oOo
She kneels on the floor, leathers crusted with drying, tacky hope. Hands clench at her belly, blood smearing brilliant against pale skin. She can't remember the last time she cried, but she weeps now, the pain unraveling her body nothing to the agony clawing at her soul. Screams echo across the snow laced valley, deep in the heart of the Frostbacks as she arches, desperately forcing the little practiced healing spells to ripple under her skin, trying to stop what has already happened. For the first time, she wishes she had learned more from Wynne, that she knew more powerful spells to save her God-child.
Wynne…darkness washes over her.
She is delirious, she has to be. A gentle touch brushes tangled, sweat coiled strands of hair from her face, the soft murmur of voices floats around her, incomprehensible. A whisper, promises of safety, too late, promises of warmth and protection. Strong arms lift her, cradle her close.
"Be gentle with her, boy. She has suffered a great deal, and we do not want to add to it." The elderly Circle mage pushes a pulse of magic into the Witch, stemming the tide of pain that crashes over her. "She will need more than I can do here. We must get her to the nearest town, at least."
Morrigan's limp body is shifted slightly, her head resting on a hard plane, she can hear the thud of a heart, feel it beat against her cheek, the rumbled inhale before he speaks, the deep resonance once he does. "As you say, Senior Enchanter." She thinks she should recognize the voice, but she is too tired to fight for it, too drained to do anything but lay in his heat, listening to the sounds of his life. "She is the one we've been looking for, isn't she?"
"Indeed she is, Cullen. Kallian was not remiss in thinking she might be in danger, as it turns out. She will be pleased that we have found her."
The responding grunt rocks her. "Will we be taking her back to the Palace, or to the Tower?" His voice is thick with urgency, his grip on her tightening possessively. "She is an apostate, Wynne. She belongs to the Tower."
The Mage's response is sharp, "She belongs to the Warden Commander, boy." Her tone softened by her hand resting on his shoulder. "She is my apprentice, as much as any, and without her, the Blight would have consumed us all."
She is being carried by a Templar. The same Templar that had begged Kallian to destroy the Mages in the Tower, had cursed her for a fool for allowing them to live. She finds she doesn't care. Exhaustion drags her once more into the nothingness.
oOo
When she wakes, it is in a strange bed, in a strange room. Clad only in her smalls, she is tucked tightly beneath a blanket, and the Templar is still there, watching her from a chair across the room. She turns her head, refusing to meet his burning stare. "Why are you here?"
Silence answers her, heavy and bleak. There is nothing of comfort in his presence, a fission of violence and turmoil instead. She is no stranger to animosity, especially not from Templars. Alistair had despised her, yet he had succumbed to her, unwilling perhaps, but in the end, it had been her body to make him gasp, her eyes that he met as he fell apart, her name falling from his lips like a prayer.
She flinches from the thought of the King, a pang in her abdomen reminds her of what she is missing. She stretches, arcing her body to try to drive the tension out, to untwist her muscles, ease the ache. Her eyes flick over, to see him still staring, still watching. There is a hunger in him, for her blood, or something more, she isn't sure. She doesn't care.
A slow burn of rage in the pit of her stomach. She has given up everything, and lost everything, and there is no one to blame. But there is a Templar, and she knows exactly what Templars are good for. The empty howl inside freezes her for a moment, her yellow eyes locked on the Chantry soldier. When she peels back the blankets, he watches, when she kneels on the bed, he tenses, a hunter's instinct as he tastes her magic, gauging it against his own.
"Do not try to tempt me, apostate."
"Who speaks of temptation, Templar? Surely not I, thus it must be you who are tempted, and seek to lay the blame at my feet?" She stretches her arms above her head, bare breasts lifted on display for him. "I do not offer you anything, nor do I seek to bargain with you." She smiles sweetly at him as she continues to stretch. "You are more than welcome to leave, should the sight of me offend you."
He snorts, blushing faintly, but his voice is venom. "As bad as a Mage is, you are worse. Apostate, you have nothing I need."
She pitches her laugh low, warm and inviting. "No? Then perhaps you watch so avidly something that you want, more than you need? Or do you lie to me? And to yourself?" She is cold inside, shivering against the inside of her flesh even as her skin heats.
Tendrils of something akin to loss wind through her limbs, and she gathers it close, wrapping her pain about her like a second skin. She meets Cullen's eyes defiantly, hoping he is too lost in his own hurts to see hers. She would pray, but she has killed her God. "Do you lie?"
His tension translates to motion, his strong hand catching up both wrists above her head, the other grips her chin, forcing her to look at him. "You think to toy with me? You think to torment me with the sight of your body, stretched bare before me?" He laughs, bitter and pained. "You cannot tempt me with anything I have not already defeated."
His fingers tighten on her chin as he bends down to her, almost brushing her lips with his. She can taste the lyrium on his breath, the icy metallic tang jolts through her. "You cannot offer me anything that I have not already succumbed to." Something in her clenches at the threat in his words, his voice. His anger makes him unpredictable, uncontrollable. Her panties dampen at the thought, and she arches toward him slightly, subtlety.
"I've no care if you are tempted, Templar, though 'tis easy enough to see that you are."
He drops her wrists, snaking his blunt fingers instead into her hair, pulling her head back until she hisses. He takes her mouth in a bruising kiss, and she is wet, writhing and needing in his grasp. "I am beyond defiled, in the eyes of the Maker," he rumbles between biting kisses, "He has forsaken me, and it matters not what sins I commit. There is no salvation left for me."
She gasps into him, "Then let me be your sin, Templar. Let me be your damnation, and in the end, I will grant you absolution." She breaths him in, swallowing his anguish, burying her own in the feel of his lips, his teeth.
He breaks away, stares down at her, her lips swollen, her silky black tresses clenched in his fist, her yellow eyes luminous and defiant, filled with hatred and desire. She smells faintly of medicine, and strongly of forest, of snowcapped peaks and wild waterways. She offers him nothing, and everything. In the curves and dips of her body, the shadow and the bright, he finds life, and death.
He licks his lips slowly, still tasting her, mingled with the lyrium he only notices when he bothers to try. Her slender fingers light on his arm, the muscle quivering under her touch, a struggle to restrain himself. So pale she glows in the weak winter sun, the dust motes shimmer around her, settling like sparks on his skin, on hers. She is a Witch of the Wilds, the thought snakes through his mind, a Goddess of death.
"Maker-" Her fingertip touches his mouth, stopping his words.
"There is no place for your Maker here, Templar." Her sly smile speaks of sin, of flesh and lust, a divineness that has nothing to do with faith or devotion, but only with the curve of her hips, the long line of her legs, the weight of her breast in his hand.
He has followed Wynne for months, searching the mountain villages, the back wood huts, the hidden settlements, for traces and rumors of a raven haired Witch of the Wilds. Wynne searching at the behest of the King and the Warden Commander. Cullen following at Greagior's, protecting the aging Healer on her quest.
He was happy enough to leave the Tower, the empty shell of a home that it has become. Of course, if he were to choose to tell himself the truth, it had become a prison for him even before the Blood Mages rebelled, tearing the world apart. Ever since the effervescent little mage, with her bouncy ponytail and her bouncy walk, had undergone her Harrowing, Cullen has been fighting a desperate battle to regain a desire to live, to find a reason for it all. Her shy smile haunts him, as does the spray of her blood across the polished silver of his breastplate as his sword pierced her heart, the demon's snarl raging on her face.
"I killed the woman I love." He pulls back on her hair, until her lithe body, scored with white scars from battle, with pink scars barely healed from her own hands, is bent backward on his forearm, knees raising from the mattress, unresisting.
She laughs, her breasts shaking under his gaze. "And I killed my deity. Who sins the greater then?" Her wriggle against him is a temptation, the strain on her body making her voice hoarse.
"You offer me redemption? Salvation?" He traces the pink scars left by her nails across her abdomen, his tongue trailing the ridges of her marred flesh. "And what, pray tell, will you take, in all this giving that you claim you'll do?"
She groans under the ministrations of his mouth. "I will take nothing but that which you give. I want only to remember that I am flesh and blood, not yet a denizen of the Fade." At last her voice betrays her, tinged with sorrow, eyes clenched tightly shut, denying tears. "Remind me, Templar, that there is more to this world than pain, and that pain is part of everything."
Her weight in his arms, the slow undulations of her body against him, the blazingly hot flashes of her despair battering against his, pull him into her. He drags her backward by her hair until her shoulders are flat on the bed, knees still bent beneath her. The splay of her thighs shows him her dampened curls, and he releases his grip on her hair to stroke the silky length of her. A hint, here and there, of familiar, he has failed the Maker before, after all. He lays the blame for his fall from grace firmly at the feet of love, but he lays the blame for the loss of his love at the feet of the Maker, so maybe they are even.
He scrapes his cheek against her belly, stubble rubbing her skin red. The raw caress of her skin as he slides up her body, pressing her down with his own. He feels her magic swell, pulse, explode, but barely registers the sting of flame as his clothing falls to ash. "Clever." he murmurs against her lips, just before he devours her.
He impales her, harsh and frenzied, she is too tight, but urges him on, eyes triumphant, still raging. He makes no move to stop her when she bucks up, kicking her legs free, wrapping them around his hips. He makes no move to stop her when her lightening spell flickers over his skin, painful tingles fluttering through both their bodies, spasms that join them closer. She rolls them, and he helps her, until she is in control once more, and he finds no desire to take that from her.
His hands grip her pale hips hard, bruising. His mouth on her breast is softer, nipping, then licking to soothe the sting. Her nails score his shoulders, blood welling in the furrows as he absorbs her fury. The rise and fall of her body over his scours him, his fractured soul coalescing in the depths of her wet flesh.
With her head thrown back just so, the line of her jaw, the part of her lips, he can see Solona, the girl-Mage he had been forced to kill. Until the light slants across her golden yellow eyes, and she is once more the Witch Goddess, using his body, his pain, as a scourge against herself.
"Why?" He thrusts up into her, the pain rippling across her face makes him flinch, but she demands it.
"Because I failed. Because my child is -dead-. Templar, I killed a God, my God. Because I wasn't strong enough." Tears spill, and he kisses them away, even as he pulls her even harder down on his shaft, punishing her already battered womb. The juxtaposition of cruelty and affection thrills him, and he bites into her lip, tasting blood as his hands caress her hips, stroking the bruises. The liquid quiver of her sheath around him, and her panting cries, tells him that it thrills her too. She swivels her hips, beckoning his body to follow her, the slow twine of her magic through his senses drawing him to the brink, dropping him over.
"Have you found something new to worship, Templar?" Her eyes are sad, windows to her soul.
He cups her face, his smile quiet, serene at last. "You promised me absolution, Witch."
"So I did." She drains him slowly, her lips barely touching his, naked against him, holding him tightly as his heartbeat slows, stuttering, to silence.
oOo
"What have you done to him?" The old Mage runs her hands along the Templar's body, her spells useless to wake him.
"He made a deal with a demon, Wynne." She shrugs. "He has shown me salvation. In return, I have given him the freedom that he sought."
