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It is only up to chance, in the end. Cassandra is flinging her cloak on her shoulders at the forward camp gate when the sky splits open and the ground around her is suddenly pelleted by chunks of stone; and she stares up, up, disbelieving.
It is only up to chance. Tell me why we shouldn’t kill you now, she snarls into the apostate’s face, heart full of fury and grief. You think I did it, the apostate spits back, accusing, cornered. The lines of that tribal tattoo turn her expression so stark and alien. Cassandra thinks: Maker, why this one. Why.
When the scouts bring an unconscious elven mage down the mountain—the only one, they say, all that is left of the Temple is rubble and charred corpses upon corpses—it all makes perfect sense. An apostate mysteriously surviving the greatest cataclysm of this age. A mark, clearly magical in origin. Cassandra is—was—the Right Hand of the Divine, a Seeker, a hero. She knows disaster. These things do not happen by coincidence .
And yet.
“ Fenedhis lasa, ” the apostate whispers when she catches a glimpse of the Breach in the sky and her fingers curl into fists. Cassandra expects her to run for the hills at the first available opportunity, after. But they are rushed by demons when the bridge collapses and she has no time to think, to secure the prisoner to a tree, anything—it is only survival then, the familiar weight of her sword and the noise her shield makes when it connects to flesh.
Chance. Cassandra catches movement behind her too late and knows it, but the claws don’t come. She turns around only to see the shade shattering into a thousand glistening pieces and the apostate skidding backwards in the snow. She is holding onto a beat-up staff with one hand and a hunter’s knife with the other.
They share a cold, hard stare over the remains.
“I don’t need a weapon to kick your ass, Templar,” the prisoner says.
Fair is fair, Cassandra thinks.
“What is your name?” she asks then.
“Lavellan,” she says, and tucks the knife in her boot.
*
“Cass. Cass. Cassandra?”
Cassandra stumbles awake with a jolt. Her hands touch stone, body stiff from the cold—no armour, aching legs, slowly radiating pain from where her head crushed against...something. Maker. Her thoughts are slow like molasses.
“Cassandra, vhenan , look at me. Please. Over here.”
Sorel. Cassandra recognises the fingers hovering in front of her eyes, knuckles ringed with pale lines of vallaslin . Behind, a shape. Cheekbones, the scar, the silhouette of flyaway hair. Her vision sharpens. Blurs. Sharpens.
“Fucking damn it,” Sorel whispers, almost inaudible.
“It’s all right,” Cassandra says, “it’s all right, everything is going to be...”
*
It was foolish to think good intentions would fix everything.
“Tell me,” Cassandra says in the most polite way she knows how, because doubt is a curious, nagging thing: “is there no room amongst your gods for one more?”
Lavellan stops, turns, gives her a measuring look full of incredulous fascination. A strange insect in a child’s hand. A tall, awkward girl in Aunt Filomena’s sitting room. Cassandra fights a scowl.
“Excuse me?” Lavellan asks.
“The Maker,” Cassandra says, still ready to launch into an explanation, but is stopped short by Lavellan’s sputtering laughter. It is a powerful thing, that laugh. It’s loud, uninhibited, and entirely lacking in real amusement and Cassandra finds herself on unsure footing and feeling suddenly and overwhelmingly irritated. “I’m glad you are still holding onto your good humour,” she snaps.
Lavellan puts her hands on her hips and grins, sharp and cold. “Tell me, Templar, does your Maker have a place by his side for seven others?”
“That is not what I meant at all. And I told you already, I am not a Templar, please refrain from—”
“Oh, whatever,” Lavellan says without letting her finish, and stalks away.
Herald of Andraste, the crowd whispers.
Do you believe in the Maker , Cassandra asks. No , Lavellan says.
Herald of Andraste, Leliana mutters, and her worn face is full of hope.
Cassandra picks up her sword and hits the last standing training dummy hard enough to split it in half.
*
The next time Cassandra wakes, there is a narrow slant of sunlight beaming through a window up high and the air is thick with heat. She attempts to rise onto her elbows, but her stomach protests violently—she groans and sinks back, feeling useless and annoyed and relieved to be alive, somehow all at the same time.
“Fen’harel’s ass, slowly! ” Sorel’s hazy image swims into her field of vision. She is holding a cup. There is a touch of cool on Cassandra’s lips and water drips down her parched throat. It tastes stale, but she swallows greedily—it’s as if her body was burned dry, muscles aching and head throbbing with every inhale. Bad, then. She recalls a clumsy parry, a slip, a fall, but everything else is hard to remember.
“Are we captured?” she asks, voice hoarse.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“Red Templars,” Sorel says, “flanked you from under, shoved you right off the wall. You hit your head pretty bad.” She sounds pissed, a good sound—Sorel’s fits of rage are almost a comfort by now, flying cushions and hair standing every which way, narrow eyes and the certainty that something will be done. Fixed. Made better.
“Are you injured?” Cassandra asks.
“Nah,” Sorel says. Cassandra narrows her eyes in her direction. Sorel frowns and looks away. “Magebane,” she mutters. “It was in the water. Can’t do shit about it.”
Cassandra attempts to sit up again and fails. “Magebane!”
“We’d already be out of here otherwise,” Sorel growls and sways—Cassandra notices it then, the unnaturally shiny eyes, the skin that’s almost more gray than brown. Sorel’s fingers are trembling in her lap.
“Shit,” she says. Sorel snorts.
“Quite.”
-------
“What about the others?” Cassandra asks later.
“Dunno,” Sorel slurs, doggedly trying to fight the shaking, “I was busy being captured while trying to save your sorry skin.”
Cassandra thinks being capable of deep, deep irritation is a hopeful sign for her eventual recovery. She opens her eyes and stares at Sorel in the most disapproving way she can manage.
She is afraid it might come off terribly fond.
“Don’t give me that face,” Sorel says gently. “I know what you’re thinking. Irresponsible, brash, hot-headed, blah, blah.”
“Yes,” Cassandra says, and reaches out to touch her hand.
*
Lavellan takes to being a hero like fish to water. Cassandra watches her fight rogue Templars, charm children and comfort refugees with well-meaning words. She hands out bowls of ram stew and never stops smiling. She drags them through the Fallow Mire with single-minded focus and destroys everything in her path until her soldiers are free.
Her last elfroot potion goes to them, even though she has to lean on her staff to balance out a bad leg wound and almost certainly has a concussion from an unlucky fall several stairs down.
“You will kill yourself before you can save them all,” Cassandra says dryly. Lavellan punches her in the shoulder.
“That’s why I have you, yeah?” she says. “You can pick me up and carry me when I inevitably break my leg.”
“Hah,” Cassandra scoffs, “it will rain purple before that day comes.”
“Right,” Lavellan says.
A week later they cross the northern edge of the Hinterlands and stop under a strange tree blooming with sweet, violet flowers. Lavellan laughs and plucks one off a low branch, marches up to Cassandra and sticks one in her hair with more force than strictly necessary.
“Purple rain,” she says, “I can break my leg in peace now, whatever happens, eh?”
“Right,” Cassandra says, finding herself suddenly speechless. Varric trips on a rock laughing.
*
The cell is unbearably hot. There are insects buzzing in the air. They stick to their skin, going after sweat, blood, whatever—Sorel stopped slapping them away a while ago, she is leaning against the wall with her eyes half closed, breathing hard and moving as little as possible. Cassandra crawls as close as she can manage and holds onto her hand despite the heat.
“ Vhenan, ” Sorel starts, almost soft.
“Yes,” Cassandra says.
“If they make me Tranquil. You have to end it, all right? Can you promise me? I will not fight you. But…” She stops and Cassandra fights the sudden urge to throw up.
“It will not come to that,” she snaps. Sorel laughs.
“Will you carry me off the mountain, vhenan ?”
“Of course I will. I promised, haven’t I?”
Cassandra holds her hand, tight, tight, tight.
*
“Motherfuckers! Fenedhis lasa!”
The Venatori swordsman freezes a second before he can thrust his sword through Cassandra’s torso. Lavellan leaps and jams her knife into him, lightning crackling up her left arm as she shocks three others and stabs the mage in the throat with a flourish.
Cassandra’s ears are ringing. Her shield arm is most definitely broken. She looks around, but the others are already making quick work of the leftover Venatori so she doesn’t hurry to her feet, catching her breath instead and watching Lavellan twirl around like a miniature snowstorm in the middle of the desert. It’s strangely, wildly elegant. Not at all like any Circle mage Cassandra had the opportunity to observe.
No respectable Circle mage would use a dagger like this, for instance. There is no saving manners either, she thinks, when the scuffle is over and Lavellan starts furiously stalking in her direction, yelling: “Fen’harel’s unwashed ass, Cassandra!”
“I’m quite all right, Inquisitor, thank you,” Cassandra says dryly, while Lavellan crouches down in front of her and inspects her arm.
“That’s a nasty one,” she says with a scowl. She digs elfroot potion, some salve and a roll of bandages out of her waist pouch, glances up at Cassandra and tucks the leather strap decorated with teeth marks right back in.
“This is gonna hurt,” she warns.
It does.
Once the bone is set, Cassandra is allowed to down the potion while Lavellan wraps the arm in a tight sling and pats her shoulder in reassurance.
Cassandra eyes her, uncertain and somehow flattered.
“One would think you were worried about me, Inquisitor,” she says. Lavellan sputters, turns, and punches her in the shoulder.
“You are indestructible like a mountain, Cassandra,” she declares with a jerk of her chin. “I will worry about you when the sky turns green.”
They see a really quite spectacular sunset that evening, blooming in the most impossible colours over the sand dunes toward West.
*
The magebane takes its full hold on Sorel by the time the Templars come. She is leaning heavily against Cassandra when their cell door bangs open and the two goons enter—one tall, skin marred with veins of red lyrium; the other an officer in regulation armour, back straight, eyes wide with excitement.
“Take her,” he says, and the footsoldier moves towards Sorel like an automaton. She doesn’t even lift her head.
Andraste help me, Cassandra thinks, and launches herself at the footsoldier, unsure what she’s hoping for, only…
She envisions the Chantry sun on Sorel’s dark forehead, finding her decapitated body somewhere in the bowels of this Maker forsaken Keep, hearing her screams echo and echo without stopping. Imagining her life stretch out before her with that in her heart is unbearable.
And so she jumps, dizzy and fighting the dark spots clouding her vision, going for the red templar’s eyes, nose, anything. It snaps out its shield arm without looking. Cassandra’s head hits the floor and she sucks in ragged breaths of pain.
Sorel.
Cassandra plants her palms flat on the ground and pushes up, up, up.
The last thing she sees before passing out again is Sorel’s eyes snapping towards her, clear and grey and terrible in the low light.
*
“You are flirting with me!” Cassandra yelps, outraged and flustered and feeling somewhat exposed.
“And what if I am?” Lavellan yells back and shoves her. Cassandra staggers backwards, mouth agape. Lavellan follows. “Huh? What if I am, Templar? What are you gonna do? Silence me?”
Cassandra’s thoughts turn in circles. Flirting. With her. Flirting. Between two shouting matches and violent bouts with Red Templars. Flirting.
She thinks about a purple flower and shoulders bumping, the colour of the sun in Lavellan’s hair, the Breach, the searing cold of spelled ice, the promise of death hanging over their heads.
Lavellan shoves her again.
“Inquisitor, please control yourself!” Cassandra snaps. She cannot do this. Not now. Not ever. Lavellan pulls herself upwards and outwards in outrage—like a cat ready to fight, Cassandra thinks briefly, before Lavellan’s hands slap down on her shoulders and she is being kissed, kissed, with such violent ferocity her back hits the tavern’s eastern wall.
Oh, Cassandra thinks, and then, oh. She finds herself kissing back without quite allowing herself to do so, hands on the small of Lavellan’s back, in the short fuzz at the nape of her neck. She tastes like sweet summer apples and ram stew. The smell of winter fills her nose.
Cassandra knows she will care about the distant gasps and giggles later, when she had time to think, to evaluate, to regret. But now. Now.
Lavellan breaks away, face inches from hers, and says: “I win. ” She touches Cassandra’s right cheekbone with one finger—purple flowers, a crooked smile, unbearable arguments—then she’s marching off, staff in hand, chin held high as she elbows through the gaggle of visitors crowding at the castle entrance.
“Nice,” The Iron Bull says. Cassandra resists the temptation to kick him.
*
It smells like winter, which is stupid, because they are in the middle of the Western Approach and it should, by all laws of reason, smell like dust and sun and stone. Cassandra opens her eyes. The room around her is a frozen cavern, sunlight glinting on ice crystals in the air.
All good, then, she thinks, and lets the darkness take her one last time.
*
Is this what romance is supposed to look like?
They argue—missions, mages, the Maker. Politics. Lavellan’s reckless battle stunts. They argue good-naturedly and violently, with laughter and with flesh-rending vehemence. Lavellan throws books at Cassandra’s head. Cassandra quotes the Chant at her, aware of how stiff and condescending she sounds, but unable to express herself otherwise.
Sometimes she finds small flowers and painted rocks on her pillow and she puts all of them carefully in a glass jar. Sometimes Lavellan bursts into Cassandra’s quarters after yet another row and they end up making out against her writing desk for what feels like hours.
Cassandra gives as good as she gets. She snaps comments laden by scathing irony, buries her face into Lavellan’s neck and wonders about Sword and Shield , candles and picnics under a starlit sky.
It’s an unusually peaceful evening when Lavellan appears by her favourite reading spot under the big oak tree, bounces several times on her toes, then clears her throat.
Cassandra blinks up. Lavellan’s face is scrunched up with a vaguely constipated expression and it is immediately unsettling—it’s somehow softer and more determined than Cassandra has ever seen her, uncertain in a way that is entirely out of character. Cassandra straightens, alarmed.
“Inquisitor,” she says, “is everything all right?”
Lavellan jerks her chin up, takes a deep breath and reaches out to take Cassandra’s hand.
“Cassandra,” she says in a grave voice she usually reserves for visiting foreign dignitaries, “I would like you to come with me. If you would. Please.”
“Come where,” Cassandra asks. Something here stinks in exactly the same way one of Sera’s more elaborate pranks would do—it was too quiet all day, she knew, neither The Iron Bull, nor Sera coming to bother her for no good reason, no emergency to immediately attend to. She scowls and narrows her eyes. Lavellan scowls right back.
“ Fenedhis , Cassandra, just go with it! All right?” She gives her hand an insistent tug. “I promise nobody will lose any limbs, and Sera is only marginally involved, and… Come on, please. Please?”
Nobody will lose any limbs, Cassandra thinks, but she will certainly lose her mind if this goes on for much longer. Lavellan bounces on her heels and thrusts a bundle of fur and cloth into her chest.
“Come on, I fetched your coat.”
Cassandra sighs and gives up.
Lavellan leads her out the castle gate onto a barely used footpath weaving around the walls, dipping in and out of the sparse woods that surround the area. It’s dark, the way illuminated only by the stone in Lavellan’s staff. Snowflakes glitter in the cold air. Somewhere in the distance an animal is moving in the underbrush—a hedgehog, perhaps, or a small bird, hunting for scraps under the thin ice.
Even with the biting cold and the unusual silence, Cassandra supposes the walk is quite enjoyable.
“In here,” Lavellan says then and lifts a cascade of vines to reveal a cave entrance.
Cassandra stops and crosses her arms.
“Seriously. A cave.”
“Yes, Cassandra, a cave. Very observant. Now would you please get a move on before I freeze my ass off?” Lavellan glares at her and Cassandra suppresses a smile—she feels much better equipped to handle Lavellan cranky and confrontational, than that odd, quiet version that seems to bleed into the winter night. She frowns for appearances’ sake and climbs through the opening.
It’s pitch black inside once the vines fall back into place. Cassandra can hear Lavellan breathing. She is about to speak, to demand an explanation or a conclusion to the prank, bring what it may, but then Lavellan’s staff knocks against the ground and Cassandra’s mouth falls open.
It’s a million stars. Well. It obviously can’t be a million stars, but it looks like they might as well be—the walls glitter with pinprick-sized lights, each blinking at a steady pace and illuminating the cavern with a strange and lovely glow. Cassandra takes an involuntary step forward.
“What is this?”
“ Alas adahlen, ” Lavellan says and walks past her, opening her pack to reveal a blanket and a packet wrapped in brown paper beneath. She shakes out the blanket and spreads it on the cave floor. “It’s a kind of fungus native to mountainous areas. They are extremely rare. I know you wanted stars,” she looks up, almost plaintive, “but it’s going on winter, and this is Ferelden, and I… well.”
Cassandra is speechless. There are a hundred words that get stuck in her throat, tight and hot all of a sudden, and she’s never been good at this, grand gestures, romance.
This is what it looks like, she decides then. Flowers and arguments, rocks and twigs and elven poetry, bullying new Sword and Shield chapters out of Varric, fighting back to back, shrieking laughter under a cold waterfall. This is what love looks like.
Lavellan actually yelps when Cassandra kneels down in front of her. Her eyes are impossibly wide and almost blue in the cave’s light, hair forever a mess from the wind, the snow, her restless hands. She’s clutching a pack of apples like her life depends on it. In this moment, embarrassed and unsure and a little bit smug, she is the most beautiful creature Cassandra has seen in all of Thedas.
“You like it,” Lavellan says.
“I like it,” Cassandra says.
“Hah,” she laughs, breathless, “I knew it.”
Cassandra cannot help it. She leans in, forehead to forehead, hands touching Lavellan’s cold cheeks.
“Of course you did.”
-------
“Sorel,” Lavellan says later, stretching out cold and tired on the rug in front of Cassandra’s blazing fireplace. Cassandra arches an eyebrow. “My name,” she clarifies, looking steadily at the ceiling. “My birth name, freely given to you, Cassandra Allegra Portia Calogera Filomena Pentaghast. Keep it well.”
----------------------------
She sneaks up to the rotunda the next day just before dawn. The vague idea is this: it’s easier and significantly less embarrassing to find what she’s looking for without half the rebel mages throwing concerned looks in her direction, not to mention Leliana’s uncanny sense for finding her at her weakest and bullying her for details.
Of course it’s Dorian who finds her looking lost in the aisle they keep tomes of elven lore.
“Seeker,” he says, “do my eyes deceive me, or is that really you, voluntarily visiting the library? ”
“Very funny,” Cassandra snaps. Dorian cocks one perfectly shaped eyebrow.
“Can I perhaps be of assistance, or are you capable of finding yourself some… light reading?”
Cassandra looks at the book in her hand—it appears to be a collection of elven fairy tales, not even close to anything of use. She glances down at Dorian.
“You don’t happen to know anything about dalish elves and birth names, do you?”
Dorian’s eyes widen with surprise. Cassandra regrets everything, immediately.
“My dear Seeker,” he says, “believe it or not, I have just the thing.”
---------
Cassandra takes the thick volume on elven bonding ceremonies to her room and stays there for an entire day. She braces herself to go find Lavellan and say: no, no, impossible, how could you , five separate times.
Lavellan has been drinking. Alone. The tavern buzzes with activity as it always does—the Chargers, Sera, Dorian, Inquisition soldiers—but everybody gives the Inquisitor a wide berth as she, apparently, works very hard on drowning her sorrows in fine Antivan brandy.
“Oh,” she says and looks up when Cassandra stops by her table, hands on her hip, “it’s you.”
“Yes,” Cassandra says. Sorel stares up, up.
“So?”
“ Yes, Maker, stop being obtuse! Ugh.”
Sorel slaps her glass down and jumps into her arms without reserve.
There is clapping and wolf whistles and hooting and somewhere, distantly, Dorian groaning: Finally.
Cassandra cannot find it in herself to care.
*
It is up to chance, in the end. Cassandra comes to in an Inquisition medical tent with her head bandaged and Sorel curled up on the other cot, asleep. There are fresh cuts on her cheeks. The surface of the upturned chest next to her is littered with empty lyrium bottles.
“Stupid,” Cassandra says, helplessly fond.
“Very,” Varric says from the corner. He is sitting on a camp stool with his glasses on, parchment and ink spread out around him in heaps. “The story has great appeal though,” he remarks, biting his pen, “the injured apostate pretends to be heavily affected by magebane, lulls her guards into a false sense of security, waits until her hulking warrior paramour creates a distraction and takes down the grievously unprepared Red Templar outpost by herself. Rescue party arrives five minutes later to collect the two of them from the smouldering wreckage. It’s quite impressive, really.”
Cassandra blinks at Varric, then Sorel, then Varric again.
“Is this what you call ‘authorial freedom to exaggerate’, Varric, because if yes, I will smack you.”
“‘S all true,” Sorel slurs from her heap of blankets. “It was all very heroic‘n’shit.”
“Indeed?” Cassandra asks, throat tight, and grasps Sorel’s searching fingers between her hands.
“Mhm,” Sorel says, grins, and falls asleep.