#shield raised

Dorian reads the note too, a shadow at Gal's shoulder. I came to the Temple of Sacred Ashes with the faithful, ready to help at the Conclave. I prayed to the Maker for peace, but the mountains shook and buried me. Alone in the darkness, my legs crushed, I cried out in fear of a world with no Maker.

Gal says, very evenly, “Thought it was instant. That the place was vaporised.”

Dorian manages, “Ah. Lovely.” And if that word has to hide the bile in his throat and the vision of it he has all too easily, then it will. He heard about the mess at the Conclave, the destruction for miles around; the burned bodies still lying contorted. Even when they were in Haven, he never had the heart to go up to the ruins – it wouldn’t have helped anything, wouldn’t even have taught him the stakes, he knows those well enough; it would simply have crushed him a little more. He’s never dealt well with despair. He didn’t need to be reaching for a bottle when there was a world to save. So lovely it will be, until he has a moment in private to scream.

When Gal looks up from the note… there it is again, that blankness. All that Chantry training to help you shut yourself away, because the truth of you is inconvenient. Not so different from training to be a magister. Not good for you, either. Dorian preferred the restless fear, worrying as it was to see. Gal folds the note, carefully, and puts it in his pocket.

Dorian says, idly, “You know that won’t come with you, don’t you?”

“I know.”

Light my final hours. Let me go to the Maker without fear of the darkness confounding me.

The candle either comes from nowhere, or was always there; either way, it’s easy to find, when Gal takes a step or two, and feels around in a corner. It flares to life the moment it’s touched, as if knowing exactly what to do, and Gal carries it back. They may have limited time until everything goes wrong – well, more wrong – but there’s an immovability in Gal’s face, his body, that says he won’t be argued with. Despite the blankness in his face, he places the flickering little candle carefully, with something like reverence.

Gal doesn’t believe in the Maker. But he seems to believe in this.

“Here!” Hawke calls, and they rejoin the group.

Dorian breathes out, and doesn’t try too hard to find a horizon as they walk; it’s one of the first tips you’re given, even before your Harrowing. There won’t be one, or if there is, it won’t be consistent. It’s rather like trying to centre yourself on horseback, except utterly pointless and creating exactly the sort of nausea that’s meant to avoid. Dreaming can be rather pleasant – but it all depends on the circumstances. The Raw Fade is too uncertain, too malleable; makes people uncomfortable. The domicile of a fear demon… Not ideal. Especially when you’re trapped there in body, not just in dreams.

“How do you think one eats upside-down?” Dorian ponders, as the lot of them stare at a dining table suspended where it really shouldn’t be. It makes it easier to ignore the endless waters, the inconsistent light, the noises from just behind you that you can never quite identify.

Gal’s response is, like its owner, so quiet it’s easy to miss. “...Carefully.”

Dorian snorts at that and gives Gal a grin; he doesn’t get a smile back, but the barest easing of the lines around Gal’s eyes. A start.

Dorian finds himself commenting on small things, odd things, eccentricities of the Fade; anything that will make Gal turn his way. Gal’s stance will loosen, and he’ll cock his head, their eyes meeting. Dorian recognises it from Redcliffe. Gal is seeking the familiar, trying to find reassurance in it. Dorian will be the familiar, if it helps. It's flattering, if anything.

And it is fascinating here. Andraste help him, Dorian can’t help wanting to explore every hidden corner. Can’t help trailing his fingers over Fade-rock, can’t help wondering if all the theories he’s read on how objects lose their sense in the Fade, how mortals shape it around them, are true. There’s never a moment to wonder, to truly examine, usually. He’s never trained himself into lucid dreaming.

Perhaps that distracts him from the man beside him. He should have spotted it. It should have been obvious from the start. When they see the memory of the orb in Gal’s hand, Gal doesn’t even look pleased to be proven right, that he wasn’t some holy messiah after all. (But still, there exactly when he needed to be. It would have been so much worse, otherwise. I still believe in you, Dorian thinks, stupidly, helplessly.)

No. Gal looked so utterly unsurprised. But it was when they saw the memory of the Divine dying in the Fade… Something settled behind his eyes. The look of a man who’s never expected he could save anything.

They’re heading forward, in nothing close to ease but at least a regular rhythm, when they stumble upon the bodies – almost literally, in Alistair’s case. The Warden avoids stepping on a hand and then backs away, grimacing.

Inquisition uniforms. Men and women, some with faces slack and soft in something almost like sleep except for the blood on their sashes, their coats, pooling round them. Caught in their teeth. Gathering in drops on metal, ruining the careful polished shine of their buttons. Some… don’t look nearly as peaceful. Dead either way.

The same sort who edge away from him or give him dark looks when he’s preparing to leave on a mission. The same sort who are awkward kitchen boys, trying in vain to create a snack they’ve heard is Tevinter. The same sort as the young woman who let him into the dungeons to see Alexius before the judgement, her eyes gentle – all odd sympathy, not mistrust. The same sort he’s walked past in a quiet corner of the gardens, sniffling while writing a letter home to parents and looking caught-out at the sight of him.  

Our people know the risks, Cullen said. We’re dying, but we can choose how, he said.

Don’t take risks, Gal said. Stay with our people, Gal said. Will it buy you all time to escape? Gal said, going to Corypheus.

They are sending me to Adamant, the note says, in the hand of a soldier – many soldiers – the dream of a soldier - who can know? The odds are grim. We cannot win, but our distraction, our sacrifice, may give the important people the chance to do what is necessary.

Isn’t it meant to feel better, being the important people? But no. Important is Our family have responsibilities and blood rituals and stiff-collared robes, the slow death of all you are. And what is necessary is this.

So much death and misery, since this all began. Even before. Twisted, burned bodies at a dismal temple in the middle of a desolate snow-covered pass. Blighted farmland in the wake of magisters’ stupid hubris – hubris that’s landed him in the Fade, too, because he thought he could ever help, that he had any power to avert anything. Perhaps the world is right about Tevinter mages. (Perhaps he’s tainting everything he touches. Perhaps his hands are changing and twisting even now. Would he know until it was too late?) Hollow-eyed lyrium-infested shells in Redcliffe. Clawmarks on cave walls in Crestwood from when the water came and there was nowhere to go…

…No. No. None of that. Especially not here. Either it’s all his own fear, or the demon is trying to draw it out, exacerbating things. Neither’s useful. He’s used to shoving inconvenient feelings down; he’s a Pavus.

Are they even real? Or simply reflections of everyone's own fears? Of Gal's? But they’re at the very least an echo. Somewhere, the real dead lie, in the ruins of Adamant.

Not everyone is used to focusing their will in quite the same way. Even a half-trained nearly-templar isn’t a mage, born with something of the Fade in their veins. Gal is staring down at the bodies with that hollow, blank look on his face again. Like the man everyone was frightened of in Haven.

It’s the barest thing, the movement of his lips. One he clearly didn’t intend to make, and this place must be bad if his control’s slipping.

For me.

There it is.

“No,” Dorian says. He finds his hand round something oddly solid in such a drifting place, and realises it’s Gal’s arm. “To stop the end of the bloody world. Now come on.” He pretends he’s being helpful, pretends it’s to the others, when he says over his shoulder, “Keep moving. This place will drown you if you let it.”

A moment where he thinks that even having got through the rift, Gal might be lost to him after all. And then, even as the blankness stays on his face, something in Gal’s eyes flickers. He nods, once.

Gal explores, wandering into dark corners. He lays spirits to rest with objects, with murmured reassurances - and Dorian has heard stories, but he hadn’t known it was quite this literal; he’d always thought it was a metaphor for some of them having unfinished business, and he wonders if this would only work in the Fade, where metaphors are made manifest.

Gal looks younger, in the green half-light, as he’s bustling about with something so many would deem unnecessary. (The same way they would deem blankets for refugees and meat for the Crossroads unnecessary. The same sort of unnecessary as him walking half a mile, all terrifying size and warpaint and wordlessness, to lay flowers at a grave for a widower.) Or perhaps what seems so young is him folding each note away so methodically. Picking up a stuffed nug – or perhaps just the memory of a stuffed nug – with careful hands. It’s as Gal is laying that stuffed toy next to a small, frightened spirit, with the familiarity of someone who knows what it is to be a child unable to sleep, that Dorian has the thought: so this is what they do, the Southern chantry. Take a young boy who just wants to help. Throw in terror, constant terror, and too much power all at once. Crush the spirit out of him, until you’ve perverted him enough that any mage would be an abomination. If you aren’t, they call you a templar.