Chapter Text
i. trembling
The devastation was breathtaking.
Every street and rambling tower of Treviso’s formerly burnished streets lay beneath a layer of scum, taint, and black decay. The little cafe Rook and Lucanis once enjoyed coffee at had been crushed under a tentacular growth, and where the bulbous, grotesque boils had split open, the stones were cracked and pitted as if washed in acid.
Worse was the smell.
Even after the archdemon had departed and the pustules stopped spreading, the corruption leached into the canals. It covered the water in a thick black film, and it churned against the embankments like old milk sloshing in a forgotten pail. The odor coming off of it turned Rook’s stomach. It made the air heavy and cloaked the sky in the dense, greasy smoke wherever it was burned.
Bodies lined the promenade.
A week had passed, but their group kept stumbling over corpses forgotten in the wreckage, wedged under fallen eaves, or simply abandoned in dead, withered foliage. For a few of the wretched, their skin flaked in black, gangrenous sheaves, and boils swelled beneath their marbled flesh. They lurched and twitched where they lay, and when Rook’s dagger inevitably found its way into their chests, their glassy red eyes would flicker over her accusingly.
Treviso had enough problems without a fresh flock of ghouls rising in the streets.
She almost vomited when they hoisted a corpse from the splintered ruins of a loft and caught the flutter of a familiar lilac cloak. It was a Crow. Rook recognized his bloated, half-ruined face. They shared a conversation once, though she couldn’t remember what about. She couldn’t remember his name.
Lucanis’ expression hardened, and a muscle in his jaw twitched. Dark circles ringed his narrowed eyes, and the lines bracketing his mouth were deeper than they’d been in the Ossuary. It’d taken a week for Minrathous to stabilize, and when Rook rallied her exhausted companions to come to Treviso, they found a different, harder Lucanis waiting for them.
He wouldn’t look at Rook.
“Holliver,” he said. His words rolled rough from his mouth, short as if he were cutting the edges with each sharp snap of his teeth. “We will alert the Crows and see his body returned home.” To Harding, he said, “Mark the location on the map.”
Harding did so without saying a word in reply.
Lucanis ran his gloved hand over the man’s face, heedless of the decay, and closed his remaining eyelid. “ Che la terra ti sia lieve, fratello. ”
He leaned away, his motions jerking, and they left the body where it lay. They couldn’t carry all that they found. They couldn’t.
Numbness buzzed in Rook’s hands as she followed the others back along the clotted canal. Someone wailed in the distance. Deep, broken moans echoed against the buildings like the tolling of Chantry bells and rose toward the sky. The taint formed spires that clawed through the clouds.
“Rook! Treviso and Minrathous are both under attack!”
They passed the edge of a palazzo, the arch cleared of taint by judicious application of torch-fire. Rook made the mistake of glancing inside—and she saw the bodies wrapped in sheets and curtains and rugs, whatever could be found, piled high on a teetering pyre. They would burn the bodies. They would burn the buildings, the shells too ravaged by Darkspawn to do anyone any good anymore.
Rook stopped walking. It felt as if the numbness had spread from her hands into her feet, then all the way into her face. She stared at the once white sheets now stained by blood like a marital bed—except it was wrong. It was too much, too dark, limbed in black sludge. And the flies. By the Maker, the flies.
“Go where you feel you must. We cannot wait. ”
Why? Why did they make her choose? Why had this been her decision? She did this. She let this happen. She poisoned the water and poured Blight down these people’s throats. She made the decision and turned her back.
If not here, then it would have been Minrathous.
Did it matter? Treviso or Minrathous, it had still been Rook’s choice—her hand on the gallow’s lever. She did this. This was her doing.
“ Go where you feel you must. ”
Rook was not qualified for this. She’d told them from the very start, she was only a placeholder for Varric and nothing more. She’d merely been an extra set of hands in his and Harding’s team as they chased the Dread Wolf. She couldn’t lead anybody. Why did they make her lead?
They piled the dead like bricks until the topmost sheet rippled in the befouled wind above the roofline.
Something soft gave under Rook’s boot. She’d approached the palazzo without realizing it, stopping in the gutted archway. She looked down and lifted her foot, finding what she'd stepped on.
It was a doll. A frumpy white doll with yarn for hair, the legs ripped off, the body freckled in garish, sticky red.
From the pyre, a small hand protruded, so much smaller than Rook’s own. Flies crawled across the drooping skin.
Gasping, Rook staggered backward.
“Rook?” someone asked, and she didn’t know who. “Rook—?”
The soles of her boots slipped on the taint-smeared cobblestones as she staggered away, running blindly from the palazzo and the disgusting ruin of the canal. She needed a moment. Just one moment where Blight didn’t sweep across her vision like a painter’s brush stroke, one chance to breathe and not suck down the taste of death and decay.
The taste of what her decision had done.
She felt again the keen, searing sensation of Lucanis’ cold eyes refusing to glance at her. Refusing to acknowledge her existence.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s all my fault— .
She didn’t know how far she’d staggered before she half-fell against an alley wall, and she couldn’t get the breath to straighten herself. Every breath wedged itself inside her ribs like a spike being steadily driven deeper, and Rook clutched at her side, tears welling in her eyes.
The memory of the unlit pyre stuck in her mind—the tiny, limp hand. She felt as if she might vomit.
So preoccupied with her distress, Rook hadn’t paid attention to the direction she’d fled, how close to one of the many ironclad barriers she’d come. She glanced up when a shadow fell across her, and she only had time for a choked gasp before a meaty hand wrapped around her throat.
The qunari had to be twice as tall as Rook and just as wide. Lifting her with one hand proved effortless, and Rook struggled in his grip, desperately trying to pry his thick fingers free. The qunari sneered, his vitaar painted thick and red over his face and part of his bare chest, his horns broken and shaved close to his head.
“ Katara ,” he growled, his Qunlat like the rumbling of a roused dragon. Rook’s kicking feet did nothing. They bounced off his thighs and shins like pebbles against a wall.
The Antaam’s fingers squeezed tighter and tighter. Rook’s vision wavered.
Maybe this is what I deserve after— .
A shout of exclamation had the qunari’s head whipping around, and he dropped Rook, her head bouncing against the stone wall at her back when she folded. Stars blinkered her vision, but she thought she saw a great smear of green swallow the air, swamping over the qunari like thick, carnivorous blanket. He roared in pain as the scourge devoured him—and it seemed as if only seconds passed before the Antaam collapsed in a heap of dissolving bones.
Another shadow replaced the qunari’s, and only when Professor Volkarin knelt in front of her did Rook realize she’d fallen to the ground.
She couldn’t breathe.
“I can’t do this—,” she wheezed. “I can’t, I can’t , please, I’m so—sorry—.”
The professor’s hazel eyes scanned her for injury before he reached out to lift her hands in his own. She shook so strongly, he had to close his thumbs over the tops of her fingers lest she shudder right out of his grip. His gaze settled on her face.
The moment his hands made contact with hers, Rook fumbled to hold on, desperate for something solid. His left hand was quite warm, the skin soft, and the leather gauntlet on the right smelled sharply of linseed oil and incense. When the breeze crossed them and stirred his collar, she smelled amber and crushed orange blossom.
“It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. ”
“Nonsense. None of this is your fault.”
“Please,” Rook choked.
Professor Volkarin blinked, then cradled her hands closer to himself, arranging them so her palms were pressed flat to his shirt beneath his golden pin. “There we go,” he said, folding his left hand over hers. It was much larger than Rook’s. “Breathe with me now. In through the nose, out through the mouth. There you are, good girl….”
Rook concentrated on the feel of his chest rising beneath her palms. He was warm. The fabric of his shirt had unexpected roughness to it, and she could make out the tiny little emeralds carefully set in the eyesockets of the skull on his collar pin. His right hand rose, brushing the underside of her trembling jaw so she would lift her face toward his.
She stared into his eyes and latched onto his steadiness.
Why hadn’t they put him in charge? He was so much more capable. So much smarter, more talented, more—.
The tightness in her chest eased as her thin breaths slowed to match his.
“Excellent,” he said, a small, soft smile lifting his lips. “You’re doing very well, my dear.”
Rook’s lashes fluttered, and she lowered her eyes to her hands, both still held under Professor Volkarin’s. Thick bands of gold encircled his large fingers, a delicate chain dangled toward his unmarked knuckles from an engraved cuff. They were less graceful than one might think, given how he wielded magic with such easy, vibrant flair. There was strength in them, definition in the muscles and veins. He kept his nails clipped and shockingly clean. Under his, Rook’s were broken and lined with grime.
Creators, she thought in a daze. He has beautiful hands.
As her panic slowly pulled its teeth from her mind, embarrassment crept forward in its place. Rook felt her cheeks grow red, and her eyes stung.
What must he think of me?
They’d only recently recruited Professor Volkarin in their fight against the gods. This was one of his first expeditions with them—right into the heart of one of Rook’s many, many mistakes. He’d argued with the Mourn Watch for a chance to join their mission, and there Rook sat like a terrified, ineffectual child, reduced to panting tears.
She tugged at her hands to free them. For a moment, the professor didn’t let go—but then he did, and Rook crossed her arms against her middle as if she could smother her mortification.
“Please don’t tell the others,” she mumbled. “I’m sorry, Professor Volkarin.”
He said nothing for a moment, then smoothly rose to his feet, brushing dirt from his cloak with a practiced flick of his hand. He reached for Rook, gently gripping under her elbows to lift her upright. Rook stumbled, flushing more, and forced her legs to hold her steady.
“Come now, let’s return to the Lighthouse. I believe we’ve seen enough of Treviso’s scenery today,” he said. Rook went to move, then pulled short when the professor didn’t release her. Instead, he tucked her arm inside his own, then folded his gilded hand atop hers. He smiled down at her, mischief glinting in his eyes. “And I’ve told you, my dear Ingellvar. It’s Emmrich .”
Rook blushed for an entirely different reason as they started walking, his boot knocking aside the Antaam’s smoldering carcass. She glanced up at him, and couldn’t help but stare as the weak, tainted sunlight bled over his regal profile.
“Em—Emmrich,” she stammered as they came out of the mouth of the alley. His hazel eyes swung to hers, alert and attentive. “Thank you.”
“Of course, my dear.” His thumb brushed against her hand. “Of course.”