A/N: This story is based on a prompt from the Cullenites Facebook group that I accepted and ran with probably farther than the prompter intended. Oops! The original prompt was: "After Kirkwall, Cullen declines Cassandra's offer to be Commander. He leaves the Order and returns home to the family farm. During a mission, Quizzy gets separated during an ambush. Cullen finds her injured and unconscious in the woods... This was kind of based on the idea that Cullen and Quizzy were always destined to meet."

Hopefully this satisfies the prompt giver as well as anyone else who reads it! Thanks as always to anyone taking a look, FF readers are the best.


Cullen cleared out the back woods alone.

It wasn't that he didn't love his siblings. He did. And his brother-in-law, and his sister-in-law, and the nieces and nephews that came with them. He'd never once regretted his decision to turn away from the path the Divine's Right Hand had offered him in Kirkwall. Seeker Pentaghast had called him a leader and Commander, but he'd seen the truth behind the Veil of her face. If he came to this new Inquisition, she would never let him forget how badly he'd failed.

So he'd come home, where his only failure was that he hadn't been a better correspondent during his time with the Templars. They'd nursed him through his hard fight against lyrium without understanding it in the least, they'd given him occupation and purpose, and they'd never asked him to pick up a sword again.

But they also encouraged single women to stop by the house more often than any man could tolerate, so the woods and the axe he swung inside it were his sanctuary.

The woods were also terribly overgrown. They'd been his father's pride, when he lived, but after he'd died in the Blight no one had taken over the responsibility. The place was thick with dead trees, moldering leaves, and nests of animals both benign and not. Cullen enjoyed the challenge of building something intentional out of something so wild, a small patch of forest that would allow everything to survive instead of just the strongest within it. The decisions of where to cut and where to push, angling the slices a way that the felled tree would fall exactly where he wanted, and seeing new life grow in the places he cleared, were joys that never dulled.

Still, he always worked with his shirt on, regardless of the sweat that stained it and the dirty looks his nieces and nephews gave him when it was their turn for the laundry. He wouldn't put it past Mia or Alice to send the women out here to ogle him under the guise of bringing him water.

And it was while he was slicing a felled tree for firewood that he heard the unmistakable sounds of battle.

For a split second he was back in the Gallows, hearing the mages tear his fellow Templars to pieces with their own blood. The feeling was so strong, the sense of place so absolute, that he almost cried out with the fear. He shook himself free of the memory, then realized why it had come so strongly. There were demons nearby.

He almost ran home, his body tight and aching against the nightmares and day terrors that were stronger without the lyrium. This wouldn't be the first time he'd suffered in the grip of hallucination. And even if it was real, it was in him to be a coward, he knew. More then a hero. He'd learned who he was as his time in Kirkwall marched on. Cullen Rutherford was a man who saved himself by leaving.

It was only when he heard a cry, one of agony and pain, that he gripped his axe and ran towards the trouble.

He arrived at the edge of the wood just in time to watch a small figure fall underneath a green glow that vanished with a thunderclap. A pride demon, large and vicious, turned towards the unconscious figure with a satisfied chuckle, and Cullen forgot that he had no lyrium in his blood, that he hadn't fought in months, and that he was the weakest of all Templars even without those things. He charged instead.

The demon never saw him coming, or if it did it didn't care. It was focused exclusively on the body lying on the ground, even as Cullen attacked and sliced at the insubstantial giant in front of him. Only when it was almost defeated did it turn and pay him any attention at all, and Cullen wondered vaguely between strikes what it was about the still figure that fascinated a demon so much. Perhaps he was the mage who had summoned it. Or had defeated the demon's fellows. By the marks on the ground and the ichor that soaked the grass, there'd been even more Fade creatures in the area recently.

The puzzle was still unsolved when Cullen finally cut his enemy in two. The demon dissipated with a dark groan and an explosion that Cullen knew enough to back away from. He breathed out slowly and thanked the Maker, with a touch of relief, that it had only been Pride. That had never been the demon he'd had to fear.

He knelt over the person who'd drawn him to this place and saw with surprise that it was a woman, slight but strong, with a face that was striking even marked by bruises and demon's blood. She was well-armored but the armor was merely scored and twisted leather, and Cullen wondered that she'd survived the fight at all.

The leather armor soothed him as well. He'd never known a mage to wear anything but cloth, something about the Fade energies and interferences that he'd never understood. And the armor held the crest of the Inquisition, the organization that was all the better for his lack of involvement. They'd swept through this part of Ferelden recently, scouting and securing what they could, and they'd had very few mages with them at all.

Cullen thought back to his early training in first aid, so very long ago and shrouded behind other, worse memories. They'd always had healers for this sort of thing. Or medics, if the mages weren't cooperating. He did remember that he wasn't supposed to move unconscious people, if he didn't know how they'd been injured. But while she was unconscious he had no way to find out if she was safe to move.

He chewed on the problem for a minute before he reached out and gently slapped an unbruised place on her cheek. Nothing happened, and he moved his hand to a bruise before tapping her again. That woke her up, with a gasp of pain that he immediately felt sorry for, but her eyes slowly found his face. They were clouded and hazy, and he wondered if she knew where she was.

"Did you hurt your back? Or your neck?" he asked, keeping his voice unconcerned. "What happened?"

Her voice was weak and cracked, hardly more than a whisper in the woods. "Ambush. They were waiting. Dorian - where's Dorian?"

Dorian. A Tevinter name, and the Imperium held no love for the south or the Inquisition. An enemy? Perhaps the person who'd brought the demon and conjured whatever had been in the sky. But she'd said his name with concern, even caring, so perhaps he was a comrade. Or a lover. She didn't look Tevene, but stranger things had happened.

"I'll look for him," he lied easily. "But you have to tell me if you're hurt, first."

Her eyes sharpened, and he couldn't help but notice the autumn-gold flecks that warmed their brown depths as she tried to focus. "Help him," she said. "I promised him it would be safe. Please. I trust you." The focus vanished, and she stared up at the sky and blinked twice. "I'm okay. I'm okay."

She slid back into unconsciousness, but not before she tried to sit up, lifting her hand in supplication as she rolled. She ended up on her side, curled into a ball like a child stretched beside the fire in winter. A wave of sympathy rolled through him as her face relaxed from its urgent pleading into a vulnerable stillness. The Inquisition worked their scouts hard, it seemed - beyond the bruises and cuts of any soldier's life, she had what appeared to be old dirt behind her soft, shell-like ears and her leg wraps were practically in tatters. Her shaggy brown hair looked like it had been cut by the edge of a sword. In a windstorm. In full darkness.

Cullen looked back towards his house uncertainly. His siblings had been adamant that they not get involved in this war, leaving the fighting to the world that was ready for it. He'd privately, and publicly, agreed wholeheartedly. But surely an injured refugee didn't count as involvement?

It didn't matter. He couldn't leave her here. She'd said she trusted him, and it had been a very, very long time since that had been true of anyone.


To Mia's credit, she didn't protest when he carried his charge through the front door. She sat in the parlor with the two unmarried daughters of their nearest neighbor, but Cullen ignored them entirely as he explained he'd found a woman who needed help. For once the guests worked in his favor, sighing in appreciation of his gallantry, and Mia couldn't decline her own aid even if she'd wanted to. She shooed the visitors away and led Cullen to a back room usually used for guests and sent a farmhand out to fetch his brother Darren. They didn't have a healer in a place so small, but his brother served as the area's vet, and that was usually the best they could do.

To Cullen's irritation he was sent into the hall while Darren examined his new human patient and Mia assisted. He paced, only realizing belatedly that he had a tear in his pants, his hair was sticky with demon's blood, and his shirt was plastered to his chest with sweat. Perhaps it was just as well that he was in the hall.

That realization didn't stop him from pinning his brother to the wall when he finally emerged. "Is she okay? Did she wake up?" Did she wake up and realize I wasn't there? is what he really wanted to know, but he kept that to himself.

"She's still unconscious," said Darren cheerfully. "But I don't think there's anything permanently broken. And she's definitely not having a foal."

Cullen glared. His brother was a good man, but his penchant for treating the world as a joke was severely trying.

"Tough room today," said Darren. "I can't find anything wrong with her. I'm not sure why she's not awake, but maybe she just needed to sleep. She looks like she's been through a hard time."

Cullen privately agreed with that assessment. "And what if she doesn't wake up?"

"Give it until the morning before you worry, okay? Or at least until dawn."

Cullen clenched his fists. He didn't know why he was so anxious that she open her eyes again, except that she was his charge. And all of his other charges had died in horrible ways that had been entirely his fault.

Darren seemed to sense his despair and his expression softened. "Hey, Cullen. Don't worry. I really think she's just resting. Mia offered to stay up with her tonight, and she'll let you know first thing if something happens. She's going all out on this nursing thing - she's even changing her into clean clothes."

A shriek from inside of the room had them both racing to the door, and Cullen shouldered his way through first. Mia held a tattered glove to her mouth, so much like their mother when she'd seen a mouse scurry across the kitchen floor that Cullen almost laughed. Until he saw the glow emanating from the bared hand that was limp on the bed.

He paled. It was an exact match to the magic he'd seen in the sky above her.

Mia turned to him with a look that was half-accusing, half-amused. "Cullen, I think you've kidnapped the Herald of Andraste."


It took some time for them to explain the magnitude of what he'd done. Cullen had heard of the Herald, in a vague, rumored way, but he'd done his best to ignore everything about the Inquisition's leadership and direction. Perhaps too successfully, he was coming to understand. His family didn't know that he'd been offered a position with them, a position of power, and each easily presented fact was a guilt he couldn't erase. The Herald was a noble woman, a youngest daughter from somewhere in the Marches, who'd been touched by Andraste in the Fade and sent to save them all from the Breach.

The Breach he knew about, of course, though it was rumored to be closed now. He wasn't sure how much he believed the rest. What he did believe was what they told him about the Inquisition's embattled status. It was besieged on all sides by enemies, from Tevinter to the Chantry to the former Circles. Even the Seekers and the Templars fought them, and they were desperate for soldiers and allies to keep them from collapsing entirely. And the woman he'd found in the woods, barely older than his younger sister, a woman with battered armor and brown pools of flickering light for eyes, was holding the world together with both hands.

Cullen could have been her general. He could have helped carry that burden instead of running from the hidden accusation in the Seeker's eyes.

But he was here and this was now. The Templars had drilled him endlessly to confront the problems in front of him, to focus on the present to the exclusion of the rest. At times that was myopia, a shared delusion that the future was easy and the past unimportant. But it did help him with decisions, and he knew two things. She'd said she'd walked into an ambush, which meant that one of her many enemies was looking for her, here. And she'd said that she trusted him.

Those two things freed him to choose. He told Mia to find another pair of gloves for the Herald and instructed both of them to keep the secret of who she was to themselves. Even Alice, their sister, couldn't know, mostly because Alice couldn't keep a secret to save her life, and their spouses were also excluded from any knowledge. The fewer people informed the better.

He wasn't worried about Mia, a woman who kept a thousand secrets every day just to keep the family spinning on its axis, but Darren tended to forget where he was when he was entertaining a room. Cullen drilled his instruction into him so many times that Darren snapped, "Both of my ears work just fine, you know."

Cullen looked at him with a hint of his old Commander's fire, and his brother fell silent.

"We're also going to keep her here, at least until she wakes up, and possibly beyond that," said Cullen.

"Surely her own people would rather care for her," said Mia. "They're far better equipped than we are."

"Ambushes start from inside information, always," said Cullen. "I'm sure most of her people are loyal. Others aren't. I don't know enough about them to choose, and I won't send her back into danger. She's too important to risk." He hadn't forgotten the hidden Dorian, a Tevene man and possible comrade who'd been mysteriously missing from the site of her battle.

Then he thought of Seeker Pentaghast, painfully upright and fiercely protective of the truth. "There is one of their ranks I would trust. I'll try to get word to her. Until then, this woman is a refugee that's staying here. Not a fighter. Just a civilian. And I still decide who knows what."

He raised his eyebrows at them both to make sure they understood. They nodded, though Darren muttered, "The Templars made you even bossier than Dad," and Mia folded her arms in a small show of rebellion.

Still, Cullen left the room mostly reassured. They didn't like to take orders any more than he did, but his family always did what was right.


He went back to the woods before darkness fell completely, moving unerringly to the place where the demon and the glow in the sky had been, and made a meticulous search of the area. He found a pair of well-crafted daggers thrown wide near where the Herald had fallen, the symbol of the Inquisition etched neatly into the handle, but no signs of any other human presence beyond his own. Cullen frowned at whatever idiot had made the decision to send someone so important out into the field without a protective guard.

He also frowned when he saw how much of the demon blood remained. This much meant a half dozen of the things had been here, if not more. He'd only seen one. And she'd been fighting alone. Just how good with the daggers was she? Or was it the glow on her hand, the touch of magic, that gave her so much strength?

He'd tucked his findings away along with his abandoned axe, still puzzling over the question, when a pair of robed men broke through the tree line and stopped short.

"Who are you?" said the taller one in a heavily accented voice. Even without the accent, Cullen recognized someone from the Imperium.

"This is my land," said Cullen in his most rural tones and drew himself up to his full height. It was technically Mia's land, but the Maker would forgive him this lie. "So my question is, who are you?"

The first man took a deep breath, but his companion laid a hand on his arm. "Pardon us, messere. We've gotten turned around," he said. His voice had almost no trace of an accent, and if Cullen hadn't known better he might have taken him for a city-raised Fereldan. A trained spy, almost certainly. "It's almost dark, and that's made my friend a little skittish."

Cullen pretended to relax. "Got it. But there's not much out here to hurt a man, if he's careful. The village is that way," he added, pointing to the southeast.

"Thank you," said the shorter man. "The kindness of Fereldan citizens lives up to its legend." He turned, then paused artfully, as though he'd just thought of something. "We had other companions we've been separated from. Another man, Tevene, with a large mustache, and a woman. Shorter, dark hair, from the Free Marches. Have they happened to stop for directions as well?"

"Haven't seen a woman," said Cullen. Another lie to add to the ledger of his forgiveness. "Did see a man, a few hours ago. Called himself Dorian. He asked where he could buy a horse."

He was swinging blindly now, but it was very important to give a predator something to chase. If they got bored, too often they stayed where they were and found a new target. He hoped Dorian wasn't actually these men's ally, whoever he was, but it was a small gamble. He'd seen the flash of a magic amulet under the taller man's robe, and mages had other ways of communicating with friends if they wanted to talk.

And it paid off. The two men gave each other a significant look and the shorter one said, "Do you happen to know where he went? We're anxious to find the rest of our party."

"Can't help you, I'm afraid," said Cullen. He spit on the ground, a parody of the raw bumpkin image that was well-known among the sophisticate countries, and he was rewarded with a dismissive wince from the taller man. "We didn't have any for sale, so he left. Might have tried another farm. Might have tried the village. Might have found the mail coach, maybe. We told him about that."

"And where does that go?"

"Picks up about a mile away," said Cullen, pointing to the north east.

"Thank you, messere," said the shorter man, turning around to stare. "Thank you very much."

Cullen called after them as they left, "My pleasure! And don't worry about the dark, serahs!"


They had one more visitor that night. After full dark, just as Cullen was about to check on Mia and the sleeping Herald before trying to find his own rest, a knock came at the front door. Alice answered it with her boundless enthusiasm, then yelled back into the house, "It's for you!"

He grimaced, sure it was one of the enterprising farmer's daughters, but to his surprise Alice was waiting in the hall with a fluttering hand over her heart, which she certainly never would have done for any local visitor. "He's so handsome," she whispered as she danced back into the house.

Cullen opened the door curiously and blinked in surprise. He'd half-expected the mysterious Dorian, mustache and all, but instead it was a wiry elf with a bald head that shined in the moonlight. He wore no magical amulets, no rings, nothing but a wolf's tooth on a cord around his neck, but Cullen didn't need any of that to scent the Fade on him.

When Cullen's lip curled, the elf smiled and stared up at him. "Hello. My name is Solas. I'm searching for a woman who may have been lost somewhere around here."

"Can't say I've seen any strange women around here recently. What's she look like?" asked Cullen, trying to radiate helpful imbecility.

This man was less gullible, or less inclined to stereotypes, than the two Tevinter men, based on his amused violet eyes. But he still said, "She is human, of medium-height, with dark hair and eyes. She speaks with a faint Marcher accent, though she may sound Orlesian at times. She's likely carrying daggers and wearing leather armor marked by the Inquisition."

Cullen shrugged. "No one like that in these parts, I'm afraid. I'll keep an eye out."

Solas smiled once more. "Don't you wish to know why I'm looking for her? All of your neighbors asked."

"I'm sure they'll tell me what you told them," said Cullen. "But if you'll excuse me, Solas, I was about to hit the sack."

The elf didn't move, staring through him. Cullen noticed, uncomfortably, that his gaze was pointing directly to the guest room where the Herald slept. The hairs on Cullen's neck raised as the air around him turned predatory. "If I told you I was with the Inquisition, would that help?" asked Solas.

"Even the Inquisition can't make memories where there are none," said Cullen, dropping the rural Fereldan act. "I haven't seen this woman." He paused. "But if you are with the Inquisition, please send word to Seeker Pentaghast that I would like to speak with her. I knew her, once, and would like to renew the acquaintance."

Solas looked at him sharply, assessing him the same way a cat eyed a mouse. "And the name I should give this Seeker?"

"Cullen Rutherford," he answered, reluctantly.

"Truly?" asked Solas with a hint of surprise. His face settled into a neutral expression. "I see. Yes. That is perhaps for the best, then."

Subtlety had never been Cullen's strong suit, and all he knew was that he wanted this all-too-knowing elf far away from here. "The village inn will stand you for the night, free of charge. Just give them my name. Good night."

He tried to shut the door, but Solas held it open with a surprising ease. "Thank you, but I'm more at home in the woods," he said. His eyes twinkled. "I perhaps should have also mentioned that my quarry is a beautiful chaos, the sort of woman who could easily touch a chivalrous man's heart."

Cullen glared and finally won the battle for the door. As it closed, he heard the elf add, "If you do see her, take care to guard yours."