Author's note: Welcome to An Accounting of the Inquisition, the fourth major story in my Sanguinarius Sanctus series. This tale is the semidirect successor to Birds of Prey, though there are also plot details taken from First Blood, which is set immediately between BoP and AAotI. At this point there have been many minor and some fairly major canon divergences in the S.S. canon from vanilla Dragon Age lore, and AAotI will explore many of these.

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Your fingers glide across the back of a row of books until they catch on aged leather. You aren't looking for anything in particular, but curiosity has you pulling at the old tome; it's thicker than any of the volumes around it, the spine rippled from use, though it evidently has no title and nothing in particular to recommend it. Its sole decoration is a rather striking symbol stamped into the front cover, comprising a flame-shrouded eye bisected by a down-facing sword. You think you vaguely recognise the symbol, almost as though you've seen it in a dream, but you can't place it any more firmly in your memory. The book is heavy but fragile, and you carefully carry it to a small desk in a private alcove. Not sure what to expect, you ease open the front leaf of the book, taking note of the vellum pages turned brown by the years, their edges uneven. The first page is filled with careful handwritten cursive, the ink's thickness varying regularly, suggesting a quill pen refreshed at intervals from an inkpot. A quick scan through subsequent pages shows the entire book is written in this manner, save for the occasional illustration, each of which seems like it's straight out of a children's book of fairy tales. On the verge of closing the tome in search of more appropriate literature, you decide to give the first few lines a chance to regain your interest.

"A good friend of mine says that the best stories need no introduction, much less a preamble," the page reads. "But, for reasons I still cannot quite understand, it has fallen to me to convey this tale, and I fear I am not nearly so accomplished a storyteller as it deserves. Still, the story must be recorded, and I hope you will forgive the unskilled manner which I have here employed to do so."

You blink, knowing you should close the book now and replace it on the shelf, knowing that the author's advisor was right and that no work of literature worthy of the term would bother to apologise for itself so brazenly, but something keeps your eyes marching across the page for just a few more lines. "This tale will one day, I sincerely hope, seem the height of fantasy. Perhaps by the time you read these words, the troubles now besetting our world will have passed into the depths of history, and thence into the realm of myth. But I promise you," the book insists, "each event relayed herein is as close an approximation to the reality as I could make it. I stand eyewitness to much, though not all, of what is to come, yet even my own memories have been examined and corroborated to the best of my ability.

"This is a story of struggle, and sacrifice, and courage in the face of the unknown. Of a disparate collection of individuals, each haunted by their own fears and famished by their own desires, who nevertheless joined to make a united body in the face of the direst threat our perilous world has yet known.

"More narrowly, it chronicles the path of a woman thrown into deadly circumstance, who triumphed over every challenge put before her, until she was regarded among the ranks of legend even as she lived. Many lies and rumours have been spread about her, some malicious, others too grandiose to be credited even by the ardent faithful. Here I have attempted, to the best of my limited ability, to set forth the truth as I have known it.

"Suredat-an Adaar. Dorian Pavus. Cullen Rutherford. Knight-Enchanter Vivienne. Josephine Montilyet. Sera. The Iron Bull. Solas. Thomas Rainier. Cole. Sister Leliana. Varric Tethras. Enchanter Rhys. Cassandra Pentaghast. Countless souls whose names I never knew, who believed in our cause, who lived and died by our actions. Separately, we were nothing. Together, we formed the Inquisition."

The last word is on a separate line, larger than the rest of the text, in solid block letters. Beneath it, in a much less careful hand, you see a note scrawled at an odd angle to the lines of the introduction. "Shit, Seeker," it reads. "If you wanted me to write the fucking introduction so badly, you should've asked."

oOoOo

Chapter 1

oOoOo

The tear in the sky was awesome and terrifying, outstripping any of the warnings we'd been given on the arduous journey through the mountains. It glowed green against the clouds, which swirled sedately around it, and if one watched closely, one could imagine seeing the bright centre of the violation pressing out against its boundaries. "Would you take a look at that," Varric said, as close to awe-struck as I had ever heard him. It did not take him long to recover enough wit to cut himself with, however. "I'll bet you're glad we took a detour back in West Hill now, Seeker," he added, covering his disquiet with a boastful chuckle.

I dragged my eyes away from the violation of nature and rounded upon him with a sneer, even as I knew I was playing into his hands. "You will not speak such flippancy while Most Holy's remains have yet to be found," I growled. "You are lucky not to be shackled and gagged as it is, dwarf." But as I turned back to the path and resumed my march to the base camp, I was forced to concede that Varric was correct, even if I would never admit it to his face; had he not attempted escape after our landing in Ferelden, I and Leliana would not have been delayed in bringing him to Divine Justinia's presence, and we would all have died in the explosion which destroyed the mountain overlooking the village of Haven.

My thoughts were interrupted by an unexpected sight in the form of Cullen, formerly the Knight-Captain and briefly the Knight-Commander of the templars in Kirkwall. He had come with us across the Waking Sea but had not wished to pause his journey for the task of collecting the wayward dwarf, and I had not asked him to; in consequence, I'd spent much of the day since learning of the catastrophe privately worried that the templar had been lost. Luckily, my fears were unfounded.

"Hail," Cullen called, offering the templars' salute, which I returned without hesitation. "It is good to see you all again, even amidst this madness."

"I could say the same," I replied with a nod. "How is it you survived the explosion? We were told there was only one."

Cullen grimaced, his eyes falling downcast. "I'm afraid the Maker had other plans for me," he admitted. "I took ill on the journey up the mountain and was convalescing at the time of the...event." He could not meet my gaze, but I sensed no malice in the evasion, only the guilt of the living in the face of so many dead. "I have recovered now, though," he assured us.

"That is a relief," Leliana said, from my and Varric's left, her voice still hollow, laced with shock. "At least the Maker's providence has seen fit to spare some of us…"

"Yet not the best of us," I finished, chancing another glance up to the Breach. "Justinia's death must be investigated, and, if possible, avenged." Cullen and Leliana both nodded in agreement with me, and my course was set. "Where is the survivor now?"

Cullen's face hardened and he gestured toward a nearby hut, where two ill-equipped soldiers stood at the ready to prevent ingress or egress. "She is within," he told me, "but she has not stirred to consciousness since stepping from the Fade through a rift. The soldiers were barely able to recover her before the area was inundated with demons." His face hardened as he swept a look up the path. "I'm afraid they're our more pressing concern at the moment. I've done what I can, but the soldiers here need more leadership than a single man can provide."

"If I may," came a tentative voice, and the elf stepped forward from where he'd been lingering in the shadows. "I will attend to the survivor while the rest of you shore up our defences against the invading spirits...that is, if we wish the survivor to actually survive."

Cullen tensed, evidently sensing the apostate's magic standing out against the background thrum from the Fade bleeding across the sky; though I still had reservations, however, I intervened. "This is Solas," I explained, giving the elf a skeptical glance. "He is an apostate who surrendered to my custody soon after news of the Breach reached us."

Solas looked to speak against my summation, but then reconsidered. "I am here to offer what assistance and expertise I might be able," he said, "but it will come to naught if we do not make haste."

"That is true enough," Cullen conceded, grudgingly. "The survivor is currently being attended by a rather reluctant alchemist. He's not a mage and certainly no healer, but he has kept her from succumbing thus far." The man looked to me for guidance, and I inclined my head slightly. In turn, he gestured to the hut once more. "You'll find her there; tell the guards I sent you, and they should present no further challenge."

The elf parted without ceremony, openly using his staff to help navigate the treacherous drifts of snow between us and the cabin. "Well, shit," Varric opined, unshouldering the crossbow that I now no longer regretted allowing back into his grasp. "Think you've got a couple more waltzes in you, Bianca?"

I rolled my eyes at the foolish nickname; it was not his companions, but rather his weapon that he fawned over as though it were a newborn doe in the glistening spring. "Let us go see to what forces remain," I judged, unshouldering the shield I still carried, of the Order I no longer served. The straps found my forearm as reliably as ever, despite my all-too-recent infidelity, and my sword sang as justly as it always had when I wrenched it from the sheath. "Are you yet in fighting shape, Cullen?"

"Indeed," he sighed, readying his own weapons, but wearily. "The path to our enemy is not difficult to follow...simply keep to the Breach, and we'll happen upon our fellows soon enough."

And so we did. We four who'd set out from Kirkwall together so hopeful that there might be peace were plunged into a battle even more terrible than the war we'd all aspired to see ended. In the few handfuls of hours since Cullen had become ambulatory, he'd organised what resistance he could with the scant dozens of soldiers left after the mountaintop's annihilation, but these men and women were weary from days of fighting an enemy with no need of rest, no pain for hunger, no tongue for reason or surrender.

Varric's doting care of his weapon was justified almost immediately, for the first time I saw it employed, I was quite impressed by the ruthless efficacy the dwarf managed. Unlike every other crossbow I'd ever seen, which managed perhaps two or three shots before needing to be laboriously reloaded, the tool in Varric's hands hurled bolt after bolt, with only the occasional pause of a few heartbeats before the dwarf's practiced fingers reset a quiver's worth in the cartridges his coat concealed. Yet, fortuitously, the tempest of battle soon drew my attention away from any admiration I might have expressed, and it was the work of hours to turn the tide in the defenders' favour.

It was no small feat to break that first wave of demons, and the exhausted troops took their share of casualties, but once the assault was blunted and turned back, it became a matter of administration and vigilance. The troops lucky enough to withstand the opening of the Breach and the subsequent outpouring of horrors were disunited, demoralised, desperate. Some of them weren't even soldiers. It took every scrap of skill and authority that Cullen and I possessed to keep the majority from simply evaporating once the immediate threat had passed, but we managed to retain the attention of the majority, and set about imposing martial order and discipline upon them. When they were not themselves fighting, Leliana and Varric saw to establishing the logistics of the camp, and within three days we had turned a pitched battle into a grinding siege. Far from ideal, to be certain, but far from hopeless also.

As hope kindled, rumour began to take root. More than a dozen people claimed to have seen the survivor stumble out of one of the rifts, a creature of flesh stepping physically from the Fade. In what limited time I was afforded, I sought out the truth of this event, and from so many differing accounts I gleaned that the survivor was seen standing in the Fade alongside another figure, evidently human but viewed only in profile. The mysterious woman urged the survivor on, through the rift, but she herself remained behind in the Fade, and very shortly thereafter simply disappeared. The survivor managed three or four steps before collapsing. From these bare facts, a wildfire of speculation was already commencing, perhaps the most audacious of which was that the elusive woman was Andraste herself, and the unconscious survivor was Her holy messenger. This was yet rare, but it still brought some concern. I was too overwhelmed to check these various rumours, however, and some of them seemed to give the beleaguered forces a semblance of unified purpose, which was essential if we were to survive long enough to keep the Breach from swallowing the world.

On the evening of the third day since our arrival, Solas emerged from the survivor's hut, with news that she was on the verge of waking. He spoke of the strange mark upon her hand that appeared, to his studious eye, to be connected to the rifts in the Veil through which the demons periodically emerged to renew the fighting. He and I spoke privately, and at some length, about the possibility of the connection, and the elf theorised that the mark might be of use in sealing the rifts...and, ultimately, in closing the Breach itself.

During our conversation, Cullen went to check upon the survivor's progress, and he met Leliana, Varric, and I just outside the door to the hut when we arrived. "She is awake," he allowed, "but she hasn't been entirely cooperative."

My eyes narrowed as I considered the open doorway. "She has offered resistance?"

"No," he clarified. "But she hasn't spoken a word since opening her eyes, and hasn't moved from her current position even an inch as long as I've observed her. Her wrists have been stocked together as a precaution, but thus far she hasn't even acknowledged any of my questions." I was about to move on, to look into the prisoner myself, but something in Cullen's expression gave me pause. Sensing my hesitation, he shook his head. "There is something else," he admitted. "I think...I think I recognise her."

That news shocked me. "Was she in Kirkwall during the invasion?" From the reports and rumours, I'd gathered that the woman was qunari, at least physically, as well as a mage. Both facts only increased my suspicion at her survival of the explosion that claimed Most Holy and nearly every grand cleric of note in the Chantry's hierarchy.

"I could not say," Cullen insisted. "But she strongly resembles a qunari woman who was present at the last hour, during Meredith's demise."

Varric guffawed an incredulous laugh. "You're shitting me," he blurted out. "You think it could really be her?"

I gave the dwarf another narrow-eyed glance of warning. "The qunari Grey Warden you mentioned in your story? The one who stood side by side with Hawke at the Gallows?"

The silver-tongued dwarf threw up his hands. "How the hell should I know, Seeker? I haven't even seen her yet!"

Sniffing, I turned back to Cullen. "Thank you for this information," I allowed. "Please make sure none of our allies get lost." The sidelong look I gave to Varric at this likely wasn't necessary, but it saved me enduring another quip, at least for the moment.

The trek to the outbuilding where the survivor was being held seemed nearly as long as the journey up the mountain had taken. The Hero of Ferelden's involvement in Kirkwall had complicated matters beyond their breaking point, intentionally or not, and her activities since had only served to fuel tension between the Chantry and the Circles. Her recent disappearance was curious as well; if one of her agents had been sent to precipitate the final dissolution of the Chantry…

I shook my head as I entered the hut and dismissed the guards who nervously stood watch over the bound woman. The men left us in peace, likely grateful for the discharge of their duty, and I took stock of the prisoner in silence for a few moments. She was large, even for one of her kind, with lavender-toned skin and long, unkempt silver hair. The horns for which her race was famed had been truncated at some point in her life, so that now the stubs rose from her skull and swept back a hand's breadth before ending in gilded caps. Even in the low light of the hut, I saw the deep punctures across her lips, proving that her lips had once been sewn shut; if anything, that made me even more deeply suspicious of her intentions. Though I would later learn that all mages under the Qun underwent the Unspeaking Ritual upon maturation, I did not know this at the time, and I had heard such was a punishment visited upon qunari mages for milder forms of magical abuse.

Even as I paced around her, though, the survivor did not acknowledge my presence; she knelt in the centre of the room, dressed in burlap hastily stitched together by the guards to make some attempt at modesty, since she had emerged from the rift with only scraps of whatever she'd worn before the explosion. It must have been intensely uncomfortable, yet she did not move, did not even seem to breathe. Part of me wondered if she even yet lived as I came to stand in front of her. "I am Cassandra Pentaghast," I told her, "and you will tell me of your involvement in the murder of the Divine if you wish to survive until morning." Even as I spoke the threat, I knew my words alone would have little impact upon her, and so I slowly drew my sword to see if the ringing of the steel would also draw out some response.

It did not. Still she knelt, as mute and imposing as ever. I leveled my blade at the bridge of her nose. "I understand you were present at Kirkwall for the destruction of the Circle and the murder of Grand Cleric Elthina by virtue of a magical explosion," I pointed out. "Such evidence would be enough to convict you in the eyes of nearly all the faithful, should it become widely known. Do you expect me to believe your presence here mere circumstance?"

Miraculously, the woman opened her eyes, and I saw pools of quicksilver which almost seemed to swirl in the torchlight. What I did not see, as she looked up the length of my blade and met my gaze, was even a modicum of fear. "No," she said, her voice as a rolling bank of thunder in the distance.

"No," I repeated, marshalling my thoughts to keep my arm from lunging forward to mete out what might well have been justice. "So you admit that you had a hand in this catastrophe?"

"No," she said again, her eyes steady even as my sword-arm trembled slightly.

I shook my head and took a step back, though I did not replace my weapon. "Explain," I demanded.

A heartbeat passed before she gave her answer. "No."

Growling in frustration, I nearly screamed. "Is that the only word in your vocabulary, qunari?"

I had only myself to blame when she replied again. "No."

Closing my eyes, I decided that getting even that one syllable out of the prisoner represented more progress than Cullen had reported, and so I took a few breaths to calm my temper. "Are you a follower of the Qun," I asked, hoping this would force a different response, "or Tal-Vashoth?"

Still, the prisoner vexed me. "No," she said another time, and when I looked upon her, I fancied I saw a glimmer of humour in her eyes and her scarred lips.

I believe I did scream, then, and I sheathed my sword to keep from wetting it with blood before I was truly convinced of the necessity of such action. "What in the Maker's name are you, then?"

She finally blinked. "Saarebas adaar," she intoned.

The sounds were meaningless to me, except inasmuch as they were a fivefold increase in the number of syllables the woman had yet uttered in a single breath. "Is that your name?" I wondered, fool that I was.

"No."

Prudence forced me to knuckle my forehead. "Let me rephrase," I insisted. "What is your name?" It seemed only direct questions would be even minimally productive.

"Suredat-an," she answered.

"And what were you doing at the Conclave?"

"Seeking someone."

I swallowed my annoyance more easily now; she was hardly the first obstinate source of information I'd ever encountered, and in this darkened room, the urgency of the Breach and the Divine's death seemed a bit more remote. "Who were you searching for?"

"Basvaarad," Suredat-an supplied, another qunari word without meaning to me.

"Were they here?" I wondered, seeking some purchase that would get the woman to be more forthcoming. "At the Conclave?"

"No," the qunari said, her scarred grimace deepening.

Then the truth, or at least a small portion of it, became clear to me. "You were seeking Warden-Commander Athadra," I ventured, not without some sympathy.

Suredat-an lifted her head millimetrically. "Yes," she admitted. "Or Lambert van Reeves."

Any accord I might have been building with her evaporated upon mention of that name. Only too recently, Lord Seeker Lambert had taken over the White Spire, apparently in a bid to keep it from erupting in rebellion. His attempts had not met success; the Spire now lay in ruins, its mages sparking the tinders laid by Kirkwall and Dairsmuid into a full-fledged rebellion which spread all across Thedas. That rebellion, or rather the Divine's attempt to end it, had been the impetus for calling the Conclave between the rogue mages and the fanatical templars who'd forsworn their oaths to the Chantry in order to hunt the former down with great prejudice. "Why would you be looking for a dead man?" I wondered.

"Because," the qunari replied, evidently unperturbed by the revelation, "he took her."

A small, sharp intake of breath drew my attention, and I looked back to see that Leliana had joined us at some point during our exchange. She shared a look with the prisoner, but her face was blank, the smoothness of river rock. "How do you know this?" She wondered, neutrally, and I marveled, for she had known the Hero personally and had greater cause than I to be alarmed by the prisoner's claim.

"I remember," Suredat-an insisted, and then her eyes narrowed and she spoke no more; I would have taken the expression as suspicion, except that at that moment, her face was illuminated from below by an unearthly glow from her left hand, and the muscles of her arm went rigid in rhythm with the pulse.

Where a guard or a peasant might see a dangerous mage in the midst of a conjuration, my years of Seeker training allowed me to discern the simple truth that the prisoner was simply in a great deal of pain. Sympathy as well as a desire for answers led me to try a different approach. "That mark is killing you," I told her, relaying information that the apostate had given me earlier. "As the rifts grow in the world, the magic spreads through your flesh, and unless you can stabilise it, you will very soon be dead."

"We cannot let that happen," Leliana insisted, stepping forward. "We must discover what caused the Breach, and close it, if we can."

"Please," I breathed, condescending to beg. "Tell us what happened, and we will try to keep the magic from destroying you."

"No," the qunari said again, though she sounded weary rather than belligerent.

Leliana put voice to my own heart's despair. "Why not?"

"Because," the prisoner rasped, looking disturbed for the first time, and perhaps a touch frightened. "I cannot remember."