Note: hey readers! Thank you to everyone who is following and cheering on Eve through all the crap I throw at her. We'll be getting to Haven (and Cullen) soon!
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Warnings: violence.
Chapter 5: Escaping Redcliffe
[1 year later]
Sliding a deft hand under the young man's stubbled chin, Eve twisted her vision until she could see inside him. The tincture and ritual had cleansed his body of the lingering fever and dried the mucus from his lungs, but the blackness in his veins remained. It traveled in waves through his arteries with every pump of his heart, threads of darkness spreading out from his core into his muscles and tissues. She bit her lip, hoping that her vision lied, yet knowing that it never had. This man was corrupting very slowly, from the inside out, and would turn into a ghoul then die.
A gentle hand on her wrist startled her back into seeing things normally. Her patient - a young human man with a face that hinted at a sensitive nature, bronze skin and dark, thick hair marking him as Tevinter as much as his style of robes - was watching her with a kind look of understanding. So, he knew. He knew his diagnosis and he embraced it. Her heart wrenched; she'd failed him and he was comforting her.
"Well?" a waspish voice asked, painfully hopeful. "How is Felix? Did it work?"
Eve tensed, gritting her teeth. She couldn't hide the truth, and she didn't want to hide it. The diagnosis had to be delivered. She lowered her hands, squeezing Felix's shoulders. "I am so sorry," she answered without taking her eyes off of Felix. "No, the Taint remains-"
What could only be described as a two-tonne bronto bitchslap flung her across the flagstones until she crumpled and slid down a bookcase. Well, at least it was her least favorite bookcase in the study, she thought dazedly as The Canticle of Andraste fell beside her head. If she didn't beat down this burgeoning fear and protect herself, she'd be in danger of losing her favorite head at this rate. Something hot leaked into her eye as she tried to both push her long white hair out of her face and scramble up from her hands and knees when another blow slammed her cheek-first into the floor; she could hear her nose breaking through the bones of her skull. Blinded, she gasped and scrambled to sit up and flung her arms out helplessly as a whip of fire lashed her arms. She cried out as her skin bubbled with angry welts and reflexively sheathed them in ice to cool the burns. Think, just think - Andraste's skid-marked smalls, how did that spell go for making a magical barrier?
"-father, STOP! You can't change her answer like this!" Felix shouted. Blearily, Eve could see a figure skidding to a stop in front of her with his arms flung out.
"How can he still have it?" Alexius shrieked, pushing his son aside to stand over her, fiery whip raised in one hand. "You are supposed to be the best spirit healer this side of Thedas!"
Eve glared back mulishly at the snarling Tevinter magister and swiped at the blood dribbling out of her nose. "The best died at the Spire before the mages and templars collectively decided to lose their shit. Lucky arse probably timed it on purpose. So you're stuck with me." And she was stuck with him. If only she'd kept her mouth shut about being a spirit healer two weeks ago - maybe then she'd still be with Fiona and the other rebel mages, wherever this mysterious Tevinter magister was keeping them.
He was now so different from the doting and concerned father he'd played every time he had visited her throughout these weeks, at times bringing her tea personally and politely asking about her progress in curing his son. Alexius snarled, his thin lips curling back to bare greying teeth; he looked like a deranged, desperate animal at the end of its tether. "But they call you the Reviver, do they not? Although," he mused, "you don't look much like a spirit healer. You're barely out of your Harrowing and clearly you don't know what you're doing, by the state of your face."
Eve glared at the pointed insult about her scar, then reminded herself that this man was watching his son die every day. She took a deep breath and tried to will the aching from her nose to fade away. "Look, I know that you're hurting," she started, "you clearly love your son-"
"Don't try to weasel out of this, knife-ear," Alexius sneered, then casually lashed her across her jaw.
She gasped, but managed to bite back another cry as her skin and the fine hairs on her jaw sizzled. Clasping her hand to the burn, she looked back up at him thoughtfully. Then she leaned over and spat blood on his shoe.
The crack that reverberated throughout her skull from a quick kick was almost worth it. Disoriented, she threw her hand out and summoned a flickering barrier that shattered on the first lash of the whip. Shit, that wasn't supposed to happen, she was complete shit at this fighting nonsense. Piercing pain licked up her arm as she tried and failed to summon the barrier against the unrelenting whip of fire.
Felix seized Alexius' arm. "Father, stop. This is what we knew - there is no known cure for the Taint!"
Alexius struggled to extract himself from his son's grip without hurting him. "That is why we had to find the foremost expert, even if it was this lying little idiot. I should've known that Southern mages like you just invent titles to better yourselves - look at the so-called Champion and now that Herald-"
During the argument, Eve had seized the moment to heal herself so quickly that it almost hurt. There was no time to heal carefully, with attention to how bones should be precisely aligned or ensuring that tissues fused to each other properly. She settled for 'passably functioning' and staggered to her feet to snap, "I didn't choose the name, I only got it because I picked a fight with the Ghost of the Spire. And I wasn't lying-"
Alexius thrust his long nose down into her face, enraged. "I allowed you to pour that concoction down my son's throat and let you do your elfy dance on the understanding that you were telling the truth!"
Eve took a deep breath in a vain effort to calm her mounting anger. It was in vain, since his condescending tone and flying spittle just made him so punchable. "The Dalish ritual I performed worked," Eve said. "But your son was already resistant to the Taint - that he survived the initial day of being infected is proof of that. While the ritual will slow down its progression, he will become a ghoul."
"You're just lying to get out of a failed ritual, you pathetic little-"
"Don't they teach you magisters how to read in Tevinter?" Eve retorted, her temper getting the better of her. "If you'd actually read my research, I state that there is no cure for it. There are two methods of slowing its progression and that is only if the patient survives the initial acute phase, which is extremely rare! By and large, no one escapes death or ghoulism, not even the blasted Wardens themselves!"
Alexius suddenly looked a little hopeful. "But did you actually ask how the Wardens-?"
Eve scoffed. "Of course I did. And, of course, they told me to bugger off. Well, technically they just never answered my letters and appeals which is Warden-speak for 'fuck off'."
The whip of fire flared, then dissipated. Alexius was regarding her thoughtfully, and while it seemed to make Felix relax, it only made Eve press up into the bookcase behind her. "Perhaps the fault lies not in the mage or the magic," he murmured, turning to sweep over to a chest resting on a nearby desk. Glass vials crashed as he swept them aside, the residue of the thick green potion that she'd given Felix staining the red carpet.
Eve cast about for an exit in the stone-walled study that she'd been kept prisoner in for the past two weeks - but the only entrance were the double oak doors past Alexius, and she'd bet her lucky scalpel that she wouldn't be able to slip by him without getting proverbially smacked to the next age. Not for the first time since the White Spire fell, Eve wished she'd spent some part of the ten years since her Harrowing in studying combat magic. But she'd been adamant on becoming a renowned spirit healer like her mentor, Old Turin, not knowing that it would take years to become passably competent, and then the years had flown by in their laboratory and clinic…
Felix was trying to signal to her to run, now, but she was mouthing back to him that she wouldn't be fast enough when Alexius turned back, a bottled glass beaker in hand. "If it's not the mage or the magic, then it is the mana," he said triumphantly. "Drink this."
Eve eyed the glowing crimson potion; molten yellow veins laced it like it was a living thing. It felt alarmingly alluring and anything that could make someone feel like licking it from five feet away was just wrong. "How many times do I have to tell you, Alexius?" she asked, edging sideways so she could hopefully make a break for the doors, subtlety be damned. "I don't take potions from strange magisters-"
"Perhaps the ritual didn't work because you didn't have enough power," Alexius said over her, advancing with the potion in hand. He shattered another of her flimsy barrier spells with a well-placed burst of fire and enclosed them in a barrier of his own, which flared brighter than hers and she was now trapped in a bubble with him. "This will fix that problem. It will give you more power than you can ever achieve with normal lyrium, more power than you can dream. Perhaps it will iron out some kinks in your ritual, and next time it will work."
"Ah, Alexius, I don't think you're singing the Tevinter anthem with quite enough gusto," a glib voice chided. "Although, throwing more magic and blood sacrifices at the problem didn't really help with the decline of the Imperium - quite the opposite, actually. I'm surprised there aren't more sacrificial virgins bleeding out around here, now that you're dancing to the Elder One's tune."
Alexius turned to glare at the newcomer who had swept into the study with a familiar nod to Felix. A sudden stab of hope crumpled to ash in Eve's chest. He wasn't a mage of the rebellion uprising, or Grand Enchanter Fiona as Eve had hoped. Instead, the man looked every bit as Tevinter as Alexius and Felix, from his ridiculously outlandish mage robes that seemed to show more skin than protect it, to the stupid little goatee under his curled mustache. As playful as his tone and goatee were, the man's dark eyes were entirely serious.
"Dorian. What are you doing down here?" Alexius snapped. "Where is Calpernia?"
"Oh, you mean the woman who was supposed to brainwash me to be as blind as you and these Venatori idiots?" Dorian asked. "She was summoned away in the middle of her 'Let's All Hold Hands and Follow the Insane Elder One Into Peace and Tranquility' spiel and I admit that I got a bit bored. You're being a poor host, to both me and that girl you got there."
"Summoned away?" Alexius muttered, suddenly sounding concerned. He shook his head. "No matter. I will catch up with the army after I make this little liar heal Felix. And if the red lyrium doesn't work, Dorian, then there is no choice but to follow the Elder One," Alexius continued. "He has the power to raise the Imperium to its golden age. He was the one who ripped the hole in the sky and created the Breach! He will recruit an unstoppable army, slay Celene and absorb the Grey Wardens! What is curing one child to a being of such power?"
A cold spike of fear skittered down Eve's spine. Wait, this 'Elder One' was the one who destroyed the Conclave and tore open the Fade so it now rained demons on Thedas? He was going to take over Orlais and the Grey Wardens to return the Tevinter Imperium back to its golden age? He - the Elder One, and Alexius - were insane. They would destroy Thedas and kill millions for what gainful purpose? To sit on a throne?
"Father, it isn't worth indebting yourself to this crazy-"
"It's worth it if it means that you will be cured!"
Dorian rapped his knuckles against the barrier, making it shimmer. "Alexius, you and I both know that even if the mage were to increase the amount of mana he pours into a ritual, the rules of magic do not change. They literally cannot change unless the ritual is changed! That is one of the basic tenants of magic! So how do you expect her to cure Felix even if you drown her in this - did you call it lyrium?"
"You don't know what this lyrium can unlock, Dorian," Alexius hissed, his face alight in his resolve. "A steady diet of red lyrium can infuse the mage with power beyond reckoning. Just watch-"
Eve struck out with her Force claws as he turned back towards her. This was her favorite spell, molded over the years to nick the thinnest and most delicate of arteries with an edge sharper than any Antivan Crow's razor. But it was a surgical tool, honed to hold an edge instead of packing a wallop - so all it did was rake four crimson lacerations across Alexius' cheek and forehead before he magically grabbed her by the neck and slammed her up against the bookcase so books rained down around her and the tips of her toes barely scraped the floor. She kicked out uselessly and tried to grab whatever was choking her - it felt like hardened air under her fingers, indicating a Force spell - but it did not yield to her scrabbling fingertips. Just as she tried to gulp down a breath, a bottle hovered over her nose and dumped red lyrium all over her face, burning a path down her throat and stinging her eyes. She spluttered and coughed, trying to spit it back out but what little she managed to choke down curled in her stomach, hot and soothing until it crackled, filling her head.
There was a distant shout, then the barrier flickered and disappeared. Eve fell as the invisible choking hand dissipated from her neck and she buckled to her knees, wheezing in gasps of air. But what was a bit of swelling in her throat and suffocation compared to the red lyrium? It thrummed through her veins with a powerful song, making everything crystal clear and so, so vivid. It lit up her insides so brightly - it was a wonder that the thin shell of her body could contain such heady, powerful light. Weeks of hunger, worry, and fatigue evaporated. She was brimming with mana and the feeling of unlimited potential - it was intoxicating. Why had she objected to this nectar of the gods?
Someone strong pulled her up to her feet. Large, concerned grey eyes lined with kohl - it was the other magister, named Dorian. He looked surprisingly concerned for a stranger, let alone another Tevinter magister. Eve tried to struggle out of his grip - were all the mages this muscular in Tevinter? Between bouts of blood magic, did they do a hundred push ups with their textbooks? "You look awful and drunk," Dorian said not altogether pleasantly, "and unlucky for you, I don't know a lick of healing magic to patch that up-"
Healing her bruised and swollen throat only took a second longer than thinking about it, and it was done. Eve straightened and rubbed her neck, trying to erase the memory of slowly being crushed. "Where is Alexius?" she asked.
Dorian was watching her with raised eyebrows. "Maybe Alexius wasn't nugshit crazy about this red lyrium business, the way you clean up," he mused. He rapped his staff against Alexius' backside as the magister sprawled unresponsive on the floor with a purple lump as large as a goose egg on his forehead.
Eve was suitably impressed. "I see you're rubbing salt into his wound," she noted, "Well done."
Felix knelt beside Alexius and shook his head. "It's not worth it," he mumbled, "I'm not worth all this. Bending time to conscript the rebel mages, abducting you and trying to recruit Dorian… and the red lyrium is the worst part of this whole thing. They've been feeding it to the rebel mages for the past two weeks. It turns them into mindless addicts, just soldiers who do his bidding for another draught of the stuff and I've never seen this before the Elder One showed up. I doubt it can be found anywhere else - he has them on a tight leash."
"All the rebel mages?" Eve asked, a sliver of worry shoving itself through the sense of exultant power the red lyrium bestowed on her. "Grand Enchanter Fiona? First Enchanter Adrian? Rhys? Randolph?"
"All of them," Felix said, staring fixedly at his father's pained grimace.
"But didn't you know this?" Dorian asked. "Haven't you been here for the past two weeks with them?"
Eve shook her head. "I was kept separately in this study and another chamber close by. I was tasked with finding a cure for the Taint day and night, and I haven't seen them since the start…"
Alexius grunted and his eyelids fluttered in the torchlight. "He'll come to in a moment," Dorian warned, turning his sharp profile to the exit. "We need to leave while we can. Who knows how many more of those draughts he's hidden around here, or how many he's drunk already."
Eve glowed briefly as she cast a healing spell. The lump on Alexius' forehead receded and his grimace smoothed out. Felix looked slightly alarmed when he looked at her. "What did you do?"
"I only healed him, and sank him deeper into sleep," she answered, combing her blood-crusted hair back to tie it away from her face. "He's lucky that I my spirit hates violence, else I'd start playing knifey-stabby on him."
Felix let out a relieved sigh. "Thank you," he said.
Dorian was looking at her shrewdly, and Eve wasn't sure she liked it. "You're more gracious than I would be, in your tiny shoes," Dorian said.
"He's only doing this because he loves his son so much," she said. She bit her lip, feeling sorry for the man. But her sympathy only extended as far as her memory of the choking or the fact that he allowed this Elder One to drug her friends. Granted, she felt fine right now - downright godly - but the masked horror in Felix's expression when he'd spoken of them had her on edge.
Dorian waved an impatient hand. "Yes, well, misplaced fatherly love aside - not that I don't know anything about it - we need to get out of here or that army outside will find out what we've done and kill us when we don't heartily sing the Elder One's anthem or drink his lovely homemade fruit punch."
"There is a secret escape route through the dungeons under the castle that leads to the windmill atop the bluff by the village," Felix said, getting to his feet without waking his father. "Take the south corridor down this hall, avoid the courtyard - that's where the army is camped - and it will lead you through the dungeons and into the windmill. Go west around Lake Calenhad and into the Frostbacks. Warn the Herald at the village of Haven. The Elder One will be sending the first wave of his army today and she might be able to put a stop to all of this."
Dorian grabbed Felix's shoulders as Eve darted around the study to collect her meager few possessions. "You must come with us, Felix, you can't stay here-"
"I'm not leaving him," Felix said with more resolution than Eve had thought him capable of. "Dorian, you must promise me that you will not get caught and stay safe. Get to Haven as fast as you can and warn the Herald."
Dorian drew Felix into a hard embrace. "You big-hearted idiot," he said, words muffled by Felix's shoulder. "I will. Take care of yourself. And Alexius."
Sticking the scalpel that Nessa had given her into the satchel she'd brought from the Spire, Eve turned to see the two Tevinter break apart and regard each other with obvious warmth. It made her think of the other mages, of her apprentice Randolph, even of her fraternity leader, Rhys. Worry was starting to gnaw at her through the red haze of exultation.
Felix held open the door and gestured to the both of them. "The guards will be here soon to check on us. I'll try to keep them here as long as I can while you two escape down through the dungeons."
"I'm not leaving without the other mages," Eve objected.
A furrow arched Dorian's eyebrows as he turned to Eve impatiently. "Dear girl, they won't want to come with us even if they had two thoughts of their own to rub together."
Felix nodded, darting a glace into the shadowy hallway beyond the study. "Dorian is right. You'll see that they are in no right state." As Dorian ushered Eve through the doors, Felix put a firm hand on Eve's arm. "Enchanter Surana, I truly am grateful that you slowed down the taint and bought me some time. I hope to convince my father to leave the Elder One and return to Tevinter with it," he said, glancing at Alexius slumbering on the carpet, "But you mustn't waste time trying to convince the mages. You'll see what I mean when you get down in the dungeons."
She was to just leave her friends in the Redcliffe castle dungeons with a dying man and a crazy magister? Eve shook her head, knowing that that wasn't an option. "I'm only sorry that I could not heal you completely," she said while Dorian watched them with interest. "I wish you the best, Felix. Hopefully we will return with good news."
Felix's directions had proven true, and after they had stuffed themselves into a closet from a passing patrol of guards they had located the right staircase without too much difficulty. Eve crept along the musty and dank corridor by touch, her left hand trailing along the rough stone wall and the cold iron bars of prison doors in the dungeon. She knew that Dorian was creeping along behind her by the light tapping of his staff against the floor and she found that she wasn't too scared - hiding from the enemy in a broom closet squashed up against each other was at least one way in building a little trust. They hurried along, the darkness seeming to press up against their eyes. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled at the dark, at every skittering sound that might hint at guards coming at their heels, and the fact that she was now supposed to escape the castle and find the Herald of Andraste in the mountains to warn about invading Tevinter supremacists with a turncoat Tevinter mage was making her life a borderline crazy fiction that could only be dreamed up by someone like... what was the name of that Tales of the Champion author? Tethras?
Eve supposed she preferred this strange mission to the outright war against the templars that had raged throughout the Hinterlands. Grand Enchanter Fiona had tried to pick a path through the fighting to Redcliffe village, but some skirmishes had been unavoidable, even when they had proclaimed that they just wanted to pass through peacefully. The templars had been unheeding and ruthless, eager to butcher them just as some of the mages had been eager to strike against their former jailers-
She halted in her tracks as she spotted a dim, red haze glowing from a dungeon cell further up the hall. A second later, an elbow caught her sharply in her shoulder. Unnecessarily.
"Don't suppose you can lull any guards to sleep, if they're in there?" Dorian whispered in her ear, his mustache tickling the tip.
Eve flinched away - that was way too ticklish - and shrugged. "I think I can manage," she whispered back. "What, the Tevinterest Tevinter doesn't have a spell to decimate the peasants?"
Dorian snorted quietly. "The term is 'magisterial magister', you uneducated southern heathen, and I'm not even a magister. While I can decimate peasants if I so chose, they are rather loud spells and in case you haven't noticed, we are in the middle of enemy territory."
"Excuses, excuses," Eve muttered under her breath as she sidled closer to the prison door, pressing her back against the wall. No sound carried over to her pricked ears, and she half-hoped that there was nothing actually in there even as she readied a sleep spell in her right hand. She took a deep breath, then peeked into the cell quickly.
At first, she didn't even recognize what she was seeing. Roughly human figures in raggedy robes either lay on the filth-strewn floor or slumped against the walls, entirely silent. Some of them may be dead, but others were tellingly alive by the red glow emanating from their eyes. Red light also wafted in a haze from their skin, from what looked like little pustules - rocks? Crystals? - laced with throbbing yellow veins. One of the strange figures slumped against the bars, his sweat-matted auburn hair curling away from his broad face - it looked like his pale skin was melting, like candle wax…
The bottom of her stomach dropped out and the air in her lungs evaporated as the pieces splintered together into recognition.
Dorian uttered some kind of warning as Eve dropped any effort at concealment and clung to the iron bars, her knees threatening to wobble out from underneath her. "Randolph?" she breathed. It couldn't be, she'd seen him only two weeks ago…
Her stomach roiled when the misshapen figure's red eyes lifted to meet hers. Out of habit, her eyes flicked to the scar on his nose he'd earned while helping her treat a thrashing templar, and the patch missing in his left eyebrow from getting too close to a flask fire in her laboratory. Her last meal was clawing its way up her throat as she clung to the bars staring at what had once been her apprentice. Pain twisted his pale and clammy face as he bared his teeth once, twice… numb, Eve realized that he was trying to pronounce the nickname he'd given her, 'Evey', but couldn't frame the syllables since crimson crystals had erupted in the cracks of his chapped lips.
"Maker's breath, this is what Alexius meant?" Eve almost jumped at the Tevinter mage's muttered oath. She'd forgotten that he was there. "'Infuses the mage with power beyond reckoning.' Left out the part where it literally infuses the body and bursts from the skin, from the looks of it."
She blinked. "Right," she said, turning back to the cell. This is what was pumping in her veins? This is what the red lyrium will turn her into? She couldn't stop herself from looking around and recognizing some of them in the wends of their waxy skin and pulsing crystals. There was Galimede, the enchanter who had taught her how to hone her Force spells, and curled on some rotten straw next to her was the mage who had sold lurid drawings just before curfew, and there lay Frida who actually didn't seem to be breathing… "How do you think we should get them out of here?" Eve asked absently, "There are twelve of them in here, don't know if-"
Dorian stamped his staff, embers sparking from his hands as he pointed down the hall impatiently. "We can't possibly sneak a contingent of half-mad and glowing mages out from under an army unnoticed," he argued, "let alone across the countryside with templars around every corner and into the mountains."
"I can't leave just leave them here," Eve protested. "They need help, they need to be assessed and the red lyrium extracted so they can heal-"
"Red lyrium?" a hoarse voice choked out.
Pairs of clammy, twisted hands thrust through the bars and seized her before she could leap away. "Lyrium? Red lyrium?" they clamored, desperation tainting their excitement. Alarmed, Eve tried to fight out of their bruising clutches, yelping as one of them pulled her braid and another bit her wrist. In a stroke of clarity, she shot a wave of magical sleep and as the mages pressed up against the bars collapsed, she wrenched away from the bars as Dorian pulled her by the arm and conjured a wall of bright orange flames in front of the door.
"Stop!" Eve cried out. "Don't hurt them!"
The wall of flames stopped charging the door. "Why not?" Dorian demanded. "Look at them! They're nothing but mindless drones at the beck and call of anyone with a draught of that - that poison, and they'll be sent to wreak havoc on Haven! Better to take care of them now-"
Eve faced off against Dorian in the dim corridor, the red haze giving her just enough light to see the man's angry and impatient expression. He was larger, stronger, and if that wall of fire was any indication, he was skilled in offensive fire while she was pathetic at it. But she couldn't let him murder them. "They're my friends," she argued, "Randolph is just a kid, and my apprentice! He was studying to become a spirit healer, just like me-"
"Eve, they aren't who they used to be," Dorian interrupted, "they're drugged and addled tinderboxes just waiting to explode!"
"They're people I lived with and saw every day in the Spire," she retorted fiercely, "they're like Felix to me!"
Dorian regarded her with sadness and pity. The heat at her back vanished as the wall of flames flickered and died. Glancing behind her, she saw that the corrupted mages were watching them listlessly, uninterested now that they weren't speaking of red lyrium. "That's a rather cheap stab at my nonexistent feelings," Dorian murmured, "but I can admit that I am not pragmatic enough to execute a cell of chained mages, even if they are the enemy."
Eve sighed, relieved. Then she stiffened as a pair of footsteps echoed distantly, back where they had come from.
She and Dorian looked at each other. "Come on-" Dorian said as he grabbed her wrist and started running down the hall. Eve cast a final look behind her at Randolph who was slumped against the bars and watching her. Guilt gnawed at her heart, and she could only start matching Dorian's sprint after she promised herself that she'd be back to help.
Note: hope you enjoyed the chapter! I always wondered why Dorian was at Redcliffe and why he decided to warn a little-known organization like the Inquisition if you decided to side with the templars instead. This was my answer to that question. Please let me know what you think or just leave a hello in the reviews :)