Feel it coming in the air
Hear the screams from everywhere
I'm addicted to the thrill
It's a dangerous love affair
Can't be scared when it goes down
Got a problem, tell me now
The only thing that's on my mind
Is who gonna run this town tonight

The room smelled like the hospital. Stringent cleaning chemicals, antiseptic gel, and the sweetly rotten smell of impending death.

It smelled like the room her grandmother died in, but Zarra Cadash had been buried for ten years, at home in the stone cairns of the ancestors she revered so much, next to the tombs housing both Maria's father and mother.

She took a deep breath, forced her eyes open again. She sat on a small table in a claustrophobic room, hands cuffed in front of her. There were soldiers at the door to prevent her from leaving, she assumed.

As if that was a possibility.

Her heart skipped another alarming beat in her chest, her vision swam, and the color began to seep out of the room again. Tears stung her eyes unbidden as a sharp spike of pain dug into her temple like an ice pick threatening to lobotomize her. She choked on a whimper, biting her lip so tightly she tasted the iron of her own blood.

When she asked one of the soldiers what had happened to her, they didn't answer. They were as silent as statues, but the small sounds Maria made did cause them to share looks amongst each other filled with both fear and concern. She could read their faces plainly enough to know that something terrible had occurred.

She thought about asking if she'd be okay, but she was afraid she knew the answer to that too.

She rolled forward as if she could curl up into herself, the cold steel circling her wrists pinching terribly. She focused her eyes down on her hands, traced her pale knuckles up…

Someone took her coat. She'd been wearing it when she entered Haven, hadn't she? Yes. She remembered the cold night air slashing through it, but judging from the watery pale light bleeding in through the windows, it was daylight.

She walked into Haven, got through the security checkpoint, and then…

Then…

Nothing. Nothing before waking up on this table in chains. Nothing before the endless, terrible rolling pain that threatened to drag her back under every time it crashed over her.

The door opened and a woman stormed in, her hair sweat slicked and sticking up in improbable directions. Her eyeliner still managed to be impeccable, as perfect as if she'd just applied it, but somehow Maria doubted it. Even through her splitting headache, she noted the bright crimson stains on the woman's uniform.

Black and white, with that burning eye pierced by a blade on one shoulder and on the other…

Just the eye, the badge of the Seekers of Truth. Maria felt as if somebody splashed icy water on the back of her neck, instantly awake. Instantly alert and wary. She'd heard that if the Seekers caught you…you were lucky if you were never seen again.

"Explain yourself." The woman demanded, piercing her with her dark eyes.

Maria was actually pretty certain she was owed an explanation. Her throat felt like sandpaper and her tongue barely cooperated, but she managed to push out the words anyway. "What happened to me?"

This was apparently the wrong thing to ask. The woman crossed the space in a heartbeat and grabbed a fistful of Maria's shirt, dragged her off the table and to her feet. She hit her hip on the edge, a dull ache that didn't quite compete with the way the room spun when she stood. In a grim way, she was thankful for the steadying grip of the Seeker. "Whatever you unleashed threatens the fiber of the very world and you dare ask what happened to you?" The woman spat.

"I didn't…" Maria began to protest weakly and the woman's white knuckled grip tightened even further.

"You murdered the Divine! You massacred hundreds!"

The accusation hit her in the gut, made her head throb in protest. For a second, she wasn't in the room that smelled like her grandmother's deathbed. She was in a cold brick room on a folding chair that screeched when she shifted, blood on her hands and a harsh voice pouring into her ear.

You killed him in cold blood.

She looked down at her cuffed hands, alarmed, expecting to find Fynn's blood dried all over her knuckles. The only trace of him left, though, was the initials over the arrow on her wrist. A more permanent reminder than the blood she washed off so many years before.

"The Divine's dead?" She repeated.

"As if you do not…" The woman made to lift her from her very feet but was stopped by a restraining hand on her shoulder and a firm command.

"Cassandra, stop. We need her."

She hadn't seen the other woman come in, she moved like a shadow, a sweatshirt hood pulled up high over her head. She obviously held enough power to cause the Seeker to reconsider. When the woman (Cassandra, Maria filed the name away for later) dropped her, Maria sagged back hard against the table. Her feet hadn't quite been up to the job of solely supporting her, but her brain was spinning as fast as it could while her heart thudded. "I want my lawyer."

Although explaining this mess would be a thrill, she was sure. It didn't even help that she didn't know where to begin. Still, at least her favorite legal representative would be happy to get out of the Free Marches for awhile. Maybe she could spin it as a vacation.

"That is your right." Cassandra sneered down at her. "But these are exceptional circumstances and we are unable to contact anyone outside of Haven to represent you. I doubt there is anyone inside Haven who would or could."

The shiver that racked her body wasn't just from the spasms of her muscles or the throbbing of her head. Some self-preservation instinct began scream that something had gone horribly, terribly wrong and she needed to get out, fast.

She wanted to ask what happened one more time, but before she could, the world spun again, the room slipping from color into dark shades of gray. She shut her eyes tightly and bit back the whimper while the pain ignited from the tip of her fingers and raced to the knot at the top of her spine.

"You are dying." The woman with the hood had an Orlesian accent, and that reminded her of something, but it was water slipping through a sieve. "But there is a warlock who thinks the only chance we have to survive lies within you. Perhaps you can save yourself as well."

Maria opened her eyes and stared the woman down. She didn't sound convinced and Cassandra didn't particularly look like she cared one way or another. Maria could see color burning back into the world, her vision pulsing like her heartbeat. "I don't remember what happened."

"Perhaps." Cassandra stepped forward again, gloved fingers dipping into the thin cotton of Maria's shirt. "It is easier to show you."

Maria wasn't sure what she expected, but it wasn't the spiraling pillar of darkness reaching into the sky. It was a storm cloud full of something crackling, sick green lightning piercing the roiling cloud. It moved in a never ending spiral, pieces of rubble floating in the air around it. Things were falling from it, escaping from it.

She'd been told the Temple of Sacred Ashes had been on top of that mountain. She guessed it wasn't there any longer. It was a shame, she'd have liked to see it. "We call it the vortex. It is a tear in the very fabric of our reality." Cassandra glared daggers at it, then down at Maria.

"You think I did that?" She asked breathlessly, the cold air stinging her lungs, increasing the effort it took to breathe. She wanted to ask where her coat was, but so far nobody had shown a sign of being a bit friendly. "That's witchcraft and I'm many things, but I'm not a witch."

"Somebody did it." Cassandra led her forward past silent, haunted faces of soldiers, templars, witches and warlocks. They all had faces streaked with sweat and grime and underneath all the righteous fury directed her way…

Fear. Pure, unadulterated horror.

"You are the only suspect." Cassandra didn't pry her fingers away from her arm. Maria would bruise later.

Suspect. She could laugh. "Why?"

She didn't actually mean it has a real question. It was more a rhetorical question to the entire universe asking how in Andraste's name her life could always get worse. But maybe Cassandra operated on a concrete playing field, because she answered. "You stepped out of it into the arms of one of our soldiers. They said there was someone behind you. A woman."

She stepped out of that? There was no way in hell or Earth anyone survived that. Maria ripped her eyes away from it, stared up into Cassandra's. "How many people died?"

The soft, gentle question disarmed the Seeker. She saw something twist within the woman's dark eyes before she frowned. "Many. Hundreds. And hundreds more are in danger. The column is expanding by the hour, we fear it will continue until the world is swallowed whole."

Maria was just under four and a half feet tall, which was way too short to be dealing with this. She looked back up helplessly, staring at the spinning vortex. "What am I supposed to do about that?" She asked, bewildered.

"Whatever occured changed you. We believe you could be the key to preventing further catastrophe. If you are innocent, as you claim, it is to your benefit to assist."

She took a shaky breath, dug her nails into the palm of her hand. "How?"

While they'd been speaking, they walked through town to an elegant set of stairs carved into the mountain. They looked… familiar, somehow. Her stomach rolled with a strange sense of deja vu, but the drawers she rattled for the memories were empty. Maria's brain stored every spare detail from a thousand useless, inane things, lines from poems she'd read in school, facts from a news story on pollution, the price of bananas in Par Vollen.

Fynn's smile against her neck while he pulled her hips to his. Bea's favorite song when she was seven years old. Her father helping her to aim a pistol with one big hand on her shoulder. Nanna crying when she found out where Maria got the money for the chemotherapy.

Her traitorous mind could recall all of it perfectly, but nothing after she stepped into Haven.

"We must make our way up to what is left of the temple." Cassandra pointed her sharp nose up the mountain. "And pray we are not too late and that our security forces have held."

xx

Life's a game, but it's not fair
I make the rules so I don't care
So I keep doin' my own thing
Walkin' tall against the rain
Victory's within the mile
Almost there, don't give up now
Only thing that's on my mind
Is who's gonna run this town tonight?

Maker's balls, he hoped if he didn't make it out of this, somebody was able to retrieve the data from his glasses. Bianca and Hawke would have a field day with the readings he was picking up. They could use the data to… He wasn't sure, honestly. Probably blow something sky-high and he wouldn't be around to talk the authorities down.

"Chuckles, I hope this plan of yours works." Varric muttered, reloading the rifle as deftly as he could. The runed bullets sparkled in his hands as he slid them into the chamber.

"Chances of failure are high." Bianca cautioned. "Even if the survivor is amenable to assisting, the vortex is emitting mass amounts of arcane energy. Enough to disintegrate anyone who attempts to get within two hundred feet."

The elf wiped his hands on his tight black pants impatiently. "Which is why we are completing our first attempt on one of the cracks, Mister Tethras."

His earpiece snapped and crackled and Varric frowned to himself. The connection with the satellite was growing more and more spotty. Every time he lost connection, Varric wondered if his clever little beauty could figure out a way to reconnect.

So far, she hadn't let him down. Instead of worrying about the AI, he turned his attention to the crack Solas studied. The elf showed up like he'd been sent by blessed Andraste himself and managed to stabilize the dying woman down below before turning his attention to the vortex itself. Varric's initial thoughts, that it'd been a crack in the veil between the two planes of existence, had been shared by the elf. Unfortunately, because Varric would have given his arm to not be right for once.

But unlike Varric, the man with the wolf-jaw necklace had an idea for fixing it. Unfortunately, it hinged on a lot of educated guesses being correct. One, that the power slowly tearing the dwarven woman apart was connected to the vortex. Two, that the vortex would respond to that power. Third, that the response to that power would be desirable and wouldn't just send them further up a shit creek without a paddle.

The cracks themselves formed near the vortex, but seemed to be spreading and opening elsewhere by the minute. They smoked along the ground and into thin air, wispy gnarled fingers of energy where the world cracked like a mirror. If he turned on the filter in his glasses, he'd see it spitting green sparks into the air around them. It was enough to make his chest air stand on end.

Solas had the wolf bone in his right hand, the leather strap he kept it on wrapped around his knuckles. His focus, Varric assumed. Hawke had her trusty zippo, Bethany used an old skeleton key strung on a necklace, Merrill carried around her boxcutter.

"There is something on the other side." Solas called out, finger rubbing the bone in his palm in a gentle caress. "Be on guard."

Varric didn't have to wait long before slender talons pushed their way through the crack. Varric took careful aim, but before he could so much as pull the rifle's trigger, a fist easily as large as his chest crashed through the crack with a shattering sound. Varric could see skin hanging, shredded and flayed, from the creature's arm as it shoved the crack open wide with a bellow, smaller shades and demons pouring out alongside it.

Then, it was all a matter of staying alive, even as the monsters descended with their gnashing teeth and deadly talons. He could hear the screams of the soldiers around him as they began to fall.

He remembered Hawke's eyes sparkling wickedly with too much drink as she leaned over the bar. All people have demons, Varric. I just see them better than anyone else.

Varric wished he could see substantially less demons and more of better things. Beaches, holiday lights, sunsets, pretty bartenders…

He was considering that thought when a blast of power forced the encroaching demons away. Varric turned, quickly, to take in the Seeker carefully aiming her revolver at the largest demon. Thank the Maker, Varric thought immediately. Reinforcements were always welcome.

And yet, the momentary distraction very nearly cost him. As it was, the close call shaved years off his life. When he turned back around, a wraith was nearly on him. Varric began to curse inventively, bringing up his rifle to give it a solid hit with the barrel. Instead, one shot rang out behind him, a perfect hole blooming in the wraith's wrinkled black skin, arcs of light dancing from the hole to extinguish the life in its eyes.

He dared a glance over his shoulder and met the most striking pair of gray eyes he'd ever seen. They were like liquid silverite, shining bright in the face of the woman they called an evil murderess. She held a pistol securely in both her hands, one wrist free of the dangling cuff still linked to her other hand. Nobody gave the poor woman back her blighted coat or even her hat before dragging her up on this suicide mission. She was dressed in that thin black shirt with the sleeves stopping at her elbow, tattered and ripped jeans, and those boots that saw better days.

His mind should have been doing more important things, surviving being key among them, but only one thought burned in his mind.

He thought the curves of her body would bring a man willingly to his knees, but it was those eyes that a man could die or kill for.

"Here!" Solas called, darting to her side and slipping one thin arm around her back, hurrying her to the crack. "Here, stand here."

She still had a pistol in her left hand, but it was her right hand that Solas raised and pressed flush against the jagged wound in the air. She flickered right in front of them, a gasp slipping from those coral lips before she yanked her hand away, held it to her chest and took a step back. Or at least, she tried to. Solas held his hand stiff behind her back, watching with an expression of smug satisfaction as the sky shimmered, the crack knitting together in front of her face, below her feet.

Oh thank fucking Andraste, they needed a damn break.

Solas changed his smile into something kind, gentle. His one arm tightened around her slim shoulders before he let go, giving an elegant and odd bow towards the small woman. "The hero of the hour, it seems. You do indeed hold the key to our salvation."

"Drop your weapon!" The Seeker demanded harshly, her own revolver leveled at the small woman next to Solas. The expression on Solas's face darkened and turned murderous while he spun, eyes alight with mutiny, to the Seeker. He stepped out in front of the dwarf, placing himself directly between the Seeker and the woman.

"No!" The woman protested, reaching out with her right arm and presenting the flat of her pal to Solas, a spike of fear in her bewitching eyes. With her other hand, cuff dangling comically, she ejected the clip from the pistol experly and kicked it away before slowly, carefully crouching to place it on the ground.

"Seeker, that is enough." Solas was immovable, back to the redhead and face pointed toward the Seeker. "I cannot claim to know what happened, but the magic that caused this is unlike what I have ever seen. Not only is your prisoner no witch, she is a dwarf. She is physically incapable of causing a disaster of this magnitude."

"She slipped her handcuffs." Cassandra argued, fingers curled tight around her revolver. "And she armed herself in spite of…"

"To save my ass." Varric sidled casually to the woman's side, shot her a wink as he bent to retrieve the clip. He held it back out to the woman with an easy, practiced grin. "Much appreciated."

She didn't reach out to take it. She still had her body angled toward Solas and the Seeker, her eyes on his but her attention on the corner of her eye where she could watch the two of them. Her face was carefully impassive, but Varric didn't miss the trembling of her hands.

The Seeker lowered her revolver with a sigh, holstering it and fixing the dwarf with something approaching resignation. "No, they are right. The most dangerous part of our climb is ahead and we cannot expect you to be defenseless. You know how to use that pistol, I trust?"

It had been a perfect shot, Varric knew it couldn't have been easy, but the woman only nodded and crouched back down to retrieve it. She carefully retrieved the clip from his gloved fingers. "You've got to be freezing. What happened to her coat, Seeker? Or her hat?"

Cassandra blinked owlishly before her cheeks flushed with what Varric sincerely hoped was shame. "I did not… time was of the essence."

"It's fine." The woman protested, but it certainly wasn't. As if reading his mind, Solas was already stripping off his own coat. He had a soft sweater underneath it, much thicker than the thin shirt their new friend wore.

"You'll have to roll up the sleeves." Solas sounded apologetic. "But it would do us no good if you froze on our way up the mountain."

"I can't…" She began to deflect again, holding herself stiff and wary. Varric broke in, taking those piercing eyes away from Solas.

"Seeker, introduce us properly." Varric said smoothly. "I typically like to know the names of all the people I'm running suicide jobs with."

The Seeker opened her mouth, then shut it with a definitive click, the color building beneath her skin. Varric raised an eyebrow as Cassandra muttered something under her breath. "Sorry, didn't catch that?"

"She didn't ask me for my name."

Varric turned in shock back to the beautiful redhead before scowling back at the Seeker. "You've got to be shitting me."

"It was not the time for pleasantries." The Seeker bit out, turning on her heel. "We need to get to the temple before…"

"I am Solas." The elf gave another of his quaint half-bows and a grave smile. "I am, much like I suspect you are, in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, I stayed to use my expertise to combat this vortex."

"He also saved your life after they pulled you down off that mountain. You looked touch and go there for awhile." Varric pulled his lock picks back from his pocket and held them up in front of the woman's eyes. "Mind if I get that other bracelet off you, Princess?"

"Princess?" She echoed, perplexed, but she held her arm out in silent invitation.

"Mister Tethras is fond of nicknames." Solas finished rolling up the sleeves on his coat and held it open in silent invitation. He missed the small, startled movement of the woman's whole body, but Solas couldn't miss the sudden gleaming interest in her eyes while Varric popped the cuff off and let it fall to the ground.

"I thought you looked familiar." There was a hint of a smile in her voice for the first time and it gave her voice a light, lilting music. "No glasses on the back of your books, though."

"I would never risk obscuring my third best feature on my author biography." Her eyes turned warm, lively. She allowed herself the luxury of slipping into Solas's coat with a mumbled, almost shy, thank you.

She didn't do it, he thought. Whatever happened here, she wasn't responsible. He was sure. "I love meeting a fan, even in the most dire of circumstances. What's your name, Princess?"

She hesitated only a second before she answered. "Maria Cadash."

His earpiece chirped. "There will be a delay, Varric, but I can begin to search for information about a Maria Cadash from Ostwick."

Bianca's voice in his ear made him smile even brighter, but he shook his head. There'd be time for that later, if they didn't die horribly. He was just glad his baby was back and the plan looked like it could work.

"If you are all quite finished." Cassandra folded her arms impatiently across her chest.

"I hypothesize that your very presence can ease the cracks in the world." Solas scowled upwards towards the vortex. "You are a part of the magic that caused it, however that came to be. You are two parts of a puzzle and by bringing both of you together… we may be able to stop the vortex and save your life. If we do nothing…"

"Everyone dies." Maria guessed. Solas nodded, weary and resigned.

Maria squared her shoulders and set her jaw. She looked like a woman about to fight a dragon. "Right. Let's go then."

Varric smirked and gestured ahead of them with his rifle. "Lead on, Cadash."