Minutes to Midnight
Summary: Cassien Amell and Alistair count down the days until the world ends in blackpowder and fire.
Word reaches them, two weeks after the Chantry in Kirkwall burns, a week after he returned, so much foreign dust beneath his boots. He won't say a word about where he's been, but his eyes are changed; hoarfrost-sharp, and weary with the passage of immeasurable time.
"Cassien," Alistair says.
"I heard."
They peer out, over the distance, as if they can see Amaranthine, Highever, and beyond them, beyond the tumultous blue waters of the Waking Sea, Kirkwall. He tastes smoke on his tongue; smoke and ash.
"The Circles are rising up."
"I know." He grips the iron railing of the balcony tightly, so tightly. Frustration makes him lash out, even when he shouldn't. He should know better.
"Knight-Commander Greagoir sent a courier, earlier this evening. His horse was lathered, almost dead."
"No," Cassien breathes, aghast at what Alistair is saying in that all too-casual voice. He folds his arms across his chest, against the chill that seems to settle into his bones. "They didn't."
"At least he wasn't asking us to go back in and help again," Alistair says, lightly. "Once was quite bad enough, don't you think?"
"Yes. This is…this is madness." He remembers bodies, scattered like limp rags, blood soaking into the floor. The Templars never managed to get all the smears out of the floor. Greagoir had the flagstones pulled and replaced, three years after the war.
"When I offered you a boon…" Alistair doesn't quite look him in the eye. "You asked me to free the mages from Chantry supervision."
"Not this way," Cassien manages. "Not like this. Kirkwall burned, Alistair. And Anders did it. He did it all. If I'd known…" he swallows, past the lump and thickness in his throat. "Nothing is worth what he's done to us. To mages. He wanted to show them all, what was being done to mages. Templars who abuse their power. He showed them that mages should be feared. That we're human weapons, that we're dangerous. Wild dogs to be collared and slaughtered."
The dogs bay, howling until his ears ring. The hunt begins, and there's no stopping them now, only damage and how they try to deal with it. All of Thedas has become a tinderbox, and Kirkwall has set flint to steel and coaxed the first spark.
"The Circle thought it would be a good time to make it clear that they didn't approve," Alistair says. "And Knight-Commander Greagoir has sent to the Grand Cleric. They're tearing Ferelden apart, between them. You didn't put me on this throne to see Ferelden in a mess, just because the mages and the Templars can't decide whose got the better uniform."
"You told me the Templars had the better uniform," Cassien says, lightly. Alistair wears the crown a little lighter these days, but the dark rings around his eyes haven't quite gone away, and the strong set of his shoulders hides the way he walks; like a man carrying too much weight on his shoulders.
"Very true," Alistair says, dryly. "So I'll be sure to tell the Grand Cleric and the Knight-Commander just that."
"What?"
"They want the support of the Crown." Matter-of-factly, as if he hasn't had to make a decision that would break a man. "Cassien—"
"You can't—"
"I promised," Alistair says, with that mulish set to his jaw that Eamon says he gets from Maric. "Damn it all, Cass. I promised."
"You'll break Ferelden," Cassien warns.
Alistair's eyes are the rich brown of Antivan brandy, with the palest of rings around the iris. "I know," his friend and his king says. "The world is breaking, Cass."
And they lean against the rough stones of the tower, drinking rough Northen Hills ale, at the beginning of the end.
Qunari gaatlok spreads, setting the world ablaze.
Cassien rides three horses to death, and maims another one for life, approaching the Circles, trying to calm things down. It's futile; they all know it is.
In a quiet workshop in a back-alley in Antiva, a once-Dalish elf demonstrates to the two of them the newest weapon fashioned for this conflict; a long tubular device and then he pulls the trigger and Cassien breathes the dark sullen smoke, bitter on his tongue and watches the leaden ball rip through the three targets set in place.
"Impressive," Zevran says, stepping lightly around to the silhouetted strips of wood and leather. The lead ball smashes through wood and shatters it like so many human bones and in his head Cassien sees the freed Circles, solemn-faced apprentices facing Templar-shaped targets and hurling fireball after fireball at them until their aim is perfect but nothing, nothing prepares them for the roasted reek of human flesh and the screaming and how slowly burns kill.
"They're calling this the musket," the elf grunts, rough voice like musket-smoke. "Supposed to turn the tide on a battlefield. Give the Chantry-skirts something to throw against those mages."
That evening, Cassien doesn't walk the Fade.
He dreams, of Thedas burning, of Templar and mage drawing together in the final conflagration that will burn them down to the marrow, to scorched stone and smashed blackened wood like broken bones with the stench of musket-smoke.
He snaps awake, and without thinking, tries to coax a tiny magelight to life.
He fails. He forgets. He remembers.
Loghain returns from Orlais with a new scar across his lip.
Alistair's gaze is still hard. He refuses to speak with Loghain, so Cassien does.
"It is beginning," Loghain says at last, after a meal undertaken in silence.
A breeze blows the sharp smells of musket-smoke and ash and salted fields into the private quarters of the Warden-Commander.
"I know," Cassien says.
"It was a foolish decision."
He knew, of course, about foolish decisions.
"There are no longer any good decisions to be made." He stares at Loghain challengingly over a tankard of good Fereldan ale. "The Divine in Val Royeaux and the Templars in the White Spire are the ones setting out the battlegrounds."
The Old Wolf of Ferelden, the Hero of River Dane snarls, bares his teeth through pale grey eyes. Time has not watered his hatred of the Orlesians. Some wounds run deeper than mead, or ale, or even rivers of blood can assauge.
One hero to another, Cassien adds, "I think we were caught up in this, long before we could have turned back."
"Maybe," Loghain says, scar pulling his tight smile into a sneer. "We will see."
The Templars raze the Ostwick Circle to the ground.
In retaliation, the mages set off a bomb in the Templar monastery. The broken ragdoll-bodies of apprentices and recruits alike litter the ground, as bit by bit, the fighting spreads.
Back in Ferelden, Alistair orders the army to take over the Circle.
The Templars retreat to the last great fortress of the Chantry; not the monasteries scattered all across Ferelden, but to Aeonar.
And whispers of dissent, of confusion, bleed into the air like poison at the Landsmeet.
In Ansburg, the fighting has spread to encompass the entire city.
During the Blight, Ferelden haemorrhaged refugees; people fleeing over the storms of the Waking Sea to the relative safety of the Free Marches. Now, Marchers and once-Fereldans flee the Marches, heading for the borders of Orlais, for the safety of Denerim.
Refugee camps grow overnight in Gwaren, in Amaranthine, especially in Amaranthine where they seek the protection of the Grey Warden Arl.
And they bring whispers—snatches of gossip, and rumour—of the fighting over the sea.
Ansburg has fallen; the mages had taken the city and turned in into a stronghold against the Templars, the Templars have launched a counter-attack, they are fighting over every house, every block, every single centimetre paid in blood.
There are whispers of blood magic at work, of the new weapons that the Templars have gotten their hands on, of blackpowder and musket-smoke and the newest bronze devices on wheels that can shatter a stone tower like spun glass.
Power, like those of the Tevinter magisters of old.
Cassien's contacts tell him something only a little different.
They don't tell him about the desperation; the knowledge that they will have made things worse for themselves, that there's no going back into Templar hands now. The mages have burned that bridge behind them, set it aflame with blackpowder reek.
The wind brings them the hazy smoke from the inferno in the Free Marches.
They tell him about the Templar marksmen; armed with one of these muskets, or a good crossbow, a single ball or bolt through the heart puts down a mage without too much trouble.
They don't tell him about the rumours of blood magic constructs, of the Templar and mage dead rising from the stained stones to fight against for the mages, of having to slit the throat of your best friend and watching him stand up again and pick up his sword and run you through.
The dead don't stay dead, and refugees whisper that there are no humans left in the Free Marches, just mages and templars.
And demons.
Shipments of muskets arrive by ship from Antiva. The new bronze wheeled-muskets, thick and heavy like a golem's arm, worked like the snarling head of a mabari hound are fashioned in Orzammar. Business is business, after all, and King Bhelen will take a good deal.
Cassien spends the next three days kneeling in the practice room, until the bruise where the stock meets shoulder stamps itself into his bones, until he is intimately familiar with the way it kicks when he pulls back the trigger, with reloading, cleaning the musket, the pause before it fires.
Until the taste of blackpowder is in his teeth, and no matter how he gargles and spits and drinks herbal tisanes, he can't be rid of it.
The mabari-cannons roar, and the earth shakes as they smash old ships in the Gwaren harbour into smithereens.
Trade from the Free Marches and Orlais falls to a standstill. Alistair, Cassien realises, or at least Anora, for she's the one with as good a grasp of politics, no matter how much of a quick study Alistair is, has realised that there are only two sides in this war.
You are with the Chantry, or you aren't.
Three weeks later, the Crown's forces march on Aeonar, armed with the new muskets and the snarling mabari-cannons. Knights from the Bannorn ride among them.
Aeonar, the mage-prison, the Chantry's prison, crumbles into aged dust. The Templars fight bravely, but it is a massacre. Cassien is barely recognisable, his face blackened from powder when he finds Greagoir bleeding out the last of his life in the rubble, a stump where his left hand was.
"…thought I recognised you," Greagoir whispers.
"Knight-Commander," Cassien says, aghast. He reaches inside him, for the spark long-extinguished; the magic doesn't answer him. Not anymore.
"Not…anymore…" Greagoir's breathing is ragged. Blood bubbles up as he coughs; his ribs move brokenly as he breathes. "Told you…magic…serve…"
"I never wanted any of this," he says, fiercely, gripping Greagoir's hand. He can barely see through the prickling in his eyes; his ears are filled with the screams and the groans of the dying. "I wanted us to be free. To be responsible." He laughs, tiredly. "Anyway, I'm not even a mage anymore."
"Aren't?"
"I lost it," Cassien says, to the dying man. "I lost my magic."
Greagoir coughs again. "Still mage," he murmurs. "Stop them."
Stone burns, like magefire; muskets crack sharply like a demon's laughter. The Circle bleeds; he remembers doors slamming shut on them, carving a path for the Circle that doesn't involve Annulment and dying on silvered Templar blades.
And now the world has caught up with them, and it is too late, much too late for anything else at all.
Greagoir's hand goes limp in his grasp, and the strong walls of Kinloch Hold, of the Circle Tower, come crashing down on him.
Cassien doesn't know how long he sits in the rubble, holding the cooling hand of the man who'd been a sort of not-quite enemy, one of the steady pillars of the circle. In the end, he's too tired to feel anything at all.
"Warden," one of the men says, and that pulls him out of that daze. Another of the Ferelden musketman, face powder-blackened, and caked with drying blood. "What do we do about the prisoners?"
The world will go on without you, Sloth whispers. You deserve a rest. This time, he straightens his back against the whispers and goes on.
"What prisoners?"
"The Chantry, ser," the musketman replies. "The Templars..." he wrestles with some emotion that Cassien can't identify. "The Templars were beginning to kill them, as we advanced on the prison. Most of them are dead."
"Well, let them go," Cassien says, frowning. He wipes his hand across his forehead, and frowns when that probably leaves a streak of blood there. "Maker's breath, man, they were imprisoned for months!"
"Begging your pardon, ser, but…what about demons?"
Still mage, Greagoir demands. Stop them.
"Take me to them," he says. "I'll sort them out."
The sharp tang of blackpowder burns his tongue and his teeth and now he tastes the copper of blood, and he'll never be free of it. Never.
He misses a demon.
It doesn't matter. No abomination can survive after his head has been taken clean off by a mabari-cannon.
Cassien walks the Fade that night. He doesn't dream.
He watches the ruins of Aeonar combed for survivors, watches as the wounded—Templar or Ferelden soldier—are evacuated. It is, in some ways, less than a heroic stand and more of a slaughter. The Chantry has its own lyrium reserves, but as he wanders the ruins, Cassien sees the signs of the dust-fever, the onset of lyrium madness.
With the Chantry in Ferelden very carefully shut off from lyrium, the Templars are falling one by one to the dust-fevers, the dust-dryness, and the lyrium madness that creeps up on the edges of withdrawal.
A chilling thought occurs to him: if they hadn't taken Aeonar, the Templars would have turned on each other, lost in the haze of lyrium madness. They would have slowly died.
Prisoners sit in their corner of the camp, eyes wide and staring and glassy, and he can count every single rib. Faces are gaunt, drawn, and thin; they are more ragged bones beneath parchment-skin than humans.
Cassien thinks he recognises a Chantry scholar or two among them; known heretics, the lot of them. He glances among them to see if he can find Lily, but perhaps she's been killed or she's never arrived or something far worse has happened to her.
The truly frightening thing is the number of people there he doesn't know; people snatched up from their lives and thrown into Aeonar and some of them stare up at bedrolls as if they don't know what to do with them and haven't for years.
Orlais is a fractured thing, now, fighting on so many fronts, the Empress herself drawn into the Chantry's plots and conflicts; drawn into the war that is consuming the Free Marches, like hungry fire.
The fire catches on; the Qunari invade from Par Vollen, the horde sweeping on into Rivain and shoving the Rivaini troops to the very edges of their borders.
It won't be long now, Cassien thinks. Soon enough, they'll see soldiers at the Orlesian border, or perhaps the attack will come from the sea, bringing wave after wave of warpaint-streaked qunari.
He ties a scroll to the leg of the messenger-bird on his arm, and then gently jerks his arm. "Go," he tells it.
It takes wing, following the direction of the twisting smoke. In a few moments, it is lost against the hazy veil of the sky. Blackpowder smoke drifts on the breeze; it is all he can scent, when he breathes, trying to catch the faintest hints of wildflowers.
If only he could remember, he thinks, and wishes wistfully for the clear blue of the sky.
In blackpowder and fire, the world ends.