ACT II: A Gilded Cage
Note: AHHHHHHH!
It had taken most of the next day to clear out the main fort. The ceremony the day before had invigorated everyone. Before the day was over, the braziers were lit and the floor had been cleared of debris. Solas had immediately taken up in the center piece, the rotunda that spiraled upward with the staircase swirling around it up to the higher levels.
I had lost Bull sometime between the ceremony and the next morning, and couldn't find the bravery to ask any of the other Chargers were he and Krem had disappeared. My Hydra had left to complete their tasks and allowed the workers free reign of the area.
Where to hide? Not like I was any use when it came to actual construction work, though I wouldn't be opposed to helping with some of the architecture. Time to go sticking my nose into places it didn't belong, I suppose.
"Brilliant, isn't it?" The cultured voice rang through the rounding spiral of the tower. Solas had been nowhere for me to find, but the sound of tossed books and frantic shuffling had me curious enough to investigate. Up the stairs I went, careful of my footing as more books hit the floor on the next landing (didn't want to be pelted as I came up).
At the landing, just before me stood our not-quite-a-prisoner. The mage Dorian Pavus, if I remembered correctly. He was dressed in dark tan robes and belts, his attire reminiscent of the bloodied one he was found in when he first crashed into our gate. Where he had found a spare was anyone's guess, as I personally had not spotted a traveling case.
"What is?" I questioned, hoping to catch his attention; another book went sailing. It skidded along the stones and tipped over the edge down to the rotunda below. He spied me over his shoulder, but his hands continued to rummage through the books that dotted the shelves. Old remnants of previous occupants, perhaps, because I couldn't think that the Inquisition had any time to save the books that were in Haven.
My chest pinged with pain. It wasn't necessarily the Library of Alexandria, but even so.
"One moment you're trying to restore order in a world gone mad, that should be enough for anyone to handle, yes?" He tossed the question at me, but drilled on without any reply from my locked up mouth. The next book was dropped at his feet."Then, out of nowhere, an Archdemon appears and kicks you in the head!"
My brow pinched. I hadn't recalled him being close enough to see the dragon, but he may have been told. What would he know what the Archdemon looked like? Do they keep records of the Blight somewhere? They must have, but that was a question to file away later.
"What! You thought this would be easy?" He scoffed, the layers of sarcasm and shrill impersonation of being offended had my mouth ticking at the corners. I will not laugh. Not yet. Not even if he's inside my head with that exact train of thought.
"No," he drawled, sarcasm dripping on the word, his hands took a stack of books and tossed them onto the chair behind him, "I was just hoping you wouldn't crush our village like an anthill." A hand of mine came up to my mouth and smothered the grin that painted itself across my face.
He ploughed on, "Sorry about that! Archdemons like to crush, you know. Can't be helped." My left arm folded across my middle and held the elbow of my right arm in place, just to make sure my hand didn't slip away from my mouth as a vague chuckle bubbled up my throat. Finally, the mage glanced in my direction fully and cocked a hip, a graceful hand settled on it.
"I suppose a proper introduction is called for, now that we're not running for our lives." He cleared his throat gently and bowed with the elegance of a dew-heavy flower, coming up just as easily. "Dorian of House Pavus, most recently of the Tevinter Imperium."
I tipped my head, not trusting myself to bow with quite the same grace. "Jaime Wyatt, the current owner of this circus."
His lips twitched, amused. "To explain – I was at Redcliffe when the Venatori assumed command of your southern mages. I only wish I could have given more warning." My right hand had rested on my shoulder after our introductions, but I raised it to appease him. Apologizes for things he couldn't control were smoke to the wind.
"You did what you could, with what you had. No sense in borrowing trouble from yesterday or tomorrow." I said, crossing my arms down along the plane of my stomach. It was a challenge not to mirror his stance and cock a hip as well, it was almost too easy to allow myself to be casual in his presence. Was that the point? He is trying to get me to play along?
I was paranoid, I could admit that much.
"Clever phrase, I'll take that if you don't mind." He tipped his head, mustache twitching. "I apologize it's taken nearly three weeks to have this conversation, but, you've been busy."
"I have gotten shit-all finished." I replied, grinning. The soldiers and civilians had done most of the work. No one would allow me near a hammer or a plank of wood out of fear that I would die from it, regardless that my bruising had healed. The ribs were still tender, but the point of the matter was moot.
"As you've said, you've done what you could." He smirked, a graceful had flipped in my direction.
"Could I ask a potentially relationship-ending question?" I jutted the conversation in another direction, curiosity peaked. He raised a sculpted eyebrow and waited with a tilt of his chin. "Could you explain what a Magister is?"
He blinked. "What? You're not assuming I'm one?"
"Are you?" I returned his blink, confused. Josephine and Leliana had titled him as such, but when he introduced himself, he had made no such claim. From what one would hear tell, someone – a mage – from Tevinter would not hesitate to make it perfectly clear how far below them you stood.
I was hoping his sarcasm was a bit like mine, but prejudices could run deep.
"I know it's all the same to southerners, but… I suppose you wouldn't have that bias, would you?" He eyed me gently, the state of my dress far from noble or armed. I was, as always, nothing more than the orphaned schmuck stuck in this rutting mess. Passively, I grinned at him when his eyes came back to my face.
"To clarify, no, I'm not." He huffed, amused. "All members of the Magisterium – and thus all magisters – are mages, but not all mages are part of the Magisterium."
"Ah, I see." I nodded, "Everyone here is a citizen of Thedas, but not everyone is Tevinter?"
He laughed with a clap of his hands. "Snub my nose first, would you? Good analogy. Crude, but it works. It isn't to imply I'm just any mage, of course, but let's not start with incorrect assumptions."
"Speaking of assumptions," my attention jumped again, "there was mention of the Venatori. Could you give me an idea of what we're looking at here?"
"Right to the gut of the matter, I see." He sighed deeply, but his mouth tugged a bit with a smile. "I see my looks aren't as distracting as they used to be." Oh ho, is that what we're doing now? Maybe I had read the messages wrong, he – or rather, I – didn't seem to be the right type. Perhaps I was wrong?
"They're distracting, all right," I appeased, laughing, "but you're just not quite at the tier of Archdemon, I would have to say." And by god, I nearly died when his hand came up to curl at his mustache, his haughty huff playing into his role beautifully.
"I would never stoop to disfigurement, my dear." He chuckled and rested both his hands on his hips, pondering my question. "Moving on; the Venatori. Fools, really, so desperate to restore the Imperium's glory days, they'd sacrifice our nation's soul."
Patriotism, I marked off mentally.
Anger tinted him, "They made an offer to your mage rebels to join forces, but I'd bet they didn't leave the outcome to chance." Long, genteel fingers gripped his hips, restraining himself from either pacing or going back to menace the bookshelf again.
"The result is the army you saw at Haven," he continued, his nose scrunched moodily, "this Elder One has more magic than you can shake a stick at." That idiom exist here? Distracted, but I focused on a glittering button thoughtfully.
"I mean, that much we knew when he managed to command a dragon to shit on us." So there was nothing new about that, and Varric's story had made it clear that without Hawke's father, the beast would have been left to roam the world as he saw fit. They had delayed the destruction, but not stopped it.
Dorian snorted, "Charming. Still, knowing that, I wasn't about to allow him to wipe you clean just yet."
"What you did for us at Haven was very brave." I honored that. A single soul without any sort of help or guidance or actual responsibility to us, and yet he drove through the snow and the mountains to save what he could. My heart squeezed between my ribs, aching at the idea of it.
"It was, wasn't it?" He smirked, unaware of my trauma, "Throwing my lot with the underdogs, that's me." He rolled his shoulders and crossed his arms, a few of his fingers coming to glide along the underside of his chin.
"Copper for your thoughts?" I nudged the conversation.
"Much more than coppers for them," he teased, "I… I always assumed the Elder One behind the Venatori was a magister, but this… is something else completely."
My head cocked, my hands behind my back. "What do you mean?"
"In Tevinter, they say the Chantry's tales of magisters starting the Blight are just that: tales." He shook his head, a twinge of disgust pulled at his lips and wrinkled his eyes, shoulders stiff. "But here we are. One of those very magisters. A darkspawn."
"Hold a sec." I interrupted, captured by something else. "Are – did I hear that implication right? Does Tevinter not follow the Chantry?"
"Oh, sweet thing." He cooed at me gently, surprised. "You don't know much of the world, do you? I'm not terribly surprised – but yes, Tevinter has its own version of events that differ from your Chantry."
I raised a hand, my eyes shutting tight for a moment. "Nope, never mind. We'll… touch on that some other time. Venatori. Corypheus. Mages. That's what we need to deal with, first."
"Agreed." He laughed. "I will happily give you a history lesson at some other time. For now, we must deal with my idiot countrymen."
"And you're here because… you want to fight them?" I asked with a hint of confusion. "Not two beats ago you were concerned for the state of your country."
"My country." Dorian stressed with a small lean forward. "The Imperium is a land of lies built upon secrets built upon falsehoods. I knew what I was taught couldn't be the whole truth," he shifted on his feet, hands on his hips bouncing with every other word. "But I assumed there had to be a kernel of it. Somewhere."
"Darkspawn?" I followed along, concerned at his mounting ire.
"Us," Dorian added with a sharp hiss, "The darkspawn that we turned into. We destroyed the world."
"Wait a tick, I just told you not to go borrowing trouble." I shifted on my feet, "You didn't do anything. Those men did, thousands of years ago." The small space that we occupied growing smaller as his emotions ran on high. Not that I was a wealth of patience myself, I could only imagine this was what Cassandra had to deal with when I went on a hysterical rant.
Dorian exhaled, slowing down. "True, except that one of them is up and walking around right now. And as I mentioned, I have idiot countrymen who would happily follow him down that path again."
I raised my hands, defeated by the line of logic.
"I have no intention of letting Corypheus win. Not without someone from Tevinter standing against him." His arms crossed against his chest this time, his dark eyes sharpened their focus on my face and he stood at his height, proud. "If it's all the same to you, I'd like to stay and help the Inquisition."
Could he be a spy? Doubtful. If he was, his masters took a stupid bet on the Inquisition surviving the shitstorm that was Haven. Or they hadn't planned to kill us, or he was back up in case we did, somehow, manage to survive. Leliana had already made mentioned she hadn't been able to clear him yet, but with Skyhold in the ruckus that it was, whatever information he had already passed along was gone.
"You'll have to be on a tight leash for now." I acquiesced, my arms relaxing at my sides. "You'll keep to the main fort and here, anything you need will be purchased through Josephine or Leliana. Any jobs you'll do will be through me, yeah?"
He grinned, "For all that they painted you a dollop, you're not as mindless as they tell it. Accepted, Herald. I always did look good in rope."
A snort escaped me. I wound my index fingers in a circle, rewinding the conversation.
"Seriously, I don't look that ditzy. Assholes." I muttered with a sigh. "Next, now that that's out of the way. What can you tell me about the Imperium or the Blight? Any clue how he got that dragon?"
Dorian snorted softly. "No idea, really. You know how it is, fingers pointed elsewhere. Not us."
"So that's why the belief of the Chantry… or your Chantry is different? There's no mention of something like Corypheus in your history?" I prodded. Something created this creature. Varric knew of Corypheus only has he was, and is, but not how he came to be. The monster sprung from a hole in the ground and then swallowed them up in it.
"They say darkspawn were always there; Magisters and the Blight aren't even related." Dorian tightened his mouth, the corners of his eyes wrinkled. "Is that a surprise? No one wants to admit they shit the bed."
A bark of laughter escaped me. Articulated curse words always got me.
Dorian smirked slightly, but anger still heated his face. "It is left to be said, if Corypheus is one of the Magisters who entered the Black City and he's a darkspawn… what other explanation is there?"
"Could we consider that he's lying and just fixated on Tevinter?" I countered, the heels of both my hands coming up to rub into my eyeballs. "I've seen the Templars when they've been infected with red lyrium, and though I haven't seen possessed mages, Vivienne says they're not so dissimilar."
"Hmm." He considered my question, dark eyes dancing over our feet and back up to my face once my hands dropped to my hips. "Possibly. Anyone could fabricate how they got into the Black City, but… there is too much detail, and he seemed perfectly capable of ripping the heavens open a second time."
My eyebrows ticked lazily, "It was a thought. No one seems to know where he came from, and he claims Tevinter, but I could say I was the Queen of Thedas with this thing on my hand. Fear does stupid things."
He opened his mouth, then closed it and considered the statement. In some vein, his world and mine weren't so different in that they had both come tumbling down, the ideals of religion, logic, and reality all blown up into smoke. My head tilted, waiting for him. I couldn't imagine the whirlwind of thoughts.
"... you're really angry, huh?" I asked dumbly, surprised. Anyone would be angry at a hell-beast ripping the heavens apart and terrorizing their lands, but Dorian steamed with a personal sense of injustice, boiling with internal fury for something he, personally, hadn't been responsible in committing. My weight shifted back on my heel, my gaze over him renewed.
"The Imperium is my home," he answered vehemently, "Southerners like to think of the Imperium as nothing but slavers and cultists. Why not? That's all you see."
"Hey now." I protested lamely, Bull's Vint comment and my own biting my ass.
"Exactly," he continued with a harsh frown, "it's not true. Some Tevinters are not only handsome and well-dressed, but rather put off by all that rot. So. I will happily kill cultists, or anyone who thinks a darkspawn god is the way of the future."
I studied him, my voice quiet. "... No one is going to thank you for this, you know that, right?" Because he was Tevinter, because he was a mage, because he was flippant, flamboyant, feckless, egotistical, and any number of other first-impressions someone could label him with and judge him. He was all the things I had worried about for the rebel mages. People looked sideways at Vivienne because of her beauty and confidence, and used her magic as an excuse to be rude.
Dorian blinked at me, his demeanor softening. "No one will thank you, either. You know that."
"I do." I answered, just as quiet, strange sense of warmth going through me; you get it. "But this isn't about being thanked. I've made a home here. I can't let someone take that without a fight."
"Well." Dorian smiled, a true one. "In that much, we are agreed. At the very least, you'll get it from me; thank you."
-0-
Dorian, I had come to find, was a historian. Intensely and passionately in love with the history of his country and how it had come to be, powerhouse or no. I had spent the better part of the hour with him, collecting the books he had tossed around. Majority of them were copies, repeats in different editions, all useless by Dorian's standards.
"If you could ask your ambassador for much more suitable material, that would be grand." Dorian took the books I handed him and stacked them onto the table nearby, the discard pile. There was a mountain of them, and yes, all of them were going to be tossed.
"What would you classify as suitable material?" I questioned, watching as he took the few rarer and older copies to replace on the shelf. A few of them were switched around and I assumed he was placing them in alphabetical order.
"Considering what we will be dealing with, anything on Tevinter." He paused, his mustache twitching, his fingers gentle on the binding of a book. "... I'll send a note down. We'll need a tradesman from Tevinter, my apologies, but I couldn't trust the editions in the south."
"That, I can understand." I laughed. "Back home, we had a book that was copied and edited thousands of times, and everyone argues on which one is the right one."
"Isn't that just the thing, though?" Dorian smirked at me, taking another small stack from my arms to set on the shelf. "I am a firm believer in facts and the followings of experimentation and science." It was my turn to hesitate, because now we touched on events that were still in the fog. Whatever had happened at Redcliffe that consequently brought the mages on our doorstep needed to be a cleared flag in our timeline.
"Ser Pavus —" I started.
"Oh, no, no, no," Dorian tutted, turning to me and promptly tapping the top of my head with a book, stunning me. "Let's break that habit right this moment. You may call be Dorian, my dove, and not much else."
"Ah," I fumbled, tongue thick. "Ooh… 'kay."
He laughed. "Aren't you just darling? Southern charm, I don't get to see it too often." There was a beat of silence as he continued to place away his books. A flush had come to my face, heating up my cheeks and quietly, I tried to gather my scattered thoughts.
"Darling," Dorian quipped softly, "your question?"
"Ah, right." My throat cleared, the books shifting in my arms. "Could you, if it's not too upsetting, give me a rundown of what happened in Redcliffe? You were there, you said?"
"Unfortunately," he huffed. The stack was cleared from my arms and he took a final look at them, critiquing his placement of them all. "I had followed my former mentor, Gereon Alexius, to Redcliffe. I was attempting to stop him and his foolishness, offering the mages refuge." He turned away from his books and offered me the chair up against the wall, but with a shake of my head, he took the seat instead.
"What was he trying to do?" I took a few steps over to lean up against the bookshelf, my hands laced together in front of me, resting at the dip of my thighs. "It's one hell of a leap to go from needing protection to being the mass of an army."
"They're not just your southern mages." Dorian murmured darkly. "The Elder One had collected a few followers from the fringes of Tevinter, the dying and desperate that couldn't be a part of the Magisterium." He raised his hands and rubbed them together before they stayed steepled along his mouth.
"That would explain the numbers, yeah." I replied quietly. My hips shifted against the books.
"Alexius had found himself in the service of The Elder One nearly a year or so before, by my reckoning." Dorian tapped at his chin with his laced hands. "According to him, the God in question had the power to bring his son's health back in order." My head tilted in surprise, brow raised silently.
"You see, a while back as they were traveling back to their home in Tevinter for the winter, they were set upon by hurlocks. They drove them back, but at the lost of Livia's life and Felix's health. He became afflicted with the Blight through the darkspawn blood." Dorian closed his eyes, pained. His hands came apart and one rubbed at his chin, a sigh escaping his lips.
A lot of information had come up through that simple statement. Hurlocks, for one, was an unknown word to me, but context given it was a subcategory of darkspawn. At the very least, this gave me some idea that there were different breeds and not just infectious zombies that walked the earth. Notably, being a young child caught in the throes of a Blight, I wouldn't know the backend of a hurlock from anything else, so my ignorance was plausible.
Wife and son, another notable piece of information to Leliana.
"So, Corypheus snatched him up because he was a mage and sorrow makes us do stupid things?" I questioned softly.
"Not quite." Dorian shook his index finger. "Alexius and his wife Livia were top of their masteries. Livia was studying the Veil and the effects of our experiments on it. Alexius and I were experts at thaumaturgy — such has creating new means of magic and access to it, and we were attempting to — reshape the boundaries of magic."
I pondered for a moment. "Because… magic comes from the Fade, and if you're… so, wait, you're rewriting the rules before breaking them?" Because if Livia had been there for the studies of the Veil, like Solas, then the assumption was they were trying to break through it, much like the Mark on my hand.
Ooooh. The light bulb flickered over my head. That's why it had to be him, his son was just an opportunity to snatch it up.
Dorian clapped his hands, "Look at you! Not even a mage, and you're startling fast. Yes, my dove, we were. We speculated that if there was a way to utilize the Fade without the direct need of magic, then it would be little else to be able to make it accessible to everyone."
"Wait, what?" I backpedalled. "I thought… well. Prejudice, I guess. Oops."
"You thought the mages across the border just wanted to hoard it all for ourselves, hm?" Dorian smirked, unexpectedly pleased. He shrugged his shoulders, "You're not entirely wrong, but… Alexius and I were driven by our need to better our country. Long before I met him, he was already a well-known figure that pushed for education and funding our schools rather than that blasted war with the Qunari."
"... Did he end up with Corypheus because of the promise of resurrecting old Tevinter?" I asked, my fingers tightening in my lap. The use of his son's health would have been a clever ploy, one that Corypheus could no doubt twist if he had spells or cures from years old that could help.
"Heavens, no." Dorian gently spat. "There's nothing in our past worth dragging back up. We may not be the perfection the nobility demand, but we're far better than we were hundreds of years ago."
"Got'cha." I murmured. "So then, Corypheus came up and told him he could fix Felix?"
Dorian stewed. "Yes, and I had warned Alexius that no such thing existed. Once you're tainted, that's it, nothing saves you — no cure, no spell, no magic. Only the Wardens know how to hold off the taint, but that usually comes with the promise of becoming one of them."
I blinked, surprised. "Yeah. Not something a noble family wants to do, lose a son." Would Blackwall know? Could we cure Felix and stop some of those mages? Something to ask my Warden when I had the chance.
"Ha," Dorian laughed darkly, a sour snarl to his lips. "One would think that, no? In any case, he and I parted ways, until I heard about the madness he was conjuring in Redcliffe. Apparently, the way to save Felix was to go back in time."
There was a deep pause. And then from my mouth; "You're shitting me."
"I dearly wish I was, my dove." Dorian tapped the heel of his palm on the armrest. "Alexius had managed to create a pendant that, with enough energy, could rip a hole in the Veil and throw you back in time."
"Where the fuck would you go?" I breathed, disbelieving. "How — the fuck do you control where you go?"
"You couldn't." Dorian explained, angered. "And that's the point I was trying to explain to him, that going back in time wouldn't guarantee that Felix would survive; nor would it guarantee that you would even come to the right place in time to do so."
"There's too many variables." I muttered, my hands coming up to my mouth in shock. My brow dipped over my eyes as my gaze shifted to the floor. "The paradoxes would be astronomical. The power to get there, the power to stop, and how the fuck would you judge where you were…" I glanced up when I realized it had gone silence in my mutterings, Dorian watched me with a curious eye and tilted his head.
"Sorry," I waved a hand, "distracted. Sounds interesting, but extremely dangerous."
"Quite." He took a longer moment to spy over me. A curious glance over my face later, "Such as it is, it failed. The Elder One was not pleased."
A chilled whisper went up my back, "... is he dead? Alexius?"
"No." Dorian whispered, grieved. "But Felix is."
"Oh no," my inhale caught my words. "Corypheus killed him?"
"Naturally." Dorian spread his hands, a nasty, angered sneer on his mouth. "The whole promise hinged on Alexius creating such a device, so: no pendant, no Felix. Incinerated, so Alexius would have nothing to bury." And though Felix had been Alexius' son, there was no hiding the tremor in Dorian's words despite his face; he was hurting too. A tiny piece of my heart broke for him, and with a heavy sigh, I raised my hands to my face and rubbed my cheeks.
"... sorry doesn't cut it, but I am." I murmured to the mage. "I knew the mages were in Redcliffe, Grand Enchanter Fiona had invited us there after the rally in Val Royeaux. I didn't… think they'd get so desperate so quick."
"My darling dove." Dorian waited until I looked up at him, his form leaned to the left in the chair. "Do not accept blame that is not yours to take. This — chaos was not your creation. Morbidly, at least now Felix will not see how far his father has fallen."
"What happened to him?" I questioned thickly. "I don't imagine Corypheus is the type to let failure stand, even if he killed the son."
"And you'd be right to think so." Dorian clicked his teeth. "Alexius is being put to work, transforming the mages into those atrocities. He forces them to drink red lyrium and sleep draught. Once asleep in the Fade, the demons come."
"Fucking hell," I spat vehemently, my hands right back up into my face and the heels of my palms pressed into my sockets. "That explains so much and I hate it."
"As do I." Dorian bit out. "Because from what I could gather, it's only the Southern mages that are being transformed. The Venatori remain as they are."
"Oh fuck that shit." I snapped, my hands slapped against my sides, smoky anger ghosting up my insides. "No fucking wonder — hell yes, my friend, you get your request. Any Venatori missions come up, you're on."
A beautiful, toothy smile graced his lips. "Wonderful."
