Chapter Text
The first time they meet he is a prisoner, shackled to the floor with the strongest steel they could find and even then there were doubts as to its ability to hold a creature his size. It had taken a team of soldiers and an old plough horse to get him down the side of the mountain upon his reentry into Thedas. What would it take to hold him there?
If he had been capable of breaking the manacles when he finally stirred into consciousness he did not attempt it, unnerving gold eyes fixed upon her instead. Seeing him now as he was, fully himself and no longer tenuously clinging to life, she understood why the pilgrims and refugees alike used words like monster and demon to describe him.
Breaching seven feet tall, it was as if he had been carved from a block of onyx. Jet hair gathered in a disheveled braid, spectacular if not terrifying horns reminiscent of a dragon’s curling up and back behind his head. In the face of her grief-stricken rage he does not flinch, does not babble and beg as others had been wont to do before him. All he does is watch as if he has experience with the fire that burns high and bright in her heart and knows well enough that eventually the fire will burn itself out.
If not him then who must I blame for this? She remembers the desperate thought, unwilling to believe that she must stand alone in failure. Why had her life not been burned from her as it had from those she cared for?
Death marches on ahead of them, unhindered and apathetic in who falls and who triumphs as the green maw of destruction opens its jaws wider above their heads. The strange mark on his hand pulses and grows larger with every checkpoint they pass and yet the only hint as to whether it is painful or not is the deepening scowl etching itself into his swarthy features.
“I would know your name.” With a voice nearly lost to the howling wind she keeps him in front of her, hand resting on the hilt of her sword. He had come willingly, near silent as they make the arduous trek to the Temple where hope might have spawned had it not been consumed in a column of fire.
“Why?” He stops and turns so suddenly that Cassandra draws back, nostrils flaring as if expecting an assault. Those gold eyes regard her once more and for the first time she sees an emotion flicker through them, quick to disappear, but it had been there nonetheless. Anger.
A reason immediately comes to mind, but will never form into words. I would rather not die next to a stranger.
It happens at the Temple.
It is a small thing easily lost in the clamor of a hard won victory, but Cassandra will remember it even years after the fact. When the pride demon steps from the rift she can hear Leliana shouting orders at the archers, the frenzied hack and slash as they attempt to bring the behemoth down.
The Qunari is hard at work trying to disrupt the rift per Solas’ instructions as smaller demons pour through the tear and Cassandra cuts through them, the blade warm and singing in her hand. A dance of familiarity and she is forever relieved to know the steps, the dodge and parry, body bending supple as a blade of grass. Through the fray she hears the larger demon behind her and the smell of ozone as if heralding a lightning strike.
A large shadow covers her then and it is him , face a grim mask as a strip of lightning flashes across his back and wraps around his outstretched hand. For a moment they are so close that she can smell sweat, blood, and cinder and in the next it is gone as he drives his sword through the creature with an angry scream. The Fade wound on his hand glows a brilliant green, a string of light like an umbilical cord snapped between himself and the rift and moments later it’s done.
He sinks to his knees like a supplicant then, head hung and skin scorched. She is close enough to hear him just before he loses consciousness a second time, his name tossed carelessly at her feet. Khalon Adaar, she thinks as they bring his too-still body down the mountain slope. There is a wound on your body that now bears my name.