Time seemed to go slow, and fast, and stop. Green. Orange. Hooded figure. A scout approaching. Cullen felt himself lifted from the ground. The Venatori agent was talking. Cullen struggled to focus. Artemis lying on the floor. No one looked at her. The scout carried Cullen back to the ledge. Green light circling around them. Then Cullen felt a jolt of pressure rising in his stomach as the scout stepped on the ledge and then off, into mid-air.

Cullen felt no pain from the fall, had they cast a barrier? Was it the poison? Cullen saw the bridge, the only real way out of Skyhold. No guards. The assassin landed next to them, still bathed in green light; he said something to the scout carrying Cullen before he lifted the body of his fellow assassin on his shoulders.

Cullen's eyes closed.

Blinking to focus, Cullen looked around the eerily deserted lower level of Skyhold. A third venatori agent came into view, he was leading three horses by the hand. Cullen recognised the saddles and knew they were the Inquisition's horses. How had they come to Skyhold then?

Cullen was lifted on a horse. Cullen struggled to stay awake, sometimes his eyes would close and when they opened he no longer knew how much time had passed. Looking every time he could, he searched for Artemis; he didn't see her anywhere.

His eyes closed again.

Cullen forced his eyes open again. Some time had passed. He could now see Skyhold in the distance, like when they had first been let to it. Artemis… Cullen knew she wasn't with their group. She was still lying there on the connecting bridge. Someone would find her, he told himself. Take her to Solas. She would be all right. The sound that had rendered her unconscious must have been meant to merely incapacitate, or the Venatori agents would've killed Cullen. Artemis had to be all right.

Cullen was bare-chested, his back exposed to the cool air, he could see it was beginning to snow but he couldn't feel it.

"…oak."

"atter?"

Artemis blinked but no one noticed. The conversation going on around her was incomprehensible to her, just sounds spoken by familiar voices. She blinked again and saw she was in her own bed. The voices were angry, it was a familiar situation; Artemis thought back to how it had been, waking up after the destruction of Haven, seeing the people she had needed to guide her bicker amongst themselves.

Cullen,a sudden memory of him covering his ears popped up in Artemis' head, and then the feeling of being carried by him. It must have been her thinking of Haven that had reminded her of him telling her how he'd carried her out of the snow. Tonight (had it been this night, or had more time passed) they'd been attacked again. Was it just the two of them affected by that spell? Was Skyhold still safe? Artemis was in her own bed, but what was going on outside this room?

Her eyes still closed, she spoke: "What happened?" Artemis' voice was soft, too soft it seemed as no one answered, and she was about to try again, louder, but suddenly felt a hand on her forearm. Artemis opened her eyes to see Solas looking down at her. Behind him Cassandra and Leliana were looking at her and then at each other. Sera was standing further back, leaning against the wall, her eyes fixed on the floor.

"How are you feeling Inquisitor?" Solas asked.

"What happened?" Artemis repeated. She didn't want to directly ask what she really wanted to know, afraid of the answer she might get. Slowly she moved so she could sit upright in the bed.

"You were found unconscious," Solas said.

"Outside Cullen's office," Cassandra added, squinting her eyes.

So they hadn't attacked the rest of Skyhold. Artemis looked around the room. She caught Cassandra's eye again, but Cassandra quickly looked away, her eyes briefly resting on something draped over a chair. Cullen's cloak. Despite the situation being grim, Artemis felt herself blushing as she remembered what – or rather what she was not- wearing when they found her.

Artemis' heart sank as it dawned on her that if Cullen's cloak was still here, in her room, he hadn't come to claim it, and he was someone who was always dressed in full armour. The only thing that gave her hope was that maybe he was still in bed as well, that the spell had knocked him out as well.

"Inquisitor," Leliana said, she moved a little forward, "we found Cullen's cloak with you and his armour inside his office, but we haven't found Cullen himself."

The way Leliana was asking her, or well, probing her, made Artemis think they weren't sure what had happened either. "We were attacked," Artemis said. "I tried to stop the attack… I don't know how well that went, I lost consciousness… but if you don't know where Cullen is –"

"They took him," Sera said. She was still looking at the floor. "I knew it wasn't good. When we found you." Sera angrily stared at Leliana's back.

Artemis started to feel restless, her mind already playing out every possible bad outcome to this situation. They have Cullen.

"We suspected as much," Cassandra said. "There were no signs of a struggle, but finding you outside wearing –" Cassandra blushed slightly and looked away.

"How long have I been here? Have you tried to find Cullen? Was there really no sign of the attackers? Nothing?" Artemis was rattling. No one stopped her, but no one answered either.

"We're still looking," Cassandra said.

"We hoped you would have answers," Solas said.

Artemis felt angry, she'd been here – Maker knows how long – and they had been waiting? Her anger wasn't reasonable and she realised that, but it was easier to hold on to that than to admit what was a growing possibility in her mind.

A loud bang resounded through the room, followed by the sounds of quick steps up the stairs. Dorian's head appeared at the top of the stairs, he rushed over to the bed and for a second it looked like he was about to hug Artemis, but he stopped himself. "Decided to have a bit of a rest, did you?"

Artemis shrugged, "well, I thought the rest of you could handle saving the world on your own for a bit." She smiled briefly.

"So I am assuming it were the Venatori?" Dorian asked.

"Dorian," Cassandra almost sounded like she was reprimanding him, she fixed her eyes on Dorian, looking at him with suspicion.

"Some people around here seem to be under the impression that the commander just went out for a stroll for the past two days and simply forgot to inform any of us." Dorian glanced at Cassandra who glared back. "I never said I thought he had walked off, I always suspected –"

"But some of us realised this has to be connected to the previous attack on you." Dorian straightened his back and crossed his arms. "And to me the Venatori are the obvious culprits."

Artemis felt her chest tighten at Dorian's words. Of course she had thought the same thing, but this just seemed to confirm it. They weren't going to find Cullen, not alive or dead, not in Skyhold. That should comfort her, but Artemis realised that this had to have the same goal as the potion did, they intended to control her and now they could.

Every muscle felt sore. This of course was not a new experience, not to Cullen: between training and his tendency to work until he fell asleep at his desk, his muscles were pretty much continuously sore to some degree. Cullen tried stretching his arms and legs but found them restricted by chains. The room – or cell – around him was dark and cold, the little bit of light came from a hole in the roof. It reminded him of his bedroom in Skyhold. To think just last night (was it last night, or last week – time still felt strangely morphed to him) he'd imagined waking up in his bed next to Artemis. He'd felt happy.

There were voices outside the room, barely audible, Cullen held his breath, trying to make out what they were saying, but gave up when he realised that most likely they were speaking Tevene. Instead he tried to find something in the room, something to use, but there wasn't enough light. Cullen rolled onto his stomach and awkwardly pushed himself into a sitting position. Slowly he started pushing himself around the room, hoping to find something concealed by the darkness.

Cullen slowly made his way across the floor, his fingers brushing the floor, but finding nothing. He was making his way along the wall, legs stretched out to cove as much ground as possible, when suddenly something slammed into his back. Cullen realised it had been the door as the room was flooded with light and then fell dark again as the door slammed closed again because of the force it had hit Cullen with.

The light came flooding back in as someone, clearly cursing in Tevene, entered the room. Cullen was temporarily blinded by the light, but tried – rapidly blinking – to see anyway, to identify the person who'd entered. It was the man who'd been dressed as an Inquisition scout the day Cullen was taken. The man said something over his shoulder and two other men entered the room. They walked over to Cullen and flanked him. The man who'd been a scout gave them an order it seemed, because they pulled Cullen to his feet. Cullen's legs were chained at the ankles, so he was just hanging between the two men as they dragged him out of the room. Cullen considered fighting them but there seemed little point in exhausting his strength in a surely pointless struggle.

Cullen's feet were dragging across the stone floor of a long hallway, every door in it looking exactly the same as the previous one and none looked like they lead outside. The architecture of the building seemed familiar. Ferelden maybe? But Cullen didn't feel confident in his ability to correctly identify architecture styles. There was no coat of arms visible or anything else that could identify where specifically he was. Not that Cullen had a plan for how to use that information even if he'd manage to acquire it; there was no way he could manage to get away from the men holding him while he was chained up like this. Still there would be a moment, a chance, at some point he could –

But what if there isn't, the thought was neither welcome nor helpful. There in the back of his mind memories were stored of the time he'd spent trapped in the circle. There wasn't always a chance to escape. Sometimes you had to be saved. And that was what Cullen feared above all else: helplessness.

The man not busy dragging Cullen around opened a door. There was nothing special about the door and looking over his shoulder Cullen couldn't even identify what door led to his cell. The room this door opened to was very large but seemed to be filled entirely with crates. Some of them were opened and empty, but most were still closed it seemed. Dragging Cullen around a wall of crates marked with strange symbols, the two men brought him to a small space made in the midst of all the crates. The men dropped Cullen to the floor, he landed on his side, a sharp pain exploding in his shoulder where it hit the stone floor. Cullen struggled until he was sitting on his knees, even though it hurt his chained feet to sit like this.

A mage appeared from behind one of the crate walls. She was carrying a large book, holding her fingers between the pages to keep her place. The mage briefly glanced at Cullen before saying something to the men, all three of them left and she opened the book. The mage started reading something from the book, chanting so softly it was hardly audible. Strange lights started to swirl around the woman and slowly they started moving towards Cullen. There was something very familiar about this whole scene. Cullen couldn't remember when he had seen something like this before, but he felt a tight sensation building in his chest, something about this or the memory of this… The lights surrounding Cullen expanded, knotted together until they formed a sphere of glowing light, sealing Cullen inside. And it was now that Cullen remembered when he had experienced this before.