Perhaps the scariest ghost stories are the ones where nobody's dead.
A/N: please excuse any typographical errors; I am writing this with the assistance of a rambunctious puppy and he can't read. I don't have the heart to tell him he's not helping. There will be swearing. There might be smut. I don't entirely know how this will go; I haven't done fanfic since I was a teenager, and I am an old. To hell with caveats, however. Let's ride.
The air in Skyhold lacked its usual purposeful hum, and Lyn Trevelyan was relieved as hell about it. For one thing, the dawn was still in its infancy, crawling over the crest of the Frostback Mountains. It was too damn early by half for all but the gentlest of sounds. For another it had been a whirlwind tour of nightmares, at times in a very literal sense. Lyn was exhausted, but mercifully every living soul in that keep (and Cole) were exhausted as well. Between stopping a demon army in both the Western Approach and Adamant Castle, and literally, physically, plummeting off a crumbling battlement straight into the Fade itself, there was a raw, numb, hung-over feeling throughout the Inquisition's forces that only a serious time of rest and recuperation could fix.
The final shock of the week however, she bore alone.
Well, not entirely. But in every way that mattered.
When she awoke to find an empty bed and a note pinned to the carving he was working on, Lyn was very clearly alone. And throughout the crisis that saw the man she loved, no matter what his name was, arrested and sentenced to hang, she was still very much alone. Leliana had obliged when Lyn begged her to come up with a plan, but by the looks that were exchanged around the war table, there was a palpable disappointment, a visible loss of respect.
Thom Rainier had returned to her still chained, with a shiner that matched his gambeson, and a beard that was far more crazed than usual. He spent that night in Skyhold's dungeons, partially for his own safety. He was thankful for the iron bars between them when Lyn had come down to yell at him. If not for the firmly locked door, it was more than likely she would have thrown her staff down and personally beat his ass. Which he thoroughly deserved.
She had said some regrettable things to him, anyway. Cursed him for a son of a bitch for lying to the Inquisition, and then again for lying to her, and then a few more times. Then she turned it around on herself.
"How could I have believed you? How did anyone believe you? But especially me! I met some jackass in the woods calling himself a Grey Warden and I decided, gee, what a wonderful thing to do with my time, how about I fall for him. Great fucking idea. Best I've had since signing up to go to that Maker-damned Conclave. And that was before I found out that everything you told me from the word 'go' was a bald faced lie."
All he had to say for himself was "That's fair."
"And it's not the killing, dammit. Everyone on this shitty mountain has a kill count. Josephine's killed before! It wasn't what you did, it's that you fucking had to lie about it. And you were just going to disappear into the night, be arrested, and eventually hanged instead of looking me square in the eye and owning up. You're no kind of man."
Lyn didn't know whether to hold him or hex him, kiss him or slap that damn lugubrious hound-dog look off his face. But he was back. And before she could do any of those things, she'd have to put him on trial. In public. In front of the Maker, Andraste, and everyone. The very thought made Lyn feel queasy.
It was hard enough to carry the burden of her authority on any ordinary occasion, whether "banishing" an Avvar chieftain to Tevinter for lobbing goats at her walls, or sentencing the mayor of Crestwood to life in prison in Denerim for drowning half his town. In the end, she was only a woman, after all, who had lived for 43 quiet years as an unremarkable mage, and four very wild months figuring out how to be a big damn hero. So taking the throne to yield justice with all of Thedas watching, especially with Blackwa-Thom, excuse me, was the defendant, seemed beyond the beyonds. Would she be forgiven by her people for not being perfectly, stoically impartial? And more importantly, did she give a damn? She at least had to pretend to, right?
There was a small tendril of smoke rising to the sky from a valley not far away, barely visible through the mist. Lyn noted it with some curiosity. Not many came through this part of the Frostbacks on purpose, especially alone. She imagined she smelled woodsmoke, but it was probably bacon being charred beyond recognition by the cook. Skyhold would be stirring soon enough. Stirring slowly, she hoped. Lyn would have paid any amount of money for just one blessed uneventful day.