Our hero is cranky, swears a lot and fights a pride demon.

"So," said Varric thoughtfully, somehow finding the breath to keep up with Cassandra and talk at the same time, despite his shorter legs, "Are you innocent?"

"I don't remember." I did, in fact, know what had happened, intellectually. I mean, now that I understood where I was, it was pretty obvious what had happened. The... setting itself was something I was dealing with on an ad hoc basis and avoiding all thoughts of at other times, because there was a hole in the sky and demons screaming and, like, no. Just no. Now was not the time to have any kind of break down, existential, moral, psychological or otherwise.

Freaking out was on hold until I was sure I wasn't going to die. Until then, my brain was booting in safe mode and honestly it was actually pretty damn helpful.

At any rate, I didn't remember, not really. And the Inquisitor wasn't meant to know, and... I was the Inquisitor, wasn't I? Or at least the Herald. Or... something. It would be convenient to... maybe I could drop hints through confused 'memories' to Leliana at a later point, but I had no interest in being hauled aside and plied with a million questions I couldn't answer.

Or, indeed, questions I might be forced to answer. I was so not ready to see what Solas might do with the knowledge of another world. One that had only had humans to fuck it up so far.

If he didn't already know.

God, he didn't, did he?

Our world did not need his particular brand of trying really hard to help.

I swallowed, wondering what he'd found when he studied me while I slept. Nothing, hopefully. Hopefully.

"That'll get you every time," Varric drawled, derailing my very loud, but equally internal panic. "Should have spun a story."

"That's what you would have done," Cassandra said darkly.

"It's more believable. Aannnnd less prone to result in premature execution," he added really pointedly.

Tell me about it, I thought, remembering the contortion of Cassandra's face in the prison, her rage and her quick hands and snarling mouth.

But Cassandra was...

Of all of them, she was faithful. Reliable. Steady. Also, she'd already jumped between me and a goddamn demon. More than once. "She has no reason to believe me," I forced myself to point out. My voice came out flat, but I said it - it seemed like something that needed to be acknowledged.

"I wouldn't remind her of that, if I were you," suggested Varric.

He... he had a point.

As much as I had no interest in discussing how innocent or guilty they might have found me, I had even less interest in fighting off another wave of demons and closing another rift. Unfortunately, that was the order of the day.

Demons made shrill noises, high and aggrieved even over the sound of the mountains' icy winds. They left my ears ringing and my bones aching.

I hesitated when I saw the first shade rise from the ground, misshapen, hunched and ugly. Nobody else did: Varric's bolt took it straight through the throat. It would have been a kill-shot on a person, but demons had turned out to be sturdy in very different ways. Cassandra impacted the thing with a violent thump. She bore it to the snow, screaming a challenge as she did.

It was enough to stun it, but there were more behind it.

I hefted the cudgel.

At least when this thing hit a demon's head, it fucking stayed down. I reached out to close the rift and saw Solas eyeballing one of the demons I'd taken out. There was little expression on his face, but he didn't seem thrilled.

Whatever. I was definitely leaving the magic shit to him - at least until somebody could teach me something about it. Preferably not Solas, because he was scary as balls and kind of an enormous jerk and he'd definitely figure out something wasn't right.

And also because I'd already managed to offend him.

I rubbed my hands through my hair. Shit. My horns. I had horns. Okay, yes. Forgot about that. Riiight. I was a qunari. That was why everybody looked like... dwarf-height.

(Except the fucking dwarves. They were way smaller than dwarf-height, from my perspective.)

We got to the forward camp and found Leliana was already arguing with Chancellor Roderick. "I?" she was saying. "I have caused trouble?"

He turned to respond, but she caught sight of us and hastened to make introductions - more, I thought, as a way to change the subject (or at least to change the object of his ire) than because she really thought anybody needed introducing.

"I know who he is," he said darkly, glowering at me.

Then he ordered Cassandra to take me to Val Royeaux for execution.

As much as I knew Cassandra and Leliana were going to get their way, I still felt a jolt at those words. The possibility was somehow more upsetting than fighting demons with these lunatics.

"You? Order me?" Cassandra spat incredulously.

The ensuing argument appeared, as far as I could tell, to be that Roderick thought the rifts were completely irrelevant - that the reasonable course of action was to ignore them and go elect a new po- I mean, Divine.

Cassandra didn't seem terribly impressed with his reasoning.

She didn't make much of an impact upon him, and his next response was to cry dramatically: "Abandon this now, before more lives are lost!"

I eyed him. I was tired, anxious, and exhausted from an exciting day of freaking out and beating demons' brains in, and this dickhead wanted me to go meekly to be hanged. "Sorry," I interrupted, in a tone that was way more growl than apology, "did you just say you think leaving this now will prevent loss of life?" I asked incredulously. "You think that-" I pointed up, "- is just gonna take care of itself? It's vomiting demons."

A noise of pure frustration came from him as he turned a furious face upon me. He clenched his fists. "The sheer impudence of the Divine's murderer -"

"It's vomiting demons. Why are you more concerned with one dead woman than the many people currently dying because the sky is vomiting demons?"

Cassandra looked sharply at me. Oops. Sue me, I'm not religious, okay? And still. Like, yeah, she was the pope, but she was also one fucking person.

Roderick looked like he was about to have an aneurysm. "The prisoner," he began, with a hefty emphasis on my 'title'.

"Chancellor," interrupted Leliana, her voice melodic but hard.

The argument continued. It... went on for a while.

I glanced sideways at Varric.

He polished Bianca's sights on his coat, glanced up at my attention, and then shrugged as if to say: well, what did you expect?

Finally, Cassandra turned to me. "How do you think we should proceed?"

I raised my eyebrows. I was the prisoner... but I was also the person with the magic glowing green hand. I wondered if we could just cut it off and give it to Cassandra or Leliana. Might be worth losing the hand, to be honest, and god knew they'd do a better job.

"Um," I said slowly. "I'm all for addressing that as quickly as we can," I said, looking at the sky. "The mountain path would be safer, yeah, but safety is kind of relative once it starts raining demons." Other people's safety, at least. I was pretty much fucked either way - for me, the only way out was through, and that way had a lot of demons.

Leliana's eyebrows shifted expressively, but she didn't disagree. Cassandra just nodded.

"On your head be the consequences, Seeker," Roderick said, soft but spiteful.

"Yes," I muttered once we were out of earshot. "Now is an excellent time for bitter whingeing."

"Ignore him," said Cassandra loftily. There was no sign that she was even the slightest bit worried about the consequences - she was committed to this path, and she would see it through.

"I'm just saying, how irrational do you have to be to choose now to be unhelpful? There's only a giant fucking hole in the sky spewing up demons."

"He is scared," said Solas.

"We're all scared. And yet here we are, racing face-first into a bunch of demons to close a hole in the sky. You're all lucky I haven't shit myself yet. But he can't even-"

My annoyed outburst was interrupted by the wail of another shade. "Brilliant," I seethed, cynical and sarcastic, and hefted my bludgeon.

The fight was faster than several others before it: I swung, angry and tired and sick of everything, and did not take a great deal of care for my personal safety. That seemed to work out okay only because Solas was throwing shielding spells over everybody, which was mighty helpful of him.

Not all demons were the same, of course, but after having killed several shades, you did start to get a bit used to the business: how to know when one was down for the count, at least, and when it was safe to turn your back on a body and let it dissolve.

"We've lost a lot of people getting you here," was very nearly the first thing Commander Cullen said to me. His face was pleasant and symmetrical with a mean scar on his mouth, and at first glance he seemed just as young as the soldiers running around after him - but there was a weight to his gaze that made me want to add a few years to my guess: resigned, jaded.

"Yeah," I ground my teeth, because how was any of this my fault? "That's shit, but you're going to lose a lot more if I don't get to that temple quickly."

A pause. Then: "Yes," he said, without so much as a twitch. "We've cleared the way."

"Great," I said, feeling as though it was anything but. My whole body was already aching, already exhausted. Despite this strange body, it was clear that I hadn't the stamina for this sort of work: adrenalin only took care of so much, and now my body felt like it had given all it was ready to give.

Just this one further mess, then. All I had to do was fight a pride demon and...

Yeah. I had to fight a pride demon.

Shit, shit, shit.

Well, there was hardly any backing out now. I was pretty sure Cassandra would drag me through the snow by my horns and throw me at the Breach bodily if she thought it would help.

I took a deep breath. "All right."

Then we moved forward and approached Temple of Sacred Ashes.

"That is where you walked out of the Fade," Cassandra said quietly. "Our soldiers found you."

It was a wreck.

Bodies were frozen in ash, each face twisted in a hideous rictus of agony. Their skin was gone, their muscle bare. Some were still smouldering.

Everything smelled of hot metal and cooking meat and burned hair. And damp, where the burning had reduced the snow to puddles. It wasn't a good smell.

"They say they saw a woman in the rift behind you, but nobody knows who she was."

The temptation to say 'Andraste,' as sarcastically as possible was overwhelming, but I didn't give in. It would cause no end of trouble, and no doubt it would piss Cassandra off something terrible right now.

Cassandra may have only come up to my chest but she was terrifying.

Amazing, yes. But terrifying.

Leliana arrived right on our heels with a group of scouts. They, like her, were mostly archers and agility fighters, but it was still comforting to have them there.

The temple was rubble, but it might once have been beautiful. A great deal of work had evidently gone into it at some point... but now that was ruined. The Breach was a long, long way up.

Just as I was thinking it, Varric said it.

Yeah, buddy, I thought. It sure is.

But below it was a rift, just like any other. A little bigger, perhaps. It was, like all the others, strangely pretty: deep shades of green, shifting and twisting in the air. It looked like some kind of mineral, really, the spikes strangely geometric. A thought flitted by: geometric shapes had something to do with strong chemical bonds or... maybe a specific kind? Didn't they? Was that what...

"This is your chance to end this. Are you ready?" Cassandra asked.

"Ready?" Are you fucking with me? "No. God, no. Not even a little bit." There, that was honest. Cassandra didn't look thrilled with my honesty though. I took a deep breath. "But you tell me what to do and I'll give it a shot."

She didn't look thrilled at this information, but she nodded.

So forward we went.

There was red lyrium, and terrible voices that echoed in the air. They weren't quite directionless: instead, they came to us as distorted, bouncing from the rubble and singing horribly along the lyrium.

"Someone help me!"

"What's going on here?"

"That was your voice. Most Holy called out to you... but..."

"We have an intruder. Slay the Qunari!"

Cassandra whirled upon me. "You were there! Who attacked? And the Divine? Is she...?" The frenzied light in her eyes banked after a moment, and she clenched her jaw. "Was this vision true?" she demanded.

I knew intellectually that it probably was, but I definitely didn't recall it happening to me. I shook my head. "I don't know."

Solas pushed past me, eyes fixed on the crackling green light.

Cassandra bared her teeth in a snarl and took a grip on my arm that was painful despite how much bigger I was. "What do you mean, you don't know?"

I flinched back from her. "I mean I don't fucking know!" I snapped back.

Solas interrupted us. "These are echoes of what happened here. The fade..." he paused, looking for a word, "...bleeds into this place."

He inspected the rift for a few more moments and then returned his attention to us to tell us it was closed without being sealed. There was no way in hell his extremely accurate 'guesswork' was getting past Leliana; she must have known by now that he wasn't just an apostate hobo who wandered out of the wilderness to help. But she let him. I glanced around, seeing her archers and a few scouts, but not the spymaster herself. She was around somewhere, I was sure.

Everybody looked on uneasily as Solas continued: "It can be opened, then sealed properly. Opening it, however, will attract attention from the other side."

This seemed to drag Cassandra's attention back to the problem at hand, thoughts of the Divine's death shunted aside for now. "That means demons," she warned in a voice that soared above the ambient sounds. "Stand ready!"

I stalled for a few seconds, staring up at the hole in the sky.

"You will need to use the mark," Solas reminded me - reminded me, as if I'd forgotten somehow - in a tone of voice that could have meant anything.

I scowled, but held my hand up toward the rift.

The mark on my hand connected with it and I could already feel the difference. This rift was... bigger, more established. The mark connected the rift and I in a crackling stream of green light, which hissed and spat out spikes of - energy, magic, something. I cringed.

The light narrowed suddenly, and then from its centre grew a ball that coalesced into the pride demon.

It was as tall as three of me, made of hard thorny skin with sharp ridges and dips, jagged and monstrous. The light from the rift made it glow green and sickly and washed it with ugly power.

I had not realised there was still enough reserve energy in my body to produce this much adrenalin. I took one look at it and the only thing that prevented me from breaking, panicking and fleeing for my life was the fact that I was fucking frozen to the spot.

Cassandra looked at it. Her face was hard. No fear. No second guessing. Just resolve. "Now!"

Her voice soared. Arrows fired.

With a hiss and a strange glittering shiver, Solas threw a barrier over all of us. Varric did something complicated looking with a winch.

All I had to do was to disrupt the rift so the others could hurt the demon. That was... not easy, no. But easier than fighting.

Then the pride demon roared and I very nearly pissed myself.

I'm not even kidding. I'm pretty sure I peed a little.

"This is so, so bad," I said in a voice gone high with dread, rough on the edge of absolute panic.

"Easy, big guy," murmured Varric, and - I hadn't realised he'd been listening. I hadn't realised he'd been close enough to listen. "If you faint, who's going to close the rift?"

"It's almost impossible to faint when you're experiencing an acute stress response, unless you hyperventilate," I informed him, automatically and, yeah, okay, kind of inanely.

Varric laughed at me.

I flipped him off with one huge hand. Bravado, but the teasing and stupid banter was... It was stupid but it made me feel more... grounded? Perhaps that was why people did it. Normalcy among chaos. That made some sense. Fine. I could work with that.

I'd never roll my eyes at Spiderman's cheesy lines again, seriously.

The demon took one ground-shaking step forward, leaving the rift behind it unprotected - for a certain value of "unprotected". Cassandra cried out, a huge, swelling scream that came with bared teeth and wild eyes and which attracted its attention immediately, and then she hunkered down behind her shield a split second before its huge clawed fist took a swipe at her.

I steeled myself and darted behind it. As long as I focused on this little slice of terror that was my part, it would all be okay. Surely.

Disrupting the rift was faster and weirdly easier than closing or opening it, and when I managed it I felt the force of the thing slam outward, a shockwave that sent all of us wobbling.

The demon itself staggered to one knee and I heard Cassandra cry out that it was vulnerable.

From somewhere in my peripheral vision, I saw Solas give his staff a workmanlike twist, and felt the ambient temperature drop as frost raced up the demon's legs.

I clutched my cudgel and wondered what the hell I was supposed to do to help.

Then the pride demon somehow summoned a bunch of shades straight from the Fade just to mess with us, and those? Those, I was getting pretty used to handling at this point. It felt productive to bash what passed for their faces in, even if the weird squelchy noises were kind of disturbing.

The fight seemed to stretch forever, and it passed in a haze of pain, panic and retina-searing lights displays. Every new second provided a hundred possibilities to falter and fail.

Disrupting the rift was becoming increasingly difficult, taking longer, hurting more. I hadn't even known I was doing anything the first time I'd done it, but now - now all I could hear was the whine of the magic, the thunder of my heart and the wheeze of my own goddamn breath.

"Tell me it's gonna die soon," I gasped to a nearby scout, falling back and clutching my arm to my chest. The mark was pulsing, radiating pain with every new heartbeat. I swallowed, which was much too much time between breaths, and then coughed. I leaned forward, bracing my unmarked hand on my knee, and tried to breathe.

"It is weakening," said a familiar voice, and I glanced sideways to see that it wasn't a scout at all - it was Leliana. Her voice was calm and her eyes were intent, shadowed but glinting in the changing green light.

She set her arrow, drew, released and reached for another like it was all one movement to her, as easy as breathing.

"Shade," she snapped suddenly, and I jerked up from my panting slouch just in time to see another one of those fuckers rise from the ground.

"Oh, fuck this shit," I muttered, clutched my club two handed, and took a wild swing at its face with all the force I could muster.

There's one thing to be said for being an eight foot wall of muscle, and that's this: when you swing a club at something's skull, it doesn't get back up.

I coughed again.

Leliana had managed to shift herself behind my bulk - which, you know, wasn't that hard - and was still firing relentlessly at the pride demon. I heard her make a soft noise of pique and looked that way to see - ah. The demon had its guard up again, and seemed to be shaking the arrows off like droplets of water.

That was as much of a breather as I was getting, then. I heaved myself into a jog back toward the rift, raised my hand and braced myself for the shock of disruption. Green light burst in a rush of noise and a smell of singed hair.

Varric had apparently been waiting for exactly that, because I heard him cry out in triumph, the sound of a projectile singing through the air, and then -

- honestly, it sort of looked like the monstrous head of that thing sprouted fletchings.

Leliana was right - it must have been weakening, because up until now there had been no way to get something to penetrate deeply enough to damage it. Now...

The demon staggered.

Solas snarled somewhere behind me and ice encased its whole torso, and all around were the sudden snap-whine-snap of bowstrings.

Cassandra looked white as a sheet, and she steadied herself on her feet, breathing heavily. She made no move to expend her energy on attacking and instead seemed to brace herself behind her shield.

She needn't have bothered, because one of Leliana's arrows went straight through its eye - which was a nice goddamn shot - and its knees hit the stone floor with a tremendous noise and a tremor.

It was down.

As soon as the demon was down, the rift twisted in on itself, huge and swirling and - I squinted against its light. This wasn't the same as the others. This was... huge.

Cassandra's voice soared again, strained and weary: "Now! Seal the rift! DO IT!"

I was exhausted, but her voice compelled me all on its own. I stumbled forward and raised my hand once more.

Light exploded from it. It hit my skin like a physical force.

Green. Green everywhere.

Then nothing.

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