AN: I'm posting frequently now to get to the good stuff quicker. Then the rate of posting will slow.
Love is appreciated!
Chapter 3: Sacred Ash
"Here, let me help you with that."
Solas plucked the heavy staff from Errol's arms. "What are you—" she started, but her words died when she felt his magic flare ever-so-slightly.
"Just concentrate on what I'm doing. It's quite simple." He placed the staff against her back and with a gentle pop of magic, the staff stayed in place. "I'm going to pull my magic back," he said, "and you use yours to take over."
"How—" she started, but his magic was already receding and she scrambled to find hers and keep the staff there. It started to slide off of her back, and she snatched at the magic indiscriminately and suddenly it was suctioned on so tightly it was bruising.
"Ahhhh!" she yelped, and released, and the staff thudded to the ground. Varric snickered.
Solas seemed disheartened. "You used magic so naturally in combat, I assumed…"
"Hey Sunshine, how old are you?" Varric asked. Errol raised an eyebrow suspiciously.
"Twenty-five. Why?"
Varric nearly hooted with laughter. "Twenty-five-year-old mage can't hold a staff to her back? Whoever sticks around long enough to teach her has their work cut out for them. Provided she doesn't get possessed first." That thought seemed to sober him.
"Will you please stop saying that?" Errol asked irritably.
"Sorry, Sunshine, but you can see how it's a bit unnerving."
"You frightening her isn't helping, Varric," Solas said, bending to retrieve the staff. He pressed it once again to her back and used his own magic to hold it there. When she protested, he shook his head. "It's a small enough expenditure to make sure that you're not exhausting yourself needlessly. When you need it, it will release."
Errol forced a smile. For some reason she felt like she was on the verge of tears. "Thanks." Then, needlessly: "It's been a rough day." She tugged the hood back over her head and followed Cassandra's snowy footprints down the hill.
Varric tagged along close beside her, and she could sense penitence in his very closeness, though he said nothing to indicate it. When she caught him watching her, he only fingered her windbreaker and said: "Weird material you've got here. Nothing I've seen before."
"It's waterproof."
"No kidding," he said, impressed. "We should try to duplicate it."
"Maybe just try for an actual coat that covers your whole chest first before trying to duplicate something from out of this world," she snarked, and he laughed.
"Touche." A beat. "The forward camp should be around the next corner. You ready to face the music? It might not be pretty."
Errol hesitated. "I guess I don't really have a choice, do I?"
"I'm here with you," Varric said, and she knew that was his apology. She smiled down at him and felt Solas' thin hand on her shoulder, his magic calming the heavy knots in her stomach.
"You are the only one who can close the rifts and you are innocent of any charges laid at your feet. We will not let you die."
"Thank you," Errol said, so sincerely that she almost choked up. "Both of you." She took a deep breath. "Let's go."
The confrontation with Chancellor Roderick left her shaken, despite his silly hat. She wanted to shout to everyone, Can't you see I'm trying to help! but with the exception of Cassandra, Leliana, Varric, and Solas, it seemed that they all wanted her in chains, and even Cassandra and Leliana were still on the fence about that, even after she closed the second rift on the mountain path. Now they were headed toward the Temple of the Sacred Ashes, where the Conclave had been held, things Errol only tangentially understood but knew were Big Deals.
The biggest rift was there. The Breach. And they were expecting her to close it, now, when her energy and emotions were almost run dry, when all she wanted to do was sleep and sleep and wake up from this terrible dream in her apartment in Seattle. The last rift she closed sucked out the remaining remnants of her energy, and her legs were so weak after the battle she had actually leaned on Solas for part of the walk to the temple. He had said nothing, but she felt his energy (someone had called it mana) seep into her, making her feel more alive and less like a battered doll, as did the bitter-tasting potion he had given her to drink.
Still, she genuinely feared closing the Breach would kill her, but what choice did she have? She was likely going to die for a world that hated her for something she didn't do, and that she knew nothing about, all for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She wanted to cry, but she wasn't sure if that would make her feel better or simply more exhausted, so she held it in.
Hurting, hunted, haunted, tears will make you break, must stay strong for now, a voice whispered to her from across the expanse. Errol, remembering Solas' advice and Varric's warnings, tried to shut the voice out, but it was persistent.
I'm not a demon! It sounded affronted. Need to show you, make you understand. Can't come now, too soon. You fear you will die now. You won't. Beeping, buzzing, static air, constant tears, man hangs on the wall, stakes in his hands, blossoms in the breeze, will she wake? Here already changing, testing, pushing, slipping through cracks, facade won't last long. You try to be the Owl but there is the Butterfly inside, fragile, fluttering, flailing, so easily to break if the wings are even lightly touched.They, you, see what they, you, want. For now.
You're not making any sense! she thought back, despite herself.
Soon, was all she heard in reply. Not a demon. Neither are you. Don't forget that.
"Errol?"
She snapped back to reality to see Solas looking at her worriedly. She had been walking on her own for over a mile now and it had been even longer since the elven mage had said anything to her. Even Varric was quiet in the face of the upcoming battle. "Yes?"
He approached her and lowered his voice so the others couldn't hear them. "Your energy slipped momentarily into the Fade. You weren't conversing with spirits, were you?"
"No," Errol said immediately, and knew that he spotted the lie. He said nothing, just wrinkled his brow and stepped back, and she wondered if she had already broken his fragile trust.
When Errol finally glimpsed the Temple, the breath hitched in her throat. It was a nightmare come to life: broken down to its foundations, still burning, bodies flayed yet somehow preserved in their final terror, their leathery hands up in fear or supplication. Red stones rose jagged out of the ground, and they glowed with a dangerous, ghostly aura. Above it all yawned the Breach, the hole in the sky, and below it but still achingly high a rift, the biggest she'd seen, a moving monstrosity of green crystal.
"Holy Mother of God," Errol whispered as they stepped over the broken stones and around the agonized faces of the dead. "These poor people." She swallowed a lump in her throat. "I've never seen anything like this."
"Neither have we," Cassandra said, sadly.
"Whatever did this was pure evil," Errol said, stopping near one corpse, its hands covering its face in despair. Varric restlessly tugged on her arm.
"Don't stare at them too long, or you'll never sleep again." He looked around. "And don't touch the big red stones. I assume you know that's Red Lyrium, Seeker."
"Yes," Cassandra said in a clipped tone.
Varric's voice dropped even lower, rumbling from deep in his chest. "But what's it doing here?"
"It's hungry," Errol said, dazed, and no one even seemed to question how she knew that.
"Yeah, Sunshine, it is," Varric said darkly. "Pray it never starts talking to you." He looked at the yawning chasm above them. "The Breach is a long way up."
There was the sound of boots on stone, and Leliana rounded the corner, followed closely by a group of scouts.
"You're here!" she exclaimed, sounding deeply relieved. "Thank the Maker."
Cassandra greeted her with a cursory nod. "Have your men take up positions around the Temple." She looked at Errol. "This is your chance to end this. Are you ready?"
Errol looked her in the eyes. "No," she said frankly. She knew she looked how she felt - dirty, bloodstained, battered, almost broken. There was a crusted cut above her brow and her hands were shaking. All of the cursing, the sarcastic jabs, the fight had gone out of her. Still, she sighed and pulled the staff from her back, feeling Solas release his small magic that held it there. She looked around at the corpses surrounding them, felt the hunger of the red stones, thought about all of the people who might be sucked into the hole in the sky if she - small, nothing, silly Errol Kerr from boring Seattle a universe away — did nothing. "But I'm going to do it anyway."
Cassandra nodded, and there was something in her eyes that changed, like she had seen Errol's thought process in that brief moment and not only understood, but approved.
"This rift was the first, and it is the key," Solas said, apparently perfectly calm in the face of world-ending danger. "Seal it, and perhaps we seal the Breach."
Errol gripped her staff. "Let's get this over with."
They started to make their way down the broken stairs to the ground floor, directly below the hanging, shifting glob of crystal. As they got closer Errol's hand flared and burned, sparking higher and higher like fireworks. She grit her teeth against the pain, determined not to cry again as she had so many times over the past few hours (had it really only been a few hours? It felt like years. It felt like she'd been cold and weary and beaten forever).
She thought of the voice she heard through the void, the one that sounded like a young man. It said she wasn't going to die, but what would it know? Maybe it was a demon, despite its protestations. She'd like to believe in it, though. It sounded kind.
Another voice rang out across the silent remains of the fortress: a woman's, echoing like it just bounced off of a thousand cliffs.
"Someone help me!"
Errol crouched, immediately on her guard, but a second later she heard her own voice, sharp with confusion and anger. "What the hell is this? What are you doing to her… stop it!"
"That was your voice," Cassandra said, her voice awed and almost reverent. "Most Holy called out to you. But…"
Suddenly a vision coalesced in the crystal - an old woman bound by magic with a huge, malevolent shadow looming over her. And there, in the corner, was Errol - she was on her hands and knees, but her jeans were still untorn and unbloodied, her french braid still neat, and her face a mask of confusion and horror. Behind her was a shifting green portal, and through it blew a few lingering cherry blossoms.
There was no mark on her hand.
"Run while you can!" the woman screamed, twisting in her bonds. "Warn them!"
The shadow looked at past-Errol and present-Errol felt ill. "It seems we've pulled through a bit of filth from one of the places beyond. Capture her. I want to hear how easily I can take her world for my own."
In a blinding flash of light, the vision vanished.
Cassandra spun on her. "You were there! Who attacked? And the Divine, is she…? Was this vision true? What are we seeing?" She stopped her rambling when she saw that Errol was bent over a ledge, vomiting up the last of the meager remains in her stomach, her shoulders shaking.
"I don't remember!" she croaked when she could finally speak again. She stood and wiped the back of her mouth with her hand. "But you heard that monster - my world is in danger too! We have to stop this! If I'm the reason that my world — oh my God…" She leaned over the ledge and retched again.
"Echoes of what happened here. The Fade bleeds into this place," Solas said softly. He rummaged in his pack and handed her a glass vial. "To settle your nerves. Don't fear, this creature hasn't found a way into your world yet. That would require taking ours first - to cross into another world, especially a world not naturally inclined to magic, in any significant way would require a vast amount of power, which It does not yet possess. Close the Breach, and you close off Its potential access to your world."
Errol accepted the vial with murmured thanks and drank from it. It tasted better than the last, like mint, and made her stomach feel less like it was trying to claw its way up through her lungs. "That will cut off my access to my world as well, won't it," she said. It wasn't a question.
"One way, yes," he said, surprising her. "But I will research. There might be another road that can access your home, a place where one soul could slip across but a dark creature like this could not follow, and we could seal it behind you."
"Thank you," she said again. "You're very kind to a stranger like me."
"You have the potential to save us all," he said. "If I am not kind to our savior, who should I be kind to?"
"Has the potion worked?" Cassandra asked, both worried and restless. Errol straightened and nodded.
"I'm fine now. Solas, how do we close this thing?"
He smiled approvingly at her, just for a moment, and then his face returned to its clinical impassiveness. "This rift is not sealed, but it is closed - albeit temporarily. I believe that with the Mark, the rift can be opened, and then sealed properly and safely. However, opening the rift will likely attract attention from the other side. Are you ready?"
Errol nodded. "Ready."
"That means demons!" Cassandra yelled to the surrounding soldiers and scouts. "Stand ready!"
Errol held up her hand. For this world.
Power shot out of her palm and the crystal burst open. Almost immediately a huge, scaled, electric creature burst from it, its laughter a bone-rattling boom.
"Focus on the rift!" Solas shouted.
"We'll cover you!" Leliana yelled, loosing arrows.
Errol kept her arm steady, the now-familiar pulling sensation stronger than ever. She narrowed her focus down to nothing but the pain and the power and will to push the poison out of her body and into the massive rift. Spirits crowded around her, fearful but encouraging. For my world. For my family.
The demon's electric whip came down hard on her back and brought her to her knees, but the spirits threw up a barrier spell that cushioned most of it. She felt their hands on her, the lightest of brushes, urging her on, swirling around her like her own personal hurricane. Outside, as if from far away, she heard cries of pain. For the people who are dying so that I can do this. She thought of Solas' gentle voice, of Varric's solid and comforting presence, even Cassandra's fierce devotion to protecting others. For everything I've lost.
For everything I've found.
The pain poured out of her, as did her energy. She felt thin and insubstantial but she couldn't stop, not yet. It wasn't done yet. She felt as if people were calling for her, telling her to stop, that it was too much, that there wasn't enough of her, and then—
The shock wave rippled out, blasting the spirits away from Errol, and everything went white.