Chapter Fifty-Five: Fever Dream
It was high summer in Par Vollen. The Arishok was newly returned from battle, his armor over his shoulder. His step was light. The old scar no longer pained him. He breathed deeply, filling his lungs with air heavy with the scents of earth and flowers and fresh green. His homestead lay just beyond, a house and grounds outside of Qunandar, its whitewashed walls gleaming. Athlok worked the fields and tended dathrasi. All smiled and nodded to him as he passed.
The one he wanted to see was in the doorway. Marian stood beneath the awning, her countenance aglow at his approach. Her hair was down, a thing she rarely did but that he loved so much. The copper locks flowed over her shoulders and framed her face. Her skin had taken on a golden hue from her time in the sun, which only enhanced the colors of her crimson and white sleeveless robes.
"Kana! Kana!" A tiny form pushed passed her and bolted toward the Arishok. Skin of silver, hair pale, his golden-eyed son rushed to leap into his waiting arms. His brow was smooth, and the Arishok swelled with pride every time he remembered that the boy would always be hornless. An asset. A boon. And his beloved Marian had been strong enough to bear him.
The woman came forward to kiss him, deep and passionate, full of the joy that he was home. She was so warm, her skin soft and hands no longer calloused from carrying a sword. There was no longer a need. She tasted of honey and spices. She smelled of incense and home.
And he was home. Truly. Where he had wanted to be with every fiber of his being since Kirkwall.
"Tevinter fell in time for supper," she murmured, her breath a pleasing tickle against his skin. "Come. Inside before it gets cold." She took him by one hand, their son already occupying his other arm, and led him within. It was cool and smelled of herbs. The low table was already set, steaming bowls and plates of food upon it. They sat and partook, and never a better meal could he remember having in his life.
He turned to his son, the small boy barely old enough to learn to hold a stylus. "And what have the tamassrans taught you while I was away?" The qunoa was absolutely amazing. Whatever combination of spices Marian used gave it the most perfect yet subtle flavor.
"The virtues of the Qun," came the smilingly bashful reply.
"Which are?"
The boy shrugged, still smiling.
"Oh, come, you know," Marian laughed. "You told me just this morning. Now, in thought...?"
"Wisdom!"
"In deed?" the Arishok put in. He remembered this adage from his own childhood.
"Courage!"
"In passion?" Marian spoke up, practically beaming at her offspring.
"Temp...temperance." It was a bigger word, hard to get out, but the Arishok suddenly felt ridiculously proud.
"And in duty?"
"Justice!" The boy threw both of his small hands up in the air as if in victory.
They had barely finished when there was a rapping at the door. The Arishok made to rise, but Marian put out a hand to stop him. "Peace, my love. I will get it." She got to her feet and moved to open the engraved wooden portal. There was a gasp. A scream. And before he knew what was going on, he saw Marian's body crumple to the ground.
Standing in the doorway was Vashkata, not as the travesty of an Arishok that he had once been but as his old self. His lithe and nimble form was strapped into woven leather armor, two deadly daggers gripped in his hands and dripping blood. Marian's blood. The child wailed. The Arishok felt his face tighten in anguish and rage. He saw Vashkata smile. It was a slow thing, cruel and wicked, and a look he felt scarred on his memory like the wound through his chest.
"Did you forget to invite me, brother?" the intruder asked, cleaning his blades nonchalantly on a drape from a nearby window. "Hearty food...your sweet wife...how could you ever think of not sharing?" He shoved the daggers home into the sheathes at his back.
The Arishok did not immediately respond. Not verbally, anyway. He leaped across the table to cradle Marian in his arms, her eyes open and unseeing, her body limp and lifeless. Tears burned tracks down his face as he wept, muffling his cries in the mess of Marian's hair. His son was crying, too. The child was screaming with all the meaning in the world thrust into the otherwise unintelligible noise.
"...Shok ebasit hissra. Meraad astaarit-"
"Oh, stop it, brother. Your prayers can't help anyone, now." Vashkata's hands silenced the boy. Violently. The Arishok squeezed his eyes shut when he heard the strangled crunch of bone. "Have they ever? Has following the Qun given you any happiness?"
"It has given me every happiness," was the weak reply.
"Has it? And yet you cower, a female in your arms—dead, I might add, through your own actions—a bastard son unsanctioned—also dead—and you a pathetic form crippled by his own selfish heart. I should kill you, brother, if for nothing but to save you from what you've become."
The Arishok snarled, his tears of sorrow turning to ones of hate. "It was your selfishness that left our people mired in the slime of Tevinter!" He laid Marian down and spun on his adversary, rage burning in his violet eyes. "You sacrificed thousands needlessly for the chance at a triumph!"
"I? Sacrifice?" Vashkata's laugh was cruel and chilling. "I sacrificed nothing that wasn't already lost. You are telling yourself lies to settle your conscience. Surely, you realize this. Cast off these chains, brother. They do not become you."
"What?"
"Rise above this. It was something that took me exile in the bas-lands to understand, but I returned to Par Vollen with such clarity. Living in the Qun is an impossible dream. Let yourself be more that what it demands. More even than this..." he looked about him, sniffing derisively, "...pitiful desire."
"You dare to call me pitiful?" Marian's voice was a shock, and the Arishok whirled to watch as she rose from the floor, her eyes burning with dark fire as her form melted away. Her skin became gray and stone-like, her head wreathed in lavender flame. The homestead around them melted away to leave behind a barren wasteland and putrid sky. "It was I who fed his passion. What have you done?"
Vashkata laughed aloud, his voice growing deeper, and the Arishok was slower to turn to watch his dead brother grow tall and broad, looming over him in a body of nothing but talons and teeth. "I fed him the truth, and he knows it with all that he is."
The Arishok clamped his hands to his ears, shutting his eyes, and trying to shake himself free of the nightmare surrounding him. Demons. Illusions. Such he'd thought left far behind in the ruin of Kirkwall. The beasts continued to argue between themselves, fighting with words as much as magic as they each attempted to restore their sway over him.
There was a hand on his shoulder.
A flash of light.
The stone woman screamed and the fanged beast fell, shattered in a splash of embers.
The whole world swam. The terrain spun and blurred and spiraled about him, dragging him down and down into a quagmire he could not hope to escape. The light dimmed and vanished, thrusting him into blackness even as the air around him thundered with noise. Roaring. Screaming. Something slammed shut, like a door, and all was silence. But that, too, was an illusion. There was a whispering, a tugging at the back of his mind. A chorus of low voices that echoed and repeated yet all said the same thing:
Justice is returned.
The Arishok bolted upright. His breathing was fast and heavy. His body was dripping with sweat, and the light blankets of his bed were twisted and half on the floor. The sky over Qunandar was still black, the sun a long way from rising. How long he had slept, he didn't know and didn't care. Panic was gripping him, a cold fear that he had been touched by something worse than the blackest taint, and it twisted his stomach. He threw the covers from him and stormed from his bedchamber. Barefoot and in nothing but a pair of linen trousers, he fled the barracks, heading westward at a brisk walk through the cool winter air...then a jog...then a solid run...and then an all-out sprint as he reached the city limits and out into the open countryside beyond.
There was a place out here that he had often come with his Qunra and brothers and sisters in the viddathlok. It was a place that overlooked the sea that the woman felt would solidify better the lessons she had to teach them. "Serenity," she had said, her voice like a summer wind through the trees, "is the heart of the ocean. Be embraced by its depths, and you shall find peace." She was the first to have him believe that the ocean and the Qun were little different, if not one and the same. It had been her lessons that stuck with him through all the storms of his life, through the chaos and trials of Kirkwall, through his failings, and through his accomplishments.
He reached the spot, a clifftop meadow carpeted with tall grass and small white flowers that glowed in the light of the moon. It smelled as he remembered it...of the blossoms and sea spray. He could hear the rumble of the waves below as they crashed into the massive stones.
But he didn't stop.
He kept running, his lungs burning, his ruined one rattling as fluid threatened to fill it again. But he ran. He ran straight to the edge. And he leaped.
The water stung as he sliced into it, his outstretched arms cutting through the roiling surf. It was cold. Cleansing. The echoing voices vanished from his head, and all he heard was the muffled thunder of the sea. When he surfaced, the salty air felt like a sweet gift. His legs burned to tread water, but his arms compensated. He swam from the cliff face to a rock outcropping and back, forcing himself to work through the weariness and concentrate on nothing but his actions. His mind was put at ease through repetition.
But his heart would not be silent.
He let the current carry him to the docks, the waves tossing him ashore like so much flotsam, and he trudged through the sand to reach the wooden planking of the pier and the smooth stone of the promenade. The soldiers on watch glanced at him, but if they recognized him or thought his behavior strange, they made no motion. He merely nodded to them if their eyes met and moved on.
It was not far to the viddathlok, and its massive edifice was alive with torchlight blazing beneath brightly painted murals. For all its visual splendor, it, too, was silent, and he approached it with soft, measured steps. The water should have tempered the fire in his spirit, but the images in his dream had disturbed him too much. Where the ocean failed, prayer and meditation would succeed. Barring that, he felt he was surely lost.
He paused at the threshold of the great hall. The doors were never shut, and incense floated into the air. Tamassrans were always present to guide the prayer or act as confessors, but the thought of being seen by any of them stopped him dead in his tracks. Instead, he made a turn down a branching corridor and wound his way through the many passages. He knew where he was going but refused to acknowledge it. To acknowledge it would be to give it power. To give it power would be to make it true. To make it true...
Doors in Qunandar could be closed but never locked. There were no locks, no keys, nothing to claim anything for one's own outside the prescribed asala. A room could be entered by anyone, used by anyone...but it did not change that certain aspects of privacy and personal space were respected. Marian slept peacefully on her cot, her hair spread over the pillow and arms clinging to the soft, woven blanket that covered her. Her armor had been carefully placed upon a rack. Basrath-Kata was sheathed and rested in the corner. There was naught else but a washbasin and a curious mabari blinking at him in the moonlight.
Swoop watched but made no sound as the Arishok approached his mistress' bedside. The kossith seated himself on the edge, the firm pallet barely giving way, and gently brushed hair behind the woman's ear. She inhaled a breath, stirred, but her eyes didn't quite open. He traced her lips with his thumb. Her breath was warm, tickled like in his dream, and his heart ached to remember it. That portion, though an illusion, had been a good dream.
He gently lifted her chin and pressed his mouth to hers. A kiss was not something that Qunari were familiar with—a thing long forgotten since Koslun's wisdom spread—but when Marian had wrapped herself up in him the other night, drawing herself so close they could have almost truly been one and the same, he had reveled in the feeling it gave him. He did not think he had truly woken her, but an arm snaked around his neck, fingers weaving into the dampness of his hair. She pulled him down against her so tightly that he could feel her heart pounding against his chest. His heart also raced, and it became difficult to discern one from the other. Her breath was his breath. His body was her body. One hand cradled her head as the other followed the curves of her form. Her own hand strayed, coursing down his back and-
The Arishok abruptly shoved himself away. Still sitting at the edge of the bed, he clutched his head between his knees, fingers clawing at his hair. "No...I will not. I must not...!"
"Taa...Arishok?" Marian was upright, one hand holding her hair out of the way while the other tentatively came to rest on his strained back.
He straightened and cupped her face with both hands. "I will not lose you. Not to my folly and not to the qamek. I should not have come here." He made to rise but Marian's voice stopped him.
"Then why did you?"
Her eyes stared at him in the moonlight, silver gleaming in her hair as it hung around her shoulders as it had in his dream. The tousled strands framed her face. Her bare arms gleamed a faint bronze, providing contrast to the stark white of her shift. His heart pounded in his ears. His gut twisted.
"Because you are the Qun to me—my very soul. You are the ocean, my serenity. Without you, I am as nothing. Without you-" He faltered when she moved the blankets aside and came to stand with him. Her mouth was on his again before he could stop her, and the blood in his ears had become almost deafening. The vision of the life he'd been tempted with flashed across his eyelids, the homestead, the countryside, the child rushing to be held by his father.
He managed to pry himself away from her. "No. In passion: temperance. Remember this, kadan." He wrapped her in his arms and hugged her tightly to him. "For, if you don't, the ben-hassrath will ensure that you don't remember anything at all."
