Chapter Text
Head bowed, face resting against the cold bars, Cullen let the hunger win. With a feral cry, he lunged his arm through the space between the metal, scraping, clawing… and falling short. He slumped forward, arm going limp, and winced at the terrible ache in his shoulder.
The chalice of red lyrium remained just out of reach.
It was all intentional. Samson’s doing. Cullen had watched the vile man set the elaborate trap himself, in the space between his cell and the raging waterfall. A guard brought a small, round table, upon which Samson placed a chalice. Carved from obsidian into a grotesque likeness of Corypheus, its mangled limbs reached skyward.
“The rules are very simple,” Samson had murmured as he unscrewed a bottle and filled the chalice to the brim with a viscous crimson liquid. “All you’ve got to do is ask, and we’ll give it to you.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Cullen said quietly, from the corner of his cell.
“Yes, yes,” Samson said, waving a dismissive hand in Cullen’s direction. “Heard that one before. Hey, d’you remember when we were recruits? The first time they poured us the lyrium, in goblets with Andraste’s face on it?” He capped the bottle. “Or did they do it differently in Ferelden?”
It had been the same. Cullen remembered accepting the silver cup with great ceremony, fingers wound around the carving of Andraste. The first hit of the shimmering blue: the sweet tingling taste, its instant warmth. A feeling of transcendence, of peace. He had thought it a religious visitation, and hadn’t understood the truth until much later, when it was already too late.
He grimaced.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Samson quipped. He pushed the chalice to edge of the table. “Consider this an initiation of another sort. To the worship of a different prophet, if that helps.”
The cup of red sang. Its music curled into the air; seductive susurrations reached him despite the distance. Cullen dug his heels into the stone, tried to push himself further into the corner.
A smirk tugged at Samson’s lips. “I know you can hear it. ’S beautiful, innit?”
“Shut up.” Cullen covered his ears, but it made no difference. The song vibrated in his teeth, pulsed through his veins. He’d been without lyrium for so long, thought he had beaten it, but the call of the red ignited a need that lie dormant, not dead. He let out a shuddering breath and pressed his palms to the floor.
Sensing his discomfort, Samson gave a helpless shrug. “We could’ve done this the easy way, you’ll recall. This is the path you’ve chosen, not me. You ask nicely, and you’ll receive. Otherwise…” He paused, voice sobering. “I’ve watched men go mad. Don’t take long. You won’t even have to touch it… though you’ll try.”
“I won’t,” Cullen snapped.
Samson shot him a look that was almost pity. “You will.”
They watched one another in silence, each sizing the other up. They’d been taught the same techniques, after all: Cullen saw Samson’s sunken eyes searching him for weak points, and Cullen did the same. Samson was gaunter than ever, skin an ashen grey. The red lyrium built him up, but it was taking its toll. It’ll kill him eventually, Cullen thought, though that was scant comfort.
“And a ‘please’ would be nice,” Samson added.
Cullen looked to the ceiling. “Oh, go fuck yourself.”
Samson barked out a laugh. “Always did like it better when you showed some teeth.” The mirth vanished as soon as it appeared. “I’m going to miss that about you, kid.”
He sounded so sincere, Cullen almost believed him. Samson turned to leave, and a terrible sense of loss filled Cullen. They had been friends, once.
The grief burned away to rage. This was the man who had taken everything from him: his life, his career, a cause worth fighting for. Even Thalia, whom he’d believed dead, only to have her dangled in front of him, the carrot on Samson’s stick.
And Cullen was the ass.
He stumbled to his feet, heedless of the scarlet siren call, and charged the cell door. He clutched the metal bars and shook them. They held fast, but produced a satisfying rattle nonetheless.
“Where is she?” Cullen demanded to Samson’s retreating back. “Where is she?”
Samson halted, turned. In the shadows of the dungeon corridor, his face was reduced to a spectral profile.
“You don’t deserve her,” Samson said softly, and left.
Samson had been right. Cullen did try to reach the chalice, again and again and again. Time was difficult to gauge in the dank darkness, but he suspected it had taken hours, not days. He was not proud of this, and at first the guilt had pounded in his ears as he stretched and grasped. Soon, however, there was no room for shame: the song subsumed it all, a red rhapsody that burrowed deep within him and purged everything but the need.
Guards brought meals, but he left the trays all but untouched. Neither food nor drink could sate him. Yet when asked if he wanted anything else, Cullen refused to speak: he would not bend, he would not beg. Each time, the Red Templar gave him a dead-eyed stare and downed the contents of the chalice whole. It was replaced it with another, freshly poured and even more potent. His sullen jailers lacked the mocking tones of Samson, but Cullen imagined other messages in their silences: Just give in. It’s easier this way.
It would be. When the fits seized him, and his vision swam in shades of vermilion, the violence of his own body surprised him. Bruises covered limbs and torso from repeated impact with the cell bars. He heard whispers from the other prisoners, that he had been driven insane. Yes, probably. Yes.
He let out a growl of frustration and dragged himself from the door. He lie on the cold stones and stared at the ceiling, exhaustion battling the compulsion to try again.
Should he give in? What a relief it would be to look the guard in his crimson eyes and say, Just one. Please, just one swallow, that’s all I need. Though that would be a lie, and they’d both know it.
He was trembling. He rolled onto his side and drew his arms around himself. He felt feverish, damp with sweat, freezing and burning at the same time. If he only said Please…
We’ve been here before, haven’t we, young templar? whispered a voice in his ear. Cullen looked around in panic. Shadows played on the walls, and coalesced into a sickening silhouette that had long haunted his dreams.
“No, no, no,” he said to the shade of Uldred. “You’re dead.”
And so soon will you be, if you don’t drink.
“I’d rather die, than live like that,” Cullen spat.
Strange, that you never said as much to me in Kinloch Hold. I could have ended your misery then.
So this was what madness felt like: strangely familiar, like what lie behind the walls he’d tried to build since the nightmare in the Ferelden Circle. He crawled into a corner and closed his eyes. “Don’t listen. It isn’t real.” He felt like he was back there, again a scared teenager, grasping at scripture to protect him. Snippets from the Chant of Light surfaced in his mind, whispered fiercely through cracked lips:
“‘World-making Glory,’ I cried out in sorrow, ‘How shall Your children apology make? We have forgotten, in ignorance stumbling, only a Light in this darken’d time breaks. Call to Your children, teach us Your greatness. What has been forgotten has not yet been lost.’ ‘World-making Glory,’ I cried out in sorrow…”
Some time later, movement outside his cell snatched him from his trance. He jerked his head up, mumbling, worried it was either another hallucination or an approaching guard. He crept closer to the bars, search for the source of the disturbance. All looked unchanged: the table, the chalice, the tumbledown stones, the roaring waterfall.
And a ring of keys, dripping wet.
Cullen blinked fiercely, but the keys did not vanish. He stared at them, transfixed, then took a surreptitious glance in both directions outside his cell. This section of the jail was, as usual, deserted.
He reached through the bars, trying to hook a finger around the keyring.
A hand flew out of the falls, slamming onto the floor for purchase.
Cullen froze.
A second hand joined the first. This one emitted a ghostly emerald light, as if bits of the nightmarish sky itself were embedded into its palm. A length of chain connected one wrist to the other.
Cullen raised himself onto hands and knees and watched as a girl hoisted herself from the water, soaked to the skin and shivering. She rolled into her back and let out a coughing fit that wracked her entire body. She had hair plastered to her head, so wet it could be any color, and her lips were blue.
She turned her head toward him, and he saw the tattoo encircling her eye.
Cullen screamed. He scrambled backward on all fours until he hit the far wall of his cell. The girl was on her feet now, keyring in hand, trying to speak. He couldn’t hear her over the raw terror emanating from his throat.
“You’re not real,” he accused, pointing at her, “you’re not real, it’s a trick, it’s a trick, GO AWAY!”
The girl who was not Thalia — who could not be Thalia, no one could emerge from the falls like that, she’d have drowned — fumbled with one key, then another and another. Finally, one fit into the lock, and the door to his cell swung open. The apparition approached, blue eyes wide, hands out as if to calm a wild animal.
“Cullen, it’s me. Cullen, please, it’s okay. It’s going to be okay, shhh, you need to be quiet, please…”
He clamped his palms against his ears. “Just leave, I beseech you. I won’t drink, I won’t, I’ll die first, please don’t stand there looking like her, I can’t take it, not again…”
The ghost girl knelt beside him, face terribly sad, murmuring things he did not catch. She did not try to touch him. She waited, speaking calmly. Her voice did not penetrate into his mind the way Uldred’s had, the way the abominations had, long ago.
Trembling, he removed his hands from his head and stared at her. She looked real — though thinner than he recalled, sopping wet and deathly pale. He had a vision of her, stumbling out of the blinding snow in the mountains beyond Haven, as impossible then as it was now. A miracle, said something inside him.
“Thalia?” he asked.
She nodded.
He reached out and crushed her in a hug. She was so cold. It scared him. Her clothes seeped water into his prisoner’s rags, but he didn’t care. She was smaller than him, and if he enveloped her long enough, maybe he could breathe some life back into her.
Suddenly, they were kissing each other: deeply, desperately. Her skin was clammy, though as he put his lips on her mouth, her cheeks, her eyelids, some of the water clinging to her felt salty and warm.
“Cullen,” she said softly, and then with insistence: “Cullen.”
He stopped at last, resting his forehead against hers, not wanting to pull away. She reached up, cradled his face with both hands and looked into his eyes.
“We need to go.”
“Go where?” he blurted, but gazing back at her, at the water sluicing off her, he understood. Fear shot through him. “We can’t. You’ll die. We’ll both die.”
“We won’t,” she said, taking his hand in both of hers. “But if we stay here any longer, they’ll catch us. I need you to trust me.”
The chains between her wrists were so heavy, weighing her down. How had she managed? How had she not been killed, a thousand times over?
“All right,” he said, the terror pounding in his chest. “I trust you.”
A headache threaded through Samson’s eye socket, pulsing in time with the beat of his heart. He propped an elbow up on the throne’s armrest and pressed a thumb against his brow bone to alleviate the pressure. It eased the low grade tremble of his hand, but not much else.
He sighed, fixing a tired glare at the servant prostrate at the foot of the dais. “And?”
“St-still no sign of her body, milord,” the servant stammered. He’d come with the place; after the siege of Skyhold had been won, Samson offered the surviving staff to keep their jobs — with quite a generous pay raise, in his opinion. Some had pledged undying allegiance to the Inquisition and were now decorating the outer walls with their heads, but some, like this elven gentleman, had been smart. Or perhaps merely a coward. Not a day had gone by that he didn’t stutter in Samson’s presence, but he got the job done. He’d been swiftly named seneschal.
“Well, then, keep looking,” Samson growled. “No one sleeps until she’s recovered, that ought to be clear as crystal.”
With a breathless yes, milord, the seneschal took his leave, and Samson slumped in the throne that had once belonged to Lady Thalia Trevelyan, the dead woman no one seemed able to find. There were no other callers at the moment, allowing Samson a brief respite. Some ruddy mess this turned out to be. The pain in his head spiked, and he wished for nothing more than to return to his quarters, quaff a hefty dose of the red stuff, and sleep off the rest of this miserable day. He would do it, too — he had the authority — if being in there at the moment didn’t give him the bloody creeps.
It wasn’t his fault, truly. How was he to know the girl would jump?
Do you really think that’ll fly with Corypheus? said a voice in Samson’s head, the one he was never sure was a hallucination or just the remnants of his conscience. The Inquisitor had been entrusted to Samson as a high-value prisoner, and he’d gone and misplaced her like a cheap toy. “Stupid” didn’t even begin to cover it. He knew Corypheus didn’t care about the girl herself, just the anchor embedded in her hand. So as long as they recovered some part of her, Samson wasn’t likely to get roasted alive for the utter incompetence of it all.
If there’s actually that much left to scrape off the rocks, he thought, stomach clenching.
He hadn’t wanted her to jump. He’d tried — really tried — to get her off the edge of that balcony. When he closed his eyes, he could still see her: the spritely oval face, pretty despite the disfigurement of the Ostwick Circle tattoo, the mouth he’d kissed contorted with despair, a wildness in her eyes as the wind whipped tendrils of hair into her face.
Was the prospect of staying with him truly so repulsive, that she would choose death instead?
It was far from the first time Samson had tried to talk someone off a ledge. Kirkwall’s Gallows had a number of towers with windows that, due to age, didn’t lock properly. Every so often a mage would sneak out there, face streaked from sobbing, and threaten to end it all. The Templars were taught scripts to handle it, that’s how common it was. He remembered the drills like it was yesterday: always get on their level. Always agree with them, acknowledge their grievances. Promise to talk and work something out if they’d just come back in. Samson had prided himself on the number of mages he’d rescued, even if most of the promises were false. By the time Meredith took over as Knight-Commander, the likelihood of change was practically nil. Samson learned their names all the same, those would-be jumpers. He promised favors — small ones, sure, but something tangible, something that would make their lives bearable. He’d made good on those promises, too. Until he couldn’t anymore.
I could have made your life bearable, Thalia, he thought, with an anguish that surprised him.
It would have been nice, to feel like he was helping again. Samson had long since given up such illusions in the employ of Corypheus. Once he’d believed the red lyrium would build up the templars he’d recruited into his army… that is, until the end result never changed. They all showed signs of corruption with alarming speed: first in the eyes, then with the physical changes, and all too often the madness came roaring in on its heels. Samson was the only one who seemed to escape — a demigod amongst men, to be sure; why else would Corypheus have chosen him? But it also meant his most loyal soldiers had been lost well before their victory. These days most of his Red Templars were civilians, prisoners of war press-ganged into service, whose names he rarely bothered to learn.
I’ll know one of their names soon, at least. It was for the best that Cullen would lose himself before he ever learned of his girlfriend’s fate. Samson had not planned for this — for any of this. He had hoped that idiot would swallow his pride and accept Samson’s offer. If Cullen had just agreed to join him, none of this would have been necessary. Instead he’d been forced to entreat with the girl, and so what if he’d been more charmed by her than he’d expected? He could understand what Cullen saw in her, and had wanted that passionate warmth for himself. It was lonely at the top, that was the truth…
It was a damn shame she was lying broken at the bottom of a ravine somewhere. I should have said something else, something to make her come back. Cullen would have known what to say, Maker damn him.
His hand slowly clenched into a fist. His chest ached to bursting from an emotion he hadn’t felt since Maddox died. He’d thought the red had burned his capacity for it away, but there it was, weighing down on him all the same.
He should have just grabbed her. She’d been right there, clutching that damn keyring to her chest as if she’d won a prize. Now he’d need to have a new set of master keys made.
Look around you, Samson, she’d said. It is that bad.
Samson lurched to his feet and stumbled off the dais. His head was pounding. He didn’t want to look around him, dammit. He knew what was out there. The sun hadn’t been seen in months; whole cities lay in smoldering ruins. The ice winds howled out of the north, and Corypheus now presided in the gateway to the Black City. Samson had finally gotten what he wanted — the respect that was owed to him, after those years with his face ground into the dirt. He’d remade the bloody world; who else could say that much?
“Milord?”
“What?” Samson snarled.
He didn’t remember reaching the door to his quarters, but his forehead was against it, taking the brunt of his weight. He swung his head around dizzily. His seneschal stood a few feet away, hand extended as if to reach for his shoulder. He snatched it back as Samson’s gaze fell on him. “I-I-I’m very sorry to disturb you again, milord, but… I’m, ah, afraid there’s a bit of a situation…”
“Yes? What is it? Has she been found?”
The elf shook his head, face blanched under his tribal markings. “No, no, it’s… well, it’s the dungeons, milord. There’s been an — well, it looks like… an escape.”
Samson blinked, uncomprehending. “What do you mean, an escape?”
“One of the cells — it’s empty, milord. None of the guards remember leaving the door open…”
Samson’s hands fell to his sides with a strange sort of calm, the kind one felt shortly before the onset of a storm. In his mind’s eye, he saw Thalia on the balustrade, clutching the stolen keyring so tightly. No. It’s not possible. She’s dead.
“Which cell?” Samson asked, though he already knew the answer.
“Th-the commander’s, milord. Cullen Rutherford…”
Rage exploded inside him. In a flash, Samson’s arm shot out and he grabbed the elf seneschal by his scrawny little neck. With superhuman strength, he lifted the man into the air and squeezed. The elf let out a choked cry of surprise and began to struggle.
“How?” Samson demanded.
“No— no one…. knows, milord!” He clawed at the vise-like grip around his neck. “Ach— please, ser… I… I cannot breathe…”
“They can’t have just vanished into thin air,” Samson shouted.
“That… that’s what it looks like… p-please…”
Samson released the man. He fell on all fours at Samson’s feet and gasped in long, agonizing breaths.
“Command the men to stop looking in the ravines, and instead send out search parties into the surrounding areas,” Samson ordered. “I want both Rutherford and Trevelyan found and returned to me at once.”
“The Inquisitor?” gasped the seneschal. “But I thought she was—”
“She’s defied death yet again, it seems.” Samson could not believe he’d fallen for it. All his bloody moping, thinking the girl had taken her own life. Some sort of dirty trick, meant to get the better of him, while she snuck into the dungeons and freed her lover.
Pathetic, to think she’d ever choose you over him.
He winced and pressed a palm to his ear to blot out the voice. Seething, he added, “And I want them alive. Is that understood?”
“Y-yes, milord.”
Samson would show her. Oh, he’d show them both. They’d outsmarted him this time, but they were only two people, and he controlled all of the Frostbacks. He would teach them a lesson they wouldn’t soon forget. By the end, they’d be groveling at his feet, begging for forgiveness, for that foreign concept called mercy.
He just had to find them first.
“Go,” Samson roared, and with a terrified yelp, the seneschal fled.