So, I posted this chapter yesterday and it seems like it got garbled somehow (thought it wasn't garbled for me when I posted it, which is weird; FF is doing some strange stuff for me lately). I just now noticed it, so reposting the proper version and hopefully this works.
Thanks so much to those who have left reviews so far. Sometimes my prose is a bit stilted, so I'm working on smoothing it out and making it flow a little better, and it's always nice to know that I'm improving. :)
It becomes an emperor to die standing. ~ Titus Flavius Vespasian
The wind howled through the valley, moaning through the dark pines and rocky crevices and snapping at the tent canvases. The air was thick with snow as it blundered steadily downward from a black and murky night sky. Braziers and makeshift campfires kept the worst of the chill at bay, but the cold was steadily encroaching and there was less warmth than there were people who needed it.
Exhausted, his body hurting in more places than he felt should have been possible, Blackwall found an empty spot in one of the hastily erected shelters and lowered himself gingerly down onto a pallet, trying not to wake others who were sleeping or trying unsuccessfully to sleep. It felt like the first time he had been off of his feet in an age, but he didn't dare take his boots off. They were keeping him warm and who knew when he might have to be on the move again.
It had been nearly a day since the attack and the catastrophic destruction of Haven. As if the situation wasn't already dire, a blizzard had set in and the remnants of the Inquisition had had to scramble to find shelter in a nearby valley. It was impossible to determine where they were and how far to the nearest civilization until the storm abated. At least the snow made it harder for the enemy, if there was anything left of the unbannered army that had assaulted them, to locate the camp. Supplies were scarce, however, and they had lost an uncounted number of people in the battle. The survivors were frightened and restless, the uncertainty of their situation and the strained resources already beginning to cause fractures in the ranks.
Blackwall told himself not to think about it. They had to take it an hour at the time right now. Survive the storm, then regroup, then come up with a new plan. The healers had patched him up as best they could, but they couldn't remove the weary ache of muscles pushed beyond endurance or put the blood he had lost back into his body. He couldn't remember the last time he had slept. There was work still to be done, but he would be no good to anyone soon if he didn't at least attempt to rest. Making sure that his sword was within easy arm's reach and wincing at the protests of his body, Blackwall leaned back and stretched out on the makeshift bedroll. But, sleep would not come.
The attack on Haven had been one of the most terrifying battles Blackwall had ever fought. The rebel mages were unhinged, tainted with magic the likes of which he could never have imagined in his darkest nightmares. They attacked the front ranks like a wave of vengeful malice incarnate and Blackwall recalled the horrific sight of thousands of lights covering the valley, torches and magefire illuminating the immensity of their foe. He had known then in his heart that they were lost. Even with Haven's fortifications well underway, there was no way the small fighting force - even bolstered by the Templars - could defend itself against such unequal odds. But there was nothing else to be done. Better to die fighting than submit to slaughter. And it would have been a slaughter, if not for Aelis.
Aelis. There was no doubt in anyone's mind now that she was dead, buried under half a mountain's worth of ice and debris. If the dragon had not killed her then the final avalanche that had buried the village certainly had. No one could have survived that. She had sacrificed herself to buy time for the rest of the Inquisition to escape to safety, and there was not one of the ragged survivors who didn't know and feel her loss. Their Herald. Their savior. The only hope they had of closing the Breach and restoring sanity. She was gone, and the world felt ashen and destitute for it. And the darkness was closing in.
He should have been there with her at the end. Thinking about it now hurt Blackwall more deeply than any of the wounds he had suffered. Even if he couldn't have saved her, at least she wouldn't have spent her final moments alone. And he would not now have to bear the unbearable shame and regret of having left her behind. Like a coward. It bit him to the very core of his being and he cringed under the heavy weight of despair and loss.
She had known it was a suicide she was going to. Before he had even heard the plan, standing at a distance and watching her conferring urgently with Cullen and the mortally wounded Chancellor Roderick, he had seen the realization in her face: the stilling of her expression, the indescribable change behind her eyes as her focus shifted from survival to calculating how many of the bastards she could take down with her. He had seen that look before on too many other faces to mistake it for anything else.
As the others had left her side to go see to the evacuation of the chantry, as Aelis had begun to prepare herself - checking and tightening the straps of her armor, binding up the wounds she already had, going through the ritual of calming herself and blotting out the instinctive animal fear of death that fell on everyone before a fight - Blackwall had approached her.
It doesn't have to be you, he had told her, willing to take her place at whatever end she was about to go to. He would have done so, gladly. She was younger than him. She had more potential, more to live for. If she survived, she had more of a chance to make something of herself. He had seen her come so far and fight so hard to be what she needed to be to the Inquisition. He couldn't let her throw that away. It couldn't be for nothing.
If not me, then who?, Aelis had replied. She wouldn't look him in the eyes as she shouldered her sword, but she had shaken her head at the ground, frowning. It's a small price, Blackwall. The Inquisition needs the rest of them more than it needs me. I might not be a chevalier or a Templar or a Warden, but I can fight like one. I can die like one. I can buy these people enough time to save themselves and show those bastards out there how the bloody Herald of sodding Andraste dies.
The determination in her face, despite the pain and weariness behind it, told him that she would insist on this and that it was fruitless to argue. She had set her mind to it. And so Blackwall, his heart thumping hollowly beneath his breastplate, had made the only decision that felt right. He would go with her. He would not let her face what was out there alone. If he died, then he could think of no better cause and no better company for it. It was what a real Warden would have done. She had argued with him, urged him to go with the others, but he had held fast until she relented. Thinking of it now - of the way she had looked at him there in the nave of the Chantry, of the way she had seemed to want to push him away to safety and cling to him for comfort at the same time - made the sense of loss he felt for her now sharpen and burn him from within.
Until that moment, he hadn't realized that he was in love with her. He had enjoyed her company, admired her for her fierce tenacity and desire to better herself, worried about her when she was in danger, and tried to be a friend to her. She had been attractive to him, perhaps because of all her rough edges rather than in spite of them. Like any red-blooded man in the privacy of his cot at night, he had entertained notions, but he had always thought it merely a game between them. Something to pass the time and knock the edges off of the strain they were all under. Another time, another place, and so on. Looking at her there in the dark foyer of the Chantry - realizing that it might be the last time he would see her this way - Blackwall had known then with a hurt deep in his heart that it was love he was feeling. And it was love reflecting back in her face and voice as she urged him to save himself. Remembering it now, with her gone forever, jerked tears into his eyes there on his pallet in the tent with the wind moaning through the encampment like a funeral mourner.
It had been a long time since Blackwall had loved anyone, if he truly ever had. In his youth, he had chased a string of women, everything from whores to tavern girls to daughters of high society. He'd had a gift for it, having learned enough courtly manner to make a wench feel like a lady and enough rough talk to titillate a lady into feeling like a wench. Some of them he'd fancied himself in love with at the time, but never for very long. They had only been an anodyne to his vanity, an entertainment to fill the hours around his work, and a means to drown out the part of him that remained unhappy. He couldn't even remember their names, though he had left more than one ruined reputation and broken heart behind him. There had always been something more he wanted - some prettier woman, some more thrilling chase.
It had been years since he had so much as touched a woman - he didn't deserve that comfort and he had stuck to the wilderness and the backwaters for a long while besides - but it wasn't just that he had fancied her. He'd spent the last few weeks almost constantly in her company, tromping around Ferelden and fighting side-by-side with her. Aelis had become a part of his life, like the air or the sun rising, integral and familiar before he had even realized it was happening. It wasn't just him, either. For all of her scowling disdain of the noble upbringing she could not hide, for all of the hardness and hurt in her past that made her irascible and aloof at times, she had had a strange charisma that made people take notice. She had galvanized respect and loyalty from the people around her - soldiers, servants, and nobles alike. Even Cassandra, with whom she had forged an instant and deeply entrenched rivalry, had recognized it. If she had lived, Aelis would have taken history by the throat and changed everything, Blackwall had no doubt. If she had lived.
He should never have turned his back on her in that fight. The memory of it, the cacophonous and angry roar of voices and armor and weapons colliding, filled his brain and he shut his eyes against it so tightly he saw starbursts on the inside of his eyelids. He could still smell his own blood and the acrid, lightning-strike odor of magical energies. His inner eye was illuminated by the flash and flare of magefire. A spear had ripped through his plated brigandine and cut a channel across his ribs and it burned and bled with every heartbeat, but it had been one of many other pains and his body had fought onwards on determination alone. They had been right at the cusp of victory - he, Iron Bull, and Dorian guarding Aelis' back long enough for her to aim the trebuchet that would bring down a final deadly hail on the enemy. And that was when the dragon appeared, blackened and raging and terrifying, swooping out of the smoke and darkness like a nightmare incarnate.
Run, Aelis had screamed at them as she turned to bolt away from the wooden siege weapon and the beast's maw, and they had all obeyed. Blackwall could remember the flash of her pale face through the oculars of her helm, illuminated by the hateful light of the burning town and smeered with blood around wide, frightened eyes. The dragon's roar was deafening in their ears, the beat of its wings overhead like a rushing vortex of air dragging them back to their doom. Blackwall had pelted between the ruined buildings and palisade walls like a horde of demons were after him, Dorian's and Iron Bull's retreating backs pounding along in front of him and Aelis fast behind. They had not stopped until, lungs bursting, they reached the hidden path Chancellor Roderick had indicated and it was then that Blackwall noticed, his heart dropping into his stomach, that Aelis was not with them after all.
Somewhere outside the tent, a woman was crying. Not loudly, but in soft, aching sobs. Blackwall could hear her, as well as the low words of comfort someone was murmuring to her. So many people had died. Soldiers and civilians alike. There was no one who hadn't lost a relative or a friend or a close comrade in the siege. He shifted onto his side, pressed a thick arm over his face and ear to block out the sounds of sorrow. For the first time in a long while - not since he had held the real Warden Blackwall, dying, in his arms - he wanted to weep himself, for his own losses, for his continuing failures, but he would not wake those who had managed to find a short respite in sleep. And so he breathed in deeply and back out, and clenched his jaw so that no grief could escape his lips.
Someone had triggered the trebuchet that had started that final avalanche. It could only have been Aelis. Stubborn and defiant to the last, she had had her victory, even if it had killed her. It had taken Iron Bull and Dorian both to keep Blackwall from running back to find her before the ground-rumbling sheet of snow and ice had been loosed to devastate everything in its path. If he had managed to escape their grasp, he would have been buried right along with the town.
You're no good to anyone dead, Iron Bull had shouted at him, wrestling him back. But it would have been better if he were the dead one. It should have been him and not Aelis. The world made no sense otherwise.
Reluctantly, in the end, he had followed his comrades to rejoin the rest of the survivors. All three of them had been burned, cut, and bloodied nearly beyond recognition, but all hands were needed to get the civilians to safety and then the storm had set in. There had been no time to mourn. And so it crept upon him now, the reality that his friend, his comrade in arms, the woman that he had come to care for, was gone. He would never see her again. He hadn't saved her.
She was supposed to have been holy and chosen. She was supposed to be the Herald of Andraste, Blackwall thought, anguished and suddenly angry. He wasn't sure if it was a prayer or just a rhetorical cry into the echoing recesses of his own darkened soul. This is the best the Maker can do? Religion had never been an interest to him, and Blackwall had always been something of a skeptic, but he had wanted to believe in the Maker. He had wanted to believe there was a divine plan in all of this. And he had wanted to believe in her, even if Aelis didn't believe it. Too many things about her, about the stories that were told about her, fit into place. What good was the damned Chantry and their Chant of Light and the bloody Maker if people like Aelis - people who meant something, who could change the world and make it better - were buried in the end anyway?
Sleep was not going to come. Not tonight. Blackwall sat up and rubbed his face with his hands. A raised voice somewhere outside pricked his ears. There was a flurry of movement, the sound of armored footsteps muffled by snow. Quickly, still aching, he pulled himself upright and grabbed his swordbelt. Though the soul seemed to have gone out of the Inquisition along with Aelis, the body muddled on. Their unknown enemy could fall upon them at any moment. He would stay and do his best to help. Aelis would have wanted that, and he could not do less than she had done. Having cheated death once again, he felt more and more that he was living on borrowed time anyway.
The chill wind felt like needles of ice on his face as he stepped back out into the churned up slush of the main walkway between the tents. A crowd had converged near the edge of camp, and he could hear the agitated hum of too many voices. It didn't seem like danger was afoot, but Blackwall started towards the gathering anyway, cautious. It was then that the crowd parted and he saw the figure of Cullen hurry through, flanked by soldiers who gently pushed the onlookers away to give the general room to pass. The ex-Templar carried something in his arms - a body, from the shape - and a prickling sensation began in Blackwall's spine and spread to the back of his scalp. The hair on his arms and neck rose. A loll of the limp figure's head, a flash of red hair and white scarred face, nearly blue with cold and rimefrost, confirmed it.
"She's alive!" a woman shouted, breaking from the crowd and running through the camp. "Praise Andraste! The Herald has returned!"
The world stop turning. Blackwall gaped, his breath frozen in his lungs, his sword slipping from his fingers unnoticed to land int the snow, as he watched Cullen disappear into the healers' tent with Aelis in arms. He didn't know how it was possible. He didn't care how it was possible. A miracle needed no explanation. She's alive, he thought, his heart filling to bursting with relief - relief that made him want to break down and weep there in the snow even more than the sharp grief of her loss he had experienced just moments ago had. She's alive.