"Back off, demon!"
At the sight of Fenris's gauntleted right hand flashing white light, Anders pulled away as if from fire, almost stumbling on the dead hurlock behind him. Or actually, half of a hurlock. "I can't bloody well get that thing out of you if I don't come closer!"
"Do it, abomination, and I swear I will make you sorry for it," Fenris growled, dragging his greatsword between him and the healer. He was already too weak to lift it.
Anders turned toward Hawke, who approached them at half run, wiping blood and bits of darkspawn from his face. The mage's ears were still ringing with the explosions.
"Do you still think bringing him to the Deep Roads was a good idea?" Anders shouted. Maybe there was something wrong with his hearing as well.
The elf stood huddled against a stone pillar, a foot-long piece of broken wood sticking out of his stomach to the right side. Jagged and splintered, it was an ugly thing to behold. Blood was seeping alarmingly fast down his hip. Despite the heat that made them all sweat, an ice-cold fear squeezed at Hawke's innards. Without healing, such an injury would kill a man, and he knew it was not the only wound the elf had suffered.
His mind was still reeling with the image of Fenris being swept from his feet by an ogre, about to be crushed. Like Bethany... Her back broken in five different places, the side of her head caved in, her arms and legs lying in unnatural angles like a rag doll's...
So much blood...
Hawke glanced at the corpse of the monstrously large darkspawn behind them. Huge, split pieces of wood had pierced its back to the left side, buried much deeper than the one in Fenris.
The fight... it had not gone well. There had been too many hurlocks... and then, the ogre. They had had no time to prepare. Roaring, the huge thing had emerged from behind a corner and grabbed at the nearest enemy, which happened to have been the elf. Hawke remembered seeing Fenris in its claws; after that, he did not remember much. Apparently he had set off a dwarven trap behind the darkspawns' back. The series of huge explosions had taken out the ogre and several hurlocks, but it had also showered Hawke and his companions in deadly shards of wood and metal. They were all bloodied and hurt.
But none of them fared so bad as Fenris. He had been closest to the blast, and although the ogre's body had shielded him from the most of it... it had not been enough. Blood was already trickling down his leg, and his face was losing color as they spoke. Hawke fought down his rising panic. "Fenris, don't be a fool."
"Vishante kaffas!"
"You're bleeding to death!"
Fenris bared his teeth in a snarl. Feral green eyes pierced the mage from beneath the white hair that clung to the elf's grimy forehead. Never yet had he seemed so much like a vicious beast, or a trapped wolf.
Hawke began to consider the chances and consequences of holding the elf down by force.
Then Fenris grimaced and pressed his gauntleted hand to his stomach. "Isabela," he groaned. "She can do it."
"She's no healer," Anders cried.
"I know how to dress a wound." The Rivaini rogue stepped to them from where she'd been picking splinters from Varric and herself. "I'll do what I can."
Anders opened his mouth to object, then looked from the glowering elf to the begrimed pirate. He took a step back and crossed his arms. "Fine. Fine! But if he dies, it's officially out of my hands."
The elf closed his eyes and leaned back as Isabela laid her hands on his steel-enforced cuirass. It was sheer bad luck that the piece of exploding barrel had struck Fenris right where a softer leather seam had been left to allow for natural movement.
"I'll have to cut this," she said, quickly learning the straps and buckles of the elf's outlandish armor. Hawke could not help thinking that she probably had a lot of experience about getting people out of all sorts of gear. He already knew she had extraordinarily nimble fingers. They had tricked him in Wicked Grace and Diamondback more times than he cared to remember.
Fenris nodded, eyes still closed. Reluctantly he let go of his sword, allowing it to drop. Isabela helped him remove his gauntlets, arm guards and belt, and they also fell to the dirty, bloodied floor.
The rogue pulled a small, sharp dagger from her vest. The thick, layered leather of the cuirass had been put together with heavy linen thread, black and oily as if rolled in tar. Cutting the seam was hard work. When the rogue was done, she was even more drenched in sweat, and not just because it was almost intolerably warm down here in the ancient dwarven thaig.
"When I dreamed of getting my hands all over you, elf, this was not what I imagined," she muttered as she pushed the cuirass open and let it fall from Fenris' shoulders.
Hawke was trying to busy himself with picking wood and hurlock pieces out of his own equipment, but his eyes kept wandering back to where Isabela and Fenris stood. The elf's chest was rising and falling rapidly. Hawke saw that, as expected, he had more of the white markings on his smoothly muscled torso. They flowed in a leaf-like pattern from his chest to his abdomen. It looked like, lower down, there would be more.
The elf's midsection was covered in horrifying red and black bruises where the ogre had gripped him. Hawke realized he was probably bleeding internally as well. How on Thedas was Fenris still conscious, let alone on his feet? Was it the lyrium? He rarely complained of wounds after a fight, even when Hawke knew he had received a battering. The next day he was usually fine, maybe a bit bruised but otherwise, not much worse for wear. Hawke had always wondered whether the markings had something to do with it.
The elf was starting to shake, now. As Isabela pressed her hand against his chest to steady him, he hissed.
"Hey! I'm not even doing anything yet," she said. "Why are you so jumpy?"
"It's... not that." Sweat was running down his temples, soaking the grime that covered him, the same as everyone else. Despite the heat, he shivered and his lips were getting blue. "Go on."
"It's me, isn't it? My touch hurts you?" she asked, pushing at him to keep him still while she examined the ugly thing sticking from his side.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"The... markings," Fenris said through clenched teeth.
"They hurt when I touch them?" Her eyes widened.
He nodded.
"That's horrible! How can we have mind-blowing sex if it hurts when I touch you?"
"You've been planning... to have mind-blowing sex... with me?" The elf's face was turning alarmingly grey.
"Wouldn't it be a terrible waste of an opportunity if we didn't? How much does it hurt? Is it like a... mosquito sting? Or 'oh, Maker, please let me die'?"
Fenris sagged against her and fainted. She staggered back and, with help from Anders, laid the elf down on the filthy floor.
"Shit," she said. "I guess that's a vote for the 'please Maker let me die'."
"More likely it's just the blood loss. Well, at least this will make things a bit easier." Anders kneeled down to help her. Together they managed to pull the piece of barrel from Fenris's side. Blood and worse bubbled out from where it had been. Anders immediately fell into his healing trance, with his hands hovering right above the gaping wound, and Isabela sat down and wiped her smudged forehead. She pulled away her scarf and, to her disgust, found a whole hurlock finger from her hair, claw and all.
"Shit!" she repeated and threw the bit of darkspawn from her in disgust. "Bloody hell, I hate this place!" She kicked at a stone on the floor and noticed Hawke hovering near, trying not to look anxious.
"You!" She pointed her finger at him. "What the hell was wrong with you? I've never seen you do stupid shit like that before!"
Hawke leaned on his staff. "I got... distracted?"
She snorted. "Yeah. If you got distracted like that every time I end up in a tight spot, we would have been dead ten times over. I guess I should to be glad that I'm not a white-haired elf with a tight arse and a full-body tattoo. And that Fenris is usually rather good at staying on top of things. Well, at least in a fight. Can't say about anything else, obviously."
"I'm not used to seeing him... in trouble."
"What you're saying is, you can't take it." With a graceful series of moves, Isabela got on her feet and came to stand in front of him. "You're in love with the elf, aren't you?" she said, her voice low in respect of not letting the others hear.
Hawke bristled. "Isabela, please."
Her golden brown eyes searched his face. He was uncomfortably aware that she was not only a beautiful and deadly woman, but also much wiser than those who met her in passing gave her credit for.
"All right then, you just really, really want to screw him and are worried out of your mind he'll be dead before you have the chance. Whatever it is, I've known you for a year now, Hawke. And I've never seen you fly off the handle like that. I'm not blind, you know. Anyway, looks like this time, neither of us is going to get lucky."
Mercifully, the uncomfortable exchange was interrupted by Varric, who hobbled toward them from where he'd been doing a checkup on Bianca.
"Guys, should we do something useful instead of bickering? We haven't got that much time, you know."
Minutes passed. Hawke wished they had passed a little faster. He pretended to gather crossbow bolts and rifle through the corpses with the moping Isabela and a slightly limping Varric, while in truth he probably didn't even notice half of the stuff he should have taken. Through the insistent whining in his ears, he could hear the eternal churn and bubble of the lava far below the stretch of red rock they were standing on. From somewhere far deeper came a distant, unending boom that he did not want to think too much about.
The Deep Roads were easily one of the most unsettling places Hawke had been so far. Maybe the second most unsettling, right behind Lothering when the blight struck.
Lothering. Hawke wondered how long it would take before anything green would again grow on the fields and forests where he'd played as a child. The useless memories he'd locked away were sneaking back against his will, stirred by the disturbing familiarity of this place. What he'd once felt as a soldier in Ostagar, or as a refugee fleeing Lothering, he now felt here, just in a more... condensed form. And the remembrance was not pleasant.
He wondered how Anders was handling it. After all, the man was a Grey Warden – or at least had been one before his strange merger with Justice.
"There," he heard Anders say. The healer's voice was exhausted as he staggered to sit on a hewn rock that was part of the barricades set up on this stretch of the thaig. "That was a nasty hole. Andraste's knickers, I hope there won't be more like it very soon. I don't know if I can stitch up anything that big again before a good night's sleep. And I doubt we'll be getting much of that, down here."
Relieved, Hawke came to stand beside the unconscious elf.
The signs of the ogre's grip were still there, but they were now the livid yellow and green of healing bruises, not the red and black of imminent death. The hole left by the shard of wood had disappeared, replaced by a pink scar.
Anders was very good at what he did. They all were.
Hawke kneeled down. The elf was breathing more easily now. His face had relaxed, and beneath the blood spatters and filth, without his eternal scowl and glower, he looked younger than Hawke had thought possible.
I am not a good target for such interests...
Oh, Fenris.
"Damn. Varric seems to have some trouble with his leg. I think I better take a look at that," Anders said and, grunting with the effort, pushed himself to his feet and went to the dwarf's side.
Hawke brushed the white hair from the elf's closed eyes. The skin beneath his hand was cold and clammy. Conjuring blood back into a man's veins was part of Anders's talent, but Fenris was still pale beneath his tan.
Stripped of his armor, Fenris had the type of build that certain patrons of the Blooming Rose would have paid fortunes for. He was slender and athletic, as if poised between the limberness of youth and the strength of maturity. A human male would have maintained such a figure for a short time before fully growing up; Fenris would probably always look like that.
Unable to hold back his curiosity, Hawke touched the white stripes on the elf's chin. Surprisingly, they were thick and hard, and coarse against his callused fingers – not unlike the surface of a fine file. Hawke realized they went far deeper than ordinary tattoos, perhaps all the way to his bones. What had it been like, receiving them? Horrible, for all he knew.
For a warrior, Fenris had very few scars, and those he possessed were old and faded. Were they from a time before the ritual that had bonded the lyrium into his flesh?
Suddenly the elf turned his head and moaned. His chest shuddered with a startled breath. Hawke felt a strange tingle in his fingers, and pulled them back as if from a stove.
What the hell was that?
The green eyes cracked open.
"Hawke," Fenris rasped, still breathing a bit uneasy.
"Forgive me. I was just trying to make sure you're all right."
"By petting my markings? They'll survive, as will I." The elf moved his right hand to touch the spot where the gaping hole had been. "So... the abomination stitched me up after all... did he?"
"We didn't have much choice."
Fenris was quiet for a moment.
"Thank you for saving my life, mage," he said then, with surprisingly little of his usual sarcasm. "But if you touch me again, I will probably have to kill you."
Hawke frowned. "You could have told me about this... skin complication of yours. Makes me feel a bit foolish, knowing about it after all this time."
"It was none of your business," Fenris said, but strangely his voice was still devoid of any resentment. He lifted his head from the stone and, with one hand on his midsection as if to make sure everything stayed in place, started to rise. Instinctively Hawke reached out to help, then pulled back his hand.
"No, I guess not. But for what it's worth... I'm sorry."
"Hawke," the elf said.
Fenris was leaning on his left hand, with his back turned toward the mage. For a moment Hawke had an excellent view of the tattoos reaching from his shoulders like some sort of wings down his back, to his narrow waist where they disappeared beneath the dull, dark leather or his suit.
"Yes?" he asked as the elf failed to continue.
"Never mind." Amazingly, Fenris was not only able to get to his feet, but to stay there, as well. "We should move on. The darkspawn could be back any minute. Give me a moment to get ready, and we can leave."
"Marvelous!"
"Bravo!"
In the center of the applause, Fenris watched as two servants dragged one more mutilated corpse from the small amphitheatre. A thick pool of blood covered the stone floor; warm and slippery against his bare feet, it glittered in the sunlight that shafted through an opening in the roof.
"You have outdone yourself again, Danarius," cried one of the magisters reclining on the soft cushions that covered the steps that ascended from the stage. "You must publish your studies! It would be a crime against the Imperium to keep such knowledge to yourself!"
"In time, my friend." Danarius smiled, and Fenris knew his master would amuse himself with his newly inflated status before sharing the almost forgotten art of infusing lyrium into living flesh – if he ever would.
"The ritual... it is a high form of blood magic, isn't it?" a female magister asked, eyeing Fenris from head to toe. The elf was only wearing a pair of black breeches, to allow the audience to observe his markings; a task made less easy by the blood that now stained almost every inch of his body.
While blood magic was ostensibly forbidden in the Imperium, the reality was a different matter. The magisters Danarius had invited to his house tonight were all practitioners of the ancient art, and there were no secrets between them – at least about this matter.
"The amount of living substance needed is part of the high cost. Lyrium does not take into skin naturally. Every ounce of it must be coaxed into place by a most intricate discourse with the underworld. What keeps the lyrium bound to my lovely Fenris now is, in effect, a daemonic bond, not unlike a mage's agreement with an esteemed spirit of the Fade."
"It is permanent, the bond, isn't it?"
"I assure you, it is as impossible to separate him from his markings now as it is to separate us from our spirit protectors, and as deadly to try."
"Are the markings very... painful?" another magister asked, his voice clearly betraying what sort of answer he hoped.
"I believe that is a question for my little wolf to answer," Danarius said and turned toward the elf. "Tell me, pretty one. Does the lyrium give you pain?"
"Yes, master," Fenris answered.
"Fenris, you must give us a little more than that. These are very distinguished guests." Danarius's voice was cheerful, yet it carried a threat only those who knew him well would recognize.
"The markings ache every waking hour, master," Fenris said. "And when someone touches them, it feels like the slice of a knife."
Some of the magisters murmured in delight. Sadistic games were a usual pastime among the nobility of Minrathous.
"The presentation is nearly at an end, my friends," Danarius said. "But I have saved a very special treat for the last. Hadriana, if you please."
Fenris, who until now had listened to the exchange without an expression, eyed his master uneasily. He had no idea what the man was talking about.
Behind him, he heard Danarius's apprentice extract herself from among the guests and step down to the stage. He could not help but wonder what Danarius had planned next. Something painful, undoubtedly. Maybe his master would demonstrate what they had just discussed; when the other slaves cleaned Fenris or dressed him, every passing brush of their fingers against the lyrium was agony. His master seemed perversely intrigued by the idea that Fenris would never again be able to touch anyone without excruciating pain. But displaying that to the audience would hardly merit a spectacle. During the last few weeks, Fenris had grown so accustomed to those occasional knife cuts that he now rarely even flinched at them. Would he have to pretend, to please his master?
"What I am going to show you is a most curious effect of the lyrium bond," Danarius said, obviously pleased at the effect his words had on his audience. "One I believe he has no knowledge of, himself."
What on Thedas was the man talking about?
Fenris turned his head to look at Hadriana. There she was, her familiar blue eyes heavily outlined in black kohl, her slender, long curves encased in thick amber silk. She smiled at him, an evil little smile that almost... almost triggered a memory.
Panic he could not explain was rising in his chest. It would have been the most natural thing in the world to flee. But flee where? And what was natural in any of this? While his mind rebelled, his body seemed to remember what his mind didn't. It is useless to fight, it said. It will only make things worse.
An almost reverent silence had fallen, as Hadriana came to stand right behind the elf, close enough for him to sense the heat of her body. Her slippers and the hem of her robe were quickly soaked in the reeking blood at their feet. They were almost of a height. Why did her proximity feel so... familiar?
"Go ahead, Hadriana," Danarius urged.
Hadriana smiled. His heart racing in fear, Fenris turned away from her. But the anticipation on his master's face, and on that of every magister in the room, with all their attention transfixed upon him... it was even worse. He closed his eyes, and braced himself against the pain that would soon follow.
Her fingers brushed at the nape of his neck, and his breath hitched.
She was barely touching him, yet it might as well have been the swing of a hammer.
Pain? No... nothing so merciful.
"As you can see... Most curious," Danarius crooned to his captive audience.
It was just a whispering caress where the lyrium markings crawled their way under his growing hair... But for the effect it had on him, it was all the touches in the world combined into one. A wave of pleasure traveled through him, straight into his loins, where it settled like a red-hot ember. In disbelief of what was happening, he tensed as Hadriana's warm hand pressed against the base of his neck. She splayed her fingers and drew them down the length of his back. His muscles spasmed under her touch. Sweat was freely breaking through his skin. Between his legs, his cock stiffened and strained against his tightly wound linen smallclothes.
No...
Hadriana pressed herself against his back and planted a soft kiss on the point of his ear. She slid her hands around him and raked her carefully manicured nails down his chest, covered in caking blood. His legs trembled and he had to lean on her to stay on his feet. "Lovely," she whispered and licked a spatter of blood from the side of his chin. Unable to help himself, he groaned.
No! Maker. Anything but this...
The people around them were fading into distance. Danarius's voice came to him as if through water, or time. "This is something I encountered in the old writings. The lyrium responds positively to a mage's touch. He will find the experience... most pleasant."
The mocking understatement cut through Fenris's pride like a scalpel. Hadriana's left hand drew a path of fire down his hard middle and found its way under his breeches. The completely ridiculous pleasure as her palm brushed against his erection made him dizzy. Her warm fingers sneaked into his smallclothes, pulled him free, wrapped themselves around him. Her other hand circled his chest, pressed his back against the silk that covered her small breasts and flat stomach. She bit her teeth into the sweeping curve of his ear, and stroked him.
It was too much. Fenris cried and arched against her, and came. He didn't have to remember to know it was the longest and hardest orgasm he had ever had. It seemed to last forever and while it did, there was only Hadriana's touch and the raw ecstasy that, for a moment, seemed like the purpose of his whole existence.
After a small eternity he came to, panting and shuddering all over. The real world gradually imposed itself over his inner turmoil. The earth hadn't shattered, sun was still shining on the blood-covered floor through the amphitheatre roof; the magisters were laughing and murmuring in excitement around him, some of them obviously flushed with arousal.
Without a word, Hadriana stepped back. With her support gone, it took all of Fenris's strength to stay on his feet. He turned his face to the side, fought to keep tears of shame from finding their way to his cheeks.
"With this, I conclude my presentation," Danarius said. "Should you wish to discuss with me privately, feel free to approach my assistant for an appointment. Have a pleasant day, my friends and colleagues. May the Fade grant its blessings upon our endeavors."
