Salem

I paced back and forth, listening to the dull, hollow thud of my boots against the wooden deck of the ship. The sound, empty and echoing, reminded me of the beat of my heart. Dull, listless, existing against my will. I wanted to scream out to the heavens, to demand knowledge of why I had been chosen for this from any god who would answer. But I could not…I had borne witness to three gods, one who fell by my hand. If I spoke to them, I feared that they would answer, and I had drunk my fill of divine meddling.

Are there no others that the gods can speak to? No other soul who might be worthy of having their waking days and sleeping nights turned into a landscape of emotional torment? I am proud of the scars that mar my body. I earned them in a battle worth fighting against a foe who could and would have destroyed Thedas. The scars that mar my psyche, however…those I have no pride for. I should be strong enough to withstand the damage that is done to my mind, but I am…I am not.

I did not understand how it was possible, but I longed for the days of the Blight. Not simply for the fact that Leliana and I would be together…but because there had been a real, physical enemy to fight. There had been battles, bodies to sink my swords into and know beyond doubt's shadow that I had won a victory. This war that I waged with the god who brought me back…I could do nothing with my blades, and my resistance seemed so passive and useless that I wondered if I did any true good at all.

My hands clenched into fists, the curve of my nails biting into the skin of my palms. I wanted to bleed. I wanted to be able to kill a god again.

"Such control. Such courage in the face of the knowledge that you possess. I did not expect you to remain here, Salem. It seems I might have underestimated the ferocity of your resolve."

Speak of the demon and it shall appear, the old adage whispered through my thoughts.

I turned to face Flemeth, my personal god of torment. She still wore her guise as the man with scraggly hair and beard, sunken cheeks, and hatred burning in his eyes. Once again, I watched her features melt and twist, her spine elongate as she shifted into the form of power with which she had greeted me in the mountains when I had come back from paradise. The light of the moon gleamed off of her hair and her eyes sparked with that eerie golden glow that Morrigan had inherited. Flemeth knew I despised watching her shift her shape, because it reminded me of the mask and gloves and the names I had given myself over the years in order to remain, in the minds of the people and the land, dead.

She moved further into the moonlight and my throat tightened. Her hands were blotched with dark stains and, as she came closer, I smelled copper and salt, the stench of blood. My body tensed and I took a step backward, but Flemeth was too swift. Moving faster than speed itself, she had my wrist trapped in her hand, my arm twisted behind my back, and my shoulder near wrenched from its socket.

I struggled against her, but she was too strong. Not a mere woman, but a god that I could not kill. The sensation of her breath whispering through my hair disgusted me, making me feel more tainted than when I had darkspawn blood bound into my veins by ancient magic. The scent of blood grew stronger and my heart beat hard and fast inside my chest, wanting to break out of my ribs, run through the city streets, searching every inn and every tavern, for I knew what had been done.

Cold steel ghosted along my unscarred cheekbone, then appeared before my eyes, held in Flemeth's hand. The scent of blood filled my nose and overwhelmed my mind, tossing me back in to horrific memories and times that I did not wish to relive. The knife was soaked with blood. It was still fresh, still wet, glistening on the blade. My neck tightened as I strained to free myself, to take the knife and plunge it into Flemeth's heart, though I knew it would not kill her.

Instead, I trembled with pure, unadulterated rage as Flemeth touched the flat of the weapon to my lips. I could taste the blood on it, the acrid iron, the sting of salt, and the sweetness that love alone could infuse into the taste of blood. I had kissed split lips and known this taste. What I had already known became real, visceral, and I pushed against Flemeth, attempting desperately to break away from er, to run, to find…

"Oh, you suffer." Flemeth's tongue purred over the words; her hand kept the blade pressed against my lips. "What will you do, Salem Cousland?" she asked, cruel. "Or, is the proper question what can you do?" she chuckled low in her throat and I felt the dreadful sound vibrate down my spine and shoot into my legs. "Her flesh gave in so easily to the knife." Flemeth continued her torment. "Parting like water through the fingers and letting a red river gush forth. Red," I could feel her lips on my ear, "the color of passion and of love. The color of death. Death is not what I want for this world, Salem Cousland."

"Then why do you hold a bloody blade pressed to my lips?" I snarled as the edge of the blade nicked my upper lip, joining my blood to Leliana's. "Why do you push me to kill at every moment?"

Flemeth shoved me away, spinning me around so that I would face her. The knife, soaked with the blood of the woman I loved, fell from her hand onto the deck of the ship.

"I do not ask for you to kill, Salem." the manner in which she spoke my name made me shudder.

"You are not asking!" the words burst from me as they had when I faced Zathrian, Rendon Howe, and Loghain, all fathers of atrocities. "You are demanding that I stand before the woman I love and let the life you forced me to live demolish her faith! After the torture and torment that Leliana has endured, her faith is all she has! How dare you say that you do not ask me to kill! You are doing worse by asking me to steal away her faith and her hope for this world! God or no, I will not bend my knee to you! I will not rape the mind of the woman who carries the entirety of my soul!"

"Strong words spoken from the weakest of hearts, but still you are refusing to see what I have spoken of since the day the spark of your soul re-entered your body." Flemeth's tone became harder than dragon scales and sharper than steel. "You do not see the larger hands here that move. You do not see the Great Game at work beyond the vision of your like, creatures poor in spirit, afflicted with mortality. Mark my words, daughter of man, if your 'Maker' and her 'prophet' are allowed to preach their message, if the hearts of mortals can be touched by love and devoted to that love, the darker of my brethren will stir from their slumber and, in the absence of worship and the absence of fealty in the form of blood and atrocities, the heavens themselves will roar, tremble, and bleed. Then shall come a voice from among them, a dread voice, and it will say that they need not fight when their enemy is not each other. When those words are spoken, your world shall burn."

"Why? Choose? Me?" I seethed, my eyes riveted to Flemeth's eyes, my mind drowning beneath the overwhelming scent of Leliana's blood.

"Because you are one who knows." Flemeth's lips curved up in a small smile that made me afraid. "You know that it is better for one to suffer than for the world to perish. Your battered and broken body is testament to that; every scar a scream into the dark that you are willing to sacrifice. That you know your duty as it comes to this. The pain borne by one, so that the suffering of many might be mitigated."

"And if I were the one made to bear the suffering then I would gladly do so!" I shouted, hearing my voice bound back to me from the rocks on the shore. "But no! You ask me to harm another, a sin that has been antonymic to me since the day I first drew breath! If you believe that I wish the gods to war in the heavens and rain down their suffering and misery upon us then you are wrong! But what manner of savior would call another, an innocent, to bear their mantle of pain!?"

"I would not know." a canny light flitted in Flemeth's eyes and around the corners of her mouth and I knew that I would know nothing but pain from her next words. "Did Andraste not burn?"

I took a step backwards, reeling, stunned, shattered. Her answer held nothing but truth. Her truth held nothing but anguish. Andraste had burned…she had worn the mantle of pain for her god, the Maker. The same Maker who had called Leliana to be her own prophet.

"The one you love bears already the mantle of pain." Flemeth continued, driving a blade deeply into my psyche as sure as she had driven a blade into Leliana's skin. "What more damage can you do that is not already written in her destiny?"

"No." my throat tightened so that the word was a low, choked almost-sob of horror. "No. I will not let that happen."

"Yes, you will." Flemeth's laugh burrowed into the waves and lapped the sides of the ship, surrounding me. "You will, for, even if you do not, the sweet and faithful Leliana is doomed as surely as Andraste was from the moment she heard the Maker's voice. You have a role to play, Salem Cousland, in this sick world that damns it saviors. Break the prophet and spare the world. Or doom the world the prophet creates."

"You wretched, horrific, torment from the abyss!" I raged at her, even though I knew she would not care. It did not matter. I needed to scream. "Can you let no one rest!? Can you not cease meddling? Leliana might have been doomed when she was called, but you have now damned her twice! You would use love itself to break the messenger of love and call that breaking salvation!"

Flemeth held out her hand and summoned into it the bloodied knife she had dropped. She held it, turning it back and forth in the moonlight. The sticky crimson that coated the metal made me sick. I wanted to rip it from her hands, plunge it into her heart, and then mine. I could do nothing.

"This blade is salvation, Salem." Flemeth told me, her voice dark and foreboding. "Held in the hand of one defending themselves, this blade is salvation. But to the body into which I push this knife, this blade is damnation. A double edged sword. Thus also stands a calling from a god. You will serve a divine purpose, but in serving that purpose, you will be consumed."

"Did you kill her, Flemeth!?" I demanded to know, for my heart was not just breaking. It cracked in its center and those cracks fissured outwards, splitting my heart into months and moments spent loving Leliana. They dissolved and rushed through my veins as a poison. If she died, I, too, would perish. "Did you kill Leliana!?"

The bitch did nothing but smile and disappear into the darkness, vanishing out of my sight and out of my reach, leaving behind a bloodstained knife. I walked to it and fell to my knees, defeated, broken, bruised all over my body by the words Flemeth had spoken, and the truth that lay within them. With trembling hands, I lifted the blood-slick blade, staring at the precious scarlet stains upon it. I knew it to be the cruelty of the world when, beneath the tang of copper and salt, I smelled the perfume of Andraste's Grace.

I grasped the hilt of the dagger and lifted it towards the sky, towards the stars and the Golden City, towards the salvation and damnation of the gods.

"Honor this!" I screamed at the height of my lungs. "Honor this! If you have ever honored love, Maker, honor this blood sacrifice!" With a wretched cry I flung the knife away, into the ever flowing waves of the Waking Sea. I closed my eyes and imagined the knife falling down, drowning in the water as surely as I wanted to do. Hot, bitter tears burst forth from my eyes like blood spurting from a wound. "Maker, please, if ever you have heard my prayer…hear me now. Save Leliana. Save her faith. Andraste failed you…let Leliana live, and I swear to you that she will not fail you. Hear the cry of a broken woman once your daughter. I beg of you. Hear me. Save her."