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"What will you do now?" Hawke asked.
Alistair shook his head. He was standing at the window, looking out over the little town, but seeing only destruction ahead. "I can't afford to be seen, but I—I can't just leave them. They're my family. And whatever is happening to them is real. So real that they can't see anything else."
"Isn't it happening to you, too?"
"Not in the same way. I was in the Blight. I know what this feels like. It's an Archdemon."
"But there's no sign of darkspawn?"
"Not only is there no sign of darkspawn, you can feel it from here to Ferelden. During the Blight, you had to be in proximity to feel it like this." He looked up, as though he was listening. "I can block it out, but it's still there."
"They'll kill you if you go back," Mina pointed out. He had told her a great deal about the Wardens' troubles since she'd arrived last night.
"I might as well be dead if I don't. I owe them." He turned from the window at last. "What will you do?"
She sighed. What she wanted to do was run home to Kirkwall, to kick Varric's door down and knock some sense into him … but Kirkwall wasn't her home any longer. "Red lyrium. I need to know what it is, and where it came from."
"I wish you luck."
"I wish you luck, too. Just … let me know where you go, will you? And if you need backup …"
"Against my fellow Grey Wardens?"
"Against anyone."
Alistair nodded. "Thank you, Mina."
Rosalind awoke in a warm enough bed in a warm enough cabin, blinking in the dimness. Slowly, it all came back to her. Awakening in chains, the green streak in the sky everyone else called the Breach, the destruction of the Chantry … the mark on her hand.
She lifted her hand. Yes, there it was. Try as she might, she couldn't get it off. Nor could she remember how it had come to be there, or anything about what had happened once she'd put her shoes back on in the Chantry. All she knew was that somehow the world had changed completely, and she had had something to do with that, and now this mark on her hand closed rifts in the sky, and she had tried to close the biggest one, the entire Breach itself.
A light knock came at the door, and Cassandra, the Seeker who had at first seemed so bent on blaming Rosalind for all of it, poked her head in. "Ah. You are awake."
"Awake, still here, still have this thing." She gestured with the mark. "So it didn't work."
"It worked … after a fashion. The Breach has stabilized; it is no longer growing. And the largest of the rifts is closed."
"Does that mean no one is calling for my death?"
"Not no one," Cassandra conceded. "The Chantry would like to kill all of us. But … here you are being looked on as something more like—a hero."
Rosalind laughed. "Well, hopefully that's an improvement."
"I wouldn't count on it. Come, I want to bring you to the Chantry."
They walked along in surprisingly companionable silence. Rosalind was fascinated by the adoring looks on faces that she had last seen glaring at her, and discomfited by the attention.
Cassandra spoke abruptly. "There was a moment there, on the trail with you, that I thought you were going to kill me."
"There was a moment when I thought you were going to kill me," Rosalind countered.
"I thought about it."
She smiled. "Well, so did I."
They exchanged a look, and Cassandra snorted a laugh.
"Does this mean you no longer believe I'm guilty of causing this?"
"It means I am willing to accept that I do not know everything."
"Neither do I. I wish I did."
"Do you? I have always thought it would be most uncomfortable to know everything."
"It probably would be."
Standing outside his tent in the rain, the Iron Bull stared into the sky at the green slash of light that had appeared in it. "Krem. What the fuck is that thing?"
"I don't know, Chief. And I don't think I want to know."
Neither did the Iron Bull … but he did, too. He didn't like it when weird shit went on that he didn't understand.
"This came for you, Chief." Skinner, one of his people, stood in front of him, holding out a roll of parchment.
He took it, nodding his thanks, and Skinner hurried off.
"They don't like it, either, do they?" Krem observed as the Iron Bull scanned the message from the Ben-Hassrath. Probably his second-in-command shouldn't know as much about that as he did … but the Iron Bull didn't care, because he and Krem had saved each other's lives more often than he could count, and he would have trusted his second with a lot more than the Ben-Hassrath's secrets, if such a thing became necessary.
"They don't," he confirmed absently. "They want us to find things out."
"They tell you how they want us to go about that?"
"Yeah, that's not how they work." The Iron Bull frowned at the sky again. "Better call off the strike on the Blades of Hessarian, though."
"Aw, Chief, they've made off with ten casks of ale in the past two weeks!"
Ten casks was a lot. "Let's find out more about what happened down south, and in the meantime, you can get our ale back. Or smash some things."
"Or both?" Krem asked hopefully.
"Or both."
Varric watched the woman from the Conclave coming toward him. The Herald of Andraste, they were calling her. "Come and warm yourself," he called to her.
She stopped by his campfire, eyeing it with disappointment. "You call this warm?"
"You want to make the fire bigger?"
Now she eyed him. "I want to burn it all down, Varric."
"Can't blame you for that. It's been a lot to get used to, these past few days."
"Don't you want to get out of here?"
He shifted his feet uncomfortably, deflecting the question. "Technically I'm a prisoner."
"Not any longer. You stayed. Why did you?"
Varric could hear the underlying question—why should she? "Well … I like to think I'm as selfish and irresponsible as the next guy, but … this shit is weird." He thought of the red lyrium in the remains of the temple and suppressed a shudder. Of all the things to find here. It had been singing to him, too, which he hadn't liked at all.
Red lyrium made him think of Hawke. He should warn her about this, let her know that the world had taken a turn for the worse.
"So you stayed because you like weird shit?"
He grinned at the Herald. She reminded him of Hawke. Not in looks—red hair instead of black, brown eyes instead of green—but in attitude. "I stayed because I hate it, and I want the world to go back to normal so I can go home and write my stories in peace."
"Well, I can't say I have any stories to write, but I'm not sure what else I would do, or where else I would go, so I suppose I might as well stay." She lifted the marked hand and glared at it. "Not that this gives me any choice."
"Welcome to the party, Phoenix."
"Phoenix?"
"I like to give people nicknames, and you sure rose from the ashes, didn't you?"
"If I had, I'd probably be warmer," she said sourly, and moved on past him toward her own cabin.