The dreams are getting worse in every way. Longer, louder, more intense, more often.
And mixed in with the archdemon's voice are guilt-soaked memories of Duncan, accusations, soaked in blood, lying broken in the ruins of Ostagar.
He can hear Rhyanon tossing and turning in her own bedroll not far away, muttering in her sleep. She does it for nearly an hour before she gives up pretending she's the only one awake or that she's going to fall asleep again.
She drags herself over to the fire, but he can't help but notice that when she sits down, it's still far enough away that he would have to get up and walk over if he wanted to touch her. Not that he would, but...
"Can't sleep either, huh?" he asks.
"I'm used to it."
"I know what you mean."
She shakes her head. "You think I'm talking about the demon dreams? Sometimes it's not the voices in your head that are crying."
"You're thinking about the Circle again?" he asks, recognizing the darkness in her eyes, the way she shifts and squirms and tries even more than usual to pretend he isn't there.
"I'm always thinking about the Circle," she says bitterly.
Well, at least she's talking to him. That's a start.
How long has it been?
But how long has it been since Ostagar (weeks, and it still hurts inside, like it just happened), And the brief months he'd spent with the Wardens before that, and Duncan rescuing him from the Chantry, and Redcliffe... Some things you don't forget, not ever.
It's clear enough that she still doesn't trust him, but at least in daylight, she's gotten used to his companionship.
At first glance, she doesn't look like anybody's idea of a mage. She never has. She wears leather armor or hunter's gear instead of robes, for one thing, and unless you saw her fight, you'd never know the power she's capable of.
Unless you could feel it, the way he can. It's like... the crackling sound of a fire, the liquid burn of alcohol, the hyperawareness and rush of invulnerability that comes from lyrium (even though that scares him). And it's all part of her, all the time.
Underneath the part of her that's just a teenage girl who is afraid to fall asleep.
She sits in the cold shadows rather than moving closer to the warmth of the fire because that would mean getting close to him.
She plays with the ring on her finger, spinning it around it lazy circles, and pointedly doesn't look at him.
He recognizes the ring of course. It's the one external marker of where she comes from that she hasn't yet abandoned.
Her status as a Warden means she's safe from the apostate label, and the sentence that goes with it, but it's easier this way.
Not that it stops any commoners who see what she is from watching her out of the corner of their eye, full of suspicion and fear, and sometimes, hatred and naked hostility.
Not unlike the way she looks at him.
"You should give that to Morrigan," he suggests.
It wouldn't stop any real templar hunters from seeing (feeling) the truth, but it might deflect any casual suspicion.
Though really, with the entirety of the Grey Wardens (all two of them) declared outlaw now, a Chasind apostate seems the least of their worries.
"I tried, she won't wear it. She calls it the mark of a Chantry slave."
He snorts. "Figures."
"She's not wrong, Alistair. I had this... friend."
She won't say his name to even a maybe-ex-templar, even though she can't come up with a logical reason why she shouldn't.
"He tried to escape the Tower. More than once." (Five times that she knows about, probably more that she doesn't.) "He asked me to come with him, a couple of times, but I couldn't. I was too scared. After a while, he stopped asking."
"Good," he says softly. And she can't tell if it's the templar speaking, or her friend, who doesn't want her dead.
She doesn't talk about the Tower, ever. Alistair knows only bits and pieces of her history, very few of them volunteered by her. It's not like they talk.
But what he knows is... unsettling. Disturbing. She's tangled up in blood magic and escape attempts, they ordered her death.And she is afraid o fhim, honestly, genuinely terrified in that primal, illogical way that goes back to childhood.
Because he is a templar, or at least, in her mind, close enough to count.
He is not an idiot. He knows more than he probably should about how the Chantry deals with troublemakers. The way she freezes up when she thinks he's upset with her, like she's expecting a hit... it makes him want to hit someone, like whoever it is that conditioned that reaction in her.
He hadn't really thought the Circle Tower would be a paradise, or anything. But he'd never thought about things from their angle before. They're mages, after all. Dangerous. Of course, he knew that most magic manifested between the ages of six and twelve, but somehow he never thought about them as kids.
Multiple escape attempts.
When he was a kid he ran away from the Chantry every chance he got. Multiple times a week, in his particularly rebellious phases. And it always meant a beating and extra chores and long hours of penance in the chapel that kept him awake half the night and meant stumbling through the combat training and falling asleep in classes the next day, and that meant more punishment and the other boys laughing at him.
All of which added up to simply giving him yet more reasons to sneak out of the dorms when he could.
Of course, a few strokes of the cane and a pile of pots were never enough to deter him, and mages are not allowed to run away at all, ever. If they do (when they do, apparently - he never thought any of them would try. He should've) they won't be treated like mischievous kids. They'll be treated like criminals, apostates, punished with the full extent of Chantry law.
He looks at Rhyanon and thinks about the things he'd been taught, the laws and statues he'd been forced to memorize (all justified by the Chant of course, fiery sermons about the inherent sinfulness of mages and bastard children), the training he'd been through, and it scares him. He thinks about the older boys who'd spent years harassing him in the dorms. He'd been all too happy to have them out of his life, but he realizes now that some of them must have been assigned to the Tower, turned loose with almost no limits on what they could do to maintain control over the mages they guard. The realization makes him feel slightly sick.
"The Circle Tower has its own dungeon cells, did you know that?" Rhyanon says quietly. "Did you ever wonder why?"
Kinloch Hold had been built long before the Circle claimed it. All the old castles have dungeons, built in. Redcliffe had them too. He tells her that, still wanting to believe it's not as bad as he's scared it is now, because he looks at her and he doesn't see a criminal, he just sees her,and he hates that she's been hurt.
She shakes her head. "The templars still use them," Rhyanon tells him, and though she sounds calm, he knows enough about not letting others see how much they're hurting you to recognize the signs. Beneath her even tone, she's still shaken by whatever memories are clearly playing in her head. "When they caught him, they locked him in one of those cells, for months. They said it was to protect us, that he was dangerous, that they didn't know what he would do. But he wouldn't hurt anybody. He never did anything wrong, except want the same freedom anybody else has. And they tortured him because of it. To show him, to show us, that no matter how much power we might have, it can't ever be enough to get away from them."
The Chantry that talks about the Light of the Maker while proving their power through force and fear. Yeah, that sounds about right.
He gives silent thanks once again that Duncan was able to get him out before he was forced to be part of that. Because he knows something else that she can't know - the templars are locked in too. They follow orders because they have to.
"I never stopped them," she chokes out. "I never really tried... I couldn't. I wasn't brave enough. Because what if they came after me next?"
She's crying now. He has no idea what he's supposed to do.
So he just does what he'd always wished someone would do when he was crying, in pain, alone against the world that kept him caged, too big to fight and too strong to get away from no matter how often or how far he ran.
He wraps his arms around her, and hopes his presence is enough to reassure her that someone cares. Amazingly, she doesn't fight him.
"Rhyanon," he whispers, the word barely more than a breath leaving his lips. I'm sorry, he wants to say, but he doesn't, because he already tried that, and anyway the words sound trite and meaningless. "I didn't know," he tells her, honestly. "I swear I didn't know."
She wipes her tears away roughly. "Would you have stopped them?" she demands.
"Yes," he promises. And what surprises him most of all is that he means it. "I would never let anyone hurt you."