Author's Note: My Inquisitor sided with the Templars (long story, but the mages looked just slightly crazier than the Templars at first go), and the resulting hallucination sequence via the Envy demon just ripped my heart out. Obviously it wasn't real, not even in a "possible bad future" sense like the one you get in the time-jump arc, but it still felt like a punch in the gut. The image of the Inquisitor's own advisors and friends in prison stuck with me like little else, and after a lot of thinking and plotbunny-fighting, this came out.
I was also listening to a lot of Dire Straits while writing this, which may explain the odd voice. For ambiance, check out "The Man's Too Strong" off the Brothers in Arms album.
The title comes from the Bible, namely 1 Peter 5:8: "Be sober, be vigilant; for your adversary the devil as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour." The Biblical quote seemed appropriate, given the subject matter, the symbolism in the game, and of course, the similarities between Tevene and good old Latin.
Rating: M for mentions of torture and murder.
Disclaimer: Dragon Age and all associated characters and concepts are the property of EA, and I derive no profit from this. Please accept this in the spirit with which it is offered—as a work of respect and love, not an attempt to claim ownership or earn money from this intellectual property.
Seeking to Devour
by Totenkinder Madchen
Nobody dares to ask why Cullen wants a private audience with this, the most important prisoner in Skyhold. The ones who trust him believe he has his own reasons, vital to the Inquisition, and the ones who don't trust him keep it to themselves. Cullen Rutherford stands with the Inquisitor herself, under her shadow and at her side and in her bed. Questioning him is questioning the Inquisitor, and that way, madness lies.
He relieves the guards from their posts and makes sure the door is securely locked behind him before moving over to the cell. A figure is lying on the straw inside, curled up around the no doubt relentless pain of broken ribs and butchered hands. Three weeks ago, when Inquisition forces stormed the rebel stronghold at Crestwood, this man personally sent eight of their finest to the Maker before they had him down. Retaliation had been swift and practical. Even if by some miracle he survives the next day, he will never carry a sword again.
Cullen opens the glassed-in oil lamp and adjusts the wick a little, chasing back some of the shadows at the edges of the room. The shape that was a king stirs, raising its head.
"Oh, hello, knight-captain," he says, blinking. "Are you here for taunting or torture?"
"Neither," Cullen replies as he closes the lamp again. "I just wanted to talk, your majesty."
"Well, it's a little late for that, isn't it? Me being disarmed and all. Hah! Oooh, ow." The king hunches his shoulders a little. "And there's no need for formality, really. Not with us being old comrades-in-arms, and you passing sentence of death on me and all that. Call me Alistair."
Words thrown out so easily. He always did have words, Cullen remembers; used to drive the Revered Mothers crazy with his talking, talking, talking. But he has done more than talk, more than preach … And it still ends with him here.
"I'm sorry." These words come out flat, stripped of all the feeling they should have. He means it, but he can't for the life of him find a way to make it worth hearing. "None of this was supposed to happen."
"You're telling me," Alistair sighs. With a moment's struggle, he manages to turn over onto one side and raise his head a little further. "What d'you want from me, then? Forgiveness? Not my department. I'm just here to look pretty." He glances down at his mangled hands. "Well, not so much any more. But I've still got my winning smile."
"I don't want forgiveness," Cullen manages to say. "But I had to say it anyway. I was certain we would … that the Inquisition wouldn't let this happen."
Alistair glances up at him again. "You know, I was too?" he says. There's a touch of bitterness in his tone, but he smooths it over with wry humor. "Corypheus dead, a new Divine, the war ending, my wife home—it all seemed perfect. I suppose when the Maker wants to knock us down, he has to set us up first."
"I don't think the Maker had a hand in any of this."
The ruined man smiles at that. He should probably flinch, but tomorrow he will be executed and he doesn't seem to have the strength left for fear. "That's heresy, you know. Not even the kind of heresy that got me in here, either. I wonder if the Inquisitor knows what her precious Lion of Ferelden is saying behind her back?"
"She will soon." Cullen seizes the bars. The leather of his gauntlets creaks with the force of his grip. "Cassandra is dead. Did you know that? Cassandra Pentaghast, the founding spark of this Inquisition. Divine Justinia's right hand! She doubted the Inquisitor, and they discovered she was harboring a demon." His forehead rests against the bars. He closes his eyes, unable to look Alistair in the face any more. "Her head is on a pike. I feel it watching me every time I pass under the main arch. Maker's breath … I was grateful when the crows finally had her eyes out. Then she couldn't stare at me any more."
Alistair's tone is surprisingly gentle now. "You should be quiet, knight-captain. Walls have ears."
A hoarse laugh tears from Cullen's throat. "It started with Mother Giselle. Mother Giselle, who never did anything to anyone! That's when I started to think it wasn't really my—the Inquisitor who'd come back from that battle with Corypheus. She'd been strange since returning, but—nerves. Fears. Killing a Darkspawn magister isn't easy!"
"Great women take things to heart," Alistair says in a low voice. "I would have thought the same. My wife was haunted, too."
His wife. The Hero of Ferelden, the Queen, the slayer of the Archdemon. The single greatest threat to the Inquisition's power. Cullen keeps his eyes closed, because he knows that if he opens them, he will see the face of the man whose lover he killed. He remembers a time when he, too, loved a woman enough to have his heart ripped out by the thought of her death.
"She was broken. Nightmares. Seeing things. The healers said it was just injuries from the fight. Diseases of the mind, like the lyrium cravings. She'd helped me through my sickness, I was sure I could do the same for her. But she just … kept getting stranger."
Alistair says nothing. Cullen doesn't need him to say anything. The words are spilling out of him now, inescapable and unstoppable.
"I don't know if there's a demon in her, but it might as well be. She's not anybody but the Inquisitor any more. She's wrong. She's wrong. Every damned thing in this world has gone wrong! And I helped it happen!"
His grip on the bars is the only thing keeping him upright. He is confessing his sins to a dead man, and he is signing his own death warrant as he does so. He can't bring himself to care. It needs to be said before someone, so they can take it to the Maker and tell Him the truth and bring Him and His bride down in a rain of fire to end this.
"I was in love with her. Maker save me, I think I still am. Not with what she is, but what she was. Just a Dalish mage from a little clan in the Free Marches, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time." He grins humorlessly against the iron. "She used to swear in elvhen when she got a bad hand of cards, but that wasn't appropriate for a Keeper's First, so she'd always get embarrassed. Sera used to tease her about it. Couldn't hold her ale, either—once passed out dead drunk in the Herald's Rest after The Iron Bull got her to drink some kind of Qunari potion."
"Cullen," Alistair says. He sounds tired. "I told you. I can't be the one to forgive you."
"And I told you," Cullen rasps. "I'm not here for forgiveness."
"Oh, I think you are."
"I killed your wife."
Silence. Then, "I always thought it was Leliana."
"Leliana was too busy with the Chantry by then. She'd turned all her efforts to trying to stop that house of cards collapsing. She probably killed plenty, but the Hero of Ferelden wasn't one of them." Another laugh tears its way out of Cullen's throat, and for a moment he wonders if sound alone can cut flesh. He feels like he's swallowing broken glass. "We all talked about her. The war council. She wasn't going to bend a knee to the Inquisition, not after killing an Archdemon, and with the two of you in power Ferelden would never think it needed the Inquisition. The Inquisitor said it had to be done, and Maker's breath, it all made sense when she explained it to us."
"Explain it to me." Alistair's voice remains steady. No anger, no condemnation, no grief. Cullen wonders how a man can go through so much and still remain sane.
Maybe he isn't. Maybe Cullen isn't. Who can tell any more?
"Ferelden didn't think it needed us, but obviously, it was wrong. The thing holding it back from us was you two—rulers the people loved. So we had to break you. Open battle would strain our forces … We still weren't so powerful as that, back then. Diplomatic connections and good reputations don't magically create men to put on the field. So I planned the assassination. The Inquisitor handed it to me. Because of my tactical mind, she said."
Something, maybe another laugh or a sob, is trying to claw its way free. He forces it down and makes himself continue.
"You were the weaker of the two. Everyone knew it. She could manage without you, but you couldn't manage without her. So we arranged for some agents to be gotten into the palace at Denerim. You already trusted us, after we'd helped with the Venatori infiltrators." He swallows again. "All we needed was one to succeed, and he did. Poisoned the queen. A lingering sickness was expected of a Warden. Once she was gone, you'd be open to influencing, especially without an heir to succeed you."
"Yes," Alistair says quietly. "She was working on that when she died. We burned her and the baby together."
"But you kept standing up to us."
"One doesn't survive the Fifth Blight by being easy to break, knight-captain. No matter how hard people try."
People. Genteel, almost. The Alistair Cullen remembers from their recruit days would be howling by now—swearing vengeance and sobbing and trying to rip the bars down with his bare hands, maimed or not. This Alistair is older and, perhaps, stronger, for all he's failed.
Cullen wonders for the thousandth time how he could ever have let it come to this.
"She's insane," he says. The words seal his fate, and it almost feels a relief. "She's insane, or possessed, and I closed my eyes to it. Because I loved what she'd been. She's a monster, and I was wrong. The Maker is not in her Chantry, and Andraste turns her face from her. And me."
"Well, that's done it," the other man murmurs. His voice is so low Cullen can barely hear it, even in the echoing stone chamber. Something else is there, though: a slow, measured tread, as familiar as breathing. It's growing closer. "Ego te absolvo, knight-captain. As they say in Tevinter. I think. It's been a while since I was last there, and I spent most of it trying not to die." He chuckles. "But considering where I'm likely to end up very soon, I think I can spare a little charity."
Cullen opens his eyes. The onetime king of Ferelden—mutilated, scarred, bereaved, and ultimately defeated—has managed to pull himself into a sitting position. What remains of his hands are folded neatly in his lap, and his eyes are clear and unclouded.
"Have hope," he says. It's the last thing in the world Cullen expected. "If the lady Lavellan really was taken by a demon, then she's already been on the other side for years. Waiting for you, untainted, just like my wife and son are waiting for me. And if I know the Inquisition …" His gaze flicks to the door behind Cullen. The tramp of boots is loud now. "You'll be seeing her again very soon."
Impossibly, a grin flashes across his face again. "Say hello to her for me, won't you? Once she's through punching you, I mean. Tell her I never did thank her properly for that Venatori clear-out. Oh, and tell her I know she pawned that Fereldan medal of service I sent, but I don't mind. Those old designs were hideous."
Cullen has no words left. He just looks back at Alistair.
Then:
"I will," he says. "If there's anything of me left once the Maker is through with me."
"Have hope," Alistair repeats. "Doesn't cost anything."
The door swings open, and four soldiers push their way into the room. They're heavy assault troops, all in thick spiked armor: not at all the ordinary guards sent to watch over prisoners, even condemned ones. These are the walking walls, slow and inexorable, that can crush even Qunari on the battlefield. Cullen has picked and trained them himself. Perhaps one or two of them will feel regret over their mission.
"Commander Cullen Rutherford," the leader says. His hand rests openly on the hilt of his greatsword. Cullen is not a man to be tangled with lightly, and these men are not sent here out of respect to his rank. "I have orders to arrest you on charges of blasphemy and high heresy against our Maker and the herald of Andraste His Bride."
"Quick response time," Alistair comments wryly. Against all odds, Cullen stifles another laugh.
"They've had a lot of practice."
"Commander Cullen Rutherford," the leader repeats. The voice is familiar. Nyree? Gawane? Yes, Gawane. A true believer. "Will you come quietly to answer these charges, or must we use force?"
The laugh bubbles out of him. For the first time in months—years—he feels free, free and unhampered. Soon he will be before the shell of the woman he once loved, and he will say exactly what has been boiling in his mind for too many damned long years.
He will die. But he has hope.
"You know," he says conversationally as two of the soldiers seize his arms, "it's all going to fall. We thought he would break—" He jerks his chin at Alistair, still sitting quietly on the straw "-and he became the heart of the rebellion. You have no idea how many plots and secrets I've overlooked over the years." He laughs again, because he's confessed and has been absolved, and the Inquisition's forces will shiver when their Commander falls to the ax. "It's going to end, boys, and you'd better hope you're well away when it does."
"He's possessed," one of the soldiers says tightly. "Always knew it'd happen. Don't look him in the eyes!"
"Oh yes, don't," Alistair adds behind them. "Wouldn't want to actually see him as a person now, would you? Easier to kill a heretic than your loyal Commander, eh?"
Thank you, Alistair, for that. Walls have ears, and those words may reach some.
"Alistair," he says. He half-turns his head. "Your Majesty. It's been an honor."
Alistair smiles and touches his right wrist to his heart. "When you're up on that pike, Commander—stare the bastards down."
"Always."
They march him out to his death. He goes, and has hope.