Currently I'm working my way through posting chapters that have been edited (by someone besides me; in general I like editing for other people and can edit my own work, but I hate having to do it). At some point, though, we will come to chapters that have yet to be edited and the pace will necessarily slow since the person helping me has a life, including a new baby. If anyone out there would be interested in volunteering some of your time to help with editing, do let me know. Even just reading through watching for typos and passages that don't make sense is useful. You get to read ahead a little, which admittedly isn't much compensation, but I know there are fanfics I would kill to be able to do that with, so maybe someone out there will feel the same about this one.

Go Oft Awry

We landed in water, falling to a flooded floor from a height nearly equal to my own, with a prodigious splash. I heard running feet, and instinctively put up a barrier even before understanding what was going on.

A good instinct - they were guards, dressed in shining, pale armor that was surprisingly easy for me to see, with wild, frenzied auras. They attacked; Dorian and I struck them down. "Where's the Veil?" I breathed, looking around at the light-filled space. Not - not real light, at least I didn't think so, but the light that was the Fade, spilling over everything.

"Displacement," Dorian mused. "Interesting." He stepped closer, studying my face. "Partially your doing - and probably not what Alexius intended. The rift must have moved us...to what? The closest confluence of arcane energy?"

"I tried to take us from the hall, to get us away from the rift - but it didn't work," I told him, still looking around with wonder. Then I realized what I was looking at, and stepped back a pace. "This is red lyrium. What is red lyrium doing here?"

"What's red lyrium?" Dorian wondered.

We stared at each other for a beat. "Okay, prioritize questions," he suggested.

"There's no Veil," I observed again. "I can see things. Likely not as well as you can, but... I can see things."

"Well, that should make this little adventure more navigable, don't you think? Are we in the Fade, then?"

"No, I would be seeing the Veil from the other side," I pointed out. "It would still be there."

"Time magic," he mused. "We must have been moved through time - the question isn't simply where - it's when! The amulet was a focus, and Alexius moved us through time!"

I glanced around. "The future, then? But how far into the future? And what has happened in the meantime?"

"Excellent questions. We had better look around and find out - along with how we are to get back. If we can," he said, his voice dropping ominously.

He left the flooded cell we had landed in, and I joined him on the slightly raised floor outside, where he paused to wring some of the water out of his robes. I stopped beside him, still marveling over my ability to see . It took another moment before I noticed both his struggle and my own sodden clothing, and summoned heat to help us both dry. Fire might be my worst element, but it didn't matter how much mana I consumed in maintaining the spell - not when I could draw more power directly from the Fade.

Dorian watched with interest. "Is it difficult to control - without the Veil, I mean?"

"No," I replied, surprised. What would make him think it would be difficult to control? "Is that why you didn't do it yourself?"

"Well, I wasn't quite sure how a sustained spell like that would react," he replied, slightly defensive. "It's one thing to call a bolt of lightning and then release it - quite another to give a spell time to soak up all the ambient energy."

"That isn't the way it works," I told him. "The spell still has to be directed. Though," I added, "it might take your expectations as direction - so I suppose your caution isn't entirely unwarranted."

"The raw Fade is so appallingly unrefined," he said with a sniff. "I prefer magic be precise and - so long as one can determine all the proper variables - predictable. Which, come to think of it, may be why I cannot for the life of me channel enough spirit to heal so much as a paper cut. Thank you," he added as our robes dried to no worse than damp.

"De da'rahn," I replied. "All right, so...I'm guessing Alexius wasn't trying to send us to the future?"

"No," Dorian agreed with a chuckle, gesturing for me to follow him. "I very much doubt it."

We emerged from a doorway into another large cell. "So what was he trying to do?" I wondered. "There was too much going on for me to even begin making sense of that spell - I've never seen anything like it."

"Likely his original plan was to remove you from time entirely," Dorian said, holding the (thankfully) unlocked cell door open for me. "If that happened, you would never have been at the Temple of Sacred Ashes or mangled his Elder One's plan. He was reckless, I tried to counter - and then you did your bit of magic trying to pull us away. The spell went wrong." We came to a flight of stairs. "I would say ladies first , but I think under the circumstances the only gentlemanly thing to do is take point."

"Especially since I don't see well enough to take point," I agreed dryly, following him up the steps. They were still blurry to my real sight, but the light of the Fade illuminated them in a way I had never before envisioned, and I could see the intent of the stone written into every finger's breadth. I knew where each crack and uneven spot lay as surely as if I had run my hand across every stair we traversed.

"You know, we still don't know who this 'Elder One' is," I called up to the mage leading me.

"Leader of the Venatori, I suspect," he replied absently, peering out into a deserted hall. "Some magister aspiring to godhood." His voice tried for humor, but he wasn't able to cover up its strident fury. "It's the same old tune. Let's play with magic we don't understand. It will make us incredibly powerful! Doesn't matter if you rip apart the fabric of time in the process, evidently."

We fell silent for a few minutes, moving with care. At last we came to a larger hall that boasted two whole guards, both keeping watch on a single exit and neither paying much attention to the duty. "Set up a glyph," I suggested softly. "I can throw them both onto it." With the Fade illuminating everything, it didn't matter that their auras were dim.

"Both of them?" Dorian repeated, glancing at me.

"I grabbed both of us, didn't I?"

"Fair point," he conceded, throwing down a glyph just behind them. I waited for it to root itself, and then wrapped the Fade around the two of them, pulling them back an arm's length onto the glyph. It went up in a sheet of fire, killing them both. "That is a very nice trick," Dorian told me.

"When I can make it work," I sighed, heading over to loot the bodies.

"Well, there is that," he agreed, following.

They didn't have much - some rations I wouldn't have trusted even if they hadn't been burned, swords that would have made Harritt howl in despair at their lack of quality, and a ring of keys, which I handed off to Dorian.

"So," I asked as we went on, "do you actually have a plan, or are we supposed to be muttering prayers to any deity that might exist, presumably excluding this 'Elder One'?" Dorian appeared to be choosing doors at random. He opened one and led the way down a flight of stairs longer than the one we had just finished climbing.

"I have some thoughts on the matter," he reassured me. "They're lovely thoughts, like little jewels."

Unfortunately the way he said it was the opposite of reassuring.

"I care less about how lovely they are than I do about how much they're worth," I replied flatly. "And do you somehow think we're going to find Alexius deeper in his dungeons?"

"We're exploring," he reminded me. "Maybe Alexius is keeping prisoners. That would tell us a lot, don't you think?"

"I suppose - potentially," I allowed.

We had only walked another dozen steps when a voice called out: "Is someone...there?"

Dorian looked at me with a superior smirk.

"Is that Fiona?" I asked, ignoring his expression and hurrying ahead.

I found her in a cell, half encased in red lyrium.

"You're...alive? How?" she asked as I stared at her in horror. Her eyes burned like coals, and wisps of red lightning danced about her skin and through her aura. She was rail-thin, and yet the lumps visible beneath her skin looked less like bone than shards of crystal. "I saw you...disappear...into the rift."

"Fiona," I managed, "is that really you?"

"What's left...of me," she said haltingly.

"Can you tell us the date?" Dorian asked, coming up behind me. "It's very important."

"Harvestmere...9:42 Dragon," she said.

"Nine forty-two," he echoed. "Then we've missed an entire year!"

"Only an entire year," I corrected him, looking around pointedly. "We apparently missed a lot during that year."

"You must...beware," Fiona gasped. "Alexius...serves the Elder One. More powerful...than the Maker. No one...challenges him and lives."

I had, apparently - not that I remembered it. Without the spell wrapped through my hand, though, they had evidently found it impossible to close the Breach. "Not more powerful than the Maker yet , in our time," I mused, putting together the pieces. "Dorian, we have to go back."

"Our only hope is to find the amulet that Alexius used to send us here," he replied. "If it still exists, I can use it to reopen the rift at the exact moment we left. Maybe."

"Good," Fiona sighed.

"I said maybe," he reiterated. "It might also turn us into paste."

"You must try," she insisted. "Your spymaster, Leliana...she is here. Find her. Quickly...before the Elder One...learns you're here."

"We'll do our best," I promised her. "I - is there anything we can do for you?" It felt wrong to simply leave her.

She laughed, and the sound was pure despair. "Only if you...can change...the past," she whispered, and then slumped against the wall - whether unconscious or dead, I couldn't say. It didn't seem as though it mattered now. We couldn't do anything for her here.

I turned away from her, sick.

We continued exploring the dungeons with renewed determination. If Alexius held Fiona and Leliana, who could say whom else we might find? Well, in actuality the answer was obvious: he held everyone who had come with us to Redcliffe Castle on a fateful morning that was apparently a year gone by.

We found Varric first, his humming leading us to his cell, where he sat, face blank with despair. His eyes, like Fiona's, blazed with their own eerie light, and red lightning whispered about him. "Varric," I choked.

"Andraste's sacred knickers," he breathed, "you're alive? Where were you?" He climbed to his feet. "How did you escape?"

Dorian explained.

It somehow sounded more unbelievable every time one of us spoke of it, but Varric took the news more or less in stride. "Everything that happens to you is weird," he laughed as he shook his head at me, sounding as though either the emotion or the physical movement of his lungs pained him.

"It certainly seems that way, doesn't it?" I sighed.

"I'm always right," he said, sounding more like his usual self but for the strange, echoing rasp in his voice, "and when I'm not, I lie about it. So, what are you doing here? Or did you come back just to trade quips with me?"

"It would have been worth the trip," I assured him, "but we actually have a plan to potentially save the world. We just have to find Alexius."

"That may not be as easy as you think - the world-saving bit," he warned us. "Alexius is just a servant. His 'Elder One' assassinated the empress and led a demon army in a huge invasion of the south. The Elder One rules everything. What's left of it, anyway. Alexius is...really not the one you need to worry about."

"He is for now," Dorian contradicted the dwarf. "We need his amulet to get back."

"Okay, sure," Varric agreed easily. "I'm in. Pretty sure I'm just going crazy and this is all in my head, but it's better than anything I've dreamed up so far. Let's go kill Alexius."

One of the keys we had found on the guards unlocked his cell. Dorian opened the door for him and he joined us.

We found Blackwall next.

He was in the same state as the others, and his voice was ragged as he spoke: "Andraste have mercy! You shouldn't be here. The dead should rest in peace."

"True," I allowed, "so it's a good thing I'm not dead."

"Alexius's spell didn't kill us," Dorian explained. "It sent us forward in time."

Blackwall blinked, and his eyes slid to Varric. "Don't look at me, Hero," the dwarf said. "I'm pretty sure I'm still in my cell, hallucinating."

"Look," Dorian interrupted impatiently, "bottom line: we get to Alexius, get his amulet, we have a chance to go back and make sure none of this ever happens."

Blackwall mulled it over for a moment, and then nodded decisively. "When you put it that way - I'm in."

"Good man," Dorian replied.

I sighed. "Thank you," I told the Warden.

"Of course, my lady. Maker, I hope this isn't a dream," he added in an undertone.

"You and me both," Varric agreed.

Solas was the last one.

"Is someone there?" he called out as we approached, peering into cells and speaking in low voices.

After finding Varric, Blackwall, and Fiona, and learning Leliana was somewhere within the castle, I had known we would find Solas, too. But - Creators, I had been hoping he, by some miracle, had escaped.

He staggered back a step as I moved to stand before his cell. "You're alive?" he rasped. "We - we saw the portal take you! I believed you erased from time!"

All I could do was stare as Dorian spoke. "We were displaced in time," Dorian told him. "We just got here, so to speak."

They all looked terrible, of course, but it hit me the hardest with Solas. Dorian opened his cell, and I watched as they traded theories of time travel, not listening. Instead, I was trying to understand the meaning of all that had happened in the lines of Solas's face, in the misty lightning wreathing him, in his eyes, burning hot as coals.

"Could I - have a moment alone with him?" I asked Dorian as they came to an agreement regarding the need to undo everything that had happened in the year we had been gone - as though that weren't already a given.

I could see the protest gathering on Solas's face, but then he seemed to think better of it and subsided. Dorian glanced between us, torn between smugness and pity. "Of course," he said finally, and shepherded the other two away.

I reached out to touch Solas's cheek, but he caught my forearm, well away from where my sleeve ended, taking care that our skin should not touch. "No," he said in a low voice. "You don't deserve this burden, vhenan."

The endearment came as a shock - I might have gasped. I know my eyes went wide, at least.

He noticed. "I have had a good deal of time to think," he explained even more quietly. "I apologize for the presumption - I never had the chance to explain to you the full significance of the bond between us." He paused for a moment, weighing his next words. "Our bond didn't break when Alexius's spell took you. That circumstance led me to believe that your existence had been erased, and that we had therefore never been tied together. The thought grieved me more than I can explain or justify." He shook his head. "I have spent a year confined to this cell, waiting daily to meet death, aware that I - aware that the world beyond is ending. Most memories of the actions I have taken and the attachments I have made have faded to meaninglessness. But not my memories of you."

"Maybe you were just desperate to cling to something," I offered, not wanting it to be true but unable to accept that I had, somehow, in a year's absence, become nearly as important to him as he was to me.

"I suppose we cannot entirely rule out the possibility," he allowed, almost smiling. The red lightning wreathing him reflected off the planes of his face, making the expression look strange and otherworldly. "But I don't think that is the cause. There is little to live for in this world, and yet finding you remain in it after all makes me wish we had more time - and makes me hope that you will return and give some other version of me a chance to know you and to enjoy your company, as I should have done from the first."

"And for you that adds up to - to - " I couldn't quite bring myself to repeat what he had said - it implied so much more devotion and commitment than I had ever dared imagine that I felt bewildered by the mere possibility.

"You don't understand how empty and lonely my life has been," he said. "I failed to understand how empty and lonely it had been until I had days, weeks, and months of enforced idleness to contemplate the matter."

Did that make his declarations more meaningful or less? I couldn't even begin to decide. "Is there anything I can do - to - to help you? Now, I mean - in this time?"

"Return to your own time and ensure I never exist," he told me. His thumb stroked my arm through my sleeve. "And make sure I kiss you, at least once," he added. "I will no doubt resist - surprise me, if you must. I find it is the small things I regret the most, and I would correct that particular mistake, if I can."

"I could kiss you now," I pointed out.

"This is not how I want you to remember our first kiss," he told me, one side of his mouth pulling up into a sad smile. "Besides," he added, looking away, "I have been force-fed red lyrium, and if I were to poison you...no. It is inadvisable on every level, ma'lath."

"Red lyrium," I echoed. "Is that," I gestured with my free hand, indicating everything about him, "what this is?"

"Those who are fed eventually begin growing lyrium crystals within their bodies," he told me soberly. "After they die, it can be mined."

"That is…" It was so far beyond words - this entire future was so far beyond words - that I could find none.

"This world must never exist," Solas repeated with added emphasis, and then released my arm. "And to that end, we need to find Alexius and send you home."

De da'rahn: It was a small thing