Chapter Text
Chapter One: The Shape of Her Life So Far
Cassandra has never heard the Maker’s voice. Not in the way Leliana and Justinia have – they claim to have literally heard Him speak to them, leaving an indelible impression of words.
Even among the Chantry’s uppermost echelons, this is considered a bit crazy.
Yet Cassandra isn’t surprised in the least when the other two confide in her about their experiences, over a grateful parishioner’s gift of very fine Orlesian pastries late one night after they’d served together for over five years. Hearing a voice makes perfect sense, for the kind of believers they are.
Leliana tells of the time when she was at her very lowest, thrown into prison for the crime she’d been set up to commit. When the guards had finished with her and left, she’d felt utterly shamed, utterly abandoned. Right then – and Leliana swears it on her mother’s grave – she heard the Maker say to her, Leliana, I love you. Within the hour, Justinia – then Mother Dorothea – helped her escape her cell. Days later, when she raised her hand to kill Marjolaine, she heard again: Leliana, I love you. She’d dropped her knife, run the whole way back to the Chantry, and thrown up on the front steps. Years later, comfortable in the Lothering Chantry, beloved of the sisters, the Maker sent her a vision of the Warden. Leliana, my cherished child, if you will serve Me, go with him. She saw his face. In dreams, she insists, you can only see the faces of people you’ve already met. Her vision was real. She joined the Warden. She never looked back.
“I would say you took things rather well,” Justinia comments, breaking a raspberry jam tart crisply into thirds.
The other two turn to her. Leliana knows Justinia’s story – those two seem to know everything about each other – but the Divine tells it again for Cassandra’s benefit. “I was a young woman, puffed up with pride that I had been chosen to lead a service at Val Royeaux. Many senior clerics would be in attendance, and I was smug at being groomed to rise through their ranks.
“The service was proceeding smoothly. I had just asked the congregation to take a minute of silent prayer.”
She catches Cassandra’s eye, and chuckles. “You know as well as I do that in most services, a minute of prayer is as good as none. It’s usually just for the musicians to check that their pages are in order. Plus, if everyone closes their eyes, the leader of the ceremonies can hike up her drawers while preserving her modesty.”
“Sometimes I don’t know whether to believe your words or not,” Cassandra says ruefully.
“What matters is that you remember them,” Justinia says, with just a hint of levity in her eyes. “At any rate, we had entered the minute of silence, and rather than turn my mind to the Maker, I was simply taking a reprieve. Naturally, that was the moment the Maker chose to speak to me. He said: My dear, if you truly want to be a sister and mother to my children, you will live putting others before yourself.
“Then added: You will die putting others before yourself.
“And I exclaimed aloud: Are you shitting me?”
“In front of all the Grand Clerics?” Cassandra asks, unable to suppress a smile.
Justinia just nods, laughing too hard to speak.
Cassandra presses, “When He said you would die putting others before yourself, did He ever tell you what that would mean?”
“No. That is hidden from me. When I was younger, I hoped it would be something very dashing and romantic, but now I think it would not be so bad to die in bed at the end of a long, good life of service. In any case, I am an old woman with bad joints. Hardly the makings of a hero there.”
Leliana murmurs, “But you must have wondered.”
“Of course. I have spent much time fretting in prayer, to no avail. He tells us all we need to know in the present.”
Cassandra makes a disgusted noise, and Justinia says firmly, “He tells us enough.”
“Has the Maker ever spoken to you, Cassandra?” Leliana asks.
She shakes her head. “No.”
She felt no unease about this. She wouldn’t trust hearing a disembodied voice claiming to be the Maker, the way Leliana and Justinia implicitly do, and surely the Maker knows it, knows He has to make his will known to her some other way.
The other two nod. There’s no sense of superiority, no suspicion, no pity. Leliana asks, genuinely, “Then how do you know you are doing His will?”
Cassandra considers the question. For once, words come easily to her. “At each juncture, I looked back on the shape of my life so far, and my next choice would become clear. It is like having two sides of a triangle, and seeing where the third line must go. I see what must be done and I do it. In that sense, His will has never seemed like a mystery to me.”
Leliana looks astounded. “Have you never struggled to believe?”
Cassandra feels her face grow warm. She didn’t mean to brag. Justinia comes to her rescue. “Our struggles are not all the same. I, for one, have always felt perfectly certain that the Maker is real. What I am tempted to doubt, from time to time, is whether He is also good.”
“Even now?” Cassandra asks.
“Perhaps I always will.” Then Justinia winks. “This is the one thing I have in common with the great saints, you know.”
Leliana says piously, “You always tell us that the dreams He has for us are so much bigger than the dreams we have for ourselves.”
Even as she looks away, Cassandra feels Justinia’s eyes on her. In the privacy of their own thoughts, and the airlessness of their own counsel, they must ask themselves the same question: How do you know which is which?
Justinia is never far from Cassandra’s mind. Though she never lived to see what the Inquisition would become, the Inquisition remains under Justinia’s aegis, as far as Cassandra is concerned.
One night in her room, Cassandra is opening the journal she’s started keeping since those first halting words about her experience in the Fade. She has found it a helpful way to lay out her thoughts.
She records the date, and pauses. It’s a hundred days since Justinia died, and the Chantry is no closer to choosing her replacement. Cassandra does not envy them their task. The new Divine would have to be someone familiar with Justinia’s legacy, able to mediate between the mages and the Templars, with progressive, moderate views of her own. The ideal candidate would unite Orlais and Ferelden, paving the way to bring the neglected Chantries in Nevarra and Antiva back into the fold. A friend of the Inquisition would be valuable, of course. And what a bonus it would be if the woman were sympathetic to rebuilding the Seekers, and supportive of Cullen’s efforts to free Templars from lyrium…
It hits her like a physical blow, so hard that her ears ring. She actually scrambles to her feet and looks around the room. There is no one there. The floor seems to tilt, pitching her forward, and somehow all this has happened while the ink is still wet on the page. No, no, no no no –
Not five minutes later, her door flies open and Leliana bursts in. Her cheeks are glowing pink, she’s out of breath from running, and buoyant with happiness.
“The Maker spoke to me again, Cassandra!” she exclaims. “He actually spoke to me! He says I am to help you become the Divine!”
Only then does she acknowledge Cassandra, huddled in the far corner of the room with her arms wrapped tightly around herself as though straitjacketed.
She adds, “And I see you know about it already.”
“I do,” Cassandra says, with misery.
It takes Leliana some time to get her off the floor. Eventually the two of them sit side by side on Cassandra’s bed, with their backs against the wall. Cassandra hugs her knees to her chest. She doesn’t feel glorious and holy and exalted. She feels singled out.
“Why are you crying?” Leliana asks, not in a mean way.
Cassandra says, “Because I have to tell Cullen.”
“He will see that this must be,” Leliana says. Apparently this is meant to console her. “After all, he knows you well.”
Cassandra’s heart only seems to grow heavier. “I’ve told him almost everything.”
“More than you’ve told me, that’s for certain.” Leliana pauses. “I suppose I never asked before.”
Cassandra shakes her head. “I suspect you know all of it already.”
“Tell me for your sake, with your own words,” Leliana says, gently. “The shape of your life so far. I think it will help you to see how far you’ve come. How was it like, before you joined the Seekers?”
Cassandra takes a deep breath and begins.