I came to slumped in a seated position with my hands tied before me. Something was wrong. With me, I mean, not with the whole tied up thing - that part was manifestly wrong and remained something I could pinpoint.
But my head was heavy, and everything seemed... subtly out of proportion. Weirdly small? Or... the wrong distance away?
Was I drunk? Drugged? Sick?
I blinked blearily, and a man in armour looked at me, snapped to alert and raced out of the room.
There were a couple of others, all standing looking at me, with mixed expressions of wariness and uncertainty.
A throb of pain spread from my left hand, strong enough that I had no idea what might possibly have caused it. It wasn't bone-deep, not the way a break was, but nor was it the stay-still-and-ignore-it pain of a deep cut. This was... flesh alight, nerves crying out, radiating. Warm pain, but not a burn.
I looked down.
There was a green light, bright like something out of a scifi film, glowing from beneath the skin of my left hand. My mind immediately went spinning away to radioactive waste or some kind of glowing mechanical insert against my will, and it took me a few moments to realise that it wasn't even my goddamn hand.
My hands? They were big for my size, but shaky, with meticulously clean nails and a great many scars - there's more than twenty on my left hand alone, a product of anxious scratching and gnawing, among my other vices.
These hands were not my hands. They were... big, huge. Seriously huge. They had long fingers with thick awkward knuckles and dark and pointed nails like claws. The complexion was all wrong. The 'me' I knew had olive skin of uncertain provenance and a very ugly yellow tinge. This skin was kind of... grey. Grey and purplish around the edges.
One of these strange hands was burning green under the skin.
I...
I looked around at the soldiers watching me.
They were all smaller than I was. Even the big ones. I looked down at my legs, folded beneath me on the floor. My thighs were huge, heavy with ropes of muscle that I'd never personally have the patience to build. They were as thick around as some of these soldiers' waists.
Gingerly, I dug one dark claw into my leg.
Ow.
It was... mine. Definitely.
Shit.
I tilted my head and felt that strange weightiness again. Somebody had tied me up, so- had they put something on my head, too? I shifted my head back and forth, but nothing moved or clattered. It was just... heavier?
Another pulse. "Motherfucker," I said succinctly, hunching over my sparking hand. "That hurts."
One of the soldiers shifted uneasily at my voice, but none of them really responded.
Then the door of this dim prison slammed open: silhouettes. Footsteps. Somebody walked with a hard, purposeful stride.
I blinked.
A woman, with dark short hair and a wicked scar on her cheek, strode into the room. The firelight glinted upon her dark-enamelled cuirass. She was both terrifying and strangely beautiful, in a harsh and austere way. For a second my eyes drifted to her extremely tight leather pants.
Another followed in her wake, quiet and soft-footed, like an afterthought. A redhead, with the smoothest peaches-and-cream complexion - she looked like she'd been extracted from a heavily doctored advertisement for skin care, but the shadows cast by her cowl covered whatever expression was in her eyes.
The woman in the cuirass stalked around me, feet clanking on the stone floor. "Tell me why we shouldn't kill you now," she said.
Well. That was... less friendly than I'd hoped.
I mean, I don't know what I expected, waking up in somebody's creepy dungeon with my hands tied together. But even so, this seemed like an unusual level of hostility.
But she was still talking, voice ringing with rage and accusation as she circled behind me. "The conclave is destroyed. Everyone who attended is dead!"
She leaned close enough for me to feel her breath on my neck. "Except for you."
Her hand snatched my glowing one. "Explain this."
There was something so terrible and final in that voice. It was ominous. It was dangerous.
It was familiar.
This whole setting was familiar.
It didn't feel like a terrible dream. None of it had, not even the absolutely bizarre bits with Triangle Head and the spiders. And of course, now that I'd seen this, been yelled at by Cassandra fucking Pentaghast, I knew what that had been too. A spirit, or perhaps the Divine... and the Nightmare.
Maybe this was a nightmare? Or an unsettling dream at least. But it was so clear, so present, and it felt real.
"Well?" Cassandra hissed.
She wasn't giving me time to think. She shouldn't even exist! I shook my head, bewildered. "I don't know." Unhelpful, but so, so accurate.
"What do you mean, you don't know?" Cassandra bellowed. Her face contorted. Her hand went to her belt. I flinched. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I was going to be murdered by Cassandra fucking Pentaghast and there wasn't anything I could do about it!
I cringed.
"We need him!" The redhead - oh my god, Leliana - interrupted, hooking an arm around Cassandra's armoured chest.
With a huff, Cassandra jammed her sword back in its sheath - thank you god - and although her expression didn't become any friendlier, she didn't seem likely to kill me right this second.
Leliana turned toward me. "What do you remember?" she asked instead. Her voice was soft and level, but I knew that of the two of them... well, Cassandra's violence ran hot and close to the surface, but Leliana...
Leliana would plan it in careful detail. She'd have a convenient disposal ready for the body before it was cold on the ground. No traces. Her expression was indifferent, pleasant.
I swallowed.
"I don't understand. I don't know what I was doing before... but there was... green, murky light. Spiders- or... no, huge spiders, I've never seen spiders that big... I was running from them. And then - a woman?"
"A woman?" Leliana prompted, leaning closer.
I rubbed my forehead with my bound hands. "She reached out to me."
Leliana shared a significant glance with Cassandra, who sighed. They conferred for a short, whispering moment, and then Leliana left just as quietly as she'd arrived.
"Okay," I said cautiously as the door swung shut after her, "but what did actually happen?"
I thought I might know. But, god, how much did I want to be wrong. Please let this be some kind of hideously accurate cosplay convention, okay?
Yeah, it totally wasn't.
My hands were shaking. 'My' hands weren't even my hands. But, oh, I knew whose hands they were.
I'd made a qunari character in this game. The latest one. A guy, so I could finally get around to the Dorian romance route, and - shit, I'd picked his horns on the basis of whether or not they'd be good handles. Great. Real clever.
Suffice to say that I plainly had not been taking character creation as seriously as I should have.
Cassandra came to me. She leaned low to help me hoist myself to my feet, which was actually harder than you'd think with my hands tied.
"It will be easier to show you."
It was. Because some things are not easily explained in words, and a giant hole in the sky is among them. I could have lived a long time without learning this.
Daylight was too bright when she escorted me outside, and I flinched and looked away for a few long seconds. When I looked back to the sky, I...
There was very little that could have prepared me for seeing the Breach, huge and yawning and green, in the sky above Haven. It was an apocalyptic horror, like staring into the mouth of hell.
"Holy shit," I breathed.
"We call it the Breach," Cassandra said.
It was a hole in the Veil, basically.
It meant something bad, but it looked beautiful in its own terrifying way. It changed constantly, shifting and moving, sometimes in a way that seemed much more mechanical than organic. It was... compelling.
But it was still a hole boiling high in the sky, and if I remembered right there'd be, like, actual demons falling from it. And Fade spirits who didn't want to be demons but who became corrupted immediately upon entry to this world. I knew from playing through the game that Coryphius was crazy but for the first time it occurred to me that Coryphius wasn't just insane, he was stupid.
"What kind of idiot would want to do that?" I muttered to myself, staring up.
"It seems to be an unintentional effect of the explosion that destroyed the Conclave," said Cassandra, in what was not nearly as neutral a voice as she probably thought.
I remembered belatedly that Cassandra actually thought I'd been responsible for that. She hadn't changed her mind yet. Might not ever, actually, depending on my luck.
She turned back toward me, her back to the Breach. "Unless we act, it will grow until it swallows the world. Your mark may be the key to stopping this, but there isn't much time."
The Breach took that moment to pulse, greenish light crackling like lightning along its edges.
My hand - my arm, my whole damn left side - gave an answering pulse of pain. "Each time it expands," she added, without much sympathy, "your mark grows. It is killing you. This may be our only chance." A pause. "And yours."
Her voice was ominous on that last bit, but her face was guileless if... stern. I swallowed. I knew how this was meant to go, but...
She was asking for my help.
I wanted to say no. My god, I wanted to say no. I looked at the glowing mark on my hand and then back to Cassandra's face. She waited patiently for a response, and I wasn't even sure if I could give one.
The mark was supposed to go to somebody competent. Somebody who could, actually, save people. Make decisions. Not... fuck everything up, basically?
That wasn't me, and there was absolutely no guarantee that anything going forward from now would play out like in the video game. I could get a whole lot of people killed. Most importantly, I could get myself killed.
Except the mark was killing me already, wasn't it? That was what those pulses meant, what the instability and the pain were telling me.
I looked up at the sky.
The logical choice was before me, but I still wanted to say no. My heart was already racing, my eyes were burning and I felt like I was going to vomit up everything I'd ever eaten.
I had to force the words out, because it was the only choice that made sense. My hands were tied (yes, literally, but also metaphorically).
"Okay," I said. "I don't think I have much choice." A pause, and then, slightly hysterically, I added: "Hole in the sky and all that."
She didn't look amused.
Cassandra led me through a crowd of tents and scowling men and women. She told me quietly about how they had all pretty much already decided I was guilty. To them, it looked a lot like I'd ...killed the pope, basically.
Their anger was stiff, obvious and pretty damn scary. I got the impression that Cassandra was the only reason they hadn't yet mobbed me.
Firmly, and with perfect conviction, she added: "There will be a trial. I can promise no more."
Then she pulled a knife on me, which made me flinch and step back. She shot me an annoyed look from under her eyelashes and - cut my hands free. Oh. Right.
"We must test your mark on something smaller first," she said coolly. "Come."
I did. It wasn't like I had much choice.
Feel free to leave a comment if there was anything you particularly liked. I guess if there was anything you particularly hated I can't stop you from commenting, but I can recommend that you use your time more wisely and read, you know, something else.
