Shortly after the gash in the sky stopped spreading and word reached the Hinterlands that Andraste had graced Thedas with a Herald, Lilith found three corpses across the creek from her house.

Matthias, her son, had been wandering ahead of her and was the one who first spotted them. He backed away and retreated down the path without a word, hands shaking threateningly, burning scent of electricity entering the air. When she approached the bodies, Lilith saw why he was so frightened. Matthias had seen corpses before, but these three seemed by their dress to be Templars.

They'd been brutalized, beaten to a pulp by magic. Armor battered, hair burnt, skin melted.

Lilith, coughing on the rich, days-old stink, took a step back. She was having trouble looking away. One of dead was a grey-haired woman who she could have sworn she'd seen in town before. There had of late been an influx of Templars and mages in the Hinterlands. All came to fight. Why the Hinterlands was the chosen battleground, Lilith couldn't understand.

The sound of crackling and a worsening of the burning smell pulled her out of her fixation.

"Matthias," she said, sloshing her way through the creek toward him. He was standing in the doorway of the house, opening and closing his shaking hands. Blue light trailed, smoking, from between his fingers.

Lilith steered him inside. She closed the door.

"Will you look at me?" she asked, taking care to speak loudly enough for him to hear. She ran a hand through his hair, anxious for her touch to register.

He looked up. His eyes were huge, and glazed with panic. "I don't think I can stop it," he said. He spoke fast, tripping over his words the way he did when his magic began to show up. "It happens when I'm afraid. I can't do anything about it."

"We'll see," she said, reaching toward him. "Hold on to my hands. Tight."

He hesitated, gazing at the smoke that wound past his knuckles.

"It'll hurt," he said.

"It won't," she said, shaking her head. "I've got tough hands. They're more scar and callous than skin at this point." She held her palms up for him to see.

"I don't know. I think I'll hurt you. I don't want to hurt you," said Matthias. His voice cracked, and he took a step back.

"You won't," she said, although she was never sure. "I'll tell you what, though—" she went to the kitchen table, picked up the gloves she used to handle some of her more abrasive potion ingredients, and put them on. "I'm prepared. Come at me."

He paused a moment, eyes flitting from his hands to hers. He then timidly reached out and grasped.

She felt heat from his hands warm the gloves. She held still, and smiled at him.

"I'm too strong for you," she said.

He didn't smile back, but his hands, thank the Maker, began to cool.

She let go. He stood awkwardly, watching her for a reaction.

"You've got burn salve, still, don't you?" he said. He glanced at her hands. He was guilty, and overeager to right things.

"I don't need it," she said, removing the gloves and waving them. "These are good. They're armor, more or less. Without them I'd have no hands."

"That's bad. You need those," said Matthias.

"Precisely," said Lilith. "But I told you I'm too strong for you. You're going to really have to try if you want to hurt me."

"All right," he said. His voice was still small and shaken, but he was trying pretty well at lighthearted. "I mean…" he made a face, realizing what he'd agreed to. "I'm not going to try?"

Lilith laughed at that, more out of dissolving tension than anything. "Thank you," she said. "Now," she glanced out the window to where the bodies lay, obscured by trees. "You should lay down."

(-)

He slept for about an hour. Matthias' magic, when it showed itself, always left him drained. That was one of a few things Lilith knew about it.

Matthias was ten years old, and had odd timing. Lilith had given birth right at the tail end of the last blight, when word still hadn't reached her home in Ansburg as to whether the Archdemon had been defeated. Then, just as the circles of magi were disbanding left and right, he'd begun waking Lilith up in the middle of the night with odd behavior. His dreams either got him glassy-eyed and screaming hysterically or sitting up calmly in bed, conversing with nothing. He became ravenously hungry and full of constant, jittery energy—even moreso than the average nine-year-old.

Then one day he went to open the front door and accidentally burnt a hole in it.

She'd suspected with the onset of strange dreams that he was coming into his magic, and had been sick with dread when he'd confirmed it. Lilith had no magic, and her parents had had no magic. Matthias' father had been a Templar on the track to becoming commander, so he was straight out of the question. Lilith, growing up, had been as afraid as anyone else of blood magic and crazed apostates. She was afraid now, but for different reasons.

In the past few weeks, she'd been preparing herself for far worse than the sight of a few corpses. First, there'd been the opening of the Breach; it had happened in the afternoon, out of nowhere, with a crack and a boom, sounding like the loudest thunderclap she'd ever heard and briefly plunging everything into blackness before switching to hazy, greenish light. The air had smelled wrong. She'd locked the door and sat for hours with an axe on her lap and her arm around Matthias, wondering what sort of demons the end of the world was likely to conjure up and what exactly she'd do when they broke the door down.

When the light came back to the sky, the breach stopped spreading, and the world didn't end right away, she wasn't sure she could relax. It was better that she didn't, because then the fighting began.

She'd seen bodies on trips into town, try though she did to look at them only out of the corner of her eye. Lilith's home was located far enough away from civilization that the worst of the chaos didn't come to her, and while she was no warrior, she could wield an axe well enough to intimidate the squirrelly groups of bandits who occasionally came skulking through.

"I want you to stay in the house for the next few days," Lilith told Matthias when he woke. She sat on the windowsill by his bed, watching him closely. He seemed well enough; sleepy, not much else.

Matthias, sitting cross-legged on his bed, rubbed his eyes, then made a face at her.

"Really?" he asked.

She was never comfortable with how quickly he seemed to adjust to horrible things. It was only "seemed"—he tended to deal with them in violent nightmares—but by all appearances, his conscious self bounced back in a matter of hours. If Matthias was upset by what he'd seen, he hid it better than ten-year-old Lilith ever could have. Ten-year-old Lilith, she recalled dimly, could barely tolerate being told no, let alone being shown corpses.

"We don't know who's in the area. And with the way your magic comes and goes," said Lilith, "you don't really know if there'll be Templars catching sight of you with your hands…you know," she opened and closed her own, "smoking a bit. It's not so easy to hide, love."

"Well, I said I think it's just when I'm scared," said Matthias. "So if I'm not scared…" He spoke sadly, eyeballing Lilith and looking, she knew, for some hint of relenting in her expression. She steeled herself.

"You can't know nothing's going to scare you," said Lilith, standing, and returning to the kitchen table. A few gnarled little potatoes sat there, waiting to be peeled for supper. "And if you see Templars coming, they'll frighten you for sure. Not to mention…Oli said something about fade rifts opening up around—"

"I'm not that scared of the fade, actually. I really did talk to a spirit there," said Matthias.

Lilith raised an eyebrow at him.

"It looked like here," he said, repeating the story he'd told countless times. "The spirit that talked to me looked exactly like—uh, like Beefbone. He told me he wanted me to be comfortable so he made himself look like…my beloved animal."

"Oh, Maker, Beefbone," said Lilith, rolling her eyes at the name. "You know that Beefbone wasn't our dog, don't you?"

"No," said Matthias, looking at Lilith as though she were insane.

"Matthias," she said, laughing now. "He was the Vales', and he kept coming here because you fed him. Madame Vale pitched a fit thinking we were trying to steal him."

"Oh…" said Matthias, opening his mouth, then closing it when he couldn't think of a response.

"Fade rifts aren't nice, though," said Lilith. "No Beefbones coming out of them. Demons. That's all."

"All right," said Matthias, getting visibly nervous once Lilith mentioned demons. He'd met those, too, in the fade, she was sure of it, but he refused to speak about them. The first thing out of his mouth, whenever the fade got mentioned, was always the Beefbone story. He wasn't willing to describe anything less silly.

"It's all right, though," said Lilith. "The Herald of Andraste's going around closing them."

She immediately felt silly invoking his name.

The Herald of Andraste, supposedly, had been the one to stop the breach growing. What scant news reached the Hinterlands from Haven suggested that he'd proceeded to do absolutely nothing; the breach still loomed large, rifts popped up here, there, and everywhere, and everyone still fought like mad. Nobody in the Hinterlands even had a name to attach to the lofty title; it was a human male, and that was all anyone seemed to know.

"The Herald of Andraste," boomed Matthias. "I gave him a name. It's Harold."

"Wonderful," said Lilith, digging her kitchen knife around the eye on one of the potatoes. "Now. Let's go over what you'll be doing in the next few days, shall we?"

"Running around the woods yelling," said Matthias.

"What'll you actually be doing?" said Lilith.

"Running around the woods yelling," repeated Matthias, giggling, which was getting a bit annoying.

"Matthias. Stop," said Lilith, setting her knife down and trying for the sort of impassive look that usually got him quiet. "You'll be…?"

"Inside," said Matthias, glumly.

Lilith nodded. "Safe," she said.

He began to speak, but was cut off by a knock on the door.

They traded a glance. Lilith's heart raced, as happened every time anyone knocked on the door or rode past the house. Fighting and bodies aside, lately, even the more apparently harmless strangers had gotten bold about begging, borrowing, and stealing. They pretended too hard to be friendly just to gain access to food and supplies. In such spare times, a house, no matter how tiny and humble, suggested to the more desperate refugees someone with endlessly deep pockets.

Lilith went to the kitchen window and glanced outdoors. Olina Gertek—a dwarf around Lilith's age, and one of her closest neighbors—stood by the door, glancing around herself and looking as anxious as Lilith and Matthias felt. This gave Lilith pause; Oli was kind but tough as nails. She'd gotten Lilith out of a scrape early on with a group of bandits on the road into town. They'd been friends since.

"Got smart about answering the door, I see," said Oli, slipping indoors.

"Hello Lilith. Hello Matthias," said a low voice past the doorway. Lilith jumped.

"Karina, come in," called Oli.

"Hello Karina," said Lilith.

Karina, a young woman with blonde hair, was about a head taller than Lilith, and stooped to enter the house. She was a mage, tranquil for reasons Lilith had never learned. Oli had found her wandering the woods, half-starved, calmly sporting all manner of cuts, and pregnant with a baby she quickly miscarried. Oli had since taken it on herself to look after her until a safer place could be found.

"Lil, we've got trouble," said Oli.

"Have we really," said Lilith, forcing sarcasm. Her heart climbed into her throat.

"What's going on?" asked Matthias. His voice had gone soft and he hung back pensively.

"Rogue Templars," said Oli. "Four or five of them."

Lilith's stomach plummeted.

"Where?" she asked.

"Close," said Oli. "They were just outside Master Dennet's stable. They spoke to me, asking did I know the mages out this way. We cut through the woods to get here and they're taking the road, but…we've got to move. They're on our tail."

The room felt airless. Matthias drew closer to Lilith. Lilith, in her mind's eye, could see nothing but the bodies across the creek, in sharp focus. She remembered the grey-haired woman's body. She gulped, nauseated.

"They know he's got magic," Oli continued. "They know about Karina, too, for what that's worth."

"Start packing," Lilith told Matthias, brushing her hand over his cheek. She let it linger a moment. "You know what to get. Go," she said, pointing to the trunk at the foot of the bed. Matthias did as she said. Karina followed him.

"How," said Lilith. "How do they know about him? How far are they?" She went to the door; on the back of it hung her axe, old now, used usually for chopping wood, but recently sharpened and easy enough to attack with. She removed the axe and went over, in her mind, how best to swing it, remembered placement of her fingers, good positioning for her feet.

"Can't be sure, but you know Berrit's a hand at the horsemaster's stables now," said Oli, grimacing. "I'll bet even money the Templars showed up with coin, hunting apostates, and he gave them his story. You know how he likes to have his own version of things."

Lilith slammed the axe onto the kitchen table.

"Sounds right," she said. Her hairs stood on end. She wanted to run and to axe someone at the same time. Months back, she and Marc Berrit had done some business, plus had a skittish little affair of convenience. He'd incorrectly taken that to mean she'd marry him.

"Point is, rogue Templars spoiling for a fight have been told there's mages living right around here. They're not right, either." She shook her head at some mental image, brow wrinkling. "They look like they haven't washed any blood off of themselves in about a week, one of them's missing an arm and another kept talking about how they'd all been tortured by a couple of the apostates out there in Witchwood."

Lilith let go of Matthias and removed the axe from the door. She listened, half-expecting to hear hoofbeats and voices approaching that second.

"Which direction do we go in?" she asked, when no hoofbeats sounded.

"Karina and I are headed to Redcliffe," said Oli. "They're keeping the mages safe enough up there. We're going to try to cut over," she gestured to the east, "the hills that way toward the old Redcliffe road."

"And the bandits in the hills?" said Lilith.

Oli gave her a pitying look. "We're not exactly spoiled for choice," she said. "We know there are Templars out there. The bandits may or may not show up once we're in those hills."

"We're ready," said Matthias. Lilith, who'd been looking out the window, turned, and started when she saw Karina standing directly beside her. Karina stared down her nose at Lilith. Matthias, across the table from them, pushed Lilith's pack toward her.

"The bandits don't care about us," said Matthias. "We don't have anything expensive."

"You hear like a hound," said Lilith. She wanted to hold him but there was, she understood, no time.

"All right," Oli gestured to the door. The four of them peered out the window. The coast, at the moment, was clear, and they slipped outside.

The house was surrounded loosely by trees, away from the road but still within sight of it. The trees weren't so thick, either; all tall, rangy pines, undernourished as most of the people in the area. It was early spring-usually biting and windy-but that afternoon the weather seemed to be conspiring against them. No wind. Dead silence instead. The fallen needles formed a thick, dry layer on the ground, and Lilith cringed as their feet crackled over them.

"Oh, Andraste's tits this is annoying," muttered Oli.

Someone's feet caused a particularly loud crack. Lilith, Oli and Matthias snapped to attention, while Karina continued on her way.

"Us. Just us," Lilith whispered to Matthias.

"No," came Karina's soft voice. "Templars."

Everything stopped. Everyone's breath caught.

Down the road, someone shouted.

Hot terror melted down Lilith's spine. She reached out and grabbed both of Matthias' hands, clinging tightly to them. Taking a step backward, she saw a disorganized cluster of people come into view down the road. The red and white uniforms were there, covered in dark stains. The Templars were ragged, with no horses, no helmets, and little armor. One of them seemed to be missing an arm.

Lilith ran, Matthias at her side. Blood pulsed in her ears, and the whole world was swallowed up by the sound of heartbeat, breath, and footsteps. They strained forward, unable to go fast enough.

The sprint had Lilith panting, and Matthias stumbled. She took him by the arm with vague ideas of dragging or carrying, then saw two of the Templars on their tail, and two more waiting on the path behind them.

She let go of Matthias. Above the booming of her heartbeat, she heard her voice.

"Go," she screamed. "Run. Go."

He sobbed, painfully out of breath. Sparks from his hands flew into Lilith's peripheral vision.

Something that wasn't a part of her conscious mind made the decision for her. She turned to the Templars, taking a few steps backward as she looked at them, but no longer fleeing. She held her axe, taking on a fighting stance.

"Oli," her mouth shouted, while her mind stayed a blur. "Take him—"

"You fucking idiot," Oli yelled. "Don't do this. Lil."

Lilith had no time to reply. The first Templar got within swinging distance, and she swung. Her axe-blade clanged uselessly against his breastplate, to her terror and dismay. His blade whooshed toward her. She dodged, off-balance.

Stumbling, she swung again, higher this time, and the blade notched right into flesh. Fresh blood spilled and ran fast, adding brightly to the crusty brown on the man's uniform. The man did not scream, and as Lilith tore her axe-blade back out of him, a hand grabbed her by her hair, dragging her. She was pressed to a hot, armored body.

"Are you the apostates?" a woman's voice shouted in her ear, jerky and rough, forcing its way out. "The apostates—" her arm reached out, pointing at the fleeing Matthias, Karina and Oli.

Lilith saw the other two Templars catching up to them. One grabbed hold of Matthias, the other, with a swing, sent Oli to the ground. Karina patiently hoisted her back up.

There was a snap and a whooshing sound, and the Templar who'd grabbed Matthias caught fire, screaming.

All was unnaturally silent as Matthias ran. Fast beyond belief. He ran all the way to the foot of the hill and his tiny figure clambered over the rocks, Karina and Oli close behind.

Lilith rammed her elbow backward, and stamped her foot over her attacker's. Both actions startled him into dropping her. One second of freedom. She swung, hit, swung again, again, and again. Her head seized up and everything blurred, but she caught glimpses of bright blood, caught the coppery scent of the stuff, and was both terrified and spurred on.

A blade slashed at her shoulder. She felt only mild stinging, and turned on her second attacker. She swung at him, too—bolting backward, for a moment, from his blade, then throwing herself forward. She swung once; blade stuck into soft flesh. She swung again; blade cracked bone.

He fell. Lilith saw one of his fellows dragging himself away. She ran, head still gripped by panic, and didn't stop until she reached the other side of the hill. She lowered herself to the ground, unable to suck in breath fast enough. The taste of blood was in her mouth, and she was shaking and parched. She rifled through her pack for water, found the skin, and drank, trying to look in every direction at once for her companions.

They'd gotten far enough that she could no longer see them, and she rose, stuffing the water skin back into her pack. She started in the direction she'd seen Matthias take, praying he'd been able to stick to his path.

She was able to move faster than she'd have expected, exhausted as she already was. But footsteps followed her, and she turned, hoping desperately that the approaching Templar was badly injured. As it happened, the Templar—a man no older than twenty—seemed unharmed physically. Something alien seemed to inhabit his skin, though; magic and torture had wrecked his mind.

"You're not an apostate, are you?" he asked her, eyes focusing on something over her head. His voice had a muffled stickiness to it. He was missing almost all of his teeth.

"No," she said, backing away cautiously, axe up. "I'm not an apostate. Wouldn't have an axe if I was, would I?"

"Maybe," he said.

"Please," she said, trying to look him in the eye, but continuing to back away. "I have no magic at all. Let me go and there'll be no harm done to anyone."

The young Templar drew a dagger. Lilith gripped her axe tighter.

"This has poison," he said. "I got it off bandits on the West Road. If you're an apostate…"

"I'm not," said Lilith. She dug her nails into the handle of her axe. Her stomach was in knots. The cut she'd been given on her shoulder began to sting.

The Templar gave her a long look, then shook his head.

"I can't trust that," he said, and she knew then that there was no reasoning with him. She turned and ran. "That's how you got us out to Witchwood, lying," he called after her, chasing, sounding almost in tears, "and you're not doing it again."

He yelled these last words like, voice now rough and hysterical. Lilith began to stumble, going out of breath fast. When she was forced to turn and fight the Templar, his poisoned blade caught her and just as it did, she knocked him unconscious with the handle of her axe. She dropped immediately to the ground and rifled through her bag for some sort of poison antidote.

She found none.

Whether she'd sold her whole supply and slipped up in documenting it, or whether Matthias hadn't thought to pack the stuff, she didn't know, but her heart squeezed in on itself when the only potions she found were health potions and antiseptic.

Time moved at a bizarre pace from there on out. Lilith drained the contents of two bottles of health potion, then continued to run. She moved fluidly and tirelessly, fuelled by Maker knew what. Though she'd knocked the young Templar out, somehow it didn't last, and he found her again.

He came across her in the sparse, chilly woods near Lake Luthias, in the grey light just before dawn. She was in a daze, unwilling to accept that she hadn't lost him after all, and unwilling to accept that the poison, slow though it apparently was, had caught up with her. She knew that she sweating head to toe and stank oddly, that her stomach felt mealy and that her heartbeat was off, but she couldn't let herself accept it. Still, when he went to finish her off, she could absolutely accept that it was time to cut him down before he did the same to her.

She was somewhat aware of another man entering the scene. When she saw he was a Grey Warden, she felt sure she'd hallucinated him. She'd neither seen nor heard of any wardens in area for a long, long time.

(-)

Lilith dreamt of Matthias, and of running. Her fever had spiked, and she found herself in some state between full sleep and full wakefulness. She was dimly aware of lying on something like solid ground and at the same time, saw her own feet pounding endlessly and hypnotically down overgrown trails. Her body was spongey with sweat, her stomach sick and her throat slimy. Chills hit her so hard that she was jerked right out of her dream-state.

Her muzzy mind suggested to her that there were footsteps headed her way, but she couldn't rally herself enough to pay attention until she heard the man's voice.

"Sit up," the voice said. "You're going to drink something."

It was a deep voice, commanding and worn. Strong Freemarcher drawl to it.

Lilith opened her eyes. She found she was lying on her back, staring at the grey sky. She didn't want to move. In a display of truly baffling fever logic, her brain argued that if she lay still, she'd stop shivering.

"I don't need to drink anything, thanks," she murmured. Her stomach gave a threatening gurgle.

"I see," said the voice, reasonably.

She was satisfied for a moment, until two strong hands grabbed her by the arms and heaved her upright. She shouted, jerking away from the man's grasp.

He let her go. With one last shudder, the chills started to dissipate and Lilith, crossing her arms and trying to sit straight, had a moment to take in the man in front of her; middle-aged, dark hair and beard, face rather gaunt. At least, that could have been the case. Her field of vision was expanding, contracting, darkening and blurring so wildly that she could have been looking at anyone.

She was fairly sure she saw the man hold out a flask.

"Antidote. The poison in your system's very common stuff. Every bandit in the area's got his daggers coated in it," he said. "Take this. Drink."

She stared at his gloved hand, and groped around it. She didn't trust flasks of unidentified liquid, particularly offered up by anyone with this man's hollow-eyed appearance. Better, she reasoned, that the flask was in her hand than his. If nothing else, she could chuck it at his head should the situation go far enough south.

"Who are you?" asked Lilith.

"Warden Blackwall," said the man, placing the flask in her grasping hand. "Once again, drink. You've not got much time."

Lilith's heart jolted at the last statement.

"Warden," she said. "Grey warden? I think we've met." She hadn't hallucinated him after all, then. That was a little encouraging.

He made some sort of noise of agreement. Lilith felt around for the neck of the flask. She uncorked it, and sniffed. She recognized the scent of some of the ingredients, but others she was surprised to find she couldn't place. There was a bitterness to the stuff that was unfamiliar to her.

As much as grey warden sounded somewhat comforting, the comforting titles of supposed heroes currently didn't mean much. Templars, too, were supposed to be honorable sorts, but that honor had gotten so far away from them of late that their name had taken on a new, ominous meaning. Anyway, the Hinterlands were such a powder keg lately that anyone could claim to be anything if it would facilitate robbing, raping or killing. The fact remained that Lilith preferred not to drink strange liquids offered by strange men, titled or no.

"That flask isn't poisoned," said Blackwall, voice raised, "The blade that gave you the gash on your arm was. So unless you want your son to become an orphan, drink."

"How," Lilith said, "do you know about my son?" She looked him over. She could grab him by the hair or beard, as both were quite long, and head-butt him. It would, at least, hold him off long enough for her to run.

"You mentioned him earlier," said Blackwall. "Threatened me with a fate worse than death if I harmed him.'

"Well, that sounds—" Lilith cut herself off with a hiss of pain. A sharp shock went through her chest. She hunched, clutching, and her hands took up a fierce trembling out of nowhere. Her heart did a strange little leap, then began to slow. It beat with a very soft, squeezing pulse. Her body shuddered, and she felt her head flop against one shoulder. She wished it wouldn't do that.

"That's it," she heard him bark at her, and he put a hand on her wrist, meaning to force her hand. "You don't trust me, I'm not disposing of your corpse."

She heaved her head back upright. It swam, and lights flashed in her field of vision.

"Oh, stop," she muttered at him. She opened her mouth and haphazardly sloshed the flask's contents back.

The stuff was foul. It tasted like creamy, bloody whiskey with a fair few sour clots to it, and it hit her stomach like a fist. She began to gag it back up, sputtering, but swallowed repeatedly, forcing the potion down. She finished the flask, then set it down and sat for a few moments with a hand over her mouth and the other on her stomach.

"Listen," she murmured, when her stomach settled. "Assuming that wasn't also poison, I've got to get to Redcliffe."