How long he lay in the sarcophagus nursing his pains, both physical and mental, Fenris could not say. No sound penetrated through the stone, leaving him to wonder if they tortured the mage as they had tortured him, or if they had simply chosen to end his life. After all, he was already hosting a creature inimical to their goals. Or perhaps the man had simply given in, as he had given in to the creature he claimed was merely a Fade spirit.
He wondered how long either of them could hold on before cracking, because he knew that eventually he would crack. It would take time – he was resilient from all he had endured with Danarius – but he also knew that ultimately, no man was an unassailable fortress.
Slowly, his resolve hardened once again. He would find a way free of this situation before he broke, and if he had to, and if he had the chance, he would kill Anders. Even Hawke would forgive him, given the circumstances.
He had fallen into a fitful doze when the lid was wrenched open again and Anders was dumped in on top of him. The lid slammed shut before he could push the mage's body aside and attempt to make his escape.
"Shit,"Anders slurred, face to face with Fenris in the pale light that gleamed from his tattoos at the mage's touch. "This is that afterlife of eternal torment thing, isn't it? I guess I should have believed in it earlier."
"That is a heresy," Fenris hissed. The Chantry taught that one spent eternity either at the Maker's side, or wandering Oblivion, forever banished from His sight. An eternity of torment was unnecessary embellishment. And, while he did not usually care enough to point those things out, the symbol of the Black Divine that Anders wore left him perhaps a bit oversensitive at that moment.
Anders just dropped his forehead to Fenris' chest with a grunt of fatigue and pain. "Fine. Heresy. Whatever."
Fenris lay there at a loss for what to do with his hands. If their last position had been too intimate, this was worse by far.
"What did they do to you?" he asked, to try to get his thoughts back on track.
"Mmpf," Anders mumbled against the leather. "You know, threats, bargains for power and freedom, torture. The usual demonic shit." His words were growing progressively more slurred, his body lying almost totally slack against Fenris.
Fenris jammed his rigid fingers into Anders side to bring the mage's attention back from the brink of passing out. "What. Else?" he demanded, biting off the words.
Anders yelped and tried to swat Fenris' hand away, but he did sound more awake. "Did I mention you were a bastard?"
He rubbed a hand over his forehead and took a deep breath while he collected his thoughts. "Four revenants, one arcane horror, one crazy bitch possessed by a demon of pride, one Lowerdark ward's worth of walking dead, one prison chamber, and oh, yes, she stabbed me in the face. Did she stab you in the face? I hope she stabbed you in the face, because I'd hate to be the only one."
At mention of stabbing, Fenris had to restrain himself from touching his own forehead.
"You don't have a mark on your face," he observed. Well, other than the marks from where Fenris had hit him, but they were not pertinent in Fenris' opinion.
"And I don't have a mark on my chest where you stuck your hand into it either," Anders retorted. "I guess you have your magical fisting thing and she has a magical knifing thing. When they open the lid again, I'll just leave you two to chat about the niceties on that, shall I?"
Fenris clenched his jaw and restrained himself from doing a non-magical fisting thing to the man. There wasn't room in their stone prison for a good punch anyway.
"Why are they giving us both time to rest?" he asked instead.
Anders groaned. "Because that was just foreplay. She was painting something on the floor when they dragged me off that table of torture. I'm not up on my blood magic, skipped all the seminars and extra-curriculars at the Circle you know, but I'm guessing it wasn't a 'let's go skipping hand in hand through the meadows' spell."
Fenris frowned, remembering that he had been so weak from the visions that had tortured him that he was barely conscious when he was returned to the sarcophagus. How was it that the mage, definitely the physically weaker of the two of them, was even carrying on a coherent conversation already?
"You saw her painting something on the floor?"
"Yes," Anders said. "Well, not me, exactly. Justice. He got a good look around while I was busy reliving some of my least favorite parts of my life, if you must know. Why can't demons ever be interested in a cup of tea and a nice chat? But no, it's straight to the stabbity and the possession and being generally demon-y."
"Mage," Fenris growled.
"We did this already," Anders groaned. "Warrior."
"Did your spirit,"he spat the word out, "learn anything useful?"
"Just ask him why don't you?" Anders said. "Maybe I can take a nap and you two can chat." He sighed again and tried to find a slightly less… cuddly position against Fenris, then tilted his head as though listening to someone speak.
"He did see something." He let out a low whistle. "Maker, he isn't going to like that idea."
"Who isn't?"
Anders squeezed his eyes closed in a grimace. "You aren't. You aren't going to like this one bit."
"Speak."
Weakly, Anders said, "Arf."
Then he leaned up enough to look Fenris in the eye. In other circumstances they would have been close enough to kiss.
"Did you see the runes all over the walls?" he asked.
"Yes…?"
"They're lyrium. You don't even want to know what all that lyrium does to my head, but that's not the point. Did you notice that one of them, by the door, had been defaced?"
"I was rather preoccupied," Fenris said dryly, although he was also silently questioning Anders' comment about the lyrium's effects.
"Me too, actually," Anders said as though to commiserate. "But Justice saw it. The metal was dug out of part of the rune. We think if it could be repaired, the whole room would go back to being the proper demon trap it's obviously built to be."
"Because these sarcophagi aren't sufficient?" Fenris asked.
Anders was very serious, a shade of the old Gray Warden in his reply. "With demons, obviously not."
He shook his head and went on. "My best guess is that Milady Stabbity is a mage who found her way down here. Maybe one of Tarohne's coven seeking more power. They'd be stupid enough to let demons out. If she vandalized the rune and opened a sarcophagus, then we would have the start of this entire bloody mess."
"It makes sense," Fenris conceded. "But it has no bearing on the fact that we have no means or time to repair the rune. They are not going to idly stand by while we find the piece that is missing. Nor does it explain what I am not going to like."
"You aren't going to like two things," Anders said. "And I'm really not certain which one you're going to hate more, but I'm going to have to ask you not to kill me when I make this proposition, because I'm honestly desperate here."
"Spit it out."
"We have the lyrium right here," Anders said cautiously. "And it… er… well, goes with the idea I was going to mention before we were so rudely interrupted for one-on-one time with monsters."
Fenris had gone completely still, feeling a cold rage start to well up inside himself, but he clamped down on the anger and sounded utterly calm when he said, "Go on."
Anders spat the rest out in a rush. "I think I can pull some mana out of your tattoos. Or Justice can, I mean. Either way, when they open the lid, I can hit them with a spell, you can distract them, and I'll run over to fit the piece into the rune. Then we run like our arses are on fire."
"The piece," Fenris repeated in a low, dangerous rumble. "You mean the piece of lyrium you expect to somehow get from my flesh."
Anders swallowed audibly. "Yes…?"
"You are mad."
"And…?"
Fenris thought he might be just as mad for even entertaining the thought. "Have you no other ideas?"
"Maker, but I wish I did," Anders said fervently. "And I hate to be pushy about the whole gouging out a chunk of your flesh and siphoning mana out of you thing, but my back is simply itching thinking about the lid opening any time."
"How do you propose we get this piece out?"
At that Anders gave him a crooked smile that did little to conceal the fear in his eyes. "That gauntlet of yours has to be good for more than just ruining my pretty face."
• • •
The less said of the process of gouging a piece of lyrium out of Fenris' hip in the close confines of their prison, the better. The mage honestly seemed to take no pleasure in the act, and both men were shaking with the strain by the time he declared the piece of sufficient size to fill the damaged rune.
The entire process was made worse by the fear that at any moment the lid would crash open and they would be discovered before they could act.
When it was done, Anders held a piece of Fenris' lyrium in his hand and strangely, when the mage pressed a kiss to Fenris' jaw, he did not have it in him to offer even a growl of complaint. Unlike the joking arousal of earlier, it was meant only as a companion's comfort, and Fenris surprised himself by accepting it as such. Certainly Anders seemed surprised both that he had done it, and that Fenris did not hurt him for doing so.
They would never speak of it again.
"The moment the lid opens, I am going to draw mana from you," Anders warned. "Don't waste time. I'll distract them and it will either be do or die. Either way, neither of us is going on that table again."
Fenris cleared his throat of barely-suppressed screams. "I should be on top."
"That's what I always thought," Anders said, then hurried to add, "I mean in here. Right. You on top to burst out doing that fighting thing while I throw a spell or two and scarper."
Getting Fenris on top was easier said than done in a space that barely contained the two of them as it was. With much contortion, swearing, and grunts of pain from both of them, eventually they were back in the position they had first found themselves in. Anders put a hand lightly on Fenris' arm where the tattoos were bared to be ready to draw mana from him as soon as the lid rose.
Then they waited. Anders tried to engage him in conversation, but each time he tried, Fenris only grunted in reply until the mage's flow of words petered out entirely.
"Fenris?"
He grunted.
"If…" Anders cleared his throat. "…just if anything goes strange, I won't hold it against you if you leave me here."
This roused Fenris from his contemplation of the lid enough to ask, "What do you mean 'if anything goes strange'?"
"Just anything," Anders repeated. "You never can tell with mad plans, right?"
This time nothing more Fenris could say would rouse him from his silence. Fenris observed that from the other side of things, doing that it was rather annoying.
• • •
It felt like something slightly longer than an eternity later when the lid was lifted from the sarcophagus. Anders' hand tightened on Fenris' arm for a bare instant, but he felt the shock of the magical pull throughout his body, painting lighting through every inch that the tattoos touched, except the strange empty space where they had cut away a piece of the marking.
"Go!" Anders hissed, his skin crackling with Justice's power, Fade light painting the revenant in front of them with Fenris' silhouette.
He exploded from the sarcophagus, ignoring the pain in his hip, hearing Anders shout the words of a spell that made the room behind the revenant explode with flame that was aimed so expertly that he felt the wash of heat on his skin, but was untouched when the revenant was not.
He bore the armored creature backward, clearing space for Anders to scramble out of the sarcophagus.
Behind him, the mage threw out another arc of ice and ran. From the corner of his eye, Fenris could see him fumbling at the wall by the door, but the revenants were converging on him, and a blue radiance had descended on the room from some spell the arcane horror had cast. He could hear the possessed mage's voice raised to shout commands to the undead. The world had exploded into noise and action in which Fenris fought like a mad thing to keep the revenants from touching him even as their malevolent auras and the blue light spell sapped away his strength one measure at a time.
He ducked a charge from the nearest revenant and raised his arm to block a swing from the next when the swing stopped in mid-air.
Everything stopped. The shouting, the creak of armor, the sound of the mage shouting not to kill them yet.
The only sound was his own harsh breathing.
Around him, the runes glowed with a soft warmth. "It worked," he said, looking at the frozen scene in awe. "It worked!"
He looked around and saw his sword and Anders' staff propped against one of the sarcophagi and retrieved them, threading his way through the revenants and past the mage, who stood with her face contorted in rage, her mouth open.
"If I kill her, will I be releasing the demon?" he asked, turning to look at Anders where he stood by the door.
Anders did not respond.
"Mage?"
He crossed to lay a hand on the man's shoulder and found him as stiffly frozen as all the other unnatural creatures in the room, his hand still pressing the bloodied bit of lyrium from Fenris' hip into the rune.
It struck him then what Anders had meant when he had said "if anything goes strange."
"Fool mage," he growled at the man. "It would serve you right if I took you at your word."
It took time to shove the revenants into sarcophagi and lever the lids into place before turning to the relatively easier work of imprisoning the arcane horror and the woman whose name he had never learned. His skin crawled at having to touch these creatures that even immobile, reeked of evil.
From there it was simple cleanup to decapitate the frozen undead – distasteful cleanup, but simple. Once the room was cleared of obvious dangers, he moved Anders' hand enough to pull the piece of lyrium from the rune.
Anders jerked back into motion and shouted, "Run!" before looking around the room.
Fenris took no small pleasure in seeing the man's jaw drop.
He stuck Anders' staff in his unresisting hand and pushed him out into the tunnel before replacing the bit of lyrium and following him.
"Let's go find Varric, shall we? I'd say we'll need his contacts to get dwarven help to fill these tunnels before more fools come down here." Anders made a show of straightening his robe and tucking away his Chantry amulet before nodding to himself. "And then I might even buy you a cold drink at the Hanged Man."
"No might, mage," Fenris growled, already striding up the tunnel despite the ache in his hip. "You will."