And the Path is Dark

V. Cullen

Part One

Cullen keeps his head bowed and chews his meal slowly, his face hidden behind a raised hand. I'm not hiding, he reassures himself. Not hiding. Why would I be hiding? I've nothing to hide from. He takes a surreptitious glance about the dining hall, searching for pointed ears and pale golden hair. He relaxes when he sees none. I'm just… taking a moment for myself. A short break. An all-too familiar voice full of odd burrs and lilting vowels enters the main hall and the Commander sinks lower in his seat, hunching his shoulders inwards. The fur lining his cloak tickles his cheeks and as he curses himself for wearing something so conspicuous.

Cullen whiles away a few agonizing minutes waiting for the owner of the voice to just leave as he plays with his food. He builds mounds the mashed parsnips up, until the mass resembles the nearby mountain peaks, a deep trench carved between them. Each chunk of mutton becomes a battalion of friendly soldiers, each pea a squad of evil forces. The mutton warriors lie in wait high in the mountains for the nefarious peas invaders to come through Parsnip Pass. Once their foes are within the pass, they fall upon the dreaded peas, decimating their forces from the flanks. Their brutal and bloody war soon spreads across his plate. He becomes absorbed with helping the forces of Muttony Justice vanquish the forces of Vegetable Evil, so much so that he fails to notice the approach of an elven woman.

Soft footfalls stop in front of his seat. He freezes at the sight of boots on the other side of the table. He tries not to wince as the chair across from him clatters against the stone flooring, and the elf takes her seat.

"Good evening, Commander," she chirps, her voice bright and cheery.

Cullen wrestles with the grimace twisting at his lips. "Herald." Keeping a cordial expression is a rather more difficult task than it should be, but he can't help it: the mage has the worrying ability to bring out the petulant teenager in him.

The elven woman grimaces at something and takes a moment to poke at the meat on her plate. Silence, blessed silence, hangs over the table. It's a little uncomfortable, a little stifling, but it's better than the alternative. Cullen's past few days, ever since the mage woke up, have been positively filled with the mage's accented prying. She had started out innocently enough: with a query here and there about the Chantry or the Mage-Templar conflict. Small, context-relevant questions with easy answers. But as the days stretched on, her curiosity became harder and harder to satisfy.

She began asking questions about anything and everything. Was Haven considered to be in Orlais, or was it Ferelden? What did he look for in recruits? What did the Chant say about elves? Before long he couldn't turn a bloody corner without running into her and a mouthful of her ready questions.

She was insatiable, voracious. And Cullen was sick of it.

The Herald stops fidgeting as much across from him. Her expression quiets and grows pensive. Her lips part and a wave of exasperation rises in him. He knows, just knows, she's going to start asking questions Always, always with the questions. He cuts her off before she can begin, hoping to derail her with a query of his own.

"Herald, why are you sitting here with me? I'm sure Josephine or Leliana would like to have the chance to ask you a few questions, and answer a few of your own in return."

The elf breaks off whatever she had been about to say, her eyes startled wide by his interruption. "I've spoken with Sister Leliana a few times. She suggested that you would be the best person to answer my questions."

"Oh?"

"She said you wouldn't mind, and that you were the best equipped with answers."

"Did she now."

The door makes a rather satisfying bang as Cullen slams it open. The noise is enough to take the edge off his swelling anger. Leliana doesn't even bother to jump at his intrusion. A bit of him resents her unshakable calm and fans the flames of his anger, driving them even higher than before.

"We need to talk," he growls out.

"What of?" Her reply is utterly unhurried and nonchalant. It only serves to make him angrier.

"The Herald," he grits out from between clenched teeth. His jaw creaks.

"What about her?"

Cullen takes a few deep breaths, reaching for the calm that seems so determined to escape him. "She's gotten the idea in her head that it's okay for her to follow me around everywhere. And she seems to have gotten this idea from you."

Leliana flips through a couple of papers on her desk distractedly. "I did tell her she should go to you if she had any questions, yes."

Leliana's instant and honest answer startles him into a few moments of silence. He has become accustomed to having to drag every last unimportant answer out of the woman. She hoards information greedily and rarely offers it up so freely. "Why?"

"She has a lot of questions. I thought you may be able to answer them."

Ah. So perhaps she's not being so free after all. "I know better than to believe that line, Leliana."

"It's not a lie."

"It's not all of the truth, either."

"No."

"So?"

"So, you're still our best option for answering questions."

"No, I'm really not." Cullen can't help but scoff at his colleague. "There's plenty of people in Haven better suited to teaching and with far less to do than I. Chantry sisters, for example."

"Fair enough," Leliana concedes grudgingly. "However, you're our best option for our purpose."

"Alright, I'll bite. What purpose?"

"To keep her with us. We need the Herald, and badly. Beyond that, we need her to think that we trust her. At the very least, we need her to close the Rifts. Beyond that, we can use her as a figurehead. If she thinks we're hostile towards her, we lose an incredibly valuable resource. She has to like us, to want to work with us. Which is why we've been humoring her. We have answered her questions, kept her movements fairly unrestricted, and allowed her to speak with Solas and Varric."

"And where do I fit in in all this?" Cullen questions, still dissatisfied.

"We still must keep her as isolated as we can manage. It keeps her from giving away secrets and keeps those who may wish to harm her away. But, again, we can't let her know we're trying to isolate her. We have to make it seem like its her own choice. If she thinks she can get everything she wants out of a few select people and us, then she has no reason to interact with others. Which is where you come in. If you keep answering her questions, keep her entertained, she will have no need to go to others."

"I still don't see why it has to be me to watch over her."

"We need her primary attachments to be people we can trust, and those are in precious short supply. The only people whose loyalty I'm certain of are myself, Josephine, Cassandra, and you. I can't watch over her, obviously. We can't have her privy to our deepest secrets.

"Likewise, many of the negotiations Josi is dealing with are of a secretive nature; our possible allies don't yet want to risk being associated with us. A spy getting ahold of our correspondences could scare away all potential allies. Additionally, Josi has to actually meet with diplomats. She can't have the Herald following at her heels like a lost dog.

"Cassandra has been occupied meeting with Chantry representatives in an attempt to sway them to our side; flaunting the presence of a heretic in front of them would do little to endear us to them. You have the most flexible schedule, deal with the least sensitive information, and are not in danger of causing a diplomatic nightmare. It's only logical that she be assigned to you." Leliana cast a knowing smirk in Cullen's direction, managing to pack a whole host of implications into a simple bow of the lips. "Besides, she seems to like you."

"I deal with plenty of privileged information!" Cullen shoots back. He tries to keep calm, but he can't help but take offense. Am I that useless? "What about our troop movements?"

Leliana scoffs, waves a hand in dismissal. "Oh, please, Cullen. Everyone already knows where are troops are; we can't hide entire armies in other nations without people noticing."

Cullen does his best not to sputter. "That's besides the point! I can't get anything done with her tagging along after me."

"Oh, come now, Cullen," she coaxes. "Surely the Herald isn't that bad."

"She never, never, stops asking questions! It's incessant!"

"I'm sure she's not doing any harm. She's just… inquisitive!"

Cullen continues to argue with the fierce redhead. He knows she won't budge, and that she'll either talk him over or browbeat him to her side. He still fights, refuses to back down. Sometimes a situation is hopeless, and all you have is the principle of the matter.

It is with a head full of unpleasant thoughts and a snarl that Cullen barricades himself in his office, determined to get something useful done today. He finds it difficult to focus, distracted as he is by his discussion with the spymaster. Not hiding he reminds himself. Not hiding.

Leliana managed to extract a promise from him before he stormed off: he will allow the Herald to natter at him, and try not to scare her off. His promise has no bearing on how he feels about the situation, however. He still believes this is a terrible idea, and made sure Leliana knows it.

There are plenty of reasons why Cullen is angry over getting shunted into Herald-watching. Firstly, and least importantly, is a matter of pride. He's the Maker-blessed Commander of an army; it's damned insulting that he has to play babysitter. That complaint hadn't held up long under Leliana's arguments for the importance of a trustworthy watcher. Secondly, as he told Leliana at length, the Herald is incredibly annoying. She possesses the unique ability to simultaneously be both infuriatingly quiet, saying little, yet at the same time saying all too much. It's likely because she only ever takes; she constantly asks questions, yet never offers up information about herself. She pokes and prods and pries, yet offers little to explain her motivations for her questioning. It's more than simply annoying: it's suspicious. Why not speak of herself if she isn't hiding something? She isn't trustworthy, and he's reminded of it every time she opens her mouth.

There are too many unknowns about the mage. She still claims ignorance about how the Breach opened, and she's maintained that she has no memory of what happened in the Fade. She hasn't volunteered what she was even doing at the Conclave. It makes Cullen nervous to have someone so obviously dangerous and so opaque about their motivations at his back. If he's not careful, he's sure to find a knife stuck in it. However, in the end, his largest objection lies with himself.

Cullen knows himself well enough to recognize the dangers in spending too much time with the mage. He had always been prone to developing unfortunate senses of loyalty for those he shouldn't.

It had begun as early as templar training. Cullen had attached himself to a couple of older recruits who couldn't have given half a damn about the obnoxious youngster following at their heels. He had his reasons, of course, for his loyalty, but they all essentially boiled down to them guiding him about in his first week of training. His devotion to them persisted for many years, despite them treating him as less a peer and more an errand boy. It only died out when all three of them were ejected from templar training for what their instructors called "an abuse of power." It was such a simple, innocuous phrase for the horrors they had visited upon the poor young man. Cullen had never found out what had happened to their victim. Something told him he would probably be better off not knowing.

The Circle tower at Kinloch Hold was an incredible tangle of challenged allegiance and confused morality. There was Ser Greagoir, who Cullen was sworn to follow. The man, being the Knight-Commander, was supposed to be the pinnacle of justice in the Tower, an instrument of the Maker himself. But Cullen soon found that Greagoir was willing enough to turn a blind eye to all too much if done by the templars, and would permit all too little if done by the mages. Is that what justice was? Letting men in armor scare teenagers into becoming blood mages? He likely would never have questioned Greagoir's orders if his devotion hadn't been compromised by a certain apprentice. She had earned his allegiance in, quite frankly, an embarrassingly short period of time with absolutely no effort: barely a smile and a couple questions. No, it hadn't been her fault; it was entirely the fault of Cullen's own flighty sense of fealty.

Meredith had been another Knight-Commander of his with a harsh way of governing. Cullen was not… himself following the fall of the Ferelden Circle. He was bitter, angry, and not a little bit fearful of the people, the creatures, who had so easily destroyed his life and danced gleefully amongst the ashes. He hated mages then. He needed someone to hate, and they made it oh-so easy in Kirkwall, with abominations on the loose, Tevinter bloodmages skulking about in Darktown and the hair-thin Veil hanging over it all. There was so much evil, and Meredith promised to cleanse it. She had taken him in, accepted him, soothed away the fears of Kinloch Hold and replaced it all with a brilliant sense of righteousness. It pervaded everything, touched everything. His actions hunting abominations were righteous. His methods for finding bloodmages may have been harsh, but it was justified because the cause was righteous. Every week more and more mages were found after hanging themselves from rafters. Every week another mage disappeared in the night and a Tranquil took their place. Every week the mages' despair became more and more palpable, until it was so thick he could nearly taste it, but it was all okay because Meredith said so, and everything she touched was, indeed, righteous. He had doubts in the many years he served as Meredith's Knight-Captain, but they were tiny things, and easily brushed aside. Except, of course, when the doubts concerned a certain Champion mage.

Cullen had known Hawke was an apostate for years. Maker's bones, he had seen her cast spells the very first time he met her! But she had helped him that day without expecting a reward, or acknowledgement. He couldn't just turn away from her after that, not when she had practically saved his life. So he kept his mouths shut as Meredith raged and despaired of ever finding enough evidence to haul Hawke off to the Gallows. He kept his silence and let her run roughshod all over Kirkwall. And look at how that ended up: with an exploded Chantry and a mage rebellion

His history of failing at his duty thanks to pretty, charming mages is a significant part of why Cullen doesn't wish to watch the Herald. She has the mage part down flat, and she's charming enough when she isn't determinedly talking his ear off. If he has to continue playing nursemaid, he may become accustomed to her questioning, perhaps find her charming. Maybe even likeable. And if he comes to like her, he'll let her get away with anything. Maker, I'm a rubbish templar.

Lelina says they need to keep the Herald close, so they can use and control her. Cullen isn't like Leliana and Josephine; he isn't able to wear masks so well he becomes them. He isn't strong like Cassandra, firm and certain in her beliefs. No, he is beset on all sides by doubts. They harry him, bring him low, until he is no longer certain who holds the truth.

He cannot trust his fealty to lie in a deserving place. He has an abysmal track record when it comes to his superiors and mages both. He has followed those who did not deserve his allegiance. He has allowed mages to disrupt him carrying out his duty. All in the name of loyalty. How can he trust himself to make the right decisions now if he couldn't before? How is what they've been building in Haven different from the Chantry he once so blindly served?

He cannot afford to forget who he is, who he must be, for the good of the Inquisition. He cannot be gentle; he cannot be lenient.

He is altogether too weak to play this game.

Author's Note:

Whooo! Finally got a chapter out. This a short one; the second half will be coming a few days.

I'm very, very, very sorry this took me so long to update. I've been struggling with depression these past few months, as well as getting hit with a bunch of bad news, and its made writing extremely difficult. I didn't mean to abandon this story, and I sincerely apologize for doing so. Thankfully, I've been feeling better overall recently, so my updates should become more frequent. Not going to lie, though, I could really use some encouragement right about now.

Notes on the chapter: We get a whole bunch of Cullen angst in this chapter. He has yet to settle into his position as Commander and loosen up a bit. It makes the story move slow, but I felt it was important in order to set up Cullen as a character. Next chapter is going to be much lighter; there's going to be Varenya and her particular brand of strange.

Cullen is extremely harsh with himself. He holds himself to a superhuman standard; it's natural to have doubts from time to time, or to have one's loyalty shaken. He, however, takes it as evidence that there is something wrong, either with him or his belief system, which then only makes his faith more unstable. He's such a perfectionist/overachiever that any road bump is, in his mind, signs of a disaster.

As always, your reads, follows, favorites and reviews are greatly appreciated!