Mother Giselle's steady hands gripped a young man's as a medic in combat fatigues stitched up a wound on his forearm. The woman's warm brown eyes seemed to contain an endless amount of patience and strength while the man hissed and groaned. Maria guessed they didn't have any anaesthetic and she could sympathize. After all, she knew better than to go to the hospital with suspicious wounds as a gang member, emergency room nurses were only too happy to call the police.

Once, Dwyka cracked her so hard with a beer bottle that Bea needed to shave part of her hair to stitch her skull back together. She wished her sister's hands were as steady as the cleric's.

"You must be the one they call the Herald." Giselle looked up from the face of the boy, rising gracefully from her knees and extending her hand. "It is an honor."

"No." Maria blurted out. Giselle's eyebrows climbed up her forehead and Maria winced. "I mean, yes. I guess that's what they're calling me, but I'm not…"

"This is the Herald of Andraste." Cassandra muttered pointedly, shooting Maria a look that clearly said not to be difficult. Maria pursed her lips and opened her mouth to argue.

"Maria Cadash, yes?" The Mother interrupted, smiling gently. "Your photos do not do you justice. You have kind eyes."

Not much could catch her off guard, but that did. Maria clicked her jaw shut immediately, looking askance at the cleric.

"Yes." Cole agreed from behind her. "They are."

Varric chuckled and she heard him urge Cole to follow him elsewhere, hopefully somewhere where Cole wouldn't distract her with his odd, yet insightful comments or his bizarre way of helping.

Honestly, just as well Varric was taking him away because Tethras served as an endless distraction with his damn half unbuttoned shirts, his infuriating smirk, his stupid bluetooth headset, and his irritatingly overprotective demeanor.

She would not admit that it was kind of sweet, not even to herself.

"I am glad that you have come to see me." Giselle swept her arm over the makeshift infirmary. "We are in dire straits, but the situation has improved vastly since the arrival of Inquisition forces. The risk of hypothermia, illness, and starvation still loom, but your efforts have helped."

"I haven't done much." Since waking, Maria did little except sit in rooms and listen to Cassandra, Cullen, Josephine, and Leliana talk circles around what to do. It was honestly enough to drive anyone insane.

"You stopped the sky from spitting out demons, did you not?" Giselle smiled again. "That is more than a little, my child."

Maria shrugged awkwardly and looked up at Cassandra, hopelessly out of place. Cassandra's jaw was set in a tense line and she was staring at the cleric, waiting for something to happen. Maybe the Seeker was more patient than Maria was, but sitting in silence seemed less than helpful. "You asked to see me?"

Giselle nodded in response, sighing wearily. Suddenly, the woman looked ages older. "Yes. I fear that you are the only one that could help. It is not bad enough that we have templars and witches at our very door killing each other, careless of who is caught in the middle, but…"

Giselle turned and waved for them to follow. Maria spared a glance over her shoulder to ensure Solas was still present. The elf nodded in encouragement and Maria stepped forward, Cassandra beside her. Giselle led her into a small, curtained area with a cluttered desk and a small statue of Andraste set up, a candle in her hands that fluttered in the breeze from a cracked window. "Excuse my makeshift office, Herald." Giselle pleaded, picking up a slim laptop from the desk and opening it.

"Maria." She corrected. Hell, she'd rather the woman call her Cadash like Cassandra did instead of encouraging this Herald nonsense.

"We were busing in refugees during the cease fire." Giselle stated while she opened her laptop and revealed a satellite photo, Maria assumed of the area. Giselle pointed to a neighborhood on the map and frowned. "There were civilians ensconced here, but their situation was untenable. We were able to remove about half of them, but…"

"The temple exploded and the war was back on?" Maria guessed shrewdly. Giselle sighed and shook her head.

"I wish it were so simple." Giselle admitted. "If it were so, I would simply send as many soldiers as we could and hope the Maker would protect the refugees from harm or that the templars and witches would see there was no sense in hurting innocent families. Instead… there is a crack in the world here." Giselle jabbed her finger at the screen.

"Ah." Solas murmured from behind her. "And has the Inquisition sent patrols?"

Cassandra glared at the image. "Several according to the Corporal Vale. The only one that was able to get close enough to investigate lost two men before coming back. Demonic forces are using the crack to enter the world."

Maria felt like someone slipped ice in the back of her shirt. "There's no other way into that neighborhood?"

Giselle's elegant fingers traced the photo. "No. The northern border is rugged terrain, we could not expect children, the ill, or the elderly to make the trip safely. The west and the east are territories controlled by the Templars and Witches respectively."

Giselle looked up, her eyes steady and calm when they met Maria's. "I was told you can close these cracks, Herald."

She had, once. She didn't know if she could do it again and looked wildly over her shoulder for Solas. The elf stroked his chin with one hand, the other worrying the jawbone around his neck. "Yes." Solas murmured. "It should be possible."

"It is dangerous." Cassandra argued. "And you should not be put at more risk than is necessary since you are the key to closing the vortex."

"Are the demons attacking the people?" Maria asked, looking at the satellite photo again. She could see the neat, tidy houses distinguished by roofs in shades of brown, gray, and blue line up in perfect rows like toys.

"If they have not done so yet, it is only a matter of time." Solas advised seriously. "They are defenseless."

Cassandra's fingers curled into a fist, her expression barely containing impotent rage. "How many?"

"At least fifty. Perhaps more." Giselle answered.

The words came out easier than she thought they would, the trueness in them startling. "If I don't close it, nobody else can. The Inquisition needs to get those people out of there, the Witches and Templars aren't going to do it."

"If you assist me in rescuing the trapped refugees, I swear any assistance I can offer to the Inquisition. My contacts within the chantry, my knowledge of my brothers and sisters, my own reputation, whatever you need." Giselle swore, eyes burning fervently. "Please, if you are doing the Maker's work you must help."

The Seeker stood, stiff and unsure, glaring a hole into the laptop screen. "Cassandra, they're going to die." Maria realized she was running her thumb up and down the arrow tattoo on her wrist. She stilled her hands, but didn't remove her fingers from her own skin. "I want to save them if I can."

"It is your decision." Cassandra declared, eyes burning just as fiercely as Giselle's. "It is your power that is needed, you who are most at risk. If you wish to seal this crack, I will accompany you, but if you do not…"

"I will also assist." Solas offered gallantly as she knew he would. "It would be good to see your power in action a second time at any rate."

"Should we get Varric, Cole, and Harding to make it a party?" Maria asked lightly. Cassandra made a disgusted noise low in her throat and rolled her eyes.

xx

"So, kid, tell me how did you like Ostwick?"

It wasn't the best place to interrogate Cole, but hell if the kid was ever far away from Maria. On the rare occasions she got pulled into those endless meetings in the chantry, Solas took on babysitting with eagle-eyed vigilance. Varric honestly thought it'd be easier to start nicking the Seeker's underwear.

But he wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth when it showed up. Solas demonstrated a fierce desire to keep Maria from being a figurehead for the chantry, a goal Varric didn't disapprove of, and he knew the elf wasn't going to let her meet with this Mother Giselle without him. Varric also realized, quickly, that Cole shouldn't be involved in any sort of negotiation or delicate political meeting.

"The ocean hits the docks. Salt sprays in the air, lingers in my nose. The cabs whiz past, Bea grabs my elbow, laughing, presses her lips to my cheek, tells me to stay close. She knows the maze of streets, feels the pavement in her pulse. It's the beat she dances to and the tune she hums in the kitchen. Home."

"Maria dances?" Varric's traitorous mind summoned the Herald rolling her hips to an imaginary drumbeat, a teasing smile over her shoulder as he watched her sway in a dimly lit room filled with the press of bodies, the kind of club Hawke favored before she became Champion.

"Sometimes. Not often, not the way Bea does." Cole tipped his head to the side, thoughtful. "Maria keeps her clothes on."

Varric couldn't wait to wake up to that headline. HERALD OF ANDRASTE'S SISTER KNOWN EXOTIC DANCER. Varric wondered if somebody had warned Ruffles yet, then immediately remembered Nightingale lurking in the shadows. They had to know.

"What does Maria do in Ostwick?" Varric asked casually, guiding the kid around a line stretching across the train station for soup that smelled a bit like old socks.

"The brick shattered the window. They wrote on it, filthy names, told them to go back to Rivain. It scared the shopkeeper's family, so she scared the ones that threw it. The kid brings a cigarette to his mouth, laughing, asks if she wants a fight. She doesn't. She wants to go home, she wants to read a book, she wants to go back to Hercinia before it all went wrong. He turns to his friend, cigarette dangling from his pale lips. He didn't know she had a gun. She wasn't going to hurt them, but they didn't know that. The bullet doesn't hit him, but it takes the cigarette with it, embeds into the brick wall. Maria's fingers are sure, steady, her voice a laugh as the kid turns startled eyes back to us. She told him that racism and cigarettes both cause cancer, told him to give it up. They ran away and Tulme smiled."

Be still his beating heart. Hawke's concerns about him finding a new muse in Maria Cadash were becoming frighteningly realistic. He was about to press the kid for more details when Cole's face darkened and the kid continued on as if he were powerless to stop himself. "But she was late to the docks because she helped Tulme. Dwyka doesn't like it when she's late, but she told me not to worry. Told me to go home. I didn't want to, but she didn't want me to see. Doesn't want anyone to see."

There was that cold feeling of dread again. "See what?" Varric asked as mildly as he could, letting his eyes wander the room as if he could care less what the answer was.

Cole's voice was cold as ice when he spoke, harsh and angry. "Who she is when she's with him. Who he makes her."

Varric had a vivid imagination and that one sentence held too many possibilities, none of them good. Varric didn't know much about the head of the Ostwick Carta, what he did know was enough to make it abundantly clear he didn't need to know more. Dwyka's reputation as a greedy, sadistic man proceeded him across the Free Marches. Somehow, Varric hoped that Maria Cadash was at the bottom rung of the Carta, removed as far as possible from the bastard in charge. That looked like an increasingly remote possibility.

So what did Dwyka have her doing that she didn't want Cole to see? Kidnapping? Murder? Hooked on drugs? It had to be more than the lyrium she'd been clearly sent to sell at the conclave, nobody cared that much about a little lyrium smuggling.

Still, something in Varric hesitated. She clearly wasn't doing drugs, someone would have noticed that. And there was no way Maria Cadash had such a dual personality that she could be handing out snack cakes to children weeks after committing murders in Ostwick, right?

Bartrand brought Varric lunch hours before he locked Hawke in a mine to die. It had been a surprising, and touching, occurrence. Varric thought it a thank you for finding Hawke in the first place. Varric still couldn't look at Rivaini food the same way, it tasted like betrayal now.

"You can't know." Cole muttered, scowled at his scuffed boots. "She doesn't want anyone to know. If you don't know, you're safe from a bullet with her name on it."

Was that what got Fynn Dunhark? A bullet with Maria Cadash's name on it?

xx

"These bullets are enchanted." The Seeker held up silver shell casing, tipped it to the side so that Maria could see the runes engraved on it. They shimmered in the steel with suppressed power. "They are created specifically to kill demons, but the only fatal shot worth aiming for is the head. Demons have no heart."

Maria was always attentive to lessons, she was a hell of a student back in the day. "Are the runes the same? On all of them?"

"On these, yes." Solas did not handle the bullets themselves, acting as if he found them distasteful. "I have seen others warded to cause explosions, fires, freezing. Any number of enchantments."

"Because regular bullets aren't lethal enough." Maria murmured, holding out her hand. The Seeker dumped a bunch of the shells in her palm and Maria rolled them in her skin, examined them critically.

"In days of old, warriors carved runes in their swords and shields." Solas smiled softly, sadly. "They were instruments of beauty as well as destruction."

"Don't like guns, I take it?" Varric asked nonchalantly, but he didn't bother to look up from his tablet screen, the one displaying the footage from the drone camera Harding was flying. In fact, he'd been making a studied lack of eye contact with her the past hour or so. Maria tried to ignore it and insisted on dismissing the sinking feeling in her gut.

"Some can certainly be elegant." Cassandra argued, setting her jaw stubbornly.

"My father had one with a mother of pearl handle."

The words were out of her mouth before she really contemplated them and she couldn't say why. Perhaps the runes shimmering on the bullets reminded her of the glossy light on the antique old gun. She hoped nobody had been paying attention, but of course when she looked up everyone was staring at her. Apparently, that statement was interesting enough to even tear Varric's eyes from the screen. Maria hunched her shoulders forward under their gaze. "He collected them. Had some pretty ones."

"My dad collects antique farming equipment." Harding offered to break the silence. "It's… well, they're not pretty."

Well, slap her ass and call her a nug, Investigative Reporter Harding was quickly becoming her favorite person if just for her knack at saying precisely the right combination of weird and endearing at the right time.

"Everyone needs a hobby, I guess." Varric mumbled with a wry grin, dropping his eyes back to the tablet without meeting Maria's again. It shouldn't irritate her, she reminded herself.

"Aim for the head. Try not to die." She repeated, pocketing the extra bullets. Her fingers brushed the square in her other pocket and she paused, thoughtful.

She didn't look at the news, but she'd bet Varric did. Had another report come out today? One delving even deeper into her own personal closet full of skeletons? Nobody mentioned anything, but the only two that seemed to do so frequently were Leliana and Josephine…

Maybe it was better to know what her companions were reading about her. She pulled the phone out, opened the internet browser and paused, wary, before typing in her name and hitting enter.

There were nine-hundred and thirty thousand results. She bit back a startled laugh and scrolled down to the headlines that appeared first and the tiny thumbnail photos with them. Her breath caught when she saw the first one, the blood rushing to her ears.

It was the photo Fynn kept as the wallpaper on his laptop. The one they took on the pier in Hercinia the day they went to the carnival there. They bought cotton candy and caramel popcorn, played the games and gave the prizes they won to small children with wide eyes and toothy grins.

Well, they said nothing posted to the internet ever vanished. Had Fynn put it on Facebook? She'd have allowed it, there weren't any distinguishing landmarks. You couldn't even tell it was a pier or that the city behind them was Hercinia.

Sweet Andraste, they both looked so heartbreakingly young.

She needed to read the headline beside it three times before her brain absorbed any of the words, before she strung them together. Weapons heir murdered. Cadash acquitted. Friends and family still mourn.

She still mourned him, more than the bloodsucking leeches that shared his blood, but nobody ever wrote that.

"Cadash!"

Her head snapped up and she faced Cassandra's steely glare. "If you are not going to pay attention, I will confiscate that device!"

Thank the Maker for Cassandra. She needed the laughter that statement brought, made her fingers steadier than they'd be otherwise as she slipped the device into her pocket next to the runed bullets. "Sorry, Seeker. Just needed to check Twitter."

"You still trending?" Harding asked brightly.

"Yes!" Varric grinned, looking back up and tapping the screen. "We've got a beautiful visual here."

"Uh… that's an awful lot of demons to be called beautiful but whatever works for you, I guess." Harding looked askance at Varric.

"Finally." Cassandra loaded her own clip and jerked her head at Maria. "Come. Let us end this."

Maria took a deep breath and nodded.

xx

Thank Andraste's sweet tits they left Cole in Mother Giselle's care. Maria said the boy was good with a knife in a pinch, but he definitely didn't think knives were gonna do much about the towering inferno guarding the smoking crack in the world.

"Seeker?" Maria asked quietly.

Cassandra made a noise that was both impatient and discouraging. It didn't stop Maria from looking over at her. "What do I aim at when the head isn't exactly head-like?"

Varric snorted in amusement before he could help himself. Solas glared at him for Cassandra, but Varric couldn't help but feel it was a fair question. "Perhaps allow Solas to handle that one." Cassandra directed tersely.

"And when they're gone, I just walk up and push my hand against that thing?" Maria continued.

"Yes." Solas agreed. "That is what worked last time."

"What if something reaches out and grabs me?"

Maria looked serious, but her eyes were sparkling. Cassandra whipped her head to the side and snapped quietly.

"Maker's breath, did you not think to ask any of these before we made it this far?"

"Would you believe they didn't occur to me?" Maria asked.

"Oh for the love of…" Cassandra pinched the bridge of her nose. Maria's lips quirked up in amusement and her eyes flicked past the Seeker to his.

For a brief second, he could almost convince himself she was riling the Seeker up just to make Varric laugh. But that sounded implausible so he dismissed it roundly and ripped his eyes from hers. "Seeker Pentaghast and I will get closer. At the signal, you will cover us." Solas reminded them all severely.

"That part I remember." Maria readied her weapon and took a deep breath. "Go on then."

Solas and Cassandra both melted away into the brush on either side of them, leaving Varric and Maria alone staring down the hill at the narrow road leading to the crack in the world. If he squinted, he could see one of the bridges into the little town chock full of innocent people, but Varric could hear nothing but the disgustingly charming sounds of nature around them. He also couldn't quite ignore the simmering tension between him and the redhead on his left.

"The news stories aren't all true." Maria blurted out, both defensive and awkward.

Varric, apparently, was wrong about Maria ignoring the news coverage. "That doesn't surprise me half as much as you think, Princess. They got Kirkwall all wrong too."

Sure, the facts were the facts either way you cut them. Hawke and Varric willfully hid a warlock from the appropriate authorities for something like eight years, said warlock blew up the Chantry, war happened because of it.

But that didn't take into account the possessed demon cat, the red lyrium, the Viscount's murder, and the fact that Anders was their friend running a free clinic in the slums, drinking cheap beer with him at the Hanged Man, making googly eyes at Hawke behind her back and…

Maker, Varric never saw it coming.

"Then why are you acting like I did something wrong?" She demanded.

Damnit, she was too observant for her own good. He couldn't risk breaking his concentration by looking at her, but he could picture her eyes flashing in the sunlight.

"You know, I had a source in Ostwick get on the wrong side of the Carta there about three years ago. Dwyka got a hold of him before I could pull the kid out." Varric waited, but Maria didn't say anything. Varric soldiered on. "He was in the ICU for a week and he still has a shit memory."

"Are you trying to ask if I was there?"

"Were you?" Varric hadn't actually meant to ask that, but if it was on the table…

"I don't beat people up for Dwyka." She hissed.

"What do you do?" Varric asked. "Cause I just can't get my head around a woman like you working for that bastard if you know what he's like, and I have a hard time believing you don't know."

"I know."

He'd expected her to deny it, but her admission was both utterly sincere and frighteningly quiet. She wasn't looking at him when he chanced a glance at her, she was staring down into the valley as if nothing was more fascinating than the rip in the world and the demons surrounding it.

Which was definitely where he needed to be focusing too, but he was floored by the brush of her lashes against her cheek, the tumultuous emotions swirling around her eyes.

She didn't like who she was, who he made her, but there was good in her. She didn't have to go back to Ostwick when this was all done, he could offer to spirit her away to wherever she wanted.

"I shake down businesses for protection money and I smuggle lyrium. That's what I do for Dwyka." She answered, finger lightly brushing the trigger of her gun. "I also do a substantial amount of illegal gambling, but that's more on my own time for both fun and profit. I don't hurt people. I never hurt anyone unless I don't have another choice, I promise."

Before Varric could respond to that, he heard the crack of gunfire beneath him. Varric looked down just in time to watch frost creeping over the towering pillar of flames that Hawke said represented rage. Maria's gun went off next, taking a shade down before it could turn its attention to Solas as the ground broke open beneath the rage demon and Cassandra shouted to redirect another shade.

"That's my cue." Maria muttered before she vanished into the underbrush. He could just catch sight of her hair weaving and ducking through the foliage before she stumbled out onto the road, aiming one other bullet at a wraith grasping at her with long, pointed claws.

Varric blew the head off one of the shades before it could follow Maria, then turned his attention to trying to keep the slimy, wretched things off the Seeker while he carefully picked his own way down the slope.

Unfortunately, it seemed Solas didn't have that rage demon under control. As if sensing the biggest danger to its existence wasn't the elf trying to freeze it, but the small figure creeping closer and closer to the crack it emerged from, it turned in a whirl of flames.

"Princess!" Varric called in warning, but he didn't accomplish anything more than drawing the demon's attention to him. Varric found himself staring up at a mountain of lava, the chest hair exposed already beginning to smoulder, and wishing valiantly that he'd have just stayed in Kirkwall. The demon roared back to suck in air, a prelude to the flames he knew were coming, and he started to retreat to the side, as quickly as he could.

He didn't expect to be rugby tackled to the ground just as the flames spewed over both his head and the fall of red hair tickling his jawbone. They'd rolled several paces away and Varric could feel his skin tingling on the right. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see his own arm laying perilously close to the crack in the world, the smoke spewing from it raising up in lazy circles.

Maybe something was going to reach through and grab him.

Before he could let the horror of that thought sink in, Maria leaned over and pressed her own palm against the ground. He felt the power he couldn't see, a force like a strong wind that snapped against his body and cause the rage demon to choke on its own flames. Maria's hand flickered, Varric was close enough to see how her skin became translucent. He could see the wound in the world stitching itself closed through her, the crack growing dimmer and dimmer before vanishing, her skin solidifying.

Varric quickly became aware that her hand wasn't the only solid part of her worth focusing on. They'd landed in a position when she tackled him that… damnit, that he really didn't need to be able to picture as perfectly as he could now.

She straddled one of his muscular thighs with both of hers, the rasp of fabric against fabric overly loud when she shifted. She still had one hand pressed to the ground to their right where the crack had sealed, but her other was braced over the red silk button-up he was wearing, the tips of her thumb just brushing bare skin. Lose strands of her hair teased his skin and her knee…

Her left knee was in a position where if she moved it just a tiny bit in a certain direction, he wasn't going to be responsible for what happened next. Varric was honestly afraid to take his eyes off her right hand and look up just in case he saw…

What? Disgust? Or worse, the blooming heat he could feel in his own veins?

"Right." Varric gasped, his mouth moving before his body could betray him any more than it already did. "Good job team. Princess, can you…"

Her left hand curled into the cloth covering his skin, her fingers burning through the fabric and Varric felt his heart thud unevenly in response. He wanted this, he wanted her to twist the fabric and lean closer until her breasts brushed against his chest. He wanted her to capture his lips in a slow, leisurely kiss that was all wicked, sinful passion and playful teasing.

He wanted to fuck the Herald of Andraste right here and there wasn't really any use acting like he didn't want it. Still, he couldn't, he couldn't because she was Carta, she was also holy, and she…

She tackled him out of the way of certain injury even though he had to piss her off.

As his thoughts scattered and sparked, he watched as her right hand slowly raise off the ground.

That's when he realized her fingers were shaking. He swung an alarmed gaze up to Maria's face, saw the crimson blood dripping from her nose as she touched it. She pulled her trembling fingertips away to examine them before looking down at him. Varric could see his concern reflected back at him even as he let go of his shotgun and eased one arm around her waist, not to pull her body to him like his cock demanded, but to steady her as she swayed lightly.

"We've got to stop meeting this way." Maria joked, trying to shove him away weakly.

"Tell me about it." Varric muttered as Maria's eyes blinked slowly, dazed. She was trying to focus on his face, but he could tell she struggled.

Then her eyes rolled back and she pitched forward into his chest.