#red lyrium

The red lyrium pulses beneath his skin like a second heartbeat, louder than the first. The crystalline growths creep like ivy along the line of his throat, veining into his jaw, webbing over the armor he still wears like penance. His eyes are no longer golden brown, now, they are twin coals, smoldering with madness, echoing the it’s whisper.

Once he prayed but now he begs for silence. The memories are a siege. The tower. Kinloch Hold. Uldred’s smile. Meredith. Kirkwall. The demons. The mages. The way the templars touched each other in the dark when the Chantry turned a blind eye. The wet slap of boots on stone floors. Screams. Apologies. The soft suck of lyrium on the tongue to forget. To forget.

To forget.

He cannot.

He tried.

Tried not to be like them, and then tried not to be like himself. Neither attempt held. Not for long. The lyrium, red, just corruption and blasphemy now, offered another kind of forgetting. Not peace, but numbness. Not faith, but power. His body rebels with tremors, fever, hunger, but it doesn’t matter because red lyrium listens when the Maker won’t.

Corypheus gives him orders, but Cullen worships nothing. He is not a believer but a broken dog, teeth bared, foaming with fury at every memory. He wants the world to burn, not because it’s righteous… but because it’s familiar. Pain is structure. Destruction makes sense and if the sky splits and the Chantry crumbles, then the Maker’s silence becomes permanent. Then maybe… the dreams will stop.

But the red lyrium eats away at his body, inch by inch. His joints grind. His skin itches like it’s full of fire ants, peeling off him like petals. The pain is constant but better than what’s behind his eyes. He’d flay himself before letting the past catch him. He can’t touch a woman’s skin without seeing hands that held him down. He can’t walk the battlements of a fortress without picturing Kirkwall strangled in smoke.

This had to be some sort of trap. Or some side effect of the sheer amount of red lyrium in the clearing, which they had certainly found. Cullen and Lux were the worst possible people to find it, with no backup and no exit, and yet here was where the Maker had placed them, right on the pyre. Trying not to make eye contact with the red glow, they turned their backs and marched in the exact opposite direction.

The half-complete map of the forest that had been useful enough was now worse than useless. It made no sense that the damned thing had brought them this far, and couldn't take them out.

At least there was a clearing ahead of them, with nothing but a few trees to separate them from it.

"Commander—" Lux said.

"I know," Cullen replied, the relief dying in his throat.

The red glow of the lyrium was unmistakable. Had they gotten turned around?

Turn. March. Try not to look.

The sound would fade, only to have always been there all over again. Was it everywhere?

Turn. March. Try not to listen.

Turn. March.

Turn.

Turn.

Were they going in circles, or had crawled inside their minds, and they saw and heard it everywhere even when it wasn't truly there? It was too much of a risk to test, to step inside the halo of that glow and touch.

"It sounds—" she said.

"Beautiful," he finished. Like home. Briefly, but truly. Like everything he had lost and could never have again. He had changed too much. He didn't belong in his own memories any longer. And the thought of it nearly made him physically ill.

"Commander." Lux's voice was calm, but the grip on his arm was urgent and unyielding as he realised he'd taken a step forward, the light bathing him like a blessing.

"Like home," he muttered aloud, mortified at his own weakness.

"Commander?"

The confused hurt in her eyes shot through the lyrium's song like a faint, distant scream. But what was worse was her simply setting her shoulders in silence, and marching on.

Horror, frustration, exhaustion took control of his tongue, at the sight of her puzzled brow, at her endless 'Commanders'.

"What would you understand of home?"

Turn.

Turn.

Turn.

Until there was nowhere left to turn. Nothing left to do but collapse as their legs abandoned their posts. Hoping for rescue. Relief.

Release.

There should have been ropes, chains even, to bind them to the trunk of the tree spanning above. But the Maker had left them no mercy here.

The smell of it, the taste of it on the air, the sound ever-beckoning. Maker forgive him, forgive him but it felt like being on the precipice of coming to faith for the first time. As if everything before this had been but a pale shadow, as if all the depictions of Andraste had before now been painted over to depict something untrue, and he was so close to wiping them clean to behold the Golden City itself.

Lady of Sorrows, forgive me.

As the roots below them reached deep into the soil, he reached for Lux and dug his hands into her arms, seeking stability, an anchor to prevent himself from crawling to the light.

"Forgive me," he said out loud to her, a strange civility even in this moment, as if he had just rounded the corner and nearly bumped into her in Skyhold. Not half-lying against the trunk of a tree, trying almost to wedge himself against its roots, trying to bury himself to get away from the song.

The sunset died right before his eyes, and still there was no peace, only an iron will that felt far too brittle in his chest.

In the long, long night, the longest of their lives, their clung to each other, fingers digging so hard into each other's skin that perhaps the bruises would never heal. But the pain was a welcome distraction, leaving the mind with no room for everything the song promised.

Was it different for everyone? Had it promised power to Meredith, Samson, Corypheus?

It did not sing so to Cullen. It was home, and truth, and beauty and forgiveness and everything he was struggling to grasp, everything he was not sure he deserved at all.

"What does it promise you?" he asked Lux at last, his voice hoarse from long disuse. She was always so quiet, had been even more so since he had lashed out at her. And startled, he realised her shoulders were shaking.

A sob threatened to crest over her voice.

"A home. Belonging"

Had a branch cracked under him as he pulled her into his shoulder? Or was that just the sound of his heart shattering?

"You have belonging," he said, unsure what belonging he was actually promising. "I am sorry that I—"

"No. You were. Correct."

"That doesn't make me less sorry. Some truths are cruel."

They tried to breathe together for a moment. Matching. Steadying.

"You are not cruel, Commander."

If he had the energy, he'd have snorted, but all that escaped him was the faintest breath to ruffle her hair. She was honest to a fault, and entirely wrong. If he wasn't cruel, he would not have found it so easy to hurt her in his own frustration. And it worried him that she wouldn't believe it.