a monster every now and then through all of it, because of some stupid mistake he’d made in the past? Well, that was a reprieve from the ongoing onslaught of pure misery that had become his life.

There was what had happened, and there was how he felt about it. He could talk about the first. He could not talk about the second. He could not describe it, because he could not understand it. He had pushed himself to keep going through sheer will alone, thinking there would be some point at the end where it all pulled together, until suddenly he had snapped, and then what more was there to say?

If Dorian was there, Trevelyan wouldn’t have had to tell him.

He wouldn’t have had to dig inside the ugly pit of gore and sick to find the words for it.

He wouldn’t have needed to fight against himself, the part of him that cared more about Dorian’s pain than his own.

And his failure to do so would not have created this rift that sat between them now.

One he no longer knew how to close.

“It’s not like there’s anything you could have done.” A sneer curled his lip. “You had to be here, didn’t you? You can’t reform Tevinter from the uncultured, uncivilized, wretched South. Why should you mourn its loss?”

“You don’t mean that. You don’t mean this, it’s the pain talking. I know you.” Dorian advanced on him again, drooping, exhausted. “I’m here now. Now that this Blight is over, I’ll—”

“You’ll what, Dorian?” The question seemed to freeze him in his tracks. “Will you find a broom closet to hide me in, here in your palace? Visit me every other month while you drown in politics and paperwork? Hope that your enemies don’t find me? Hope your allies don’t remember me? The man that almost killed everyone’s new favorite hero?”

“I could have done SOMETHING.” Dorian’s mustache quivered. “You bastard, you took that away from me!”

Trevelyan felt a pang.

Even filled with heat as it was, Dorian’s voice broke. “Why is this the pattern of my life?” There were tears in his eyes, now. “Why do I always have to find out when it’s too late to fix it?”

The question hung there between them. Trevelyan shrank from it. From Dorian, who was slowly approaching him again, with the care of someone nearing a wounded animal.

“You don’t have to be alone. I would do anything for you. Fight anyone who tried to keep us apart. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know me, by now?” He reached out to grip Trevelyan’s fingers in his. His hands were warm. Calloused from his staff, but softer than they had been years before. “My love. My Amatus. My everything. Please.”

Trevelyan looked down at their hands together.

One line left, after all.

One pulsing, shimmering thread still tied to something.

“…I’ll ruin you. I’ll make you sorry you kept me.”

Even as he spoke, Trevelyan felt it pulling at him. Felt the sharp edges turn inward. He swallowed, and his throat was bone dry.

“I’ll cause endless problems for you. I’ll claw and tear at everything you try to build. I’ll lash out until I’m the only thing you have left, until you’re as miserable as I am.”

Without the anger to propel it, he found that his own voice shook.

“So you won’t keep me.” A breath. Draining. He pulled away. “…I won’t let you.”

Dorian’s sad grey eyes twisted in another burst of anger. “Do you think this is how I wanted this to go? Do you think I don’t mourn our friends as you do? Do you think I didn’t also dream of--” He choked. Shook his head. “—So it has to be a choice? Achieve my life’s work or be happy, but not both?”

“Dorian…”

“I-I-I don’t even know if I can do this. I must be mad to consider it. Fix Tevinter? It all seems so possible over wine and firelight but when I look out at all of this—” He, too, gestured in a sweeping spread at all of Minrathous, but unlike Trevelyan he was not gesturing to the withering Blight that coated the land. No—he saw the city itself. The buildings steeped in tradition, built in an era of rampant blood magic and the worship of vicious dragon gods. A legacy that lingered into the modern age even now. “And I think—why shouldn’t I just run off with you? What makes me think this will go any better for me than any other fool who’s tried it?”

Trevelyan approached him. Cupped Dorian’s cheek in his real hand so he could feel the warmth there. Tucked a strand of hair behind his ear with the other.

He was still the most beautiful man that he had ever met, the only one he could ever look upon and feel something, though the years had not been kind to him. The stress of the Magisterium had greyed his hair, wrinkled his eyes, etched lines into his once smooth face. He looked lived in. He looked like home. He looked like all the things Trevelyan wanted that would never be his, ever again.

“Because you’re a good man. Who will take all this pain and misery, and use it to make a better world. A safer world. A just world. You’re willing to do whatever it takes to make it a reality. And that’s why you’ll win, when so many other reformists have failed.”

The truth was, Trevelyan knew he alone was the problem. Not Dorian. Not Rook. He’d declared it enough times in the past, in fits of melodramatic rage, but this time there was no disputing it.

Varric dying. The Evanuris unleashed. Everything that had followed.

He should have been the one making the orders. Calling the shots. Rook would have followed him gladly, he knew that. But he had allowed Varric to take on the role, instead spending so much of his time finding his sister, helping his brother stabilize the Free Marches, focusing on his own problems. The little world-saving measures Solas had once suggested, which had become so irrelevant now. They had all agreed that as Inquisitor he was too notorious. He wasn’t like Leliana, he had never operated in the shadows, he was a figurehead with branding. The very thing that had given him power tied his hands when it came to anything so subtle and covert as subverting Solas’ network.

But wasn’t that an excuse? Varric had been a viscount, after all. And it hadn’t stopped him.

In truth, he had been scared to get between friends. Varric had come around to the idea of talking Solas down, and Trevelyan had just vainly hoped that it was possible. That the people he cared about wouldn’t kill each other while he grappled with what he would have to do if it wasn’t.

And then they had.

And now that inescapable nothing was back in his heart where it had been waiting for him. And all he could think about was how much he hated the thought of the songs they would make. The relief they would feel. The happiness and love and hope that didn’t belong to him anymore.

“You’re a good man, and I was just pretending to be one to be with you.”

Dorian did what he always had. He vainly saw good that wasn’t there. “You’re a man. A man who has done more than anyone could ask of you. Who has lost more than anyone could bear. And you think that makes you a monster.”

“That’s not the part that makes me a monster,” Trevelyan said. “That part, I’ve had all along.”

Dorian surged through his grip and crashed their lips together.

In all those serials and performances and stories consumed through his misspent youth, Trevelyan had never understood the significance of a “goodbye kiss”. Just like he hadn’t understood a lot of things; the trembling of a new romance, the glow of sitting at a fire in a circle of people who knew you, the aching precipice at which you stood before a jump. To him it had just looked like another moment, just one of many in the lines of a scripted romance.

He couldn’t have imagined it. The oceans of grief within.

Drowning him. Smothering him. The hands wrapped around him, on the back of his head, in between his shoulder blades. His own fingers curled around Dorian’s arm, and he felt power coursing beneath them as the skin crackled with energy. The contained storm. Magic and electricity and pain, all the hurting that Trevelyan had once been able to touch, and soothe, and share. Knowing what it was to be alone, and unloved, and not allowed to love, to exist in a world where he didn’t and couldn’t fit. How could Trevelyan have believed he wouldn’t be understood? Hadn’t he had ample evidence? Hadn’t it been made clear to him by now?

But they weren’t the same. He knew that too.

They parted slowly. Breathed in each other’s air, for Dorian a sound almost like a sob, but that was all. Trevelyan thought about holding on forever, but he made himself let go. Took a step back.

The only way he could feel something properly. Feel it through someone he cared about. And here he was, with just the one left, and soon not even that. To keep him safe from this dark pit inside.

“That’s it, then.” At last, Dorian spoke with resignation. Like a man condemned. “You have to leave. And I…I can’t come with you.” And then he laughed too. Bitter and ugly, but short. “Yes, I’m aware of the irony.”

The worst had drained out, it felt like. Trevelyan knew it would come back, though. The next morning he’d see the damage and it would come back at him all over again. “You could follow me. …But I don’t want that for you.”

He sniffed. “Fine, just—just stay long enough to let me have another sending crystal set up, we can—”

“Dorian.” Trevelyan put a hand on his shoulder. “I would rather kill myself than have to talk through a sending crystal again.”

“Amatus, please.” He didn’t push his hand off. “You can’t just leave me without any way to contact you.”

“No way to contact me? Dorian, you’re about to become the most noteworthy person in Thedas.” Trevelyan cocked his head. “I’ll always know where you are. And you’ll always know I’m watching.”

Dorian pulled away to wipe the tears from his cheeks.

Trevelyan thought he should be doing that. But instead he stayed where he was. Kept his twitching fingers at his side.

The Blight changed the people it didn’t just kill outright. Not just this new one that the Evanuris unleashed, even the old Blight had done it, in its way. Turned its victims into monsters in the most classical sense. Worthless shells capable only of death and violence wherever they went.

He didn’t know how else to describe the feeling in his gut. The unrelenting pressure that only eased when he’d held Rook’s throat in his hand.

When Dorian turned back to him, he looked perfect. Composed and dry and severe. “Someday there’ll be consequences for this, you know.” Like a threat. Like a warning. “Some Southern Soporati barbarian breaking the heart of an Archon? It’s the kind of thing they’d write in that cheap pulp swill down by the docks.”

Trevelyan swallowed again. Felt the single thread pulse inside him.

“When you return, don’t expect me to take you back,” Dorian said with his arms crossed, eyes that beautiful, sullen scowl. “…I will. But don’t expect it.”

Trevelyan stepped forward, leaned in and gave him a last kiss on the cheek.

Then he left.

In the coming months, the former Inquisitor made himself scarce, and busy.

To get out of the city, he killed a merchant and took his enchanted wagon, along with the large dark mare pulling it. No one stopped him; no one questioned him, or took him aside to investigate the body with its arm hanging just out through the curtain that covered the back. The benefits of chaos.

Before any reconstructions could begin, he made one last trip back down South. To his home. Not Ostwick—that hadn’t been his home since the first time he left it—but to the lands he’d spent so long in. Adventuring. Fighting. Exploring. He saw it in ruins and felt the pointlessness of it all over again, had to go scrounging for something to kill to vent it again, but that wasn’t the point.

He just needed some reading material.

Fereldan; a few volumes of A Study of the Fifth Blight, without the edits by Orlesian censors. Kirkwall; The Tale of the Champion, one of the copies with the author signature in the front. And…

He stopped in Val Royeaux, in the town square that had once been hung with colored streamers and thrummed with the sound of the Chant being performed—but was now a grey, silent husk—and hunted for that bookshop in the upper levels of the market. Once he’d found it, half destroyed, he hunted for an hour until he’d managed to dig out a slightly scuffed volume of Black Fox tales. There was another book in there, one that had his name embossed on the cover, but he didn’t take it.

And that was his business done.

It wasn’t completely devoid of life, this place. It took him weeks to traverse it all, no longer daring to access the Eluvians now that he had declared himself a fugitive (and having strongly disliked traveling in the Crossroads even before then), so of course every now and again he would run into the odd survivor. The occasional band. A few scraps of lingering towns that had somehow managed through some quirk of fate or another to weather out the Blight, albeit brittle and on the verge of collapse from the slightest wind. And many, many shambling souls that were not long from a life as ghouls.

Most people knew better than to talk to him.

Those who talked to each other, he listened to while facing the wall with a drink, ears pricking up at the mention of another Trevelyan who had taken command of the survivors at Skyhold.

Those who offered him supplies did so out of fear, rather than generosity (as hunger had withered most of that away).

The ones that tried to rob him, he took a day or two to dissect their bodies and pick out the bones he liked to decorate his new wagon.

It was a nice, simple existence that he carried with him back up North.

When the hour grew late and the moons were high, he still felt things. Had unsteady dreams where he was being chased by a wolf in the woods. Or maybe hunting alongside it? Or maybe it was just trying to tell him something. He wasn’t sure. He’d wake in the middle of the night with a sucking, swirling grief that lived in his stomach. That broke and flooded into something sad and wet when he thought about Dorian.

The only one left that mattered.

He had almost taken it back, that night he left Minrathous for good. Creeping in through the window of Dorian’s townhouse--the sudden awareness that this was the last time he was going to be in here. No longer would he be allowed to sneak up behind Dorian and wrap his arm around him. Not even Dorian would be here for much longer, planned to take his lodgings in that castle in the sky. Some of the furniture looked freshly scorched, a dresser carried a lightning pattern burned into the wood.

Would it be so bad if he stayed?

Couldn’t he try?

Live in the anonymity he’d always wanted. Be Dorian’s secret. Kill the people he asked him to. Wait for him in between the obligations of his new station. Swallow down the burning in his throat whenever progress was made. Whenever Dorian went somewhere without him. Made friends without him. Immersed himself in a world that Trevelyan could never ever be a part of again.

He could struggle against himself forever.

Or poison Dorian’s food and drink until he was too sick to go out.

Trevelyan took the prosthetics that Dorian had commissioned for him, even the ones that he didn’t particularly care for. Then after some consideration he grabbed a pillow and a few choice articles of Dorian’s clothing, and made his way back out when he heard conversation downstairs.

It grieved him, to pass through Minrathous’ gates, to officially leave his love for the final time, but there were less tears than it might have deserved. It wasn’t that he didn’t care; it was just that he could see the truth now.

That he’d already lost Dorian. Before his plans to become Archon. Before the Lucerni broke up. Years and years ago; that day in Halamshiral, in between navigating the Exalted Council and uncovering operation “Dragon’s Breath”, when Trevelyan had sat behind a hedgerow out of sight and listened to Varric toast his beloved on his new appointment to the Magisterium. Dorian had shushed the dwarf and made him swear not to tell; “I’m not putting this on him now with everything else he’s dealing with”. His Dorian. A Magister.

Back then a part of him had known. He’d tried to resist it, clinging selfishly to the sending crystal, to scattered nights of passion, to Dorian’s promises and his own dreams. He had grabbed at pieces of happiness, seemed at times to mend the distance only to let it come between them again. Take whatever comfort he was offered even if it came with a knowledge that it was fleeting. But it had only ever been borrowed time. He knew now. It was never going to end with them together.

Maybe it was better that it ended this way. Suddenly and painfully, breaking under the pressure of a crisis they could have only survived intact together. Instead of letting it prolong that soft, slow death.

As for what Trevelyan intended to do now…

A part of him still burned to avenge what he’d lost. But against whom, and how, there were no answers for. And what good would it do, anyway? What cause would it serve? He wasn’t stupid enough to think it would stop the hurting, that wasn’t the kind of man he was. And he wasn’t like Solas, or Corypheus. He wasn’t some grand master with a plan for the world, some old splendor to rise out of the ashes when they burned all that was to the ground.

All he wanted was to be miserable.

That particular kind of misery that had once felt like joy.

He couldn’t get that with spies. A grand army at his command. A roster of noble names in his pocket. Family.

But maybe a good knife would do the trick.