But upon the throne of heaven they found

No dragons bearing promised rewards.

Silence 3:2, 1-2

In silence, Zevran Arainai kneeled, and offered the woman a piece of cloth; she looked away, not accepting it. It was remarkably unwise of her, he thought; her injuries looked days old. Some were caked, some already infected – he might have aided her with a wet piece of cloth, yet there was no water in her cell.

Not even the regular drip of humidity that such places conjured, in Antiva, but then, he considered, Antiva was wet; Tevinter was dry, and Minrathous was far further north than Antiva City was…it was still a port city, there should have been some water dripping somewhere…

'There is no clan Arainai,' the beaten woman said, in a hoarse voice. 'That is a Shem name.'

'Is that important, my lady?' Zevran asked. 'I am here to…'

'Your mock vallaslin is that of Ghilan'nain. How does a knife ear with a Shem name come by a vallaslin?'

Oh, Zevran thought, drawing a deep breath, they'd told him she was a handful, but this was not quite the handful he had imagined. A pleasant handful she might have been, or could be again, he considered, also regretfully contemplating the fact that his employers were extravagant indeed, if they chose to send an assassin on a rescue mission better suited to a Templar.

Or well, not a Templar. Just a man in heavy armour, in more ways than one.

On the other hand, given Abelas, and whatever that strange creature's employer was, he should have expected this. He sought to reason.

'Veldrin Lavellan,' he said to the beaten woman, 'you have been imprisoned for over a week. You are beaten, you are starved, you are bait worth no more than the fish that would swallow you…'

'You are a human with pointed ears,' she hissed, in return, 'an usurper of a marking you do not understand and an insult from Solas to me. Be gone. If he wanted me, he should have come himself.'

Here, though, Zevran had the upper hand.

'My lady, I am told he would have,' he said, hoping revealing all he knew would strike some chord, 'but the true bars of your prison are more magic than locks. Those who imprisoned you made them so. I am here because I have no magic, but I possess skill with locks and dark places. I am merely to guide you…carry you,' he corrected, looking upon the woman and wondering if she could even stand, 'until we are outside the magic bars of your cage.'

She looked up, and Zevran noticed something strange. Perhaps merely thought he'd noticed it – he'd been told this woman's eyes were golden, yet as she glanced up, her eyes glinted red for the briefest of moments.

'Go, before they kill you,' the woman called Veldrin said.

'Maker,' the man mumbled, 'this is starting to look more like a kidnapping than like a rescue by the minute…'

'Do you know what they plan to do?' she asked. 'Those who sent you here?'

'Yes,' he replied, losing his patience. 'They plan to save your life.'

Heavy steps resounded from the end of the corridor, approaching rapidly; Zevran knew he had been quiet, but that the bodies of the two guards who had stood before the door were plainly visible. He cursed under his breath, realising that even the small distance between them and the door spun the width of a continent. He reached out to grab Veldrin's shoulders, nonetheless. If she truly fought back, he would not be able to carry her, but that, in the end, another bruise among many would matter little…

His hands went straight through her figure, and he stared at his fingers in incomprehension. They felt wet.

'Run,' the woman said, but there was nowhere to run to; the door behind him opened, and slammed against the wall.

'Veldrin, thank the Maker…' Zevran heard; he sprung to his feet. The voice was a woman's, so some hope of dashing past her, and out of magic nullifying cell yet remained. Once outside of it…

He turned and froze, as did all hope.

Indeed, the person standing in the doorway was a woman – a tall, heavily armoured woman, whom he vaguely recognised as the Divine, and against whom, he guessed, his swords would count little. Two mages in black robes flanked her on either side, looking…amused? Zevran dazedly noted, before realising that the bodies of the two guards should have been sprawled at the mages' feet. They weren't.

The assassin slowly sheathed his swords.

'I do not know what this is, my lady,' Zevran said, in sincere self-irony, 'but by the look on your face, I can only assume that we have both been cruelly had. Some, I think,' he added, looking over his shoulder at the utterly empty cell behind him, then measuring the look of sincere pain on the tall woman's features, 'more cruelly than others. Yes?'

Even as one who hated politics and all forms of the game, Orlesian or not, Divine Victoria found the few days that immediately followed Solas' attack on Tevinter utterly fascinating – granted, in a terror inducing manner. The only consolation she took from watching it all unfold was that her Imperial counterpart was even more baffled than she was, and did not wield a quarter of her influence.

Or well, Cassandra had realised, the influence she had thought she possessed.

Unlike she had expected it had been Ferelden, not Tevinter, to withdraw from scheduled negotiations on the very next day. Teagan had made the flimsiest of excuses to Radonis, and none to Cassandra herself, when she'd managed to see him.

The situation, he'd said, had changed, and he would not proceed until he received further instructions from Denerim. Explaining that Tevinter's plight would soon translate into a plight for the entire continent had left the Fereldan man utterly untouched – for as far as Denerim was concerned, this was an opportunity. Treaties would be signed, he'd assured an increasingly furious Cassandra, yet not quite the treaties that had originally been intended.

He'd not gone as far as to remind the Divine of her open support of the former Inquisitor, who'd now been shown as the danger Ferelden had always known she would become, but the words had been on the tip of his tongue and in the corner of his lips, as he grinned. He was grinning though, and the Divine suspected it was her still impressive physical form rather than her holy garments to keep Teagan from outright gloating.

The Orlesian court's position, which Archon Radonis, rather than Cassandra had received on the afternoon of the very same day had been far more nuanced, yet no more encouraging.

Empress Celene expressed her deep regret over the attacks in three impressively short paragraphs. Most of the next four pages of the letter detailed her sincerest desire for strengthening a recent friend and ally by bolstering Tevinter's armies with Orlesian ones; the Chevaliers were assembled and would ride as soon as Tevinter agreed that standing against the Qun was the single most important action both nations could undertake, under these concerning circumstances.

The precision of the plan, the exactitude of the numbers, the detail of the positioning of both troops and fleets had made Radonis smile and light-heartedly comment that Orlais' generals were truly great minds, if they could design all this…support within a day and a half; he too had needed say no more, and Cassandra had left his presence with a bitter taste in her mouth as well as the terrible realisation of the very real downfalls of optimism.

Of course those plans had not been created overnight, she'd later said to Leliana.

Of course the plans have nothing to do with the Qun, Leliana had agreed, with the air of one who had expected all chess pieces to move precisely as they had; though the Nightingale had meant to be reassuring, and had not spoken the words in reproach, Cassandra had not been able to listen further, and had merely contented herself on a nod.

All had seen this coming, it seemed – all but the Divine herself, and perhaps Veldrin, who'd assumed Thaedas would at least wait for Solas to be defeated before they once more tore at each other's throats.

And to think I called her cynical, Cassandra had sadly reckoned, remembering the former Inquisitor's expression as she'd spoken the words, and realising that, in a sense, Veldrin had been as foolishly optimistic as she had…

That first day had been one of reflection; a flurry of madness had risen to engulf her on the very next one.

Maevaris Tilani had stirred fury in the Senate, not in Veldrin's or Dorian's defense, but strictly on her own behalf, and watching the spectacle to which she'd adamantly been invited to had made Cassandra numb with incredulous awe.

She had only met the Magistra on the day of Solas' attack, but she knew of her from Varric, who spoke of her kindly and with an amused, warm glint in his eyes. Eccentricities aside, Tilani had not struck Cassandra as a ruthless turncoat, and nothing in their short acquaintance or the dwarf's outlandish tales could have prepared her for the fact that Maevaris had asked for Veldrin and Dorian's heads with greater ferocity than even their enemies had – this woman, the one who'd shamelessly kissed Dorian on the lips wanted his head on a pike two days later, and nothing was safe or sacred in her desperate attempts at saving herself and her fraction.

Tilani had called for Veldrin to be publically questioned; she'd called for Dorian to be returned from Quarinus in chains, and from above it all, Radonis, who not often presided over Magisterium sessions in person had impassively watched, saying neither yay nor nay to Maevaris' speech. The only thing he had said was that nothing could save Tilani from her own fate, and that she should perhaps considered what she wished upon her treacherous friends, as she would soon join them…That, in fact, his patience with her was running thin – no sooner had the Archon said the words, that Templars had moved in, and the Senate had cheered and clapped and howled with joy at her arrest, like so many Avvar in a bear baiting ring…

…and Maker, the feeling that this was not, that it could not be subterfuge as Leliana sourly warned, had gripped Cassandra's heart like a vice. If the Magisters would do this to one of their own, Andraste only knew what they were doing to Veldrin – Radonis was unreadable, the rest were hostile, and the only way that Divine Victoria could feel ascertained that she was merely playing her part on a stage meant to deceive another was by seeing Veldrin herself.

She'd petitioned for it, only to be served with a persona non grata order in Leliana's name in Radonis' antechamber. The Divine was still welcome, but the Nightingale was to leave the Imperium, or risk consequences. Despite gentle hints from the Black Divine, who shyly whispered that what the Archon said was what the Imperium would do, and that just standing in his antechamber with no hope of being received diminished both Chantries, precisely when both had been dealt a deadly blow, Cassandra chose to grit her teeth and wait.

In vain, or, at the very least, for little practical gain.

For the entire week that followed, seeing Radonis alone had proven an impossible feat – the ranks of his concilliarum had closed about him, forming an insurmountable wall. He had, after two days of waiting, received her, but only in official capacity. All communication had been flawlessly polite and at a definite armoured arm's length, and if the man wore a mask, seeing beneath it was impossible.

The moment, he had explained, while his six dark shadows loomed over them both, was too charged for suspicions of collusion to run rampant. Thus, all conversations needed to be witnessed or put in writing, or, preferably both; the only sign of goodwill that Radonis did extend was the fact that Leliana's removal, for however harsh the wording of the expulsion order had been, was not truly insisted on.

Nor, the Divine noted, was the impressive guard detail stationed outside the Pavus mansion truly intrusive; they never truly entered past the foyer, and the house felt more protected than actually watched.

This, of course, changed nothing – with each passing day, Leliana grew grimmer and more withdrawn. The activities of her known agents were being closely supervised, yet not curtailed, which only seemed to infuriate the Nightingale further, for she was playing a wasteful cat and mouse game on uneven territory, and without truly knowing whether she was the cat or the mouse. In truth, Leliana considered that the unexpected freedom of action had only been granted so that the Imperium's own agents could see what her own agents were looking into, and was thus a more effective shackle than an outright ban.

The Magisterium's behaviour, the Nightingale had sourly said, was perfect, too perfect, in fact. To an outsider, the two intelligence organisations might have appeared as hostile to each other, which, of course, was absolutely true from Leliana's point of view, as she was thoroughly assured that Dorian was not in Quarinus, and that Veldrin herself was long gone from Minrathous – a thing that Cassandra absolutely refused to believe.

Radonis' stubbornness in not even sharing where Veldrin was being held had thus begun to seriously chip away at even Leliana and Cassandra's wizened and tested friendship; the former feared the elf, the latter feared for her, and it seemed nothing but Veldrin herself could bridge the divide – at the end of ten days of waiting, the Divine had had enough of both suspicion and fear, and decided she'd had quite enough of playing to the Archon's tune.

In full view of the Fereldan delegation and concilliarum, and at the risk of causing the Black Divine to collapse to the floor in shock, Cassandra had announced that she would personally not participate in further discussions until she was allowed to ascertain the condition of the Inquisitor, whom she considered innocent beyond doubt.

The surprise hinging on panic and the sudden shift in attitudes that her words had caused might have been amusing under different circumstances – Radonis had arched an eyebrow, but Teagan's entire edifice of superiority had crumbled in an instant. Ferelden could afford to posture, but could not afford to actually walk away, nor could they continue speaking without the Divine's blessing – Cassandra had played a grand political card without even noticing she had, and twisted Teagan's arm into adding his voice to hers, in Veldrin's defense.

Though he had probably swallowed bile at every word, the Arl had found himself in the terrible position of petitioning for the Divine to meet with Veldrin; Radonis had not crumbled immediately, but he had folded another day later, granting Cassandra a bitter-sweet victory over the Nightingale.

The discrete notice that the Divine would be allowed to meet and speak with the Inquisitor had truly left Leliana baffled, yet relieved; true to herself, the Nightingale had muttered that now, that they were certain Veldrin was truly in Radonis' custody, Cassandra should not have gone through with the meeting. It was enough confirmation that the elf was still in Minrathous, and the Tevinters had already dangerously underestimated Fen'Harel twice. In fact, all the Divine had succeeded in was blackmailing Radonis into leading the Dread Wolf straight to his enemy.

Or lover.

Or both.

Which, Cassandra bitterly thought, as the blonde elf who stood in Veldrin's empty cell sheathed his sword, was precisely what she might have done, if she had not been led astray herself. So deep was the heartbreak that the fact that Veldrin's dance had equally fooled Solas did not enter her mind; instead of seeing to the elf, she spun on the mages who'd led her here, down a false path.

'What is this?' she growled. 'What…'

The mages pulled their staves, and brought them to focus a heartbeat too late, for, from his sword's hilt, the elf's hand swiftly moved along his belt, to a small leather pouch. He yanked it off and threw it to the floor, causing thick, poisonous smoke to engulf them all. She felt nauseated and dizzy, but still managed to grip one of the elf's swords as he darted past her; the next deep breath she took, while angling to strike was her undoing.

Numbness spread though her limbs and her eyelids fell heavy. Whatever she had eaten over the past two days returned to her mouth with a vengeance, and she heaved – the blonde elf darted though the thick smoke, past her and past the mages and out of view; there was a quick flash of light and then he was gone, leaving Divine Victoria with naught but the image of the empty cell and the aftertaste of his mention of cruelty left in her mouth.

Hello, hello, and thank you for reading and commenting!

Seems like Vel has, in the end, learned a bit from her beloved, in terms of causing chaos and confusion, yes? ;) And it will only get worse up next :)