One Step Ahead Chapter 5

Aaron had certainly made an impression. Standing atop the shattered statue of Andraste, his shackles left behind, Aaron looked out over the cheering soldiers. His emotions were completely unreadable past the armor, but Cassandra imagined he was unbearably smug in the unexpected adulation. It seemed obscene to her that the soldiers could switch from justified contempt to hero-worship in a matter of minutes.

Perhaps it wasn't too surprising, in retrospect. Cassandra had already overheard the fierce debate in the Chantry and among the soldiers over whether Aaron was a knight sent to aid them, or the one responsible for the Breach. The side considering him guilty had apparently been dominant, which fit with the available evidence, but with this, a spark had ignited. It seemed that people on the side of the excitable young witness Tournay had been proven right all along, at least in the minds of the cheering, praying soldiers. They accepted the sudden and complete shift seemingly without question. It was unreal.

Vision or no vision, Cassandra would not leap to conclusions about Aaron's innocence just yet. Not without verifying each and every detail for herself. She was a Seeker of Truth, not a tavern-dwelling dwarf spinning a tale. She would have answers, whether she liked them or not.

It had only been when the cheering had died down that it occurred to Cassandra that getting Aaron down from such a great height would be awkward and difficult.

Aaron, it seemed, had other intentions.

Without so much as a nod or a wave or even a dramatic swish of his mantle, Aaron had turned on his heel and started moving around the perimeter of the crumbling statue, walking with alarming haste despite the precarious footing. He had ducked behind the statue and out of view quicker than anyone could react.

Cassandra broke into a run, trying to keep Aaron in view, but by the time she had circled the base of the statue, he was gone.

How?! How in the Maker's name does he keep disappearing!?

Cassandra raced to climb out of the lowermost floor. She vaulted over rubble, deftly sprung from boulder to boulder as though she wasn't wearing full plate armor, and when she made it to the intact section of stairway, she took the steps three at a time. Her rush proved pointless, however. When she came to a level with the statue, it remained obvious that Aaron was not hiding out of sight anywhere. He was simply gone.

They'd all been had.

Aaron had been tortured and dying because of the giant rift at the Breach, and with it now sealed and the Breach in the sky seemingly calmed, the Chantry's usefulness to him had ended.

So he left. Just as quickly and inexplicably as he'd arrived.

I should have seen it coming! How could I have not seen it coming!?

It was too much, just too much. As the confused murmur of the soldiers built to a roar, Cassandra's sudden scream of fury rose above them all, ringing painfully in her own ears. She heaved in a lungful of smoky acrid air, pressed her leather-gloved hands over her ears, and she screamed again, raw and pained and despairing. She screamed for all the times she had wanted to scream over the last two days, for the awful sickness inside of her, for the grief, the hatred, the terror, and for all the hopes that had been snatched away as the world itself came to an end.

Aaron was gone, and it was over. Cassandra had failed, and Thedas would have to face an unending tide of demons with no way to stop them.

Cassandra trudged back towards Haven in a fugue.

The chain of events would not stop repeating in her head. The more she thought of it, the more she realized there were countless ways she could have foreseen this, but almost no way she could have prevented it. This did not in any way make her feel absolved of the blame.

She had known he possessed the ability to seemingly vanish. She had heard the testimony, and she had dismissed it in favor of something more mundane, more believable. But last night, when Aaron had arrived outside the chantry, that light and that noise—she hadn't even realized it at the time, but that had been him appearing, somehow, in the way that he did. He had known exactly where she was, and did it behind the corner so she wouldn't see it, just like he had done on the statue. Even though she hadn't made that connection, seeing him vanish during the battle when those demons had piled upon him should have brought that capability and its obvious implication to the forefront of her mind.

She had simply assumed that if Aaron tried to leave, by whatever arcane method he used on the soldiers before, that they would be able to stop him. Almost all magic took time to prepare and cast, and for something as spectacular as disappearing, it would presumably take a long time. Cassandra hadn't really taken the risk of him escaping seriously. He had seemed so weak, barely able to stand, his magic all but undetectable. She'd been so confident she could use her powers to stop him if need be, she had trusted Leliana to watch over him when she went to get Solas, and she had believed Solas when he assured her that he and the templar guards wouldn't allow him to escape, but it had been illusory. Aaron could have been gone any time he so desired. His seemingly instantaneous escape from the demons had proven that.

But when Aaron had decided to leave and turned to walk away, Cassandra had utterly failed to act, to think, to do anything whatsoever. She might as well have been somewhere else entirely. She might as well have been asleep, or dead. Compounded with the loss of the Conclave, she had never felt such a profound sense of uselessness and failure in her entire life. She was the Right Hand of the Divine, yet Most Holy was dead, and she had let the only one who could seal rifts get away without so much as lifting a finger to stop him.

So this is what it is like to hate yourself, she thought as the imprecations echoed through her mind.

Varric and Solas plodded alongside her in the filthy slushy snow path leading through the trees, the only ones remaining at her side after Leliana had gone ahead to Haven, and Cullen and the other soldiers had stayed behind at the temple. She had been too busy stewing in her self-recriminations to really notice them, but now Varric tugged at her sleeve insistently. "Seeker. Seeker. You there?"

"What do you want, Varric?" she said dejectedly.

"Chuckles has been talking to you. You've been ignoring him." Varric said, indicating the miffed elf.

Cassandra grunted and turned her attention to the elven apostate. "What is it you were saying?"

"I think I may have an idea of how Aaron may be... functioning, for lack of a better word." Solas said, looking as if the idea had left a bad taste in his mouth. At Cassandra's nod, he continued. "It is almost unthinkable that Aaron would be able to talk, walk, and perform magical feats with the mark draining his mana and physically harming him. He should have been unconscious all along, possibly for days. His resilience was something of a mystery to me until now, but I think he may have been using some form of blood magic, or something similar, in order to stay awake and perform magic, even while his mana and vitality was drained by the mark."

"Of course," Cassandra said darkly. It seemed obvious when he put it that way. "Do you have any idea how it is he keeps vanishing?"

Solas' frown deepened. "I can offer no certainty. Despite the enormous energy it would involve, moving through the world physically using the Fade—or somewhere adjacent—as a bridge is not impossible, and might be made more possible by the mark on his hand. That would have been my first guess, especially in light of how he was discovered, but during the battle I felt no evidence of his passage in the Veil, and such a thing would certainly leave a disturbance. Aside from that, magic is too varied for me to be able to guess at what ability or spell he might have employed to disappear. Any number of things can give the appearance of vanishing, and I can only speculate, as I was... preoccupied... at the moment he apparently vanished. It could be a matter of rendering himself invisible, or blotting himself from our minds even as he stands before us, or something else entirely that we have failed to consider."

"Maybe he was a ghost all along," Varric suggested with a shrug. "He did come out of the Fade, after all."

"Varric, this is not one of your tales. If—" Cassandra cut herself off, her mouth dropping open as she caught sight of something in the corner of her eye.

Standing under a tree by the path was a man wearing a bear pelt around his shoulders and a hooded mantle over a suit of silverite armor.

It couldn't be. No one could possibly be that reckless or foolhardy.

The man approached them at a measured pace.

"Hello," Aaron said, his raspy voice instantly recognizable.

Inside, Cassandra was warring over how to react to this. Part of her wanted to do all the things she had failed to do before- smite him, or set the magic in his blood aflame. Part of her wanted to know why he had returned. A tiny, indignant part of her wanted to beat him senseless for having the gall to just casually say 'hello' to them like nothing had happened. And part of her was screaming at the rest for doing nothing, again. That was what finally gave her the impetus to break out of her hesitation.

Cassandra gave no outward sign, but she drew in her power to strike him at the slightest indication he would vanish. She very deliberately held her arm out away from her sword so as not to scare him off.

"Explain yourself." Cassandra said, her voice coming out much more level than her emotions should have allowed.

"I wanted to apologize for leaving you back there. I don't know what I was thinking. Well, actually, I do know what I was thinking, and it sort of made sense in context, but soon after I left, I realized it wasn't the correct course of action." Aaron rambled, shaking his head. "I was… being in front of all those people made me very nervous. I wasn't thinking clearly."

"And you still aren't, apparently," Varric said, chuckling incredulously. "Seriously? Escaping twice, and coming back twice? Who does that?"

"Someone capable of changing their mind," Aaron said, sounding a little relieved.

Solas looked baffled. "I confess, though I find myself pleasantly surprised, this is certainly not what I had expected. The Breach is stable, and the mark is no longer killing you, so why return? Surely you must realize that the Chantry considers you a criminal!"

Underneath the folds of his mantle, Aaron crossed his arms with a faint clatter of metal on metal. "I am aware, but there are more important considerations than my personal liberty. I thought about it, and if I were to flee, I could accomplish nothing I set out to do. These rifts are obviously a threat to everyone, and I can't seal them alone. Nor would I be able to speak to Leliana, which was my whole purpose for being here. Also, fleeing would make people more likely to consider me guilty of a crime I am reasonably certain I did not commit. Thus, I consider it worth the risk to cooperate with you."

"You're not even a little offended that the Chantry wants you to be tried and executed?" Varric asked.

Cassandra shot Varric a venomous glare. He grinned and shrugged.

"In light of the vision, and my assistance in closing the Breach, I think I could mount a plausible defense in a trial," Aaron said, shifting nervously from foot to foot. "Even so, I imagine I would be more reluctant to rejoin you if I didn't believe I could simply escape again. Is that feeling justified? There is only one way to find out. So here I am, taking a non-negligible risk, for what it is worth. Will you accept my parole, with my apologies?"

Cassandra didn't want to just say yes, that felt wrong, like she was letting him get away with it. But he was offering to go with them willingly... Or at least he wanted them to think that he was going to cooperate. Either way, could she get away with imposing conditions on him? That didn't seem wise, either—

"Absolutely," Varric answered jovially. "Welcome aboard, Fluffy!"

Cassandra sent him a mortified look, simultaneously grateful and infuriated with him for acting unilaterally while she vacillated, and more than a little bothered that Varric had deigned to give Aaron the nickname Fluffy. Varric gave her a maddening wink, which made her let out a disgusted noise halfway between a grunt and a sigh.

Varric only smiled wider.

The four of them fell into an uncomfortable silence as they came down the mountain. Cassandra took the opportunity to reflect.

Aaron… didn't make sense. She thought she could see his motives before, but now she was just left feeling sick and confused. It was like she was seeing two different images of the same thing: one a maleficar acting virtuous to manipulate them somehow, the other an innocent bystander who was simply caught in this maelstrom, just like the rest of them.

The former possibility was looking more remote the more Cassandra examined it, but she couldn't quite bring herself to let it go. She wasn't mad; she had seen the vision, yes, and she knew his return wouldn't make any sense if he was evil, but it didn't seem to matter to her stubborn mind. She couldn't let herself not hate him. That would… what?

That would mean that I no longer have him to blame. It would mean facing the grief and despair instead.

Cassandra knew as soon as she thought it that this was the real reason. There was no point in denying it. Did that make her a terrible person? What did Aaron ever do to deserve her loathing?

Probably a lot, considering he is an apostate mage… But nothing related to the reasons I actually hate him.

Aaron had been far more cooperative and calm than she had any right to expect from someone in his position. That in itself had seemed quite suspicious, but could be plausibly explained by his ability to escape at any time—or perhaps it was something else entirely, like shock. Cassandra had seen many people react to dire circumstances in a variety of ways, and seen many more over the last two days. Some people broke spectacularly, and others showed little external reaction at all. Leliana was one of the latter. Cassandra thought she was somewhere in between. But they were, all of them, just as broken on the inside.

A large and growing part of Cassandra simply didn't want to feel this hatred anymore. She was exhausted and could barely muster up the effort to keep moving. Not since her brother Anthony died had she felt such emptiness, such loneliness. Leliana, Cullen, even Josephine—they were more allies than they were friends. And her family, that large and distant clan of Pentaghasts, offered no solace. Uncle Vestalus was the only one who truly loved her, in his own well-meaning but misguided way, but she and the Mortalitasi who took her in had too much acrimony and too many leagues between them, now.

It was a cruel irony that Varric, of all people, was the closest person at hand with whom she shared so much as a contentious emotional connection, and she wasn't even certain whether she liked him or not. Regardless, she identified more with the characters in his books than with most of the people she knew, and that was just pathetic now that she realized it. Still, Varric and Leliana had been there for her when she had fallen at the Temple of Sacred Ashes.

But what connections did this Aaron have? What must he be feeling right now? Hunted, hated, and now a hero? As the four of them approached the improvised tent barracks that had sprouted up around the village of Haven, she resolved to subject Aaron to questioning and find out what kind of person he really was. She would give him a chance, one chance, to prove to her that he was truly not responsible for this nightmare they now found themselves in.

Cassandra started mentally preparing for the interrogation.

A/N

Solas speculates on some minor mysteries, and the hits keep on coming for Cassandra. We're going to start seeing a lot more characters offer up a lot more radically different theories about who Aaron is and how he does what he does. As ever, I encourage you to leave a review with your personal theory and the evidence you see for it. The first to guess correctly and for the right reasons are entitled to a prize after the reveal, plus the priceless feeling of being proven right. Good luck, and happy nitpicking!