Marian forces herself to her feet, but when she looks around the room, the demon is gone. A second glance shows her its body hidden behind the statue. Whatever they'd done in the Fade has taken care of it, and that's good enough.
The others get to their feet in their own time, though Alistair avoids looking at her, instead checking that his armor and weapons are where he left them. Wynne and Leliana are sober and thoughtful, but not embarrassed, and of course Cú has no cares in the world, instantly coming to her hand and panting happily when she speaks to him.
She doesn't know what she'd do without Cú. He is constantly by her side, strong and free and loving her as if it were the obvious thing to do, and she leans on him more than she'll ever admit.
They may have had a nap, but it wasn't quite restful, so Marian decrees another quick stop while she sets her teeth and moves to Niall's side. He's so freshly dead that he's still warm, and it's only the fact that the demon is already dead that keeps her from killing it all over again. It doesn't seem fair the way it could trap someone in their own mind and use their own life force to keep them there; it's not that she expects the world to be a fair and just place, but the idea of a situation without options, without a way out, is anathema to her.
"Maker take you to his side," she says to him, prays for him, and it is little enough, but at the same time it is all she can do. She takes the Litany from his hand and leaves him dead on the floor, another person she couldn't save.
The Litany is nothing but a small, golden book, heavy in her hand. She turns the pages, reading quickly, and has the invocation memorized before their rest period is up.
Is this all there is to it? It can't be, otherwise blood magic would be nothing to fear, but she can't find any other instructions. She presses her lips together into a thin line, irritated and worried in equal measure, and tucks the book away in her belt. She may need it soon.
She'd been brought this way for her Harrowing, so she knows that there are three more rooms on this floor, hidden behind the rest, and while she thinks she's prepared for whatever enemies they hold she swiftly finds that she's wrong.
"Drakes?" she says incredulously when they're all dead, staring at their bodies on the ground. Cú nudges one of the corpses with his nose, and seems disappointed when it's still dead.
"Maybe the templars were into drake racing," Alistair says with a shrug, eyeing the bodies when he's finished wiping the blood off his sword.
"We should hurry," Wynne says, her urgency palpable at this point, and Marian nods, falling in behind Alistair. They advance down the hall step by step, fighting abominations the whole way, until they reach the last little room on this floor.
It's full to the bursting of that organic grossness, huge, foul sacs and dripping globules lining the walls, outgrowths slowly colonizing the pillars, feelers tracing their way across the ceiling. In the middle, there's a clear space that leads to the staircase to the Harrowing chambers. There's a force field in that space, and inside is a templar on his knees, his forehead pressed to the floor, praying under his breath, desperate and heart-wrenching.
It's Cullen. She'd recognize that hair anywhere.
Marian races over, dropping to her knees just outside of the force field, but when she touches it hesitantly it spits at her. She swears, shaking her hand to get the feeling back in her fingers. Wynne is circling around the edges, probing it with her magic.
Cullen looks up when she speaks, and she doesn't know what to expect, but it's not the weary determination that she sees before he bends back to his clasped hands. "This trick again?" he asks, so tired, so agonized, that she tries to reach for him all unthinking and swears when she shocks herself on the field again. Cullen shakes his head. "I know what you are," he says, and now there's disgust. "It won't work. I will stay strong..."
What have they done to him?
"Cullen, it's me," Marian says, distressed. "Don't you know me?"
"Only too well," he mutters.
What?
"How far they must have delved into my thoughts..."
"I've never seen anything like this cage," Wynne says, her eyes narrowed, finishing her circuit of the field at Marian's side. "But the boy is exhausted. Rest easy," she says to Cullen, like the grandmother she wishes she had. "Help is here."
"Enough visions," Cullen groans into his hands. "If anything in you is human, kill me now and stop this game."
She doesn't know what they've done to him. In truth, she doesn't want to.
Leliana crouches on Marian's other side, regarding Cullen with shaken pity. "He's delirious," she says. "He's been tortured, and probably denied food and water. I can tell."
Marian glances at her, wondering how she knows that, but it's not important right now. Later. She'll think about it later, along with everything else, when she has time.
Leliana twists, digging in one of the packs. "I have a skin – "
Cullen scrambles several feet backward in panicked reaction. "Don't touch me! Stay away!" He folds himself back into prayer almost immediately, speaking faster as if to make up for his lapse. "Sifting through my thoughts... tempting me with the one thing I always wanted but could never have... Using my shame against me... my ill-advised infatuation with her, a mage of all things – " Despite herself, she can feel herself turning beet-red. Alistair is right there – she can feel his eyes on her back – and so is Wynne, and there aren't two people in the world she'd want to hear this less. Marian balls her hands into fists on her thighs and prays for patience. She's not embarrassed, because there's nothing for her to be ashamed of, but the heat climbing up her neck is unwelcome. She hadn't realized his feelings ran so deep. She hadn't thought of how it must seem to him, to be a templar obsessed with a mage under his sword. "I am so tired of these cruel jokes, these tricks..."
She hadn't thought her heart whole enough to break again today, but it does now, for Cullen who is so tired, so agonized and hurt.
"Cullen," she says, doing everything she can to make herself smaller, less of a threat. "This isn't a trick. It's really me. I came back to help."
"Silence!" he screams at her, trailing off into a gasping sob as he brings himself back under control. She digs her nails into her palms, searching for the self-control not to reach out to him again. "I'll not listen to anything you have to say. Begone!"
He closes his eyes, returning to his prayer with new fervor and desperation, muttering the Chant under his breath. She can just make out the words. "Guide me through the blackest nights," he says.
She knows this one. "Steel my heart against the temptations of the wicked," she says in unison with him.
That makes him look up again, and the look he fixes on her is thoroughly shocked. "You're still here? But that's always worked before," he says, stunned. "I closed my eyes, but you are still here when I open them."
"Because I'm real," she says, her brow furrowed in concern.
He looks at her then, and for the first time he's really looking at her, not whatever nightmares have taken root in his mind. He takes in her companions, too, his eyes lingering on Wynne, narrowed and judgemental, before coming back to her. "Don't blame me for being cautious," Cullen says, his voice tired, hoarse now, like he's been screaming. "The voices, the images, they were so real..."
Marian shakes her head tightly. She'd never dream of blaming him for that – not when she has her own trauma she's not anxious to explain to anyone.
"Why did you return to the tower?" Cullen asks, almost glaring at her, accusatory, daring her to say something wrong. He stands, and she doesn't like the way he looks down at her from height, so she gets to her feet too, stepping back from the edge of the force field. "How did you survive?"
"If you mean Ostagar, Alistair saved my life," Marian says, glancing over her shoulder at Alistair. He frowns at her, and she shakes her head in the smallest gesture she can manage before turning back around. She doesn't want to get into the details, which are irrelevant and would include Morrigan in any version of the story; and in any case, what she said is just as true, if only metaphorically. "I came back because the Wardens require the Circle's aid," Marian says slowly, carefully, picking her words. "We have treaties – "
"Good," Cullen interrupts, clearly not listening to her, rough and angry. "Kill Uldred. Kill them all for what they've done. They caged us like animals, looked for ways to break us; I'm the only one left." He takes a breath, and while it's shaky and there's still something wrong with his eyes, he appears calmer, and yet still sad, still haunted. "They turned some into monsters," he says softly. "There was nothing I could do." He must mean the other templars, the ones she's seen no sign of. She crunches numbers in her head, weighing the population of the Tower against the number of blood mages, mind-controlled templars, and abominations they'd fought on the way up, and she still comes up wanting. How many can still be alive up there?
Marian wants to give Cullen time, and space, and respect the memory of his dead friends. There just isn't time, for any of it. Damn Greagoir and his fucking reactionary –
She stops herself. That, too, is a thought for another time.
"Where are Irving and the others?" she asks, urgent now.
"What others? What are you talking about?" Cullen demands impatiently, pounding his fist against his thigh so gently that his gauntlet only makes a rhythmic clanging against his fauld. Marian's not even sure he knows he's doing it.
She'd known a man named Ser Cullen, smiled at him, teased him, laughed with him, had even kissed him on the cheek once. That man is dead now, and even if this man before her recovers from the monstrous thing that's been done to him, the man she knew won't ever come back.
"Irving and the other mages who fought Uldred," Wynne explains. "Where are they?"
Cullen glances at the stairs to the Harrowing chamber out of the corner of his eye, but clearly won't turn any further. She doesn't know if he can't bear to look at it, or if he won't turn away from her, the threat in front of him. "They are in the Harrowing Chamber," he says, and the belligerence has gone again from his voice, leaving only pain and the memory of pain. "The sounds coming out from there – oh, Maker – " He traces the Maker's Circle on his chest.
"Then we must hurry," Wynne says to Marian, imploring, and Marian nods, gesturing for Alistair to precede her as she knows he must.
Cullen draws her attention back to him, and when she turns her head, he's stepped even closer to the field than before, his fists clenched. Alistair pauses on the first step of the stairs. "You can't save them," Cullen says raggedly. "You don't know what they've become."
"If you know something, then tell me," Marian says, imploring.
He swallows. "They've been surrounded by blood mages whose wicked fingers snake into your mind and corrupt your thoughts," Cullen says, low and fast. Marian thinks it's the only way he could get it out at all; he's near shaking now, his fists clenched tight, but he's so pale and thin that it's a wonder he's the energy for so much vitriol.
Alistair and Wynne are conferring softly behind her, and Leliana hasn't said a word to anyone since whatever memory prompted her to speak up about Cullen's treatment, but Marian can't look away from Cullen. "Are you saying that everyone up there is an abomination?" she asks.
She can't believe that. For all his flaws, Irving is an exceptionally strong mage with an equally strong will, and he knows the dangers.
Cullen jerks his head to the side in what Marian thinks is supposed to be a shake of his head. He's vibrating nearly out of control now. "I am saying that to ensure this mess is truly over, to guarantee that no abominations or blood mages live, you must kill everyone up there. A thorough cleansing."
Marian forgets how to breathe for a moment. She'd trusted this man once with her very life – but her earlier thoughts about this new, broken man in front of her come back to her now. That man is dead. This man is just a damaged templar, and that's all.
And any templar will advocate killing mages.
It takes a certain amount of effort to keep her voice modulated and cool, to avoid unleashing her anger and pain and hurt on this man who does not deserve it. "You'll be safe enough here, Ser Cullen," she says, turning her head to nod at Alistair, who takes her silent hint and starts up the stairs again. Leliana and Wynne follow him, while Cú, as always, sticks close to her side. "We've cleared the Tower below. We won't be long."
She turns and takes the stairs two at a time, but she can't outrun Cullen's voice behind her, calling after her, rasping, angry and desperate. "You cannot tell maleficarum by sight! Just one could – "
She shuts the door to the Harrowing chamber behind her, cutting Cullen off, and takes one long, shaking breath before she turns around. A mage she can only assume to be Uldred glances over his shoulder at them, grins sharp and wicked, and then just dismisses them to turn his attention back to two abominations standing over a third, prone on the floor.
Irving is there, bloodied and bruised but still alive, thank the Maker. There are some others with him, including her friend Rashmi, but their numbers are far too few to account for the missing population of the Circle. Her heart sinks; Lissette is nowhere to be found, and if she's not here...
The Harrowing Chamber is festooned with the glistening, wet sacs, the ones Marian's subconsciously come to think of as egg sacs. An infestation of this size requires either a long time to grow or a huge amount of... raw material.
Marian bites her lip hard, brings her staff around; her companions are already there and ready, and they throw themselves at Uldred and his abominations.
Her first shock is the flash and fog of Uldred changing form into – into she has no idea what, actually, something huge and fierce and deadly, as big as an ogre and twice as strong. It laughs at them, deep and menacing, and that reminds her of something – but then she and the others are hip deep in abominations, and she puts it aside for later.
"Don't forget the Litany!" Wynne cries at her, and Marian wrestles it out of her belt so she'll have it when she needs it. The Litany can only be used at the moment blood magic is being cast, so she'll have to be accurate and she'll have to be quick, but most of all she'll have to be observant.
She flings a frantic force field at the thing that was Uldred before joining the others in laying into the abominations. They use the time as best they can, whittling down their enemies to one before Uldred finally cracks the barrier around him and rejoins the fight, huge fists swinging and just as dangerous on the backswing with elbow spikes the size of druffaloes.
Cú rips the last abomination's throat out with his teeth and Uldred tries something on the captive mages, a pulse of something that Marian only catches the edges of and yet it still makes her feel grimy and revolting inside her mind.
"Use the Litany!" Wynne calls. Marian fumbles the incantation the first time, but she gets it right the next try and feels a different sort of pulse emanate directly from the book, something cleansing that negates Uldred's magic and leaves the air feeling curiously neutral, like a glass waiting to be filled.
It hurts Uldred, too; he roars, not triumphant as before but agonized, and Marian narrows her eyes. "Get him," she says, so cold and angry at everything he's done to her and her friends and her lovers and classmates – and even those she'd hated didn't deserve this, any of this.
They resume the fight, Marian fighting with a passion that would surprise her if she weren't already full up on emotions right now, and after several rounds of the Litany, Leliana puts an arrow through Uldred's eye socket and directly into his brain and finally, finally it's over.
Marian doesn't even pause to watch his body fall, instead racing around it and over to the captive mages. She unties Irving, and then Rashmi, turning her face to look at the damage –
Rashmi slaps Marian so hard across the face that her head turns to the side. When she looks back, wounded, her brows drawn together, Rashmi bursts into tears. "Where have you been?" she demands between sobs, and Marian closes her eyes and gathers Rashmi in for a hug, avoiding her obvious injuries. That there are injuries not so obvious, Marian has no doubt. She doesn't know how to answer her, but luckily an answer doesn't seem to be required.
Irving and Wynne confer in low tones, and then Irving comes over to her. "I was surprised to see you," he says, searching her face. "But I am glad you have returned." He looks around at the mages who have survived Uldred, the very few, and suddenly he looks so old, older than Marian's ever seen him. She realizes that she has no idea how old he really is. He could be fifty, or he could be eighty, or anywhere in between. He's been the First Enchanter here a long time, and yet he never seems to age, like the political machinations he enjoys are a potion of youth.
This has done it, though.
Irving sighs. "The Circle owes all of you a debt we will never be able to repay," he says.
Marian shakes her head. "Not for this," she says, and doesn't reply to Irving's questioning look.
They take the mages back down through the quiet, empty Tower. Rashmi holds Marian's hand tightly the entire time, so tightly that the tips of her fingers turn quite blue, but letting go is out of the question. Marian is holding on just as hard.
After they pass through the library Marian forces herself to let go, to let Petra take care of Rashmi, and she hugs them both before she accompanies Irving to Greagoir out in the foyer. She watches them greet each other with the genuine relief of real friendship, and again she wonders at even the possibility that they have feelings for each other other than jailor and prisoner.
It's not her problem nor her concern at the moment, and so she puts it aside. Cullen is there already, filling Greagoir's head with his poison, and the only surprise is that Greagoir asks for her opinion before slaughtering the mages out of hand. She can be honest when she says that she thinks the mages are safe, that they show no signs of blood magic. She expects to feel guilty at how much she wants that to be true, and yet she really, really doesn't.
After that, arranging for the Circles to honor their Blight treaty is easy. Marian finds herself thinking that it's too easy, that there's a catch she's missing, and reminds herself that the entire day has been that catch and then forces herself to put it out of her mind. Cullen is not as angry with her as she expected and in fact, seems almost calm about the way things have worked out. It worries her, or it would if she weren't so entirely done with this place. It's only a moment's extra work to arrange for a group of mages and a sufficient quantity of lyrium to be sent with her to Redcliffe and to accept Wynne's offer of a helping hand against the Blight, and then she is free.
The ride back across the lake is so, so quiet that it makes her ears ring. No one seems to feel up to breaking the heavy silence.
After only a little searching, they locate Bodahn in the Spoiled Princess, and he's willing to pack up his wagon and meet them three leagues down the road in an old campsite where Marian had agreed to wait for the Circle mages accompanying them to Redcliffe.
It's a long, slow, cold walk, one that gives her too much time to think and not enough to distract her. She doesn't want to relive today; it'll be bad enough when she sleeps.
She keeps ahead of the others, so they won't see her crying.
It seems like they walk forever before they make camp, and when they do, the silence lingers. Alistair brings the rags and polish over, and they clean their armor in silence, broken only by their scale mail jangling and the spitting fire. Alistair keeps stealing glances at her, little things out of the corner of his eye, and she doesn't know why. Eventually she asks.
"Do you remember the dream?" he asks casually. He's very intent on grinding a deep nick out of the edge of his sword, giving him a great excuse not to look at her.
Marian thinks about lying to him, about telling him that she doesn't remember. She decides against it, not because she wants him not to know but because if she says that, she's acknowledging that it has power over her, a hold on her, and she won't do that.
"I remember," she says, and nothing else. She wants to see where he's going with this. For lack of anything else to do, she takes up his shield and begins to wipe it clean in slow, rhythmic circles.
"So you saw..." He trails off like he doesn't want to say it out loud.
Marian takes pity on him. "I won't tell anyone, if that's what you're worried about," she says. She doesn't think she's imagining the tension that leaves his shoulders, the line of his back, his neck when she says that. He had been worried, and for what? "You haven't anything to be ashamed of, you know," Marian continues. She uses her thumbnail to scrape off a particularly stubborn bloodstain. "Mine was similar."
That doesn't seem to help. It almost prompts a question, though, something he immediately seems to think better of, by the tiny shake of his head and the way he firmly closes his mouth again after. She imagines he wants to know what her dream was, and he's restraining himself from asking.
She can feel the way her eyes are going soft around the edges, the little smile on her mouth that's happening quite without her permission, and she hastily looks down at her work before he looks at her again. But she can't quite extinguish the warm swell of affection in her heart.
Oh, she's in so much trouble.
But she can't quite bring herself to regret that, either.
She can bend a little, she decides. "Do you remember in Lothering, I disappeared for a while?"
That brings his head around fast. "Of course I do, I looked for you everywhere," he says, with the slightly injured tones of remembered indignation.
She thinks carefully about how she's going to word this next part. She doesn't want to lie to him any more, but for her sister's sake, she can't tell him the whole truth, either. "My family used to live in Lothering," she says in the end. "I found out there that my father died three years ago."
She swallows down tears again. Marian is so tired of feeling this way, hurting this way, and she'd quite happily cut out her heart and set it on fire if it would help.
It probably wouldn't, though.
"I'm sorry," he says, and while Alistair does look genuinely sympathetic, he also looks like a rabbit that's just turned around to see Cú, teeth bared and ready to pounce. He looks like he has no idea what to say to her and he's terrified that she's going to start crying any second.
Marian is surprised by her own laugh, and while it's creaky and rusty and weary, it still counts. She savors that for a minute, just the idea that there's something in her beside pain and the memory of pain.
"That's what the demon tried to trap me with," Marian says. She expects it to hurt just as much as it had, but it's softer now, with duller edges. She doesn't understand the difference, but she's thankful for it. "My father was there, and we had a little farm. We were happy."
"But how did you figure it out?" Alistair asks, pressing her.
How had she known? "Something wasn't right," Marian says, hopelessly vague. "It was perfect, but... something was missing." She pauses, trying to pinpoint what she meant, but she can't put it into words. "It was just wrong, that's all, and eventually I worked it out. Something kept bothering me..." She trails off, looking over at his face, lit soft and glowing by the firelight, and only then does she realize what she'd been missing in the Fade, who she'd been missing. It settles into her like she's known it all along, and maybe she has. It would explain a lot.
Try not to tell everyone how easily fooled I was, he'd said. She thinks that it's not about what she saw, which was the deepest, most secret desire of his heart, but that he was fool enough to believe that it was real and that he could have it.
It takes Alistair more than a little while to respond, and it sounds like he's doing his best not to sound as self-deprecating as she knows he can be when he does. "I'm guessing you did your own rescuing, though."
Marian laughs. It sounds wrong even to her own ears, and she can't imagine how it sounds to him. "It helps that I knew my father was dead," she says. She looks up at him only to find he's staring at her; that's when she knows for certain that he'll do his feeble best to comfort her and then she'll cry and she just can't. She searches for something else to talk about, anything else, and hits on something she'd wanted to know. "So, do you really have a sister?" Marian asks, making no attempt to hide her changing of the subject.
Alistair raises both eyebrows, but he lets her have her way, shrugging and going back to his sword and whetstone. "Half-sister, actually," he says, bringing his sword up to sight along the blade. He finally seems satisfied with the edge and turns it over to check the other side. "I told you about my mother, right? She was a servant at Redcliffe Castle, and she had a daughter... only I never knew about her," he says. "I don't think she knew about me, either. They kept my birth a secret. But when I became a Grey Warden I did some checking, and, well..." He looks up at her, and she marvels again that he lets himself be so vulnerable with her. She could cut him to the bone with one cruel word; he's given her plenty of ammunition, and she thinks that they're friends now, even if they weren't before. He'd let her do whatever she wanted. She doesn't want to, but she could.
She's secure enough in herself to acknowledge the way the idea lights her up inside.
"She's in Denerim," he says simply. "She's still alive."
"We'll probably end up in Denerim eventually if we keep going this way," Marian points out. "Do you want to look her up?"
Alistair hesitates for a long moment, watching the whetstone and sword in his hands like they hold all the answers. "She's the only real family I have left, the only family not also mixed up in the whole royal thing," he says eventually. "I've just been thinking... maybe it's time I went to see her. With the Blight coming and everything, I don't know if I'll ever get another chance. Maybe I can help her, warn her about the danger, I don't know." He looks at her, his hands still, and as the seconds go by, she realizes that he's actually looking to her for an answer, that he really wouldn't go if she thought it sounded like a bad idea.
That tiny little jealous part of her tries to point out that Alistair had chosen his sister over the Wardens in his dream, that he might do it again, that she really can't do this without him, but she brushes that away. Alistair would never abandon them in the waking world. She's ashamed of herself for even thinking it.
"Alistair," Marian says firmly. "You should see your sister."
The way his face lights up, pleased and almost surprised, makes her smile, and that's a gift, too, after the day they've had. "Thanks," he says with a grin. "I appreciate that. If something happened to her and I never went to at least see her, I don't know if I could forgive myself."
"Remind me whenever we work our way out there," Marian says, though she's fairly sure she won't forget. She has a constantly updated list of errands that need running in her mind, and she checks it often.
"Will you..." Alistair trails off, closing his mouth and busying himself with the polish.
Marian pokes him with his own shield, and he turns a startled look on her. She's done with it, so she hands it over and pins him with a look. "Just ask me. You'll never know if you don't." She's never seen the point of keeping questions hidden inside. She wants to know everything, and even if that's impossible, she's still going to try. Questions are her tools. She likes questions.
He gives her a look, narrowed eyes, flat mouth, and all, but then he relents. "I suppose you're right," he says. "Will you come with me when I go to see her?"
It surprises her, not that he'd want some kind of emotional backup, but that he wants it to be her. There's the kind of situational friends that she'd thought he thought they were, and then there's the kind of real friends that trust each other. He trusts her. She's finding it hard to believe, but she'd like to. It feels good.
"If you'd like me to, of course I will," Marian says, watching him intently. He grins at her, pleased, and she smiles back.