My deepest apologies for the crazy delay on the new chapter. Been pretty distracted by another fic I'm working on.
Fire, ice, then a couple well placed kicks, repeat, repeat. He'd brought a whole cliffside down for Maker's sake, surely he could find a way to pry loose the ancient metal bars of his cage, since it was clear no one was coming back for him. At least not until Selise finally figured something out. He was sure she would, but whether she would do so in time was a problem that made his heart flutter with panic. His clock was ticking, and ticking all the more swiftly with each passing moment.
Until then, a blast of fire until the metal glowed, followed immediately by a shock of ice. The extremes of expanding and contracting had to weaken either the rock or the metal eventually. Sometime, something would have to break. He had no choice but to try, and keep trying. He would not just sit and let himself die while Selise was under the control of a depraved madman.
It was the last thing he expected. A strike back against him would have been better. But to just leave him there? To starve slowly while still looking at, and now smelling the decaying bodies of Etienne and Kinley, left to wonder what they were doing with Selise, it was about as cruel an action as he could imagine. He was sure that Julian knew exactly what he was doing when he made that decision. He was probably very happy with the suffering he could cause simply by doing nothing. Anders wondered if he'd have still been left behind if they'd known who he was. Perhaps it'd been foolish not to tell them. As just another mage, he was expendable. But as someone with numerous bounties on his head, someone whose capture could offer a generous payout, they certainly would have thought twice about just shrugging him off. He cursed himself for that decision, at first quietly, and then out loud. And then he screamed while he kicked, pouring every ounce of anger he could muster into his assault on the metal bars.
They had to have left the area completely, traveling back toward Skyhold. He hadn't heard any footsteps nearby in a day in a half. His throat was parched, every cell in his body crying out for hydration. He'd been blasting fire onto the rocks behind him and lapping up the melted drippings that emerged from ancient cracks, but it wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough.
A blast of fire until the iron glowed orange, and then a well placed kicked at the intersection of two bars. It felt soft, but still barely budged. And then a blast of ice until the orange hissed and crackled and another kick, hoping the next one would be the time that something finally shattered. First the cross section, and then where the bars met the rock. The metal was thin, pounded into crude strips, and the cross hatches overlapped in thick squares. Perhaps he should focus on where the bars met the ground, at least until he could see how deeply into the ground they go.
But his weakness was increasing, waves of dizziness coming each time he stood. He'd already been malnourished, and then a solid day and a half without a single scrap of food, and there was no question he was fading. He wouldn't last long, forgotten in the cell. He knew Selise knew that much, and hopefully she was faring better. If they were forcing her to travel they'd need to be feeding her as well. If she couldn't figure out something, that could only mean that there was nothing to be done. If this was the way it ended, he hoped that at least she got out of it all alive.
Justice rumbled his frustration regularly, and chunks of time slipped away, lost to darkness. He was no longer sure if it was Justice taking over or just simple, intermittent blackouts. But if Justice was attempting anything in the way of an escape, it too was useless.
He fell back against the wall, needing to take a break from the last hour's exertion, and he felt the hazy darkness of sleep lingering close. Sleep came almost as an attack now, rearing up and swallowing him whole with only a few minutes warning and sometimes not even that. His body and mind were breaking down, and doing so all the more quickly for the efforts he expended in his attempt to escape. After yet another unsuccessful attempt at breaking the bars, he sank down into himself, exhausted and drained, and let it come. Sleep washed over him in an inky black wave, but his mind wasn't quiet as it fell swiftly into unconsciousness. There was a voice there, waiting for him. It was calm and soothing.
"Pay attention Anders, I only have a moment."
Something survived outside the blackened ring of death that Selise found herself within. She'd gone up in a burst of flames, but the snow hampered its reach. Millie was gone, the memory of her hair and flesh burning away from her bones replaying vividly in her mind, but there was still movement somewhere close. There were the gurgling sounds of pained breaths, the slaps of arms trying to find purchase in its surroundings. The smoke lingered around them, a hazy cloud that smelled of burnt hair and flesh. It had been much easier to bring a rickety wooden house down. Surrounded by rocks and snow, her flames had not found much to catch.
She blinked the fog out of her eyes and tried to focus on the scene around her. The gurgling and slapping belonged to a struggling Julian, while Qaris lay prostrate in the snow just beyond them both. Her limbs shook as she rose to a stand, and after the first few steps she worried that her wobbly legs might not carry her all the way to Julian. The exertion of all the running in the snow they'd done, combined with a explosion of power from immersion in the fade, had combined to make her very bones feel like jelly.
Qaris stirred, his hair had been singed nearly to the scalp, and his clothes hung in blackened tatters. As he turned to face her, he revealed a number of large orange blisters bubbling off his skin. He'd been burned for sure, but was otherwise intact.
Julian looked no better, only his own blood streamed from his nose and mouth, a trickle from his ear pooled beneath his head. Selise felt a surge of panic, needing suddenly to get to him, to finish him off before he attempted to make use of his own bleeding lifeforce, but her attempt to walk faster only found her facedown in the snow. Her body still felt foreign, her limbs disobedient and sluggish, every vessel, vein and artery sore and bruising through her flesh in purple streaks and lines, running up and down her arms, her legs, her neck, stinging from the memory of pulling her over mountains like reins on a horse. Her scorched leathers crackled around her as they cooled.
There came a grunt, a hitched breath and a startled, confused gurgle of a voice, asking in shrill, terrified tones, "what are you doing!?"
She turned around completely, still feeling like she was caught in a dream, still unsure of the reality she found herself within, but what she saw was the hilt of Qaris' blade buried in Julian's chest. Selise forced her legs to stay steady for each pained step until she was towering over the dark skinned man. Those white, perfect teeth were red with blood, his eyes casting about in fright as he coughed and hiccuped. Qaris had not stabbed the man in the heart, but had deliberately aimed a little lower and off to the side. A lung. One single lung, pierced straight through, meant a slow, painful death, and Selise gave Qaris an approving, thankful nod. Whatever else Qaris had planned, he'd at least given Julian the death he deserved.
Selise knelt down to look into the man's eyes, and that ocean of Fade magic still felt so close, as close as one could get without walking within it. It was nothing to Selise to gather up a new infusion of mana, as effortless as taking a breath. All that power she shaped carefully, sending it into Julian in the form of the most horrific nightmare she could create. His already wide eyes widened further, pupils blown hollow and black as the scream in his throat started out a small, high pitched whine. It was coming slowly, an instinctive reaction that was dampened by fear-induced paralysis, his mind digging deep to find the very darkest imagery that existed within. She was looking into his eyes the moment he had his final spark of lucidity, before madness carried him into himself and out of himself and sent him tumbling headlong into the nightmare world which would be his deathbed. She imagined the images plaguing him drew new dimensions of fear by manipulating his pain, mixing with the sensation of lungs that slowly filled with blood and then collapsed. It would be a death as terrible as any he'd ever inflicted upon anyone else, certainly as bad as whatever he'd had in mind for her, and for Anders. A death that maybe Anders had already suffered.
When his screams made her eardrums ache, she stood on creaking bones and took a long look at her surroundings. What she needed was their trail of footsteps in the snow, hoping against the rational voice in her head that it might be as easy as simply backtracking the entire way. As long as no fierce winds had blown, the possibility existed, however unlikely it may be. Qaris was groaning as he moved about and Selise turned to see him packing snow onto his blisters. She could stay and speak to him, ask what his intentions were now. He was clearly no threat, or he'd be jumping on this moment of opportunity to make a move of his own. But he wasn't bothering with her at all, and apparently not fearing her wrath either as he kept his back turned to her, focusing only on his own wounds.
He had good reason not to care, as he was not her concern. Anders remained strong in her mind, and she held to the love that swelled in her heart for him, shaking away the memories of the demons whispering, taunting her with her own self-doubt, toying with all her insecurities. She would have to learn to resist such mental attacks if she was going to walk in the Fade as the somniari of legend do. She would have to strengthen her mind, and learn to block it out.
This is what she told herself as she pushed each leg forward, first one and then the other, traveling away from the panicked screams of Julian, screams that sounded as though they were ripping apart his throat. The Fade rift continued to buzz and thrum through the air, and she felt the legions of demons on the other side, attracted to the wails of pain coming from the incapacitated blood mage. Soon more would appear, and whoever was left in the vicinity would have to fight all over again. She turned and called to Qaris, the elf crouched down in the snow, seemingly in shock.
"Hey!" she rasped, her voice croaking and not carrying far at all. "Qaris!" she tried again, and this time he turned. She nodded to the Fade rift, feeling the pulsations of demonic bodies preparing to plunge through it. "Get away from that thing!"
And then she turned again, seeing finally the line of disturbance in the snow that indicated their trail, and onward she trudged, her muscles screaming, her bones vibrating, her head pounding. It would be a slow trip, and at some point she'd have to rest, but she couldn't rest too long. Something in her gut told her that there was no time to spare, not a single second to waste resting when she had the energy to move forward, however painful that might be.
It helped to think of things, get lost in thought as she moved, trying to separate her mind from the raw mass of pain that was her body. She thought of Solas' words, that exploring her past might be the key to her magic. He had been right of course. Getting knocked into sleep during the fight with her father had given her access to destructive magic, a magic she could never quite master under any other circumstances. When she'd tried in the Circle it always came in irregular, uncontrolled bursts. Which brought her back to his statement that her presence disturbs the veil. If the barrier between herself and the Fade was moving, changing around her, then perhaps that was why the destruction she tried to pull through it always pulsated and changed so unpredictably. It was like trying to run water through a constantly changing sieve. Walking through the Fade in dreams was something most mages were supposed to be able to do anyway, at least according to the Circle, but she was different somehow, he'd said. As a dreamer she had more control, more freedom, the ability to shape the Fade to her will and not just be a tourist fumbling about in a strange land.
She stepped on as though practically sleeping on her feet, opening an eye every now and again to confirm the trail still lay before her, her eyes searing with the brightness of the sun reflected off the snow. How many days had they been walking away from the caves? Two days? Three days? She wasn't quite sure anymore.
There was one frightening moment she woke up face down on the ground. Her cheeks were biting with cold, and she had no memory of falling. No memory of laying there for however long it had been, and she certainly hadn't felt like she'd slept. Weakness was creeping in. There'd been no awareness of anything other than walking one moment, and waking up the next. She pushed herself onto shaky arms and saw the red staining the white below the imprint left by her head. Her fingertips searched the wet, matted tangles of hair and came back fresh with crimson. It must have been from the hit she'd taken when the demon threw her against the rock. But it was not dried or sticky. It was a fresh bleed.
Selise sat up and looked around the forest. She'd wandered slightly away from the path in the snow, and she had no idea how long she was out. The light looked different, but her thoughts were coming too randomly, too disorganized to remember the position of the sun when she'd begun walking away from the rift. Qaris was not following behind her. For a moment she sat still and numb, feeling too exhausted to cry, realizing there were things she should have done before she left. The rift had been about to burst again, but she should have grabbed packs, should have searched for rations, should have confirmed that Julian didn't have the book. She had done none of those things. Why hadn't she?
The world was blinking into darkness around her again as she distantly registered more warm moisture oozing around her ear. She knew not where exactly the wound was, only that it was somewhere on her head, the entirety of which swelled and ached as though the whole thing was the wound. For a moment her stomach heaved, but she swallowed down the bile that crept up her throat. There was little in her stomach anyway, just the small ration of stale bread she'd been given that morning.
Julian had loved trying to make her eat. He laughed brightly, his eyes twinkling with amusement as he tried to work her jaw, pulling on the blood in her neck and her throat that made her swallow, and in the process she choked and repeatedly bit her tongue. She'd closed her eyes and tried to drift away from it, only to be yanked back to attention when a dry piece of crust lodged in the back of her throat. She could barely cough, and could only sputter helplessly, until Julian figured out the right controls to get things moving again. She felt like a piece of machinery, an elaborate contraption with gears and pulleys and switches, and a controller at the helm who had no idea what he was doing. There were few other moments in her life in which she felt as deprived of dignity, even among the memories she had with her father.
The blotches of black began pulling on the edges of her consciousness, and combined sickeningly with a spinning of the trees, and flip-flopping of the ground and sky, and for a moment her head grew cold, finding itself mysteriously cradled within a pillow of soft, fresh snow. She noted somewhere vaguely that she was laying down again, her lids growing heavier and heavier with each breath she took. As the pain ebbed out of her body, and the cold soothed the pounding of her skull, she closed her eyes gratefully and let the darkness take over again.
Solas had told Anders where the keys to the cell were stashed, behind a rock in a separate cave, a rock that would be hard to move due to years of not being touched, not that it would do Anders any good from trapped inside a cage. He'd also pointed to a piece of rock in the wall behind Anders, that he'd said sat just before a giant block of ice. If he directed his flames just right, the water would pour out so at least he could remain hydrated in the meantime. If he could ration it well enough to wait out his rescue; a rescue which was not guaranteed to come in time.
There was little Anders had been able to say in return, and they were things that Solas seemed already to know. He told him quickly about the blood mages, and that the blood mages had Selise and were heading back to Skyhold. He told Solas that they had some sort of plans for the Inquisitor, and that it'd been a few days — he was losing track of how many - and that he had no food. Solas promised help was on the way, and then he was gone. Anders didn't even remember now how long it had been since the dream. Time was flowing past him both faster than he could grasp it, and slower than his body could bear. Death was not far away. Another day, maybe two, or so it felt. Even with the little portions of water he'd had so far, his muscles felt like they were eating themselves, and his bones felt increasingly hollow.
As Solas had instructed, he forced a torrent of flames toward that one particular rock, starting slowly at first. For a moment, nothing happened and Anders' heart sank within his chest as he waited, not even bothering to stand to investigate further. He heard the cracks and shifting in the wall that indicated something was happening, but no water appeared. He tried again and waited. Slowly little drips formed on the lowest ledge of the rock, bulbs of clear liquid that hung in place for long moments before finally gathering enough weight to separate and fall. One more blast and the drips got fatter, faster, falling and then filling again. Anders stood on shaky legs and opened his mouth beneath the ledge, letting fat drop after fat drop fall onto his tongue. The rock steamed with residual heat, and quickly the drops were fuller and falling in a stream. Anders gulped and gulped, the water sweeter, and much more pure that the drivel he'd been surviving upon thus far, and soon his cramping stomach felt like it was expanding with the growing contents. In time his whole head was wet with a curiously invigorating burst of icy runoff, wrenching him away from exhaustion. He drank until his stomach hurt, and until he was sure he'd begin to retch if he continued. But the water kept coming, and he made a mental note to go easier next time. He didn't know how long he'd have to rely upon whatever mysterious stores were secreted behind the wall, and didn't want to deplete his new supply too quickly. The full stomach, as uncomfortable it made him after days and days of living on scant rations, still gave him a burst of energy that was enough to turn him back toward the bars.
He paused for a moment, his nose filled the putrid scent of rotting meat, and he first turned back toward the bloated bodies of the two sharing his cave. More ice now, in wide scattered bursts, covering and freezing the corpses. Ice at least might further slow the decomposition, and lessen the stench somewhat, giving Anders a welcome reprieve from the constant presence of death. Anders could barely look at them any more, as deformed and discolored as they were, and he administered his bursts of ice with averted eyes.
When that was done it was the metal bars again, a new surge of hope encouraging him to continue on, to begin the cycle anew. A burst of flames. A burst of ice. And a roar ripping from his throat as he gave the crackling metal a solid kick. Something had to give eventually.