Chapter One: Divine Intervention?

Drawing sharp breath in through his teeth, Albaticus managed to prop himself up on his elbows and blinked back tears drawn from dry smoke and hot dust in the air.

His head hurt and everything was on fire.

"Captain! You're alive! Shit, I thought you were fucking done for."

Through blurred vision the man made out a greenish shape bobbing in his general direction against the red heat of the flames. Ahh. Tessa. Who else? With a strangled grunt she kicked the fractured wooden beam that had smacked him in the head off from over his legs. She crouched next to him, looping her arm under his and heaving with grand purpose to haul him upright.

"Where are the others?"
"Main square. Your leg is bleeding pretty bad, should I get Gray?"

It was a good idea ruined by the reality of his armour. Both of them knew that Tessa would not be able to drag his sorry carcass from inside the burning chantry if the worst happened and he could not at least marginally support himself. Albaticus tilted his head back a little and examined their surroundings, leaning on the girl more than he should have.

The painted ceilings were invisible under dark swirls of thick black smoke and the building groaned as the inferno began to take its real hold. Thankfully he could not have been unconscious more than a few moments or the poisoned air in his lungs would have finished him off long before Tessa could have even thought about rescuing him. He was grateful for that small kindness at least.

"There's no time. As fast as you can please Tess."

"Right."

She said it with the sort of certainty that he had grown to expect from his finest sapper. Despite the fact that she barely came up to most people's shoulders, Tessa was the type who was at her best when something challenged her; at her worst she was a sore loser. So off she shambled, sweat beading on the dark smudges of ash on her skin and both their hearts pounding in their chests.

For Albaticus the journey was agony. Each step was vicious, stabbing pain, even with Tessa taking as much of his weight as possible, and his vision faded in and out inconsistently and without mercy, reminding him how weak he was. When his booted, injured foot did connect to the floor, he felt the blood that had soaked into the padding underneath his plate, and scarlet footprints marked their slow progress.

"Shit!" Tessa hissed as the creaking grew more ominous. Above them, a golden statue of Andraste warped hideously into molten, metallic lumps of dripping flesh with the heat, a parody of everything she represented. Tessa was doing her best to be as fast as possible, but she was already exhausted from the fighting and, ahh, if only Gray had simply come with her.

They were about halfway across the beautifully paved chantry tiles when Albaticus stopped. Big, dark, fearful eyes turned on him.

"Captain?"

"Run, Tess."

"What?"

"I said go. That's an order."

With the last of his failing strength, he gave her an almighty shove. She almost fell, and there was a moment where he thought she might not leave, where her stubborn nature might kill them both. But at the last second she broke, wiped her bleeding palms on her shirt and then bolted. She ran so fast Albaticus thought she might actually fly, barely making it through the big red oaken doors before the statue above whined like a sick dog and crashed to the ground, severing his connection to the outside world.

So this was it then, he mused silently to himself.

Albaticus slumped downwards to the floor, leaning back against an ember streaked pillar to watch as great claws of orange flame savaged the chantry from the inside out.

A Tevinter expedition had arrived at this town two weeks ago. The locals had pooled together all their coin to hire a mercenary group to evict them after they had taken over a mine and shut down all production, cutting off the main source of income for many families. It should have been a simple enough job; Vint mages from unimportant bloodlines digging up supposed magic relics in weird places was nothing new.

So the demons had not been a surprise, all things considered.

The mayor being in on it had been. Things just went to hell sometimes, he supposed. And one could not win every battle.

Albaticus tried to shift his leg, but found that it had gone numb. He was in the middle of contemplating just how much everyone would cry at his funeral when the sound of frantic footsteps tore his gaze from the blood pooling under his ankle and snapped it directly to his left.

A few paces away from him a splintered door burst open and a tall, skinny man that Albaticus almost mistook for an elf staggered out, his cheeks pink and his expression flustered. He shook his hands as if fighting a static shock, and their eyes locked. He did not look like someone who was trapped in a burning building and desperately seeking an escape. He looked like someone who had just woken up from a pleasant afternoon nap.

After a moment of indecision, much like Tessa's, the man loped over to Albaticus' side with the gait of a perturbed rabbit and held up his hands. He said something, but Albaticus could not make it out over the sounds of the chantry twisting and screaming around them, ravaged by fire, giving up the ghost. He shook his head and pointed upwards.

Only now did the man seem to respond appropriately. He gasped, like he hadn't even noticed the blaze before now, and then seemed to … speak to someone on his right? This was a dream, there was no doubt. The smoke had rendered him comatose and this was his final delirium before the end.

Around him there was a swell of energy and a cold rush of wind as the stranger began to distort the very air about them both into green strands of magic. Albaticus decided not to fight the inevitable any longer and closed his eyes. His mind felt clearer than it had been in years, like a pleasantly cool pair of hands touching his face and drawing out all the imperfections of his life. If this was what death was, it was not all bad. He could certainly think of worse ways to go.

Comforting voices meandered over his thoughts, some familiar, some not, calling him away, all of them too important not to follow. He chased, emerald light permeating through the thick fog of darkness that pressed in on all sides the louder they got.

And then, quite suddenly, he was awake.

He was back in his tent, thick green canvas walls sloping upwards to a point above him.

"He's awake!"

Albaticus blinked up into Tessa's face and she burst promptly into tears. Without thinking about it, he reached up and ruffled the springy coils of her hair affectionately.

Eruthan cleared his throat to make himself known, lurking in the corner by his desk, shadowed by the lit candles that denoted the time to be late at night.

"... Where is he?" Albaticus asked, his voice hoarse.
"With Needles. He's not up yet though."

There was a heady pause, and then the Dalish elf took a few steps forward into the more direct light, his arm bandaged all the way up to his elbow under his shirt.

"I have written a full report for when you can read it. Tessa, make yourself useful and go get the captain some soup. There's plenty left."

Glad of the excuse to save herself further humiliation from her very public sobbing, Tessa nodded. She wiped her face balefully with the back of her knuckles before slinking off, just to make a point of the fact that she was actually far above weeping like some scared noblewoman.

He was pleased that she was well.

Speaking of which ...

Albaticus wriggled his toes tentatively beneath his thick linen blankets, the only decent thing to have come out of his time in Orlais, and was pleased to find that he still had two working legs. He let out a sigh of relief that he did not know he had been holding.

"Did you see what happened?" He asked his lieutenant.

"Not personally. Gray says he felt it though. He's defini-..."

A loud, high-pitched scream echoed through the camp from somewhere off to Albaticus' left, followed by raucous dwarven laughter.

"I shall retract my previous statement," Eruthan commented, his tone dry, "and go and make sure he does not incinerate anyone. Rest well."

The hunter glided from the tent with a vengeance before his captain could answer, as he usually did when he knew that Albaticus would start a pointless argument about something just for the sake of it.

The human ran a hand through his greying hair, his body stiff and almost past its prime.

But he was alive. And he dreaded to think of the miracle that had made it so.