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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.

Chapter Text

Chapter Two: Family Property

Strange that Dorian, of all the companions Cassandra’s traveled with, should have been the most interested in hearing about her life before the Seekers. They were quite content not to reveal too much about themselves around each other.

Yet it made a kind of sense that he would ask. He also was from people who considered themselves more of a dynasty than a family.

Riding through the Exalted Plains, he’d ventured, “Tell me, Cassandra: did your family throw suitors at you?”

She’d replied, lightly, “My uncle did, waves of them – until I broke one’s arm. Then there were fewer.”

“I must admit I never tried that,” Dorian said, smiling.

“It was an accident,” Cassandra said. “Well... mostly an accident.”

Just like she was mostly telling the truth.

She can hardly remember her life before her Uncle Vestalus adopted her, along with her brother Anthony, after their parents were executed for treason. She suspects herself of idealizing the memory of her parents. In any case, she lost them before she could know any better. She remembered her father as a man of unshakable conviction. She remembered Anthony taking her to a square, seating her on his shoulders, so she could watch their father make speeches to the crowds. Her mother was renowned for her beauty, gifted in art and music. But for all her accomplishments, she loved nothing better than to read to sit her children by the fire in their library and read to them. She even did voices, even if to Cassandra the best one was her very own.

Forcibly from this life – and it seemed, to Cassandra, from childhood itself – she and Anthony were delivered over to Vestalus, their father’s older brother. There were two sides to Vestalus, and Cassandra still couldn’t explain why that made her so uneasy. He was on one level a Nevarran noble, entirely like the seventy-six other Pentaghasts who stood to inherit the throne ahead of him. He rode, hunted, and fished on his lands, was waited on by servants, kept perpetually freshly soaped and perfumed, inclined towards gray wool and red silk scarves. On another level – and here she couldn’t help but think literally of his underground workshop that was much vaster than the manor house above them – he was a Mortalitasi, a death mage. Coming and going, he wore gray robes and a stained leather apron, his hands were sticky with embalming fluid, and even after he and his associates left a room she could still detect a stale stench in the air.

Death’s craftsmen, he called the Mortalitasi.

Their relationship was uneasy from the start. “He hadn’t seen us since I was a baby,” Cassandra tells Leliana now. “When he agreed to take us in, I do not think he realized that I would be eleven, and Anthony sixteen.”

“He had no children of his own?”

“No. His wife maintained a separate residence. I never saw her at all.”

“So he tried to get rid of you?”

“Not at first. He tried to make use of us.” Cassandra smiles wryly. “After all, we were family.”

Her uncle hosted visitors in his manor almost every week. This was not by choice. Guests were foisted upon him because he was a blood member of the ruling family – specifically, an unimportant one. Vestalus was both civil and unctuous; many of the guests were themselves unpleasant. No one ever stayed with them twice.

She could pity her uncle, when she thought about the role he’d been born into.

Anthony didn’t. He and Vestalus were constantly at each other’s throats. Even though Vestalus would be his legal guardian for several more years – with full control over his rights, and his inheritance – Anthony could have run away and fended for himself. She suspected he only stayed for her sake.

It was Anthony who loved her, and Vestalus who provided for her. She was quite clear in her mind what she owed each of them.

“During those years, Nevarra was on especially bad terms with the rest of the Chantry. It was a political nightmare, I see now, but at the time, very fortuitous for me.”

“I’ve never heard of these Seekers,” Anthony said, over another moody, protracted breakfast. Cassandra held her breath. Nevarran custom dictated that all the occupants in a house take their meals together, but recently even Anthony and Vestalus’ best attempts to adhere to such civilities had resulted in fights.

Vestalus frowned. “They are an important Order,” he said vaguely.

“Surely not, if this Seeker is being sent to stay with us.”

“You will hold your tongue,” Vestalus said sharply, and the conversation derailed from there.

The main problem wasn’t that Anthony was being unreasonable, or that Vestalus kept losing his temper to a seventeen year-old boy. The main problem was that by now the two held each other in such deep contempt that they would always consider themselves opponents. Cassandra kept her eyes on her plate, trying to imagine what a Seeker looked like. He’d be some kind of scholar, or librarian, maybe.

So she was surprised to see a warrior ride up to their manor on horseback the following day. The man’s armor bore the insignia of a watchful eye. When he removed his helmet, Cassandra saw that he had long white hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and thick white eyebrows. Somehow that made him seem gentler. His face was lined with kindness.

When he had been shown into the drawing room, Vestalus began, “This house extends its greetings to you, Seeker Byron. I am Vestalus Pentaghast.”

Seeker Byron bowed. “The Seekers thank you for your hospitality.”

Anthony stepped forward. “Anthony Pentaghast. I am his nephew.” If Anthony didn’t assert himself, Vestalus tried to pass him off as his son. “This is my sister, Cassandra.” Cassandra curtsied, not really expecting their presence to be otherwise acknowledged again.

But Anthony seemed determine to draw himself into this conversation, asking many questions about the Seekers’ purpose and Byron’s mission in Nevarra. Cassandra wondered if he was doing it just to spite their uncle, who couldn’t very well leave in the middle of a formal reception. After some minutes, a servant appeared, as though summoned by Vestalus’ own will, and he seemed grateful to have called away. Cassandra had never seen him respond to a servant so quickly.

Byron had been talking animatedly with Anthony about the Seekers’ initiation rites. Now he broke off suddenly and said, “You are Matthias and Tigana’s children, aren’t you?”

 “You knew our parents?” Cassandra blurted out, wondering if she shouldn’t have spoken. She never actually had anything to say to any of their visitors before.

Byron shook his head, apologetic. “I never met your mother, but I know some of her relatives. Many members of her family are renowned, devout Andrastians. None serves in the Chantry, but we are just as in need of such members for our congregations. They have been great patrons of the Chantry’s scholarship and art. You ask many keen questions, Anthony. Have you considered joining one of the Orders?”

“Not once, I’m afraid,” Anthony said, smiling. “I am a dragon slayer through and through, albeit one who seeks to remedy his ignorance whenever he can.”

Byron turned to her. “What about you, Cassandra?”

Cassandra held his gaze and answered, “I belong to my family.”

She thought Byron would be impressed, as the Nevarran adults were. Instead, both of his bushy eyebrows shot up. It was quite the production. “Your family doesn’t own you, Cassandra,” he said. He seemed astounded at her. “You are their child, not their slave.”

“You wouldn’t exist without your family,” she pointed out.

“True. And since I became a Seeker, the group of people I have come to think of as my family has expanded greatly, beyond those related to me by blood or marriage.”

Vestalus returned. “Cassandra,” he said significantly, “the count of Hasmal has arrived, half a day early. He is very eager to see you.”

(“So that’s where you get your sarcasm from!” Leliana exclaims, which startles Cassandra. She’d always thought she’d picked it up from Anthony, but even if she had, Leliana was still right – they’d both learned it from Vestalus.)

Cassandra gathered her skirts and rose. “You are welcome in our house,” she said formally to Byron, relieved to fall back on custom. So far the man had gone off the script every other visitor knew to follow, and she wasn’t sure how to answer him.

But Byron answered, correctly, “You will also find welcome in mine.” So he wasn’t simply unaware of the way things were here.

Which wasn’t to say he understood them. As she was leaving, their low murmur of conversation was punctuated by Byron exclaiming, “But she can’t be older than twelve.”

“My uncle feels she is not too young to marry,” Anthony said sourly, right in front of Vestalus. “Evidently, there are many who agree.”

“How did it go?”

“It was fine. We talked about his provinces, and the festival his town is throwing next week.”

“That is all? You only talked?”

“We only talked, Anthony,” Cassandra said dutifully. “I promised I would tell you if any man tried anything indecent.”

What she never told him about were all the touches that seemed too little to complain about – men taking her hand in theirs, draping an arm possessively around her shoulders, resting a hand on her knee. She didn’t enjoy the advances, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that Uncle Vestalus had told her to be charming and agreeable, and as his niece and ward, she owed it to him to do her best.

“I’m sorry to nag at you.” Anthony sighed. “It’s just that men are pigs.”

“I know,” she said, thinking of a few in particular, and suppressing a shudder.

She hadn’t really thought any man would dare try anything, for fear of the repercussions. She was a Pentaghast, of royal blood, and under her uncle’s and Anthony’s protection. She’d been painfully naïve.

The next day, a suitor outright propositioned her, and got angry and offended when she turned him down. He stormed out and Cassandra, simply relieved he hadn’t said anything to her uncle, said nothing to Anthony either. What she still couldn’t stomach, even now, was men like him who seemed to think that somehow, she ought to have put up no resistance whatsoever, ought to feel flattered by their artless advances. At the end of the week, an earl from Cumberland cornered her by the door and tries to kiss her, but she faked a bout of coughing and claimed she was having an asthma attack – belied, no doubt, by her running out of the room as fast as she was able in her long skirts. She passed Byron on the staircase, but didn’t stop, even when he called out to her by name. Back in her room, she bathed and changed her clothes, the only response she could think of to the feeling inside her that seemed at once too little and too much.

Finally, after Byron had been with them for almost a fortnight, all but confined to the house – his requests for an audience with the Chantry falling on deaf ears – the duke of Hunter Fell paid a visit. When she first laid eyes on him, Cassandra’s feeling was of relief. He was an old man, thin as an empty husk blowing on the wind, skin loose and wrinkled over his knotted hands, and barely taller than she was. There was an oily expression in his wide, pale blue eyes that she didn’t like, but she imagined herself safe from him.

“Men are pigs,” Leliana says, shaking her head.

He placed his hand on the back of her neck when he talked to her, as though yoking an animal. That was bad enough. She brushed him off repeatedly, but he kept at it, undeterred. She lowered her eyes and kept them down, tracing the pattern of flowers on the carpet, which was how she felt rather than saw his cold fingers lift the hem of her skirt, skating up her bare thigh like a horrible insect. That was when she kicked blindly out at him and – he made a grab at her skirts – screamed for Anthony.

She doubted he could have heard her, but he came running in anyway. He always knew when she needed him.

Her first thought was that it must look awful – the duke groaning on the floor, doubled over on his side in evident pain. Her uncle swept in, and the darkening rage on her his face almost convinced her that she’d done something terrible. But then Anthony was kneeling by her, clasping both her hands. “Cassandra, are you all right?”

She looked away from him, trying not to cry. “Is the duke hurt?”

Byron, whom she hadn’t noticed come in, spoke up. “I will see to him.” He sounded angry, and she shrank back, but he only hauled the duke roughly to his feet and, ignoring the man’s complaints, marched him out of the room.

That day, she’d been wearing an ivory satin dress. She remembered how starkly it held the creases from her struggle, showed the places the duke had clenched his fists in the fabric.

Her uncle was livid.

“You broke a man’s arm, Cassandra. What do you think gives you the right to do that?”

“He fell. I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

Anthony leapt up and placed himself between them. “Don’t you dare speak to Cassandra that way. That man molested her.” Anthony had spoken with her while their uncle had gone to pacify the duke.

“Do not make up wild accusations.” Vestalus raised his voice. “Do you really think the duke would attempt such a thing?”

Anthony’s eyes flashed. “I think he’s a monster. He’s just as bad as a man who arranges for his own niece to meet with lecherous old men. Without a chaperone. Even merchants show more care for the goods they have to barter.”

Before Vestalus could respond, Anthony reached for Cassandra’s hand and pulled her out of the room.

Cassandra almost had to run to keep pace with him. He held her hand so tightly that she couldn’t feel her fingers. All Cassandra could think was that she wanted him to hold on to her like that forever.

“Anthony,” she whispered, though it was only the two of them in her room, as he tucked her into her bed even though it was still light outside. “Please don’t go back and fight with Uncle Vestalus.”

He threw his arms around her. “I can’t promise I won’t ever again, but today I’m not leaving your side.”

He would do anything for her. Take her side against anyone. Stay with her no matter what. He was hoarse from shouting at their uncle, but he read aloud to her anyway until she fell asleep.

Anthony had gotten in the habit of taking long walks since they’d moved to their uncle’s house, mostly to get away from Vestalus. Besides, there wasn’t enough for him to do indoors. For a few days after the incident with the duke, he stayed within the grounds. He conversed often with Byron, who did not openly criticize Vestalus but made his disapproval known in other ways. He never let Cassandra out of his sight. When the shock had worn off, she’d found herself afraid to be alone, even alone with her uncle. He was still angry at her, she knew.

But she didn’t like to watch Anthony pace back and forth, just for her sake. Eventually she suggested they go for a walk together, and Anthony had readily agreed.

They went far out into the woods. The forest, caught in a brief season of lush greens and warm reds, seemed impossibly beautiful to Cassandra, even without knowing she was seeing it for the last time. She could have gone back, but she’s chosen not to, wanting to preserve her memory of that last afternoon there with Anthony. Secure in the knowledge that she would never have to prove herself to him, nor he to her – even though he did, every day.

By the time the mages blocked their path, they’d also been surrounded from behind. “The blood of a dragon slayer,” their leader said. “The blood of a Pentaghast.”

Anthony spun around to face her. Right at that moment, the mages attacked. They used their magic, and the worst part was how long it still took for them to kill him.

He had no last words.

Cassandra knows that she didn’t scream. There was no use in crying out to anyone, now that Anthony was dead. She ran and threw herself on top of Anthony, waiting for the mages to kill her too.

They took some of his blood. Cut her cheek when she tried to stop them. But they didn’t take her life, even though she didn’t move again until Anthony’s body was cold, the warmth of her body no longer enough to sustain them both.

It was, and still is, one of the most difficult tasks she’s undertaken. She had to find her way back to Vestalus’ house, sneak inside without her uncle seeing her, and locate Byron. Fortunately, he was alone.

He was shocked to see her distraught and bleeding, trembling so much that she was hardly intelligible. He’d said, gently, “The Seekers cannot raise the dead. The Maker alone…”

She’d reminded him that Vestalus was a Mortalitasi. Begged him to help her destroy Anthony’s body. “I will help you,” Byron said immediately, pulling on his cloak. “Show me where he is.”

He didn’t question her. He carried his sword, and Cassandra felt sick with dread and relief. They ran to the place where Anthony had fallen. Unexpectedly, Byron stretched out his hand and touched Anthony’s forehead. He closed Anthony’s eyes.

“The Seekers can prevent the dead from being turned,” Byron said, turning back to look at her. “It is the best way to ensure that his body will not be desecrated. May I perform the rite?”

“Do it,” she said, still waiting for him to draw his sword.

But Byron only knelt and began to murmur a prayer. A pale blue curtain of fire appeared and descended over Anthony, but when it faded, she saw that his body was not consumed.

For a moment, it almost seemed as though he would open his eyes again.

“The Maker who made you come back for you, Anthony Pentaghast, to gather you back up to Him, and give you His good rest,” Byron said.

That was the last time anyone spoke of her brother as though he had been alive. From the way everyone else acted, he had never been with them at all.

Byron assured her that the Andrastian rites had placed her brother beyond the Mortalitasis’ reach. Still, he must have been the one who arranged for the cremation, because her uncle did not even attend. She stood alone at the pyre, where only the closest family members were permitted, until her breath could stir the weightless gray ash.

“You really feared your uncle would reanimate his body otherwise?”

Cassandra says, “I can guarantee you that for at least as long as my uncle is alive, my parents still walk the Grand Necropolis. Whatever is left of them, in any case.”

Leliana shudders. “That’s terrible.”

“Before I met Byron, I didn’t know a single person who felt the same way.”

Leliana waits a moment, then asks, “Did you ever find out if your uncle sent the mages?”

The circumstances certainly pointed to something afoot. There was the timing of the attack, coming so soon after Anthony and Vestalus had had their worst quarrel. The mages had never been caught. Cassandra had been spared. “I could never prove it,” she says.

“But what do you believe happened?”

“I do not know,” Cassandra says quietly. “I was told afterwards that my uncle did not come to Anthony’s funeral because he fainted and couldn’t be revived for hours. Truly, he seemed bereaved.”

She’s done her best not to think about it, which was why she’d become so upset when Cole had remarked one afternoon at lunch, when everyone was present, “Your uncle misses you, Cassandra.”

“Picked that up from my head, did you?” she’d responded, fighting her to keep her hands from trembling.

Somehow Cole never seemed to notice the present feelings of whoever he was speaking to. “No, he wrote you a letter. There was pain on the page.”

That had made her flinch. “Stop going into my quarters. How many times must I tell you?”

She hates talking to Cole. There is so much he doesn’t understand – not his fault, he’s essentially a child – and she doesn’t want to be the one who explains it to him.

Leliana just nods, for once not pressing her any further.

She remembers going directly from the funeral to her room, collapsing there with the smell of smoke still in her hair and clothes. She refused to talk to anyone. She thinks she bit the healer who came to check on the gash on her face.

She felt hollow, as though the last light in her had gone out. Better to fold in on herself than be see for what she was – empty.

“Cassandra, will you drink some water? Please?”

Her eyes had stayed swollen, though she hadn’t cried in some time. She stared weakly at the figure of Byron, filling a clear glass from a clear bottle.

She was ready to refuse the glass when he offered it to her, but to her surprise he raised it to his own lips and took a sip. “I promise this is only water. See?” He produced a clean white handkerchief, wiped the rim of the glass, and kept the clean side facing her when he held it out.

She gulped the water down and let Byron refill her glass before she knew she’d done it.

“Your uncle is worried about you,” Byron said quietly. “He even asked me if I could perform an exorcism. But I know you’re not demon-possessed. Just a little dehydrated, no doubt.”

The headache she’d had for days began to ebb. The question she’d been asking herself for days spilled from her lips. “What you did for Anthony. Was it magic?”

He shook his head. “Not magic. Just a ritual the Seekers can perform, with one of the prayers. There is one we like to say when family and friends of the deceased are present. When there is more time. Would you like us to pray for Anthony now?”

She nodded. Byron clasped his hands in front of him, and closed his eyes. She folded her own hands but watched him the whole time. He never peeked. He spoke as though he were talking directly with Anthony, like he was right there in the room. But the words were for her, too.

“You and Cassandra love each other. Nothing can separate you from that love. Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature. Nor wickedness. Nor despair.”

Later Byron brought food, and they ate together. She asked him more questions about the Seekers’ abilities, their history, their beliefs. “You could call us knights, I suppose,” he said. “The Maker fortifies those who serve him, and they glorify Him with their strength. The Maker loves justice. He loves to right wrongs. Following Him means that we do not try to amass power for its own sake.”

He told her stories of good deeds the Seekers had performed – courageous rescues, victories for the poor and helpless. He briefly mentioned that they worked with the Templars to defend people from mages, and at times to defend the mages themselves. Even on that subject, knowing how raw it was for her, he was careful to show as much compassion as he was able.

She hasn’t always been able to claim the same for herself. The best she can say is that her anger – for vindication and vengeance – only came later. She credits those earliest days with Byron for all her idealism at its best.

Three days later, she was dressed in her riding clothes and carrying just one bag of her belongings. In it she had some money, a few changes of clothes, her grandmother’s locket with a portrait of Anthony inside, and little else. She wondered what would become of her room, her clothes, everything she was leaving behind. She and her uncle hadn’t spoken of it – hadn’t spoken much at all, except when Vestalus had given her his blessing. Those were the most heartfelt words she’d ever exchanged with her uncle. Yet their parting was a hasty one, somewhere between escape and exile.

When Cassandra mounted her horse, proud of the form her tutors had always praised, Byron let out a short laugh. “You ride like a Nevarran princess.”

Her first instinct was to feel embarrassed, until she realized that Byron wasn’t chastising her. She lifted her chin. “Will that be a problem?”

“Yes, because we need to ride for more than an hour, and I don’t want you waking up tomorrow too sore to walk.” His look softened. “I do always want you to be proud of who you are.”

He showed her what he said was the Seekers’ preferred riding form. Later, she’d found that this was actually a matter of raging debate among the Seekers, and she’d tease Byron for his style, and she’d always ride the way he showed her, proud to share in the derision they received from the majority.

On that day, she only exclaimed, “The women and men ride the same way?”

He looked amused. “You have two legs, just the same as I do, don’t you?”

“Are there many female Seekers?” she asked, as they started on the road.

“Oh yes, as many as there are men. My mentor Arabella was a woman. She trained me and taught me everything I know. Man or woman, it makes no difference in the Seekers. We serve the Maker equally.”

“Are women recruited so there will always be someone to marry?”

“Ha! No, the Seekers are simply open to those whom the Maker chooses, and as many women as men decide to join. Some – when they are older than you are now – marry, certainly, but many choose not to marry at all.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “There are people who choose not to marry?”

“Certainly. I am one of them. The world sometimes regards marriage as the only worthwhile state. Your world more than most. Even many of us in the Chantry are guilty of it from time to time. But we do have teachings that tell us otherwise. To declare, against the pressures and contempt of society, that some should decide to marry and some should decide not to. It is a stay against the tyranny of thinking only married and childbearing people are of worth.”

(Leliana giggles. “Is this the first official conversation all Seekers have with their apprentices?”

Cassandra snorts. “It certainly is.”)

Byron went on, “In any case, some serve the Maker in marriage, some by remaining single. Neither is a higher calling than the other. We answer directly to the Divine, who of course does not marry.”

“Why not?”

Byron sighed. “I should not have sounded so glib. There is a long history behind the answer to your question. It would be better if for now, I spoke only for myself. I came to discern that I wanted to reserve my most particular affection for the Maker alone. Certainly marriage does not preclude this possibility, but for myself, I think it would. Good things can get in the way of what’s best.” He paused, smiled. “When you meet the Divine someday, you may ask about her judgment yourself.”

Cassandra thought back to the portraits of the Divine she’d seen. The Divine had always seemed remote, hard to understand. Now Cassandra saw her in a new light – as a woman who would never be troubled with questions of matrimony, would never have to fear her hand being given away against her will. For the first time in days, Cassandra’s heart rose within her. She would pledge her allegiance to the Maker, and this woman also.

“If Anthony had lived, do you think you would have become a dragon slayer like him?” Leliana asks. “Only – I wish to imagine you would have found some way out of your uncle’s house, on your own terms.”

Cassandra sighs. “Sometimes I wonder how much I was ever a part of my family. I always had a great revulsion for death magic, and even before Anthony’s death I found the use of dragons, and the whole craft of dragon slaying, equally unappealing. Byron knew. Years later, when he discovered the plot against Beatrix, he tried to keep me out of it. Perhaps he would still be alive if he had involved me sooner. In any case, he should have. He of all people had to know that that terrified girl he saved was long gone.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Three: Breaking Her Vows

“Go on,” Leliana says. “What’s next?”

“The time I decided to leave the Chantry. I mean, the first time.”

She’d done well with the Seekers, even if over the years, she’d grown so angry and reclusive that few of them would approach her. At any rate, as she and her peers reached their late teens, many began to pair off, taking themselves out of the fold two by two. Cassandra counts it to her credit that she was altogether unbothered by this. She kept to Byron, who had grown more and more like a father to her – though like a father, he always maintained a certain distance between them.

She stumbled upon his plan to keep Avexis from High Seeker Aldren completely by chance. Watched as he was slain in front of her, and Avexis was captured. Found herself fighting against Templars with the help of a mage claiming to have been Byron’s friend, who introduced himself as Regalyan D’Marcall. Who saved her life, and in turn, helped her save Divine Beatrix from a high dragon, and the greater conspiracy behind it.

And then, as they waited behind closed doors for her anointing as the Right Hand – Cassandra wishing so much that Byron could have been there to see her – she and Regalyan shared a look, and she fell – out of herself – for him, exhilarated, frightened. He said she was the most beautiful and bravest woman he’d ever met. He’d been a trusted friend of Byron’s. He was a mage, and suddenly that made him all the more irresistible.

She hoped no one else in the history of the Chantry had taken her vows of chastity standing shoulder to shoulder with the man she’d break them with that night.

“Mm, oh my, how shocking,” Leliana says, not sounding shocked at all.

By then, Cassandra had already made up her mind to resign as the Divine’s Right Hand – to give her notice, in any case. She’d mostly been given the position for the show of it, she thought, and perhaps the Chantry would be relieved to install someone more qualified in her place. Regalyan would be the center of her life now. He was everything she cared about.

He was never more charming than on the morning they’d last spoken.

Cassandra had been sitting up in bed, watching him get dressed. He turned to her and smiled. “I’d like to spend more time with you again, the next time our paths cross.”

Something collapsed inside her.

“The next time?” she said, faltering.

He missed her confusion. “As soon as next month, possibly, if the Divine pays the scheduled visit to the Circle. I’m supposed to show her around. I’ll look forward to my duties much more if you’ll be there.”

“I did not think I would be on that trip,” she said, haltingly. “I – I thought I would be with you.”

He had to pause for a long time, as though considering how to approach the subject neither of them thought they’d have to tackle.

Decided to skirt it completely. “Cassandra, I have to be at the Circle. The Circle is for mages. What would you do there?”

She was speechless.

He leaned down to kiss her, and said, “But we’d find plenty to do on your visit, I’m sure.”

She pulled back. “Chantry teachings…” Realizing how absurd it would be to bring up the Chantry teachings on marriage, now.

He winked. “I know. I know how it goes in the Orders. I could tell you such stories about Templars and mages at the Circle.” Noticed only then that she had frozen. “What’s the matter? You told me yourself that you thought the vow of chastity was unnecessary.”

She still thought so. After all, Andraste had been married with children, and she had still been the Maker’s prophet. The manmade legalism only came later, the whole sordid history she’d learned in the hurried catechism she’d undergone. Originally, the Divine had been permitted to marry, like anyone else. But after being embroiled in centuries of property disputes among husbands and descendants of the Divine, the Chantry had passed a law forbidding the Divine to wed. The ban was founded thus on politics rather than theology, in the name of the Maker but primarily to curb the dregs of human corruption. Gradually other members of the Chantry adopted the same standard, with the Left and Right Hands leading the way. Telling Regalyan all this had made him laugh, and Cassandra had liked that at the time.

“Still. I took the vow.”

“Historically many have interpreted them as loose guidelines.”

“Loose guidelines being good enough for the likes of you.”

She’d meant that to be insulting, but his response cut far deeper than hers. “Come now, Cassandra, there’s no need to be so romantic.”

She must really have bristled, because at that, he changed his tactics. “Can’t you see how a partnership would benefit us both? You and I both know how the Chantry has been mistreated mages. Together, we could help them get justice.”

She went fully on the offensive then. “You just want me to help you gain personal glory.”

They lashed out at each other. For years, she’s been haunted by some of the things he said, fearing them to be true. She knows now that it’s unreasonable to blame him for her own uncommunicated expectations. That they both should have tried to be fairer to each other. For years she wondered if she owed him some kind of apology.

When she heard of his death, at the Conclave, a weight lifted off her heart.

It settled back down moments later, and there it remains.

To Leliana, Cassandra says now, “I probably would have agreed to any kind of arrangement, if he had only said he cared for me. Do you think he knew that?”

Leliana scoffs. “It still would have ended soon enough. And sooner was better.”

“Sooner was better,” Cassandra agrees.

“I thought you were different,” he’d said in the end, and at that point she decided not to let him have another word out of her.

Even if she barely managed to hold back her sad, sorry reply: I thought you were.

Only respect for Byron kept her from attempting to use her influence to besmirch Regalyan’s reputation. In Chantry dealings, she was passive on behalf of the mages, not going out of her way to give them any credit. She watched astounded as they received even less than she’d expected, as though she had singlehandedly slain the host of dragons and rescued the Divine.

“They would not have listened to you, anyway,” Leliana says. “You were new, even if you were the Right Hand.”

“Regardless, I should have tried. I regret that now. I did not do an ounce of good for mages until Justinia became the new Divine, years later.”

She’d poured out all her guilt to Justinia, prior to asking the older woman to accept her service. Justinia had given her a piercing look, the one that would always leave Cassandra wondering if the real bond was always between the two of them, and not Justinia and Leliana at all.

Or if that was simply Justinia’s gift with everyone – Cassandra never made up her mind.

But she thought often on Justinia’s words to her then: “How can we choose to love Him freely, were we never tempted to love another?”

Presently, Leliana says, “It seems so strange now that you came so close to leaving the Chantry. When you went on to break a record for long service to the Divine…”

Cassandra smiles grimly. “I worked harder in those years than I believed possible. I refused to be give them any reason to remove me. It was my way of snubbing Regalyan.”

“The Maker can bend even our baseness for His good.” Leliana is thinking about the position of the Divine again. “Cassandra, you bring such so many years of experience to your candidacy!”

Cassandra smiled wanly. “I have made many enemies over the years as well.”

Leliana brushes this aside. “And you’ll have me to agitate on your behalf! I’ll go around making trouble, when we both receive nominations.”

Cassandra blinks. “Both of us?”

“Yes. It’s all part of the plan.” There is a steely glint in her blue eyes. “You’ll see.”

She stretches, thinking. “I’ll spread word of crazy politics. Abolishing the Circles. Opening the clergy to all races.”

“Leliana, those are your real politics.”

“I know!” she answers gleefully.

A thought crosses Cassandra’s mind. “What if the Grand Clerics vote for you instead?”

“That won’t happen,” Leliana says immediately, with utter conviction.

“Even so, you shouldn’t bait them like that.”

Leliana grins. “You can’t control me. You’re not the Divine yet! But there’s more. When you’ve been appointed, you can make me your Left Hand, and that will bring our factions together too.”

Cassandra should feel excited by these plans, cheered by Leliana’s support. But the more the future comes into focus, the more dismayed she feels.

Leliana, noticing, says, “Meanwhile, you’ve been planning to leave the Divine’s service for Cullen.”

“Yes.”

“That was the second time?”

“I have endeavored not to make a habit of it. But yes.”

“In the case of Cullen –” Leliana lets out a sigh. “Who could blame you?”

Cassandra sits quietly for a moment, before she asks, in a small voice, “How long have you known about me and Cullen?”

Leliana just stares. “How stupid do you think I am?” she says. “How stupid are you?”

“You saw us at the beginning.”

“Oh, well,” Leliana concedes. “I suppose things were a little ugly then.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Four: Sore Subjects

They were standing at the ship’s railing watching Kirkwall recede into the distance, alone together for the first time.

“I feel lighter. It’s hard to believe that just a few days ago, I couldn’t imagine ever being able to leave Kirkwall,” Cullen said. “Or the Templars, for that matter. Or – my past,” he added, mouth twisting up with self-deprecation.

Cassandra said levelly, “I do not care where you have faltered – only that you stand here now.”

“Thank you,” he said. Paused. “I still can’t believe I’ve actually met you. Cassandra Pentaghast, the Hero of Orlais, who saved Divine Beatrix from forty dragons.”

Cassandra sighed, angrily. She hated this conversation. “It is fortunate that there are enough unflattering stories about me to counteract those ridiculous ones.”

“I have heard those too,” he said carefully. “But there’s no truth to them.”

“What makes you so sure you know me?”

Cullen stiffened. Too late, Cassandra heard the bluntness of her words. She hadn’t meant to sound so antagonistic. She looked away.

And thought: I did not intend to be harsh, but I do not like a sycophant. In her mind, she reorganized her assessment of Cullen Rutherford, whose record in Kirkwall and Kinloch was what some would call disastrous, who was no doubt used to coasting on his golden good looks (Justinia – more with each passing year – had a certain weakness for the cute ones). The unpleasant echo of Regaylan’s words sounding suddenly: I know how it goes in the Orders. I could tell you such stories about Templars…

“A good point. You’re a hard person to get to know.”

She felt her patience evaporate. “Do you only tell people what you think they want to hear?”

“Not at all.” He was angry now. “It seems you do not know me as well as you think either.”

Somehow that stung her on a personal and a professional level. “I know your history. I know plenty about you.”

“Then you know I can do this job.” To drive the last point home, he smiled. “We don’t have to be friends.”

Leliana presses, “But you did find him attractive? I saw.”

Cassandra fights a hot blush. “Of course I did.”

“Cullen was smitten too, you know. Varric said so. He also said that all boys are mean to the girls they like, and I quite agree.”

“That wasn’t it. We couldn’t stand each other!”

Leliana flutters her eyelashes. “It really wasn’t love at first sight?”

“Love at first sight isn’t love, Leliana.”

The spats worsened.

Cassandra can’t even remember exactly what they argued about, only feeling blinded with rage. The Templars featured often. In light of recent events, she had grown much more critical of the Templars, believing Knight-Commander Meredith and Kirkwall Templars to have been the true instigators of the mage rebellion, through their excessive use of force. She knew Cullen agreed – he had stood up to Meredith, and chosen to leave the Templars, after all – yet he kept insisting that she was too severe in her judgment.

She had always prided herself on controlling her temper – or at least being able to direct her anger towards a useful purpose. But on board ship, frustratingly, there was no channel for her rage. She had more of Anthony’s stubborn temperament than she’d realized. All she’d needed was for the right adversary to come along.

Now she had two. Cullen and Varric were sharing quarters below deck, and getting along just fine. Somehow Cassandra hadn’t expected that, even though she knew they must have known each other before – Hawke had had dealings with Meredith for years. And while Varric was, if anything, even more against the former Knight-Captain than she was, he found no shortage of other subjects with which to provoke her. Any encounter with either of them ended badly.

Things reached the next level when Cullen confronted her one afternoon. “I agreed to join the Inquisition,” he said, with a level of calm that Cassandra knew was only on the surface. “I intend to keep to my agreement. But I want to make it clear that I don’t support the way you’ve treated Varric.”

“He made things difficult for himself.”

“You placed him under duress.” Cullen raised his voice. “When you came to see me, you spoke so glowingly of Divine Justinia’s vision for the Inquisition. You said we would be a peacemaking, nonpartisan force, to step in if talks at the Conclave failed. Not a crusade of threats and violence carried out in the name of the Divine. Or is that how the Divine operates?”

She was torn. Caught between her own sense that she’d done what she felt was right, and knowing Justinia would have wanted to see her handle things better.

In her silence, his expression hardened. “I suppose a sincere Inquisition can hardly do its chosen work with mildness. Command me as you will.”

His words sank deep.

Her objective had been to bring Varric and Cullen back for the Divine. This she had done. What she hadn’t considered was how her methods reflected on Justinia herself.

Man’s wrath does not produce the Maker’s righteousness, Justinia was fond of quoting.

“Not really,” Leliana says now, frowning.

“She said it all the time to me.” Cassandra folds her arms. “What did she say to you, then?”

“The Maker makes all things beautiful in His time.”

Leliana’s delivery is impeccable. Nothing gives her away. But from seven years of knowing her, Cassandra senses that that isn’t quite right. “What did she really say to you?”

Leliana goes quiet for a moment, then answers, “Delight yourself in the Maker, and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

They are silent, remembering.

Eventually Leliana clears her throat, “So what did you do, after all that solemn rumination?”

Cassandra says – incredulous still – “I apologized to Varric.”

Begrudgingly.

He was angry and unmoved. But he accepted her apology, begrudgingly as well.

She left, shutting the door as loudly as she could just short of slamming it.

And found herself back in his room a moment later, apologizing for a second time. “That was bitter,” she said. “But I mean to be sincere.”

“No harm done, Seeker,” he said, still impassable.

Maker. What would it take to do this right? Cassandra tried praise. “The Divine is looking forward to meeting you. She would like you to sign her copy of Hard in Hightown.”

“Anything for my fans,” Varric said, a touch more congenially. “If I’m going all this way, it’s the least I can do to be useful.”

She was leaving, again, when it slipped out, “I am an admirer of your work as well.”

Honesty. That got his attention.

“Of Hard in Hightown?” he said, eyebrows raised. “After the way the agents of the Divine turned against her?”

“I am afraid I have not read that one yet,” Cassandra said, with growing dread.

“Which ones have you read, then? The Viper’s Nest? Darktown’s Deal?” He named several more, growing more and more perplexed. “You sure you didn’t read something by some other Varric Tethras?”

“Of course it was your book!” she exclaimed. “Swords and Shields!”

Varric’s eyes bulged. “You liked Swords and Shields? But it’s so…”

Feminine. Melodramatic. Smutty. She braced herself. It was all true.

But when he said, “Obviously my worst book,” she sprang to its defense, indignant, and curiously hurt. “Why are you so hard on that series, Varric? You are its creator.”

He looked down at his feet and sighed. “Maybe because that’s the kind of world I most wish were real. And believe me, I know it’s not.”

“The first honest answer I ever got out of him,” Cassandra tells Leliana ruefully.

“Very touching,” Leliana replies.

So she and Varric had called a truce, of sorts. But Cullen continued to get right under her skin. And she kept running into him.

Leliana says now, “You do know Varric was orchestrating some of that deliberately? He had a feeling about you two.”

Cassandra glares at her. “I’m surprised you’re not trying to claim all the credit.”

Leliana shrugs, modestly.

A few nights later, Leliana found her kneeling in their cabin with her forehead pressed to the floor. She only prayed like this when asking for pure divine intervention – and doubted that any was forthcoming.

“What are you looking so saintly for?” Leliana asked.

Through gritted teeth, Cassandra replied, “I am praying that the Maker will keep Cullen Rutherford and I from killing each other before the Inquisition’s work is done.”

“Count it all joy,” Leliana said sanctimoniously. “Justinia says that the Maker puts people in your life to show you what kind of person you’ve been to Him.”

“Contentious and insecure and self-righteous?” Cassandra said, regretting it immediately. “Never mind. Don’t answer that.”

“Pray instead for the development of your character,” Leliana continued. “And then when the Maker tells you how to behave, obey.”

“For the Maker’s sake, take a walk,” Leliana snapped two hours later, her own saintliness having reached its limit. “I can’t sleep with you breathing wrathfully beneath me.”

Cassandra had a wrathful retort ready, but she held it back. She swung her legs over the side of her lower bunk, kicked on her boots, and slammed the cabin door on her way out.

She’d worked through seven years of petty squabbles and deep disagreements with Leliana. She should be able to come back from a few bad encounters with a man she’d just met.

She thought of Justinia, shaking her head at her on many occasions, saying, “You seek the truth, but you do not speak it in love.”

If she was going to make an attempt to clear the air, she was going to have to do it properly the first time, because she didn’t think she could swallow her pride for Cullen Rutherford’s sake more than once.

By now, she was standing on the deck of the ship, taking deep breaths of the cold salty air. Maker, she thought, it would be nice if he decided to apologize first.

“Cassandra?”

She turned quickly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Cullen said.

A first apology. The Maker’s sense of humor. “That’s all right.” She drew in her breath.

“I just wanted to say – ”

“Cullen, I have been thinking – ”

They both stopped, looked at each other. She waved him on. He said, “I’d like to ask if we could make a new start of things. We’ll be working closely together. And I admire you tremendously, although I haven’t spoken to you as though I do. I apologize for that. I would like to be friends.”

“Then we are,” she said at once. Sensing she still sounded mulish, she added, “And I am glad of it.”

“I hear you and Varric are friends now, too.”

She was about to say what she thought about that when she caught the twinkle in his eye.

Fought to pull herself together. To remember what she’d wanted to say.

“There is something I wanted to say to you as well. You made me realize something I had not thought about before. I served for twelve years under Divine Beatrix. She was an exemplary leader in many respects, yet she showed great favoritism in her dealings. When she wished to reward someone, she rewarded them prodigally. That was how I became her Right Hand, though I was very young, and had no standing in the Chantry. But when she decided that someone was at fault, she was completely without mercy. In that time, I had to become like her in order to meet her standards.” She added, “I know that my faults now are my own. I don’t mean to blame her.”

“I didn’t think you did.”

“Another thing. For years, I was hostile towards the mages. Not until you told me off did I realize that I had grown contemptuous of the Templars as well. That is hardly the path to reconciliation.

“With regards to Divine Justinia… After seven years, I ought to do her more credit. What she has shown me, I ought also to show towards others. I want to assure you, Cullen, that whoever leads the Inquisition – Hawke, or someone else – we will be under Divine Justinia, and she is excellent in every way. You will see that, when you meet her.

“As for my own behavior, I apologize, Cullen. I would like the Inquisition to be less like what I’ve done and more like what you envisioned it to be.”

He looked uncomfortable. “You needn’t apologize to me, Cassandra. I’m no one.”

“We are of equal rank in the Inquisition. And should I not apologize to someone I have wronged?”

After thinking for a while, he said, “Meredith would never have apologized. I was used to clashing with her, especially towards the end. If you weren’t angry and forceful, she wouldn’t pay any attention to you at all. Not that she would have listened… But I grew accustomed to locking horns with her. For years, that was apparently the only way anything got done.

Nor can I claim to have the moral high ground, where coercion is concerned. In Kirkwall, we ruled with terror. We threatened people and said it was for their protection. I would not see the Inquisition go down the same path.

“Thank you, Cassandra. That was very affirming. It was very… personal.”

She felt awkward about that, and probably he did too. She changed the subject. Tried to speak lightly. “It was good to have run into you here. I was not planning to be out so late, but Leliana wanted the room to herself for a while. After seven years, we still fight about who gets the top bunk.”

He looked surprised. “You two seem to work together so well.”

“If only because we are rather unalike. ‘There must be very two, before there can be very one,’” she quoted.

He hesitated. “May I ask you something, Cassandra? When Leliana traveled with the Warden, years ago – did she really die, at the Temple of Sacred Ashes?”

“Different people get different answers to that question,” Cassandra said delicately.

“But what has she told you?”

“That the Warden killed her. And the Maker brought her back to life.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

“That, or she has her reasons for telling an impossible story.”

She sensed something was still bothering him, paused to give him room to speak.

“You’re all legends,” he said quietly, at last. “There is you, Leliana, and Hawke, if you have your way… And I’m a former Templar from a town too small to appear on a map.”

She answered him honestly. “Justinia herself suggested your name. So you have the Divine’s esteem.”

He didn’t seem reassured. As gently as she could, she asked, “What more do you want?”

He looked straight at her. “Yours.”

It was as though a match had been struck inside her. It wasn’t altogether a good feeling. Even if some of it was.

“No one’s esteem will be enough for you, until you have your own,” she said. Shaking. With what? “Goodnight, Cullen.”

“Goodnight, Cassandra,” he said uncertainly, but she was already turning away.

Chapter Text

Chapter Five: On Their Own, They Flower

Soon after the Herald was instated, Cullen approached Cassandra, deeply upset.

 “The Herald tells me you interrogated him, threatened him, refused him a weapon at first. What happened to not using threats and coercion?”

She stood taller. “I have spoken with the Herald since. He understands why I did what I did. What more do you want from me?”

“To not let punishment be your first resort. If you had any idea how it feels to be powerless, you wouldn’t persist in placing others under such conditions.”

“I know what that’s like. I was terrified of him.”

His eyes widened as she recounted the scene: dead bodies everywhere, most mutilated to the point of being unrecognizable, Justinia likely among them. Finding the Herald at the very center, with a glowing mark the same eerie green as the explosion. She’d sensed no lyrium in the man’s blood. She’d guessed that the mark was the manifestation of some kind of new, terrible magic.

“I took him into custody, yes,” she finished. “I questioned him. I did not harm him. You may have done differently in my position – or imagined you would. However, I will defend my actions as having been entirely reasonable.”

She expected a retort from him – prepared herself for another bout. But he frowned and said slowly, “That does not quite match up with the scene that the Herald described it to me.”

“Make what you will of our accounts, that is mine.”

“I meant that I believe you,” Cullen said quickly, seriously. Half to himself, he said, “Why would he…”

Cassandra had been wondering this herself, privately. While she and the Herald were ostensibly on good terms now, there was something about his demeanor towards her that she doesn’t like. But she shrugged and said, “Perhaps whatever he described to you is accurate about his experience. I do not make a good first impression.”

Cullen glanced up, startled, and then began to laugh. She laughed too, even though – with Cullen – she wasn’t completely sure if they weren’t laughing at her. Were they friends? Rivals? A crackling rain started to fall, cutting short their conversation.

“Are you and the Herald on good terms?” Cullen asked, with a shrewd glance at her.

Her intuition said no, they were not. But outwardly they were civil. “We are fine.”

Cullen let this pass without comment, tellingly, as they headed for shelter together.

It became more apparent a few days later at a meeting among the advisers, plus Cassandra. The Herald argued stridently against adhering to certain of Justinia’s guidelines, talked over her even when Cassandra was midway through a sentence. Cassandra looked imploringly at Leliana, but her face was like an expressionless mask. Cassandra understood that this didn’t necessarily mean that Leliana didn’t agree with her, but that Leliana was going to let her take the fall for this one by herself. “Justinia is not here, and I am,” the Herald declared at the end of a series of other insensitive pronouncements.

“He’s right,” Cullen said quietly. Cassandra glared at him. “New leadership has to take charge in its own way.” He bowed his head slightly, looking up respectfully at the Herald. “But perhaps you should still consider some of Justinia’s other ideas. She thought about this longer than you have, and personally knew many of the major players you’ll be dealing with.”

“Very well,” the Herald said easily.

For the rest of the meeting, Cassandra fought constantly against the loop of self-doubt. Why did the Herald listen to Cullen, and not to her? Because the two of them were friends? Because Cullen could always come across as so likeable and reasonable? Because he wasn’t in the Chantry? Because he was a man? She fumed, as much at Cullen as herself. This was just when it was paramount that Justinia’s last representatives be on hand to offer as much guidance as possible. How was it that Cullen Rutherford was doing a better job at suggesting it than she?

The Herald left first. Cassandra waited, letting the others exit to put some distance between them. She was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she almost didn’t hear Cullen ask, “Cassandra, do you have a moment?”

“A moment for what?” she snapped.

Leliana was still in the room, rearranging her papers silently, the better to eavesdrop. Cullen said, “Would you walk with me?”

Cassandra only agreed when she saw that he was frowning, as though something were weighing heavily on him. They went beyond Haven’s perimeter, until they could no longer hear the sounds of their camp. She thought he was going to say something about their meeting with the Herald. Reprimand her, perhaps.

She asked, as a pre-emptive strike, “Are you experiencing adverse effects from the lyrium withdrawal?”

“He’d already asked for your help with that?”

“Before our ship reached Haven. He’d resolved to do it when he decided to join the Inquisition,” Cassandra answers.

She’d taken aback by his request, even after he’d given her his reasons, careful ones. “It has been done, but you ask a great deal of yourself. Have you considered this fully?”

“Yes,” he said, exhaling. “But I know from the accounts that I must have external accountability. I would ask that of you, as a Seeker of Truth. Please don’t allow me to fail.”

“I’ve begun to feel the symptoms, but they haven’t bothered me yet,” he said, shrugging. “That wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

She expected some kind of lecture, on some other area in which she should allow the Herald to have his own merry way.

Instead, Cullen said, “You must still be deeply grieved by Divine Justinia’s death.”

She was disarmed. He had been one of the first to offer condolences after the explosion at the Conclave. That had been days ago. “I am. I must concentrate on the task at hand, however. After all, I am here and she is not.”

The last part she added spitefully. But Cullen only replied, earnestly, “She is with the Maker now.”

“Thanks be to Him,” she said, softening slightly. She registered that it was kind of Cullen to adjust her thinking without reproach.

He was waiting for her to say more. It wasn’t exactly that she didn’t want to. She wanted to talk about how courageous and wise and noble Justinia had been, or it would be as though she had never existed. Not all her goodness had to be lost along with her. Still, she didn’t know where to start.

After a period of silence, Cullen cleared his throat. “Some years ago, I lost a mentor in the Templars who was like a father to me in some ways. His name was Francis.”

Cassandra frowned, thinking back to his records. “Not someone named Aurelie?”

“Officially, it was Aurelie. But Francis was more of a mentor to me than she ever was. He took me under his wing, not because I had much to boast of. His regard for me was not contingent on my performance. He was the one who taught me that the Maker is pleased not only be strength, excellent, or the execution of duty, but that He takes pleasure in the invisible – our worship, the attitude of the heart.”

In a low voice, Cassandra asked, “Were you with him at the end?”

A shadow passed over his face. “No. Lyrium drove him mad, like so many others before him. They lose their minds and wander off. No one goes after them. He was already deteriorating when I met him. It would have been something to know him in his prime.”

Cullen looked out at the mountains, the meadows, stretching out his hand. “Yet he could find something instructive in everything. He’d always ask new recruits to take a walk with him. He’d remind them that they joined the Templars to do together what they could not do along. A body united was far more than the sum of its parts. He believed so much in the importance of togetherness. He used to say, consider the grasses of the field. On their own, they flower; together, they bear fruit.”

“A wise analogy.” Purple flower buds peeped through the snow. She would never have seen them if he hadn’t pointed them out.

He cleared his throat. “I didn’t mean to do all the talking.”

She shook her head. “I am sorry for your loss,” she said haltingly. “Justinia was aware that the Templars were badly treated. She wanted to improve things for them. She wanted to do so many – ” Her voice caught on a sob, and suddenly she was crying. Appalled at herself, but unable to stop. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d even come close to crying in front of anyone.

He hugged her.

Anyone would have.

She told herself that this was nothing special, and didn’t believe herself for a second.

He was taller and stronger than she was, but he held her very gently. As though she were something valuable, something deserving of care.

Her heart stumbling in her chest.

Maker help her, this was so wrong. She was recovering from a deep loss. Fighting with the Herald, whom she suspected of everyone she’d met so far was going to be her real nemesis here. It was entirely the worst time to start developing a torrent of muddled feelings for someone she didn’t really understand. As Cullen himself had rightly pointed out to her, and no doubt would again.

She pulled away, wiped her eyes, thanked him and said it was time she should be getting back. He looked concerned, but didn’t comment.

They walked quickly back, making only a little small talk before they reached Haven and she left him quickly. For anyone else she would have done the same.

For no one else would she have felt so conflicted.

Over the months, they grew closer, somehow in spite of the mess of her feelings towards him – often provoked to anger, often precariously desiring, always sharp. Perhaps her pep talk on board the ship really made a difference. Or if Cullen was simply willing or able to put on a braver face in front of the others. In any case, most of the time, the Commander of the Inquisition at Haven was a very different man from the one she’d first met.

It appeared to all that Justinia had chosen well. Cullen seemed perfectly sure of himself and of his job from the moment he set foot in Haven. He jumped right into training their troops, while Cassandra – there is no better word for it – hovered, uncertainly, never in the way but not particularly of much help either. Or at least it seemed to her.

He got along famously with the Herald, who chafed at everyone else, and Cassandra especially. He was so confoundedly charismatic around everyone.

She was impressed. And infuriated.

(“In the earliest days of the Inquisition, you and Cullen and Josephine had your role laid out for you,” Cassandra says to Leliana now. “Whereas I was never quite sure what I was supposed to be doing.”

“Now we know,” Leliana says. “Keeping your hands clean.”)

It took her months, but she finally got it, why Justinia wanted someone from Meredith’s regime. There are some things a person can only learn about being a good leader from a bad one. More telling than his mistakes in Kirkwall were his successes in spite of Kirkwall. Perseverance, character. Ultimately, he chose to do what was right.

They met and talked almost every day, continuing on through the move to Skyhold.

She rode out often with the Inquisitor, and was absent for weeks on end. It was all the more apparent on her returns that Cullen was looking more and more ill. The lyrium symptoms were taking their toll. But he rarely spoke of them, and she learned not to bring them up.

He wrote her letters when she was gone. His handwriting had grown shakier. That he made the effort to write at all, she tried to take as a good sign.

Until she returned from a long trip to the Hissing Wastes, and one look at Cullen’s face was enough to tell her those good signs hadn’t amounted to enough.

(“In fairness to Cullen,” says Leliana, “once the Inquisitor found out, he ordered Cullen to return to taking lyrium. He deemed it too risky.”

“He condemned him,” Cassandra said bitterly.)

She’d held on to her anger – though it threatened to overload her – waiting for Cullen to breach the subject. Finally on the third morning after her return, while they were overseeing the soldiers training in the frosty morning, he admitted to her in a low voice that he’d gone back to taking lyrium.

He wouldn’t meet her eyes. But he looked up when she walked off, suddenly, decisively.

She went up to one of the recruits, who was carrying a Fereldan greataxe, evidently on his way somewhere. He looked up, startled to be addressed by her. “Give me your axe, soldier. The Commander has need of it. He will return it to you before the day is out.”

She didn’t have to turn around to know that Cullen was hurrying after her, scrabbling through the snow. She strode smartly through the courtyard, ascending the battlements and letting herself into his office. Ignoring his protests, she reached behind his desk and grabbed his lyrium kit. She overturned the carved wooden box, shaking out the terrible apparatus, the half-empty vial. It took all her resolve not to show her pain at the sight.

“What – ” Cullen halted midsentence as she dropped the wooden box in the middle of his floor.

She picked up the axe, tested its weight, and brought it down sharply. Splinters flew through the air as the axe bit deeply into the wood. Cullen yelped. She swung harder. The second strike cleaved it, and by the third, it was getting hard to tell what it had been originally.

“That’s the image of Andraste!”

Cassandra raised the axe, chopped again. More pieces split and flew across the room. “She should not have to watch you destroy yourself.”

“Oooooh! I didn’t know this part!”

Cassandra isn’t proud. “I felt I was doing what you would do.”

Leliana looks at her with pity. “In your own way, I suppose.”

“We had an agreement,” Cassandra said, between strokes. “I was to oversee you – as you quit. I agreed – to be bound by those terms – just as you did. You asked me – not to let you fail.”

His alarm had turned to fury. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“I know that it is not impossible.” The box was entirely in splinters. “Remember that you do not suffer for suffering’s sake. I would not see you be less than you should be.”

Cullen seemed too outraged to speak. She drew on his anger, matching him emotion for emotion.

“Give me the rest of your supplies,” she said.

“I didn’t destroy them,” Cassandra says, with a lump in her throat. “If he left, he would need them.”

Leliana nods. “Did you leave them with Josie? I thought she was getting a bit jumpy around then.”

“With Varric, actually.”

Leliana opened her eyes very wide. “A striking turn of events!”

Cassandra does a passable imitation of Varric’s voice: “Keeping secrets among friends is what I do best.”

She slammed the ax down on Cullen’s desk before she left.

“Polish it and return it by sundown,” she said.

“He wouldn’t speak to me for a week. In fairness to him, he may not have left his room much in that time. He was very ill.”

She’d missed him, though she doesn’t feel like admitting that to Leliana. Wondered if she’d gone too far. Agonized.

“Then I found him in my quarters.”

She could sense someone was in her room as she approached. She guessed it was something she’d picked up from Leliana. There was so much more intrigue in the clergy than in the Seekers, she thought ruefully.

The door was just ajar. She pushed it open soundlessly.

Cullen was sitting her chair, looking down intently at his hands.

That was surprising enough. She’d expected to find him ransacking her things, looking for lyrium – really, given what she’d just, considered it just a matter of time. A function of the illness, not the man himself.

Then she saw the long silver chain wound around his fingers.

As furious as she was, the sight arrested her. A beautiful man holding a treasure in his hands. Even if he didn’t know its meaning, he evidently knew its worth.

She could have watched him for much longer.

She said nothing, waited for him to notice her. When he did, he jumped.

“I see you have become well acquainted with my brother Anthony,” she said levelly.

His expression became even guiltier. “In Ferelden, lockets are for sweethearts.”

“I am aware of that. Another reason why I keep it in my room.” She closed the door behind her. “So you took me for a cradle-snatcher? Corrupting the youth?”

“Not at all.” After a moment, he blurts out, “I was just thinking that he was a lucky man.”

And with that, her anger was weighed down, dulled, with sadness. “Not so lucky. He was murdered just a few months after that portrait was painted.”

She ended up telling him the whole story of how she and Anthony had been left to Vestalus’s charge, how she’d met Byron and come to join the Seekers. “I know joining the Orders is no easy thing. Leaving must be even harder. I want you to know you have my support. Whatever I am able to give.”

“Thank you, Cassandra,” he said quietly. “Always.”

She fixed her eye on him. “But if you break into my quarters again, it’s not a story you’ll get.”

“Very restrained,” Leliana says, approving greatly. “You handled that like a lady. Justinia would have been proud.”

“Justinia would have pointed out that there was no axe on hand.”

When he’d left, she went through her things. Tried to see them through his eyes. Had he noticed that she kept all his letters in a separate box?

When she sat down the next morning to do her makeup, she found the tip of her eye pencil had been blunted. Apparently Cullen had taken the cap off to look at it and replaced it too forcefully, stubbing the tip. How very like a man, she thought.

And found herself, a moment later, still grasping the bruised pencil between her fingers, praying for him with her forehead pressed to the floor.

Chapter Text

Chapter Six: The End of a Dream

Cassandra doubted the Inquisitor even knew that Cullen overcame the lyrium dependency, after all, even though the change in him was remarkable. After a tortured convalescence, there was color in his face, new energy for everything.

Months passed, and as much as Cassandra chafed at the thought of depending on – of needing – another person, she couldn’t deny that there are things they couldn’t have done without each other. She helped him to stop taking lyrium when no one else grasped what it means to him. He counseled her to rebuild the Seekers, thought they seem lost to everyone, most of all Cassandra herself. Each time, they were leveled, humbled, exposed. They understood each other better than they understood themselves.

Her heart condemned her often for her failings. But now she found that his opinion of her counted for more. It was greater than her heart.

And if her own foolish feelings about it all were driving her mostly out of her mind, he seemed to be caught up in a kind of manic energy with regards to her project, throwing himself into planning what she could do next. His letters to her began to include detailed suggestions for where she might begin her search for the missing Seekers, all good ones but more than she could possibly follow up on in the present. She thanked him often, anyway, and hoped she was successfully hiding her confusion.

She’d been telling him about Byron. How he’d helped take her away from the men her uncle wanted her to marry. How he’d never married himself.

“You were so young when you were certain that you should take up that life,” Cullen said, awed.

She shrugged it off. “Many who join the Seekers are younger than I was. I was late to start my training. My trainers were so good to remind me that aspects of my form would never attain perfection.”

“I meant – when you began as Divine Beatrix’s Right Hand – you were choosing not to marry. Not to have a family.”

Once, opening a volume of Fereldan poetry that was laying on his desk, she’d found children’s drawings of a house, various children and adults, all drawn with the same curly blonde hair. A garden. Apple trees. “From my sister Mia’s children,” he’d said quickly, and changed the subject.

“The Seekers and the Chantry sisters are my family,” she replied, and though she meant it, she sounds wooden to her ears. He always thought her so much better than she was. She couldn’t bear it. “The truth is that when I was young, I fell into one thing after another, mostly by accident. By circumstance.” He already knew about the death of her parents, Anthony. “At the time I was preparing to serve Divine Beatrix, I actually thought I was going to leave the Chantry. There was a man I cared for. The mage who helped me uncover the plot about the Divine. Byron’s friend.”

Cullen asked softly, “What happened?”

She gave him a wry smile. “What do you think happened?”

“You saw that you had to put your duty first. You turned him down.”

She just shook her head. His face changed. It wasn’t necessary to elaborate. But in the next moment, she found herself telling him about how Regalyan had proposed a marriage of convenience, so to speak. How even now that made her feel sickened, used. How even up until he’d been killed at the Conclave – a primary representative for the mages – she’d wondered what the two of them could have done if they’d stayed together.

She realized, too late, that mentioned Regalyan could be interpreted as a request for him to show him hand. That hadn’t been her intention – if anything, that was a conversation she was terrified of having.

Whatever his history was, she was relieved when he kept it to himself – said nothing.

(“It was only ever always you, wasn’t it?” Leliana says with satisfaction. “I thought so.”)

But at the time, she’d been disappointed, too. Exasperated.

Who’s a hard person to get to know now? she’d thought, with roiling jealousy.

For weeks, her growing feelings for Cullen were a torment to her, a barrage of unanswered questions. Yet surely it was nothing but an accident of how close they’d become – talking every day, those nights working together in his office that, astoundingly, continued. When she was away, he wrote her letters. Traveling, she couldn’t always reply, but she’d receive more from him anyway. She thought about what he was going through almost to the exclusion of her own life. How could she think about herself when she could be thinking of him instead?

She wanted so badly to believe he felt the same for her.

Cullen Rutherford. Cullen.

She lay awake, remembering the touch of his hands, as warm and soothing as the sun.

Remembering everything she found so infuriating about him. Her fear that his first inclination was to mistrust her, to think the worst of her motives or actions. That in spite of whatever he said about wanting her esteem, on a level so deep he wouldn’t always admit it to himself, he scorned her. She’d been so sure of her assessment at the start. Why doubt herself now?

She daydreamed that if he just enfolded her in his arms again, she’d hardly even care what he thought of her.

She wondered if he’d be repulsed if he knew.

Or.

He despised her flaws. He saw her clearly. He knew her.

That didn’t mean he loved her – far from it.

When had she even started thinking that she loved him? Since being in love with him – one-sidedly – had become too painful. Instead of letting her feelings go, she’d let them go deeper.

She wanted so much from him, more than she had any right to expect. The way she couldn’t look at his hands without thinking of him touching her, his mouth without wanting him to kiss her, his eyes without longing for him to look at no one else.

She hadn’t been able to judge the toll lyrium had taken on his body, his mind, his spirit, until now, when he was free. He held his head higher. He was training more.

Or maybe it was just that she couldn’t stop looking at him.

He wore thin padded armor, though it was a cold spring. He was showing the soldiers a particular maneuver, one that he seemed to have adapted himself from the Templar training they shared. His movements were bold and graceful, his face flushed from the exercise. In the middle of his routine, he paused and stripped off his shirt. Without missing a beat, he took up his sword and shield again and resumed the demonstration.

She stood watching impassively. For about ten seconds. Then she turned on her heel and all but fled.

In that time, she’d taken in the sculpted strength of his arms and shoulders, the hard muscle of his back, the sharp lines of his chest, gleaming with sweat. The low curve of his trousers that kept tugging her eyes lower still. Even standing off to one side, she’d thought she could feel his heat, and all she could think of was all the ways she wished she could pay him back for the pleasure she had just from watching him.

So she’d made herself leave, quickly, before she could be any more ridiculous.

She thought to go to the Chantry, to its cool stone and quiet. But that was no place for the thoughts she was thinking. The sanctity of the Chantry was that it was the place she’d found shelter as an orphaned girl, when she had nothing to offer anyone. All her life she’d been told that the Maker loved her. The Chantry was practical proof. It was the love and acceptance she’d received there that had nothing to do with particular preference; it bestowed on her instead intrinsic worth. That was the purity the clergy stood for, had to uphold.

And she’d already let enough of Cullen into that space. Because when they sang at service, she listened for his voice, rich and clear. Because she thought of the prayer he’d prayed once to the exclusion of all others: “We must desire most of all to be all the Maker made us to be. The dreams He has for us are so much greater than the dreams we have for ourselves.” Because she knew he was there each day at sundown, and if she went then, she’d be there with him. And that would be trespassing on his own sacred space. He went to pray for wisdom, she knew, for his health and sanity, for the soldiers lost in battle that day. For their families.

This wasn’t just foolish. This was wrong. She was a mentor of sorts to him, one to whom he had held himself accountable, sanctioned to go to any lengths to ensure he didn’t succumb to old ways. They’d intruded on each other, out of necessity, being so close. Gotten into blazing arguments. Always made up afterwards. Liked each other more for it, or so she hoped.

She saw now that she’d crossed line after line with him, in no clear order. First he’d become her unexpected ally against the Herald, then a companion – just because they were so often in the same place, at the same time, overseeing the troops, sparring, going to dinner, working into the night. Then he became her friend, when she’d found she liked the sheer pleasure of his company, missed it miserably when she was away. And how could she not have begun to develop feelings for her when she saw how good he was, how sincere, how she’d grown dependent on him too. How she couldn’t miss a day of going to see him when she could, for their routine of her standing his open doorway, knocking softly, how he’d look up only then, and give her that smile that made her heart rise and melt for him at all once.

This spilling out of emotions, this overflow of her heart. Out walking once, she’d tripped over a loose flagstone. He’d thrown out his arm to steady her, and she’d spent the rest of the day off-kilter at that momentary touch.

And he’d never before seemed so distant, so hard to read.

It was impossible to remain so close to someone beyond a needful season, she decided. Now that was ending as he recovered, stronger than before. He was trying to give them both a graceful exit.

And to reciprocate, however he could.

He found things for her – often from the merchants she’d missed while she was away, though she wouldn’t have gone through their wares so painstakingly even if she’d been at Skyhold with nothing else to do. She tried to refuse them, protested that she wasn’t giving him anything back. “They’re gifts,” he said. “They’re not meant to be repaid.”

A better compass. A new oilcloth bag because she’d mentioned hers leaked. Once, a very fine horse she’d never seen before outside of Nevarra, as black and lustrous as wet ink, so fast that when she rode, she felt as though she were flying.

She couldn’t help but notice that they were all things that would take her further away from him each time.

He’d really fixed upon the task of her rebuilding the Seekers.

“I am not even sure we deserve to be rebuilt,” she said, troubled.

“I am,” he said.

Of course, she was too, upon reflection. He was right. And she was never one to hesitate once she saw what needed to be done. Why was she delaying now?

Because she didn’t want to have a future without him, she realized. He had changed her. And he had made a space for himself in her life, her heart, her very being, that she knew she could never fill with anyone else.

She’d been fine for so long, avoiding coming to care for anyone that way, to need to love like that, unguardedly, without calculation, without reserve. No, she didn’t need him, she reasoned; she was herself before, and she would be after.

But not the same – that she couldn’t deny. And that difference was everything.

It reached a fever point the night when, as she was about to retire to her quarters, he pulled her aside and started telling her that he’d just found a set of very good maps of the Hunterhorn Mountains, north of Orlais. More to appease him than anything, she offered to go with him to his office to take a look.

He had, in fact, spread those maps right on top of comparatively more urgent Inquisition business. She was only half-listening as he started going into great detail about the terrain, reports of sightings of the Seekers, a network of caves his scouts were investigating. Nothing could have been further from her mind.

“After the Inquisition’s work is done,” he kept saying. He was going to try and clear the roads, to set a watch out for bandits, and hundred other tasks, after the Inquisition’s work was done…

Finally she couldn’t hold back what she thinking any longer. Tried to say it jokingly, but sounding accusatory, as she invariably did. “Why are you trying so hard to get rid of me?”

She’d expected irritation on his part.

Instead, he looked like he’d been slapped.

She raised an eyebrow, steadily held his gaze. Felt certain he was a second away from starting another row.

“How can you say that?” Cullen said finally. “When I care more about you than everyone else put together?”

Cassandra was speechless.

She thought she stood paralyzed for a full minute, wondering what she’d just heard him say. He cleared his throat. Lowered his gaze. Said very quietly, “If you have to go, I want to know where you are. That’s all. I won’t bother you anymore, if that’s what you want.”

She hugged him, suddenly, before he could retreat any further. Found her voice. “No, Cullen. I don’t want to leave you.”

He hadn’t moved. As though he were afraid to hold on to her. “You have the Maker’s work to do.”

She let out a shaky laugh. “You could come with me. You already know where we’re going.”

He held her then, tightly, now as though he couldn’t ever bear to let her go. “You’re the best thing in my life. The best part of me. I love you, Cassandra.”

She blinked through sudden tears. “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”

“I mean all of it. I’m in love with you. I love you.”

A shiver ran through her. She said, fighting to keep her voice from breaking, “I love you too, Cullen.”

“You don’t have to,” he whispered.

But he was holding her tighter to him, sure of himself now even as they waited for their minds to catch up, for their hearts to be amazed. Now, pressed right up against each other, heat radiating through them, she feels as though they could melt into each other.

“True,” she said, and felt his surprise. She pulled back just far enough to give him a teasing smile. “You don’t have to kiss me now, either.”

He kissed her then at once, with gladness, with delight. She felt his smile pass right through her, making something deep with her bloom. He kissed her gently, slowly, letting her show him that she wanted him to. When he slid his tongue between her lips she gasped. Realized she was panting for him, wanting to feel him everywhere, his mouth, his hands, his hips pressed up against hers. But he was unaccountably tender with her, if anything even gentler with her than a moment before, softer, kinder. Refusing to rush even a second of his devotion.

They found their way to each other slowly in the beginning. They kissed and kissed and fell asleep holding each other, still in their clothes, that first time.

He was caressing the small of her back, a light, almost casual touch that was having wildly unfair effects on her. “I’ve wanted you like this for so long,” he murmured.

If she weren’t already off her feet, she might well have swooned. “Oh?” she tried to say nonchalantly, but the breathiness of her voice gave her away.

He gave a low chuckle. “You’d be horrified if you knew.”

She couldn’t resist the challenge, and he knew it. “From the moment you met me?” she asked, teasingly.

“From the first time I heard about you.”

The ground rocked. Or maybe that was just her, tilting, listing, pitching forward into his waiting arms. His smile, the warmth in his eyes, and the love behind them – it was all there. How had she missed it before?

“I’ve made you blush,” he said, very amused.

“You can do more than that,” she said softly, and was rewarded by a darkening gleam in his eyes.

“Oh, Cassandra. You’re more beautiful than all the portraits and more courageous than all the stories. You’ll let me tell you that, now that I know you a little better?”

She felt a smile rise to her lips, as inevitably as bubbles in champagne. “You left something out.”

He frowned. “I did?”

“That I was lucky enough to find an incomparably handsome and valiant man. Who for all my faults loves me more than I could ever have imagined.”

“Hmm,” he said, failing to keep from smiling. “A grave omission. How can I make that up to you?”

“Endlessly, I hope,” she said seriously, but she giggled when he rolled across the sheets and kissed her, taking her into his arms.

“Anything, Cassandra,” he whispered. “Anything.”

They’d made such plans.

He’d always hoped to have children someday.

But first he insisted that going to rebuild the Seekers in the Hunterhorn Mountains was the right thing to do. When she argued that it wouldn’t be fair for her to drag him along on what might be years of fruitless labor, he simply said, “You have a calling right now. I don’t. Which is well. Where you go, I will go.”

“That is very poetic,” she said drowsily. “It sounds almost like something the Maker would say.”

He chuckled, kissed her brow. “Then I must be doing something right.”

Meaning – she should have put this together – that it sounded, in this wild world, like something only the Maker could promise.

He’d said the sweetest things, things it seemed she’d waited her whole life to hear. I’ve thought of you every night since I met you. Every single night. The only thing that could bring me to sleep was the hope that I might dream of you. And I did, sometimes. They were always good dreams. But nothing at all compared to this.

The whole time, Cassandra couldn’t shake the feeling that this couldn’t be real.

“And I was right,” she tells Leliana now, choking. Leliana squeezes her hand.

The sun is rising, light filtering in through the window. The dream is over.

“I should go tell him now,” she says.

Leliana blinks. “Now?”

“Now.”

She gets up from her bed, dresses.

Leliana touches her arm. “One more thing. Byron’s words to you. Did you ever have a chance to ask Beatrix or Justinia about their reasons for becoming the Divine?”

“No,” Cassandra says. “I regret that.”

“I asked Justinia. Why willingly put aside marriage? Why ascend to the rank of the Divine?”

“What did she say?”

“She said she did not think serving the Maker was tantamount to ascetism, deprivation – as though He required emotional martyrs to do His work, of which marriage must be no part. She adhered to the ban on marriage, though she felt it was a symptom of man’s own falseness and legalism. But in one respect, she welcomed the choice of celibacy and singlehood, for to many, that made her more distinctly other.”

“Other?”

“She says for her, being the Divine all came down to embracing the other. The Maker embraced His created beings. For that reason, we ought to embrace one another, not only those who are like us, but those who are unlike us – by race, male or female. In becoming the Divine, Justinia saw herself accepting greater otherness. In loving the other, she modeled the Maker’s love.”

The words were familiar to Cassandra. “But that was the speech she made at weddings.

“Exactly,” Leliana says, acknowledging her puzzlement. “I never understood how it made sense to her.”

Leliana sighs.

“Still, you are clear on what you must do. Go.”

When Cassandra knocks on the door of his office, Cullen looks up and smiles.

She almost turns around and runs back out. Maybe she would have, if her strength hadn’t deserted her as well as her nerve.

She thinks, Once you hear what I have to tell you, you will never look at me the same way again.

“Cassandra?” Cullen asks, doubt already creeping into his voice.

She stands a good distance from him, folds her arms. She says everything she thinks she needed to, but rehearsing her words has made them lifeless, flat. The Maker has told me I must be the Divine. I cannot be yours. Cullen, I am so sorry.

He says nothing for so long.

Silently, she pleads with him to be angry. She could walk out on anger, angry herself. His sadness makes her wish he’d never met her – which had been, she is sure now, the best thing that ever happened to her.

Instead, she has to watch him pull back, close off, do what he can to shield her from his pain. She knows he will wait until she is gone before he cracks from it. She will do the same. The distance between them – now greater than it’s ever been – is what hurts the most.

She knows that her heart, broken now, will break for him again and again.

He says, painfully, “So I’m supposed to let you go?”

She summons up her last note of resolve. “Do what you must. As I have.”

Hold me. One last time.

But she doesn’t say it, and he doesn’t hear. In spite of her best efforts, she leaves already in tears. He does not come after her.

A messenger arrives that afternoon with the nominations. One for her. One for Leliana. Just the way they were sure it would go.

Cassandra knows she knows she’s done the right thing, and that she may never feel she has. Justinia once described something similar. More than that, she can’t recall.

Let us pray, Justinia used to say, after a silence, always in the same cool way. She’d always sounded so calm. Like holding a coin in your palm, knowing it by the way it always felt. Cassandra used to replay her words when she was trying to sound detached and controlled herself. Now she just wants to bury herself under the earth and let the ground bear down on her.

Technically she and Leliana aren’t supposed to confer in private now that they’re both candidates for the Divine. Nor does she expect that Cullen will want to see her again anytime soon. Suddenly she is quite alone, cut loose from the ties that had mattered to her the most.

She walks through the courtyard. Talks to no one. Stands out under the sky, as though that could bring her any closer to consolation.

Maker. Here I am. Make what You will of this guilt and grief.

Chapter Text

Chapter Seven: Wedding at the Winter Palace

This, thus, was what the Maker brought to pass –

Cole comes to Cassandra’s door, a week after the nominations were announced. “There’s something I want you to have.”

It’s a locket, a gold one, so simple that it’s impossible to say if it’s of Nevarran or Fereldan make. She holds it in her palm, afraid to open it.

“Don’t worry. I did it the right way,” Cole says, misunderstanding her hesitation. “I left money for the seller. A lot of money. For the two lockets, and the paints.”

The locket swings open easily with a click.

She’s startled to see herself inside – and yet the likeness seems strange. In the portrait, she has a certain light in her eyes, a soft smile.

“It’s how he sees you,” Cole says, motioning for her to put it on.

The chain is unusually long. The locket goes right over her heart. It’s heavier than she expected. Matches the physical ache inside her.

The Divine couldn’t be seen to own a locket like this with a man’s portrait in it. It would raise questions, could be used falsely against her. Leliana would probably make her destroy it, Cassandra thinks, suppressing a shudder. But this would be safe.

She thanks Cole profusely. He shrugs, not looking for any kind of thanks.

“He said it’s usually the other way around. But I thought you should have this one. You already know how you see him. You won’t forget that.”

And then it was three years since the Inquisition defeated Corypheus. Three years since she became Divine Justinia with Leliana as her Left Hand. But it feels as though she’s accumulated three hundred years of turmoil, just for this day.

In their quarters at the Winter Palace, where the Exalted Council will convene tomorrow to help decide the Inquisition’s fate, Leliana helps her dress.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Leliana murmurs. “You wouldn’t even have to know I was there.”

Cassandra shakes her head. “But come get me if I’m not back in an hour.”

“One hour?” Leliana says sternly.

Cassandra swallows. “Half an hour.”

Even that seems too much, Cassandra thinks, and still not enough, when she sees Cullen leaning against the railing of the balcony overlooking the garden, exactly where Leliana had suggested they meet. Private, but not secret, she’d said. It seems to take an age to reach him, beyond how her long robes restrict her movement.

He looks a little older – but stronger than ever. “Cassandra,” he says, the first to speak, and she realizes she’s been holding her breath. No one has called her by that name for a long time. Hearing his voice alone is almost overwhelming.

“Cullen. It’s good to see you. You look so well.”

“You look…”

He is seeing her in the sacred vestments for the first time. By now she’s seen the whole range of reactions it can provoke. Her uncle – who struggles to walk now, and hasn’t practiced his magic for years, as far as she knows – touched one of her sleeves with awe, as delicately as though it were a butterfly’s wing. The Inquisitor laughed out loud and said, “You look like a meringue.”

Only Cullen looks at her exactly the same way as he did three years ago, with as much joy as hurt.

“Anxious,” he says softly, and she blinks. That was one word she didn’t expect to hear.

For a moment her mind clears. She says something about the Fereldan and Orlesian ambassadors, and he nods in response. Apparently she’s coherent.

“Thank you for your letters,” she blurts out, far too formally for this point in the conversation. She’d meant to say it at the very beginning, but the sight of him had neatly displaced the thought, for all she’d rehearsed it. The distance between them seems to double. “I apologize that I have not been able to write back more often.”

“Scattered thoughts don’t merit such attention.”

“Your words do not want for merit, when they come to me from your hand.”

She can tell that he adds to his letters a little each day, sometimes crossing whole lines out, only to write them back in below. She writes to him in the same way, when she can.

Lingers over every unfinished line.

Feels their words strain beneath the weight of all they wish they could say.

… yet I feel that I stand in your shadow. Has it seemed to you…

… thought that if I did the right thing, eventually my heart would follow. If that is what has happened…

… when what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. Could it be that…

Meanwhile, here, overlooking the palace grounds, they keep on conversing, apparently with ease again, though Cassandra hardly knows what she’s saying. She asks him about the sanctuary he has been preparing to found for former Templars, and those who have succumbed to the adverse effects of lyrium. He says, “I’ve said I would never have managed to stop taking lyrium, if not for you. The others don’t know this, of course, but – it was the hope of being together with you some day that kept me going. I feel fortunate to have had that. It may have been short-lived, but it was not false. And it is from that still that I give hope to others.”

She says something in response.

He replies. His voice is hard and bright.

She says something else, and he replies again.

They keep this up for some time, talking faster and faster all the while. Right before her very eyes, he is becoming less and less himself. She realizes with a start where she’s seen people talk like this – after trauma. Trying a little too zealously to hold themselves together.

His answers don’t quite make sense anymore. “It’s a child who sulks when he can’t have everything he wants, thinks the world and the Maker unfair because of it. Should I get hung up on the one thing I can’t have? I should think on my other blessings. I have my work, my health, my mind. That is much more than most have had. Isn’t it?”

She finds her voice. “Cullen, I think you should sit for a moment.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re scaring me.”

He looks genuinely taken aback. Sits down suddenly on the steps. She gingerly sits down beside him.

She’s about to tell him to take a few slow breaths, when he blurts out, “Forget everything I’ve said so far.”

“Cullen – ”

“Cassandra. Maker help me, Cassandra.” He holds her in his gaze, searching her expression. “The only thing I wanted to tell you was that I love you still. I resolved that no amount of suffering would take that away from me. I love you, Cassandra. I always will.”

She tries to tell him the same, but he holds a finger up to her lips without actually touching her –a touch would shatter them both. “Don’t say it,” he says. “I shouldn’t have – I knew you would feel obligated to – you are the Divine.”

“No less have I longed for you,” she says, finally giving herself away. “I think about you every morning, every night. I wanted to tell you sooner. Forgive me.”

“Forgive me,” he says brokenly.

“Do you…” She exhales. “Do you wish we hadn’t…”

He shakes his head. “If we had only been friends, we might be better friends now.” He paused. “But no, Cassandra, I have never regretted anything we did. I could never regret anything about you. Even the pain.”

She closes her eyes. “I feel the same way.”

His voice sounds as though it’s coming from a long way off. “Do you think you made the right decision in yielding to the Maker’s will?”

She bows her head. “I do.”

“Do you ever think you should have chosen differently?”

“I do.”

What they have done, she thinks, they have done. This impossible wedding of what they want and what they cannot have. If this is as much as they can get, then she will do her best to cherish it. She will die trying.

Knowing their time is almost up, she gets to her feet, stammering something about Leliana expecting her back. She hates that she’s strayed back into not saying what she really means. She makes one last attempt.

“Cullen, I am so sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” he says at once. “I’m sorry I said you looked anxious, when you arrived. I was the one who was anxious. All I could think was how beautiful you look.” He is crying now. “In white.”

Back in her chambers, Leliana is waiting serenely, the picture of patience.

“I was going to give you a few minutes’ grace,” she says, rising.

Cassandra shakes her head.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Leliana asks softly.

The question in her heart escapes. As in – she feels the loss, as it spills from her mouth. “Must I keep choosing?”

Does the Maker love a lost cause?

For once, Leliana does not set about answering her. She just helps her out of the headdress and robes, sinks into bed beside her, and holds her for as long as she can.

Rocks her, though she will not go to sleep.

Sings her lullabies.

Chapter Text

Epilogue: On the Altar of Their Desire

From an address given by Divine Victoria, on the occasion of the first day of the fifth year of the Sanctuary

… but I know that not all of us gathered here are familiar with the history of this place, and its founder. I first met Cullen Rutherford ten years ago when I recruited him for the Inquisition. Some years later, when the Inquisition declared itself independent of the Divine’s jurisdiction in the wake of the Qunari threat, Cullen left his position as Commander, and established this sanctuary.

Although the purpose of the Sanctuary was always to aid Templars who suffered from the devastating effects of lyrium – and where possible, to allow them to heal – I advised Cullen to set up the Sanctuary an independent organization. After all, he himself had already taken a definite stance to break away from the Templar Order when he stopped taking lyrium.

However, Cullen chose instead to position the Sanctuary within the Chantry, under the aegis of the Divine. His decision proved to be a wise one. He understood that care for the body is not enough, that our deepest needs are of the spirit and the heart.

Furthermore, as I rebuilt the Seekers of Truth, there has been much fruitful exchange between his former Order and mine. We who are present already know that the new friendship that flourishes between the Templars and Seekers has had far-reaching effects, and it brings me great joy to celebrate them here where that dream began.

In the past five years, the Sanctuary has faced many challenges. These include indifference and outright hostility from those who would turn a blind eye to the injustices committed against these servants of the Maker. Terrible facts have come to light: the number of those who, over the years, have been unable to have children, or to care for children, as a result of lyrium’s devastating effects. Greater still in number are those who have lost a parent, or both parents, or a brother or sister or loved one. Before this sanctuary was founded, these people were scattered to the winds. Now, they have a place to gather, a place to call home. A family by adoption. A community that gathers in the Maker’s love.

Community is not an easy thing. There is a myth about community, just as there is a myth about marriage. The myth of marriage is “they lived happily ever after.” The reality of marriage is that it is a place where a man and a woman are called to sacrifice their egos on the altar of their desire to create one body. Community also means death to the ego, in order that people might grow to become one body, truly belonging to one other, not in a closed way but in a mysterious way where each one is growing in inner freedom.

Often, community is a place of pain. In community we sacrifice independence and the pseudo-security of disengagement. We can only live this pain if we are certain that for us being in community is our response to a call from the Maker. When we answer the Maker’s call, we answer to Him. Without this confidence of faith, it is impossible to stay in community. Cullen has told me that when somebody says to him, “I find it very painful to live in this community, but I’m here because the Maker has called me here,” he knows that that person has passed from living in a dream into reality. They have gone from choosing community to knowing that they have been chosen for community. Such people have found their place.

Such people make this Sanctuary a hallowed place, not on account of their religious acts, but because of their participation in the sufferings of the Maker in the whole of life. In this place of deeper love and liberation, so many who were cared for in their time of need now find themselves able to give new life to others.

I invite you all to continue looking to Cullen Rutherford’s example. All that he has done, he has done from a place of love. There is no man I hold in higher esteem.

A private letter from Cassandra Pentaghast to Cullen Rutherford:

Dear Cullen,

You must stop going around telling everyone that the sanctuary was my idea. That is true, but it does not matter. You may not name it after me. Bianca Davri may consider such a gesture flattering, but I do not. I will not be given the credit you deserve for all you have done to implement it, day after day. The sanctuary – even if we must go on calling it The Sanctuary, five years on – must be seen as a whole community that brings together Templars and Seekers, clergymen and lay people, Andrastians and non-believers, people from every race and every nation. It is exasperating to hear that…

Maker have mercy on me, Cullen. I started this letter as I intended, but the truth is, this churlish start is far from I most wish I could say to you. And even if I sent you ten letters for every one you sent me, how could I say it all?

From the time I joined the Seekers as a girl, I set my course to do the Maker’s will. There was so much to be done, at every turn. But in these last few years as Divine, doing more than I ever have, He has yet changed my way of understanding Him. He who made the world and everything in it, being ruler of all, does not live in temples made by man. Nor is he served by our hands, as though he needed our work, our sacrifice, or anything from us at all. The Maker made us not only to work, to write, or to wield the sword, but above all and in all to love. Not only Him, but one another. The way we treat others is the way we treat Him.

When I saw you yesterday, at the ceremony for the sanctuary’s fifth anniversary, I felt my heart break, the worse for how many times it has broken for you already. And at the same time – permit me this one comfort – I felt soothed, because it brought me such joy to see you in person, alive and well, even more handsome than I remember, beyond what I can possibly describe.

You know this, I know.

So much time passes in between the times we are able to see each other, but my feelings for you are only stronger than ever before.

I do not know what you see. I am the Divine now. I am a servant of the Maker, and the Chantry, and all of Thedas. I am not my own. But my heart lies beneath all that. It yearns for what I cannot have – you, always you.

I knew that becoming the Divine meant that I could not marry you. For some time I feared that choosing to love the Maker in this way meant I could not love anyone else. I know that I caused you terrible pain in that time, and not a day goes by that I don’t think of begging your forgiveness. But the way I was thinking was entirely wrong. He is the source, the Maker of love itself, and from Him I have received more than I thought possible. Love does not have to be selective. It does not divide, it multiplies.

I write this confession to you fearfully: Though I submitted myself to becoming the Divine, I have only grown to love you more.

Perhaps this sounds impossible. Or hypocritical. Or delusional – a myth I tell myself. Sometimes I think they will say one of two things about me: that she stayed true, or she became the worst of charlatans.

But I know you understand me still, Cullen, even as we both know now that to live by faith is to live by doubt. You said before that what we are is a paradox, but not a contradiction. I rely wholly on you to keep reminding me of that.

I know you will, but still I will ask: write again to me soon. No matter the passage of the years, no matter the circumstances or the distance between us, I am filled with inexpressible hope whenever I think of you. And yearning.

Love is a mystery. Love is a wonder. Love is a fool who cannot give you up, Cullen, no matter how hard she tries.

I love you, Cullen. And though it will hurt no less to part, I hope to see you again soon.

Yours, always,

Cassandra

The End

Chapter Text

Chapter 9: Chapter 7 Version B - An Answered Prayer

This, then, was what the Maker brought to pass –

The day they defeat Corypheus, the Inquisition seals its own fate. Having accomplished its mission, the organization is already starting to come apart. Of course the soldiers are entitled to their celebrations, and complete chaos hasn’t broken out yet, but the prevalent sense is that they’re finished.

It’s a death, Cassandra thinks. The kind that comes with the changing seasons. The kind that’s a part of something bigger still.

She weaves her way through the soldiers’ encampment, just to make sure no one is getting out of hand. Across the camp, she catches sight of Cullen doing the same, and her heart capsizes again and again. He is the real reason she’s out here. She’d take the way this hurts over any amount of rest.

Still, she’s careful not to get too close. She succeeds, too, until Leliana takes hold of her elbow and tugs her over to where Cullen is standing. She says, “I need to speak with the both of you.”

Neither of them reacts. Or looks at each other. Leliana isn’t deterred. “Let’s go somewhere private,” she says smoothly.

She is persistent, and they are worn out. She leads them to Cullen’s tent, where someone has cleared some room, added a second chair. “Perhaps you should sit.”

“Well? What is it?” Cassandra demands, when they’re seated, as though they’re about to receive a scolding.

“Great tidings of good news!” Leliana’s smile is triumphant. “The announcement just arrived. I am the new Divine.”

Leliana hugs them both and leaves smiling.

For a long time, neither of them can move.

“She told me she was creating a stir so that the Grand Clerics would vote for me,” Cassandra says slowly, at last. “I never suspected that she was using me to gather support for herself.”

Cullen murmurs, “It never occurred to you that she might be elected as the Divine?”

“Never,” Cassandra says, still in shock.

“I didn’t think so either,” he says. “But I must confess, I prayed for it a great deal.”

“I do not even know what to say to that,” she stammers, after a moment.

He bites his lip, which makes the scar on his upper lip twist in a way that turns her heart right over. “You said the Maker told you that you had to become the Divine.”

“I did not mean that I heard His voice. Nothing like that. But I was so certain, and especially after Leliana…” Her head spins. “Perhaps it would not have hurt to have doubted a little.”

“Could you still become Divine someday?”

“That is highly unlikely. A Divine has never been chosen from previous candidates.”

“Would you be Leliana’s Right Hand?”

“Even if she called me, I would refuse. We would not trust each other.”

“But if the Maker’s purpose – ”

“If the Maker wants to me serve as Divine or otherwise, then He will have to make a way.”

At that, Cullen drops down on both knees, and Cassandra startles. For one moment, she’s afraid he’s been wounded somehow, or has simply collapsed from the strain. It’s a moment before she’s able to make sense of what she’s seeing – Cullen kneeling in front of her, holding out a ring.

Not even an engagement ring. An actual wedding ring.

“Cullen,” she gasps. “You had it with you – did you know?”

“No. I just – I had the pair from before – it was a habit…” He touches a hand to the back of his neck, sheepishly. “I only have yours on me, though. I didn’t carry both rings around. That would be overkill.”

Tears spring to her eyes. Of all the things. “That would be overkill?”

“I suppose I’ve always hoped for miracles.” He laughs shakily. “Will you marry me, Cassandra?

“Yes, Cullen, yes,” she says, falling to her knees beside him.

He slides the ring onto her finger, and she closes her hands around his. They embrace, still kneeling on the ground, both of them teary and trembling with happiness.

He amazes her.

She admires his strength, his power, his fierceness more than she can say. But what makes her weak for him, wonderfully weak with need, is how gentle he is with her, how self-possessed, how carefully restrained. The way he holds her is no accident. He’d studied her, searched her, reached beyond himself to know her even before touching for the first time. She feels more than safe with him – she feels trusted. More than loved – adored.

He’s done nothing but kiss her and kiss her and already she’s overcome with longing for him. His hands trace the curve of her shoulder and waist, moving now with greater pressure, his mouth, his breath responding more urgently now to her cries. And with each new thrilling thing he does to her, she feels as though her deepest longings might be at once satisfied and subsumed in his – completely enfolded, joined, one.

He buries his face in the curve of her neck and presses his mouth to her fluttering pulse, his own breath coming quickly, deliciously hot against her own hot skin. Hearing him moan her name makes her whole body shudder. Cullen, Cullen the heat flowing into her core, Cullen the pleasure she feels in time with his. Calling his name over and over, feeling his body flex and tighten, desperately craving release. Distantly she’s almost embarrassed at how easily she comes undone for him, except that there is no room at all for shame or anxiety or fear when she’s here with him, and he’s with her, his body, his bliss. His voice.

Cassandra. Cassandra. Let me love you.

As she lays next to him, sighing with contentment as he rests one arm protectively around her waist, she wonders about one more possibility.

But she isn’t sure yet, and she doesn’t really mind.

The Maker will know when she’s ready.

Chapter Text

Chapter 10: Epilogue Version B - Outrageous Domestic Bliss

Dear Cassandra,

Happy birthday. As I write this, I can just picture your scowl.

Already two weeks have passed since the ceremony for the fifth anniversary of the Templar sanctuary. We barely had a moment to speak. I know you are trying very hard to bring about more cooperation among the Seekers and the Templars, and the rate of progress is not to your satisfaction. It must be frustrating to have to work against and around the Lord Seeker, without the recognition or authority you deserve. I’d offer to pass a decree if I weren’t certain it would backfire on the Seekers. I doubt an alliance with Divine Victoria would do them any favors in our current climate.

It disappoints you, doesn’t it? My radicalism? Actually, I laugh when I hear myself called radical, because really in practice I have tried to make my reforms halfway between us. I think that is what Justinia would have wanted. Yes, I flatter myself in thinking I am correct in my judgment of what she would have wanted, I know. Feel free to weigh in. I know you are careful not to be seen interfering, but I request your council, so there.

There is a myth about marriage – well, many, if I’m to start down this path, but one is particularly pernicious, and that is that marriages diminishes both parties. By making one whole, it creates two halves, poor lesser beings who now have need of the other to complete themselves. No, never mind – I can’t stop at just one. Another myth is the one perpetrated by those who have renounced marriage, their pride convincing them that they have chosen the superior way. As though denial for its own sake were good.

Have you not had to hear me argue vehemently for both sides? I like to think that somehow I inspired your determination to prove me wrong. As you have, conclusively – you may have that satisfaction. It is abundantly clear to me that you and Cullen are more together, and stronger, than you ever were apart. (Or in those early cagey days when you were sneaking around Skyhold – fooling no one, I would add.)

Ten years later, the love between you continues to flood out, adding so much to the world. Multiplying, in fact – don’t even get me started on what I think your children will do, and I suppose I mustn’t overlook those enormous Ferelden dogs you keep adding to your clan. How you’ve settled the whole happy family near the sanctuary and still continue to travel occasionally on Seeker business amazes me. Sometimes when I am feeling especially cynical and downcast about the Chantry, I try to remember the world is still being changed for the better if somewhere out there, there are adorable miniature composites – half Cullen, and half you – toddling around. Poking squirrels with sticks, or whatever they’re doing at their age.

See, what do I know about children. (On that note, the Chantry school for girls that Justinia always dreamed of will be opening its doors soon. I have asked my Right Hand to try to time our visits to coincide. You will cooperate, won’t you?) I will, however, remind you that their Aunt Leliana would still like very much to meet your little ones someday. While they are still little tumbling pups, preferably. And if you are worried about exposing them to me, well, all the better while they’re still young. I don’t ask that they remember me much.

I envy you what you and Cullen give to each other, especially when I am feeling very alone at the top, and full of self-pity. There you are in a warm loving family, while I am up to my ears in religion, the cemetery where questions of faith are answered, and where there really are people who would gladly argue about the spacing between the stitches on the hem of my sacred vestments through eternity. In such times I can’t help but think you know the Maker’s love better than I do, though in the next breath I hear you admonish me that there is no hierarchy in His love, only different expressions of it. Different paths. Different gifts.

So many myths to be exposed for what they are.

Allow me one more digression. You were ready for this long life of singleness, just as I was, and I cannot help but think that you would have borne it better, had you been chosen. (Although, my dear, it’s true I was never going to let them choose you as the Divine, and I am sorry I deceived you for so long, but it was the only way.)

Still, the worst of it is that even after all these years – you may laugh – I find myself pining for you know who. If you know who had not been quite so averse to marrying me, my life, and I daresay the history of Thedas, would be different. But that is another story.

By the way – they will announce this soon – I am close to lifting the prohibition on the Divine to marry. You realize this will make you a candidate again, instantly. And though you are quite busy at the moment, and I am not planning on dying anytime soon, think about it, will you?

That’s not a request, really. Think about it.

For now… Enjoy your life. Love those whom the Maker has given you well. Enjoy your outrageous domestic bliss. I hear you and Cullen have started a garden, with apple trees. Excuse my Orlesian, but Cassandra, what the fuck?

Well. You were always too pure for the Chantry, and it gladdens my heart that the Maker has finally released you (at least for the time being) to serve him elsewhere.

I miss you very much. Of all the women in the Chantry, you were the most like a sister to me, with all the horror that entails.

Give my regards to Cullen. The Maker’s blessing upon your household, because I say so.

Your sister still,

Leliana 

The End