The Elder One was coming.

Of all of the deadly boons that the red lyrium had given Samson - the strength, the power, the desensitization to pain - this was the strangest effect. When it was quiet, when the wind was still and the noise of men and armor and voices had abated, he could sometimes hear echoes - snatches of a music so beautiful and grotesque in its wrongness that it made him ache inside. And it became stronger whenever Corypheus drew near.

Trevelyan knew it, too, whether by observing him or through some intrinsic instinct for danger. She was as irascible as ever, but increasingly restless as the days counted down. She slowly and relentlessly paced the length of the wall that her bonds would allow her to reach, back and forth, as if deliberating with herself. Samson could hear the rattle of her chains when he approached the chamber. She would sit quietly - apparently in meditation - while he was working, her eyes closed and her posture as rigid as a statue. When his work was finished, however, when he was with her and in her in the late hours of the night, she devoured him with her mouth and her hands and her warm cunt as if his skin were made of lyrium.

"I'm surprised you haven't tried to escape," he had told her on a night where she had knelt before him, working at the laces of his breeches as he gathered the bloody veil of her hair in his fist so that he could watch.

His cock had needed no further encouragement when it was free of his cod. Her warm breath on the engorged member was aphrodisiac enough. She had kissed him there and sent shivers of fire up through his belly and back.

"Haven't I?" she had asked, pausing in her ministrations to look up at him.

There was color in her cheeks again as her body began to recover from the worst of its deprivations - the last late autumn bloom before the deadly frost, Samson thought. The hands that spread warm across his abdomen were braceleted with red - chafed, broken skin showing underneath her manacles. He had not noticed the cuts and nicks on her fingers and hands before, or he had simply dismissed them as artifacts of battle or passion like her other small marks. But, it was the faint distance in her eyes as she had gazed up the length of his body into his face - a dragon goddess on her knees - that had made him understand her meaning before he had guided her mouth back to his cock.

She had tried. And this had become her escape.

Trevelyan sat against the wall, lost in thought, when Samson laid a plate of food down in front of her. The archers had been fortunate. The ram had been old and tough, but fresh meat was a better meal than dull dry rations and anything tasted fine if you stewed it well enough. She stared at the plate for a long moment. She was too intelligent not to know what it meant.

"I know you said you'd die before breaking bread with me," Samson told her, filling the poignant silence, "but it's hard to share a meal with a corpse. Make an exception?"

She nodded and picked up the plate as he settled down on the stones in front of her with his own. He had spent a fortnight looking down at her. Tonight, for a little while at least, he wanted to look at her face to face.

"Tomorrow, then?" Trevelyan asked as she picked at the food. The question was delivered with her typical cool composure, as if she were merely inquiring about the weather, though her voice sounded tired to his ears. Samson shrugged.

"Tomorrow. Or the next day. He's close."

The corner of her lip twitched up briefly as she attempted to add some levity to the conversation.

"Will it be quick, do you suppose? I expect to sit through the obligatory insufferable gloating, but his last attempt to kill me did drag on a bit."

"No," Samson replied, trying to match her tone and finding that his voice felt heavy and leaden in his throat. "You've cost him too much. He'll make an example."

"Well, perhaps he'll delegate the honor to you as a reward. No doubt you'll enjoy that."

Samson glanced up from his plate to catch her gaze and determine if the needle jab of the comment was meant to hurt or if it was simply her way of playing with him as she sometimes did. Trevelyan's lips formed a smile that the rest of her face did not share. Samson saw how her eyes searched his face, as if reading him like the page of a book.

"That would be poetic, would it not?" she continued, her cultured voice turning up at the end, seeking an answer to a different unspoken question.

"I never liked poetry," he grunted in reply, letting his gaze shift back down to his plate so that he would not have to look at her when the image of her death - her imperious face slack, bloody-mouthed, with eyes that reflected only the Void - flashed through his mind.

When the meal was complete, Samson fished out a bottle of something strong and Antivan that he had looted from some villa or other during his travels. Drink had never been his particular poison, but he had found its numbing qualities useful at times. And he wanted to be numb now. Trevelyan accepted a cup, sipping it, rolling the burn of the alcohol through her mouth as if pleased with its sour sharpness. She always enjoyed a good bite, Samson thought, remembering her exultant growls when she felt his teeth on her flesh.

"Afraid?" he asked her, the brandy softening the macabre nature of the conversation.

"Of death?" she asked, chuckling as if he had told a joke. Samson was instantly reminded of the small arrow scar over her heart. "No. It will hurt and then it will no longer hurt and that will be the end of it. If I was afraid of pain or dying, I would never have picked up a sword to begin with."

"I forgot. Her Worship - the high holy Inquisitor - fears nothing but the Maker Himself," he teased her, engaging her in a game that he knew she excelled at. Trevelyan's teeth flashed, but with rare good humor this time.

"Not even the Maker," she corrected him, her tone both haughty and humorously blasphemous.

"Regrets, then. Everyone has those," he pressed.

Even after this long, he knew so little of the woman in front of him. His fingers could navigate her body now like the twisting alleyways and dark dens of Kirkwall's Lowtown, but Samson didn't truly know her. Here at the end, he wanted something of her - a piece of the puzzle that made Trevelyan who she was, given freely.

"You are expecting me to say that my only regret is that I was not able to kill you first," she replied, half of her smile falling as she slowly turned her cup in her hand. Trevelyan drew in a slow breath, considering his question

"I was no one before I became the Inquisitor," she began. At his scoff, she raised an eyebrow, pausing, before she continued. "I was the youngest child of a large and prestigious family - chattel born to serve the interests of my parents and elder siblings. If not for the Conclave, I would have been forced into the Chantry eventually as a Sister or, perhaps, a Templar if I was very lucky. Instead, I became the Inquisitor, the Herald of Andraste. Instead of serving them as I was brought up to expect, it was my family that served me as allies of the Inquisition. I have looked into the face of an Empress - and also the Emperor that I replaced her with - and I saw them flinch under my gaze. Whether the Inquisition succeeds or fails in stopping Corypheus, whether the world grinds down to oblivion or not when I'm gone, that world was mine for a short time. I have very little to regret. Except . . ."

She raised her glass in salute, inclining her head in a solemn, genteel gesture.

" . . . that I was not afforded the pleasure of killing you first."

Samson smiled. Despite her sardonic wit, this was meant as a compliment. The acknowledgement of a worthy adversary. He leaned in and refilled her cup.

"What about Rutherford?" he probed, feeling the pleasant buzz of the liquor beginning to hum in the back of his head. "No regrets there?"

"Ah," she said, almost a sigh. Her expression went wistful for an instant, as she sipped the brandy. "Only that I've disappointed him. I've given him one more pain to replace what I tried to take away." Trevelyan closed her eyes for a moment, frowning. "One small request. The future will be difficult enough for him. He doesn't need to know about this."

Samson had half expected her to ask for Rutherford's life to be spared - but she already knew how trite and impossible and eventually cruel that request would be. He would have liked to have seen the look on his former friend's face when the man found out that Samson - Samson, of all people - had bedded his woman. But it was, as she said, a small thing. He nodded.

"Done."

She smiled briefly at him, thanking him without words. A fraction of her formal bearing eased and Trevelyan leaned back against the wall. The rise of her breasts was more prominent in this position. He could easily imagine her leaning against a bed frame in a house somewhere and regarding him this way - as his woman, not just for the few days that he had held her prisoner. A reality that never would be and never would have been, but it sent a brief flash of hot desire through his body. That would keep. This would likely be his last opportunity to enjoy her this way and he wanted to remember it and make the most of it. He kept his gaze on her eyes.

"What do you regret, Samson?" she asked, using his name for the first time that he could remember. She had never called it out once, not in battle nor in the throes of carnal passion. Her voice was smoothed, relaxed in the way that he only ever heard it after the lust and the lyrium were both satisfied. It was not part of her game. She wanted to know.

Was there anything in his life that he did not regret? That was a better question. The lyrium? There were days when he cursed the first hour that he had ever tasted the stuff. He should have had the courage to throw himself from the highest cliff on the Wounded Coast long before he had allowed it to turn him into what he had become. But it had meant something more than mere relief once. It had been an oath. One that he had been proud of. The letter? How many times had he gone over his mistakes in his head? If he had been smarter, if he had been less careless, less certain that he would not be caught, Maddox would not be Tranquil and he would never have been drummed out of the Order to rot on the streets until his entire being was consumed with the hunger for lyrium. But Meredith would have found a reason in the end. She always had. The mad, heartless bitch.

He remembered Trevelyan's accusation when he had first confronted her about the lyrium and how it had stung him like the lash of a leaded bullwhip. I took the risk only upon myself. You poisoned every soldier under your command.

"The Templars," Samson admitted, realizing with crushing certainty that this was absolutely correct. "I wish that it could have been another way - that I could take the red out of them. If I could stop it now, I would. But what's done is done. I'll pay the same penalty as the others in time."

He did not care if she believed him. It was true whether she believed it or not. But he could tell from the way her chin tilted, from the way her expression did not shift back to her hardened public face, that Trevelyan did. He could not decide if that was a relief or if it was merely one more thing to regret.

She undressed, her face flushed from the brandy, as he prepared their philters. He undressed himself before he approached her, the first time that he had been fully naked with her. Samson had always given Trevelyan the dust afterwards - that was their bargain, her body for the lyrium - but tonight he took her hand and pressed the vial into it at the beginning.

"Take it now," he told her.

She could try to cheat him out of her body if she wished - take the lyrium and turn him away. But, tonight, Samson wanted her to feel something else. On the rare occasions where he had been able to afford a hit of dwarf dust and a whore at the same time, it was the closest that he could come to shutting out all of the raging needs and hates and lusts that were the bedrock and cornerstone of his existence - a moment where he could escape from the cage of his body and remember who he had been before the fall. He wanted to give Trevelyan that. And he wanted that with her for himself.

Samson brushed her hair out of her face, caressing her neck and shoulders as she drank. The gooseflesh rose on her skin under his fingertips, her eyes closed, her mouth opened slightly as she gave in to the rush. He quaffed the glowing red poison in his own philter, heard it roll as it dropped empty from his fingers, and then he kissed her. She tasted of sour-sweet brandy and bitter lyrium and, as the ecstasy of the dust swelled up within him, everything that had gone before her or that would happen after her ceased to matter

Samson consumed her. He kissed her shoulders and her chest and her breasts. He kissed the bruises and the bites and the scar over her heart that had not killed her. Trevelyan's hands roamed him, her arms wrapped around him like the pulse and burn of his lyrium armor. Her touch left no scratches this time. His kisses left no bruises. He heard his name whispered out somewhere above his ear and it was a more exquisite pain than any he had ever experienced.

"Say it again," he told her as he went to his knees before her. Her belly was taut and firm, but it rippled with her breath as he kissed the smooth skin beneath her navel, nuzzled his nose along the soft crosshatch of red hair, and tasted her again. Sweet honey.

"Samson," she moaned. Her hands found his neck, her fingers raked into his dark hair as he growled against her, praying at her altar with his lips and his tongue and his palms on her thighs, belly, and cunt - a supplicant with many sins to confess and only one petition.

"Again."

Her bonds were cold on his bare flesh. They looped around his neck and tightened before he fully comprehended what was happening in the furious haze of his need. In the candlelight of the chamber, Samson looked up from his knees into the eyes of his lover, her hands tightly gripping the lengths of steel chain that would choke him to death before he could gain enough leverage to stop her, and for an instant - through the mist of her own intoxication - he saw the flash and fire of the dragon looking back.

I'm surprised that you haven't tried to escape , he had told her.

Haven't I? she had replied.

Another stupid mistake. Another failure. Almost - what was the word she had used? - poetic. Samson felt his body relax, accepting it. She had beaten him in the end. Of all the ways that he could die, this would be the cleanest. The one that he would regret the least. He breathed out, leaned his sweat-beaded forehead against the flesh of her stomach, and waited for the chains to constrict.

"Samson," Trevelyan whispered - the first and only gentle word that he had ever heard uttered from her lips.

Her hands were on his cheeks, caressing the rough stubble of his jaw. She helped him stand. They were tangled together in her chains, her arms around his neck, his around her waist for stability. When he looked again into her eyes, the dragon was gone. The Inquisitor was gone. They had left only an anguished blue-eyed woman behind.

She pressed her face against his chest for a moment, breathing out against the rhythm of his heart, and then she drew him back to the wall with her.

He held her there long after their bodies were spent. She held him also, her arms around him, her body stretched along the length of his own so that every curve and valley fit against a corresponding curve or valley like puzzle pieces. They did not speak. There was nothing left to say.

When he left her at last, Samson sat down on his cot, sweaty and still smelling of her, and he stared hard into the darkness of the room for awhile. Setting his mind to what would have to be done the next day.

~~0~~

"Wake up."

Trevelyan normally roused instantly, but it had been only two or three hours since Samson had left her to sleep and she had been exhausted. He shook her shoulder roughly, seeing the bleariness and confusion in her eyes as they opened.

"Come on, girl. Get up," he snapped at her, impatiently, grabbing her arm and beginning to haul her to her feet.

She complied, regaining her senses. Trevelyan's gaze lingered on his face inquiringly for a moment before he turned her away from him and pulled her arms behind her, exchanging the manacles that chained her to the wall for a different set. By the time Samson was finished, whatever softness there had been in that gaze was gone - covered once more by the indifferent carapace of the Inquisitor.

She did not resist as he pushed her ahead of him through the chamber door. It was two hours before dawn. The grounds of the Shrine were quiet, save for the sound of sentries about their patrols. Samson did not take her through the courtyard. He marched her quickly through a side corridor, turned, and then turned again, descending a flight of stone steps.

"Where-" Trevelyan began, but he cut her off sharply before she could complete the question.

"Shut up."

They emerged into the moonlight in a small overgrown yard near the cisterns - it had likely once been a kitchen garden to serve the priests who tended the shrine - and Samson stopped, pulling Trevelyan back into the shadows as he listened carefully, waiting.

He knew the sentry patrols like the back of his hand. He had assigned them and rigorously enforced them. Samson waited there, almost breathlessly, feeling Trevelyan's shoulder warm under his hand until he heard the armored clank of one of the Red Templars approach and then fall away again. A few moments more to be sure, and then he pushed her roughly forward again out of the garden towards the trees.

The woods that surrounded the Shrine were a tangle of vines and briars, but he had walked this way before. He knew the way. The scent of loamy earth and damp leaves and the susurrus of insects surrounded them. Samson followed a narrow game trail down into a creek hollow, his eyes scouting for landmarks in the dark. When he finally reached the bank of the narrow stream he pulled his charge up short.

"Cross the hollow and head up the hill," he instructed Trevelyan in a gruff, urgent tone. He turned her roughly and unlocked her bonds. "When you crest the hill, walk due south. Don't stop. Don't piss about. There are Inquisition scouts camped in the river valley fifteen miles in that direction. If you hurry, you can find them."

Before she could respond, Samson spun her around and kissed her fiercely, his fingers grasping into her hair, his tongue invading her mouth as her surprise turned to reciprocation. He crushed her against his body. He did not want to stop. But if he paused for even a moment, the part of himself that knew this was insanity - suicidal, even, in that it she would almost certainly be the death of him one day - would win out.

"You're mine," he growled, brusquely, baring his teeth furiously against her cheek as he broke off the kiss just as abruptly. "I had you before he did. You'll always be mine first."

And then Samson shoved her away from him, backing in the direction of the Shrine. Trevelyan stared at him in the shadows beneath the trees, frozen to the spot as if stunned, and he felt his exasperated anger flare.

"Go!" he snarled at her.

She needed no second bidding. He watched as she turned like a cat and sprinted off through the trees, leaping the narrow creek and disappearing into the underbrush.

He did not linger. He did not want to stand and listen to her fade away into the night. Samson turned on his heel and stalked back towards the Shrine.

He would have to find a convincing lie, but it hardly mattered. The Elder One would kill him for his incompetence or he would not - but Samson didn't think so. Trevelyan had been too thorough in bringing all of the magister's other plans to ruin. Even allowing the Inquisitor to slip through his fingers, Samson knew that he was Corypheus' final and best weapon. Too valuable to sacrifice on a whim.

He would see her again. Trevelyan and her people always turned up to thwart him - the thorn in his side as much as she had become the bait to his loins. The next time he saw her, she would kill him or die trying. She would not spare him again, nor would he spare her. As he climbed the stone steps back up into the main sanctuary of the shrine and returned to his quarters, Samson hoped grimly that it would, at least, be soon.

His chamber was now too empty and cold without her.